Burr Family

A Memory of Halling.

My great-grandmother, Mrs Clara Burr, had the Supply Store in Halling Road for many years from the early 1900s. She had been widowed in 1903 when her two sons, my grandfather Rowland and his brother Norman, were babies.

When Rowland married Nellie Dale of Snodland in 1925, the couple bought a block of land in North Halling and built a bungalow (single story home) on it for 425 pounds. They named the house 'Kalamara', the name of a Greek town where Rowland had been stationed during his army days. It was on the high side of the street and looked over the marshes to the River Medway and its traffic of barges. They sold the home and moved to Sidcup around 1933.
Rowland's brother Norman and his wife, Doris Monk, bought a house in Halling Road not far from the shop. Norman and Doris (better known as Queenie) had one son, Brian Burr born in Halling in 1929.

Rowland and Nellie's only children, my mother Joyce and her twin brother, John Burr, were born in the room above Clara's Supply Store in 1928. When Clara retired, she bought a cottage that overlooked the marshes and Pilgrims Way and settled down to enjoy retirement. The cottage was one of a set of three, it had a brass plaque on the wall with the name Rock-a-nore which was where Clara worked as a girl and met her husband, John Burr.

When the Second World War broke out, Clara moved in with her son and rented her home out to some lasses in the WAAF.

She returned to Rock-a-nore after the war, but housing was still scarce so when my mother Joyce Burr married Peter Ashdown (who was a carpenter/builder) in 1952, she allowed them to renovate the coal bunkers at the rear of the cottage into a small home. It was here that my younger brother and sister were born and where I spent the first four years of my life with great-grandma Clara. My mother would take me for walks in the pushchair along the narrow path at the back of Rock-a-nore, where we would pick primroses, bluebells and wild orchids that carpeted the woods around Halling. Along the path there was an orchard with huge eating apples, far larger than you ever see today. The man who owned the orchard knew Clara well and whenever he saw us he would give Mum a bag of apples to take home to Clara, and 'one for the baby'.

---

---