Stories Told To Me By My Mother Of Penge Characters

A Memory of Penge.

Old forgotten characters of Penge and Eden Park:

The Duke of Penge

Nell Horley the midwife

Winny of the Eden Park Trading Agency

The Lad who gave a prize-winning fighter a taste of what it felt like to be on the receiving end

William Younger was born in 1901 into an ordinary working-class family, his father being a coachman, a strict disciplinarian and authoritarian, and an insistence on reading the Bible at meal time. He had an elder brother Thomas (Dink) who was unable to walk from birth, and a life time to be spent in a wheelchair. In 1919-1921 Dink would make cardboard aeroplanes and tanks and would be seen in Beckenham and Crystal Palace together with my granddad, Thomas Lang (Mother’s side) selling these models. Years later he would eventually go off with a ‘red-haired’ woman to Yorkshire and was never heard of again.

William was nick-named by Penge folk as the ‘Duke of Penge’, being an artful gentleman. Tall, 6’ 1”, very smart, he would drape his gloves over a walking cane when sitting, and was eloquent, ‘he could mix with the toffs‘. He was artful in many ways, some embarrassing, some laughable, but the penalties for such crimes was half his adult life in prison, and he died at the age of 46. He was afflicted in later life by TB. Whilst in Peckham with his brothers George and Albert had a fight with six men, with their backs to the bar, and won.

Most stories of uncle William were mentioned by my father, James, who died in 1986. Their main residence was in Arpley Road, Penge, a very poor setting, known for bugs crawling up the wall, which they disposed of with the heel of their shoes, which would leave blood smears across the walls. Dining tables were covered with newspaper and dinner often took all day to cook - stew in the pot.

Many children born in Penge were delivered by the local midwife, Nell Horley, including both my parents in Arpley Road. Nell also owned a boarding house, where she would be cooking a daily pot of stew for the tenants. In the evenings Nell would go down to the local pub and be bought a pint by the men as she was held in high regard. Poor Nell’s son, my Nan’s first husband (first of four) died in the First World War (I have a pictureof him and my Nan on their wedding day). Nell Horley and her granddaughter, Kathleen (my half-aunt) both died of T.B (hole in the lung).

Nell also had a brother, nick-named ‘Spider’, who lived in one of Nell’s rooms, and his trade was to collect rags which he washed, and used most of the garden to dry them out in. My mother, as a teenager, worked for Nell, and she would clean out the gentlemen lodgers’ fire grates, but Nell mentioned never to help ‘Spider’, though he was afflicted with disability. My mother would normally get a tanner for cleaning a grate but she felt so sorry for Spider one day that she cleaned his grate and received a whole shilling from him. It was whilst working for Nell that my mother developed a chest complaint, which took 6 months to right itself, regularly visiting Beckenham Cottage Hospital. Her condition was exacerbated by poverty. When Aunt Kathleen died in 1929, Nell made a request to my Nan, asking whether my mum would go and live with Nell, (my mother was aged 8 then) but Nan turned her down as she did not want her to catch TB. Anyway, my mum was useful collecting old clothes from well-to-do houses in Beckenham, West Wickham and Eden Park. My mother later worked for a local button factory and Woolworths. A knowledge of clothes stayed with my mother all her life, and she would often go to Winny’s at the Eden Park Trading Agency, in Eden Park, where Winny would set aside second-hand clothes for her (there were twelve of us children).

A prize-winning fighter visited Penge and offered to take on all-comers. He drew a line around himself and room for the other volunteer boxer. One lad stepped in and gave him a taste of his own medicine and almost won. I suppose the boxer was a bit reluctant afterwards.