Memories Of Greenford

A Memory of Greenford.

My parents home was in Costons Avenue in Greenford, I was born there in 1937 and lived there for 30 years. The rear of our house looked out to trees which grew on the boundary of Perivale Park some eighty yards away across the “Little River Brent” and the allotments. On the far side of the park, on an embankment, the GWR Greenford Branch Line and Greenford Halt Station and hidden behind the embankment Perivale Maternity Hospital where several of the contributors to these memories of Greenford say they were born, as was my daughter.

One of my earliest memories is of my father, Leonard, taking me up to bed one night. In my bedroom he turned of the light, opened the curtains and showed me the red light glowing in the night sky over the park. At that time, the beginning of the 1940s, and on a “quiet night”, the sky was usually dark except for the moon and stars. There was no light leeching upward from street lamps, traffic or the windows of buildings as there is now, there was the “Black Out” and thus no loom of light to hide the Milky Way. As he showed me the red night sky he told me:
“That is the light from London burning, never forget it.”
It was the blitz.

Despite it being wartime I remember Greenford as a safe and happy place. Indeed my memories are that the freedom we experienced, even as young children living through a turbulent time, was very extensive by comparison to the restrictions which contain the activity of children nowadays. Perivale Park and Horsenden Hill were our playgrounds and in all of the years we played there as far as I know no child was harmed, except in an accident of play. When the nights were not quiet and the Air Raid Sirens wailed their warning the dark night sky would be pierced by search lights from the Ack Ack Batteries in Perivale to the east and RAF Northolt to the west.

The factory estates local to the Hoover factory in Perivale and to the Aladdin Lamp factory half a mile west of the junction of the Greenford Road and the Western Avenue were the targets as was RAF Northolt a mile farther west. Hoover’s and many of the other factories close by were completely involved in armament manufacture. Hoover not only manufactured standard items of armament, their design engineers also designed and developed special items for the war effort. The Trepur factory near by in Bideford Avenue, which in peace time had made cardboard tubes for products as varied as tubes for Vim cleaning powder and Tampax, in wartime adapted their technology to make aircraft fuel “drop tanks” which were carried external to aircraft to extend their range. When dropped, the tanks exploded on impact with the ground thus also becoming a weapon. My mother’s youngest sister Veronica, then a teenager, worked on the making of the drop tanks.

Aladdin and companies close by also formed a manufactory of armaments. In addition to Aladdin were the British Bath Foundry, a manufacturer of fire extinguishers and several other engineering concerns. I remember this area was a major depot for the Royal Army Service Corps and from the Western Avenue one could see a vast number of field artillery pieces parked under camouflage netting alongside the Grand Union Canal. Close by were barracks and in the local area also a POW camp. I recall an occasion with my mother on Greenford Road close to the Granada Cinema, now Tescos, as German POWs under armed guard marched by. The dowdy uniforms of the Germans identified them as POWs by the large coloured patches sewn onto their outer garments. Women, one of whom was my mother, gave cigarettes to the prisoners and as she told my very annoyed father, who had been a POW in Germany in the First World War:
“They are some ones sons”.
During the war the food ration for British troops was more generous than for the civilian population, the troops needed it. I wonder now how she, and other people, would have felt toward those German prisoners had it been known they received the same food ration as British troops, more than British families received.

The foregoing are things that I remember, I was there. Amongst others of my memories are things I know from being told about them, things like a lighter side to life, entertainment. There was a branch of The British Legion on Oldfield Lane, opposite to The Holy Cross Church, which had a large concert hall. During the war this was The Place to go at weekends. Amongst the accumulation of military personnel stationed in or near to Greenford was a lot of theatrical talent who performed on the stage at “The Legion”. The only names that I clearly remember being told about were a young Canadian singer stationed at RAF Northolt, Pilot Officer Ted Hockridge, who became better known in peace time as Edmund Hockridge, a world star. The others were Tommy Trinder The comedian and another you may remember, Harry Worth who went on to become a star of British comedy.

Other memories are of the shops: Home and Colonial a grocery shop, List’s Bakery and the Co op shops on Greenford Road: Sainsbury’s, Woolworth’s 3d and 6d store, Regies Milk Bar at the top of The Broadway – I can still hear the whizz whizz sound of the Horlicks machine when we went for that special treat, it tasted better than the home made variety – and Lavell’s sweet shop at the bottom of the hill facing the recently demolished Red Lion pub. Sweets were a rare treat, Food Ration Coupons were reserved for buying sugar and jam.

Around the corner on Greenford Road going north was Pegley’s Cycle shop. How many hours did I idle away admiring bikes in that window? Eventually, when I started work as an apprentice in an engineering factory, the dream I’d found in Pegley’s window was fulfilled when my mother bought me what boys thought of as a racing bike. Mine was a called a Europa, dressed in something like a red metallic paint with gold “coach lining” and full drop handlebars. It made me feel like the king of the road.

Beyond Pegley’s, the parade of shops below two tiers of flats stretch on to the Granada Cinema. In the later years after the war one of those shops became Creamery Fare a restaurant come ice cream parlour owned by an Italian family and where my mother Ellen, known as Nell, worked. If those of you as old as I am bought ice creams from the Creamery Fare on Sunday you would have met my mum, it would have been her who served you. In the back of the shop there was the small factory where the ice cream was made but did you know that as you enjoyed your ice cream it was being served in the Ritz, the Cumberland and other hotels in London. Good stuff, made in Greenford. You may remember from the radio, we called it the wireless in those days, a group of musicians called Troy and His Bandoliers. Troy, the leader, was of the same family that owned Creamery Fare.

A hundred yards or so north of the Granada is a parade of shops at the junction of Greenford Road and Costons Lane. There you would have found Dr O’Rourke’s surgery, the house immediately before the shops began and where, in the days before the NHS, if you had the requisite “doctors fee”, three shillings and sixpence, you could get medical help. Among those shops I remember particularly were Gregory’s barber and ladies hairdresser, Mrs Malley’s green grocery where I would be sent to buy 5lb of potatoes and also Louis De Phillipé’s Cobbler’s Shop,. Across the road was a newsagent / tobacconist, an off licence, a children’s clothes shop and others. There was also the Salvation Army Hall next door to the Co op dairy depot.

As a child I thought of a visit to the barber’s a nuisance and a discomfort. Getting my hair cut was a waste of playing time and the hair clippings down my neck provided the discomfort. In my teenage years the barber’s became a source of embarrassment. There was one barber who, when the cutting and combing was complete would whip away the shroud from around my neck and in a loud voice ask:
“Does sir require anything for the weekend?”
That question referred to condoms, an item never spoken of by name, and his question was intended to embarrass the callow youth I was. It did, my stumbling refusal and blushes were intended for the amusement of the older men waiting.

The cobbler, Louis de Phillipé was a remarkable man. Small wiry and of dark complexion. On those Saturdays when I took my shoes to be mended I usually lost a lot of time talking to that fascinating man. He was very knowledgeable and I often wondered why that intellect chose to mend shoes. After the half hour or so the mending took, our conversation having ranged over such things as metaphysics or the state of the world, Louis would accept payment, give change and often end the conversation with the expression:
“And so we progress toward millennium.”
Louis often used words like “millennium”, words which I had to look up in the dictionary to understand and millennium was one of them. Millennium, you and I, we all got there fifteen years ago, Louis couldn’t, time and age denied it.

The old joke says, nostalgia isn’t what it was. The old joke is wrong. My young life in Greenford was great. We didn’t have so much stuff then as we do now but after all, stuff is just that, stuff. I value my memories of being young in Greenford and these memories remind me of the debt of gratitude I owe to my long passed parents and of many other people and events, there are so many:
The day men went around all of the streets taking away the metal railings and garden fence chains for the “war effort”.
The List’s Bakery man pulling his bread delivery cart along the street and taking his basket of bread and cakes to each front door.
The Gas, Light and Coke Company’s steam powered lorry which came to deliver coal and coke. It always stopped just before our house to take water from the Little river Brent.
Going with my sister and friends under the Iron Bridge and along Windmill Lane in Hanwell to what we called Blue Bell Woods.
Watching the Blue and orange flash as Kingfishers took sticklebacks from the Brent.
The appetising aroma of coffee blown from the J Lyons factory on Oldfield Lane when a north wind blew.
The way the picture on our TV sets wobbled and melted away when an aeroplanes, inbound to Heath Row, flew low over our house.
My tutor at Southall Tech deliberately marching the Holy Cross Boys Brigade Band to play outside our house on Sunday to rouse me from my lie in.
The way that people in shops, and in general conversation used, during late December, to wish each other Happy Christmas.
The list goes on until:
The day we “closed up” our house and moved away from Greenford to other lives.

Since leaving, my only visit to Greenford was around 1990 and though the buildings were more or less the same I felt regret that the atmosphere of the place I once knew was gone. Adding your memories to the Greenford Memories site helps keep alive, particularly for those of us fortunate enough to have been there, what Greenford once was. That right place at that right time. Keep up the good work.