A drawing of our house done by our Mother before a garage was added
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EARLY DAYS of WOODLANDS RISE, WOODLANDS CLOSE and HAVEN CLOSE by Iain Elliott
I was born in February 1954 at West Hill Hospital in Dartford, Kent, England to my Parents; Walter Herbert Chaplen Elliott (Wally) and Adrienne Moyra Elliott nee Dodds (Moyra). I have an elder sister (born April 1951) Jacquelyn and a younger sister Susan (born June 1956). The day I was born Mum’s horoscope said “Now that an obstruction has been removed you can complete some work of reconstruction.”
We lived in a 3 bed semi - detached house in Woodlands Rise, Swanley, Kent which my father helped build as part of a self-build group. As mum was pregnant with me at the time, we were the first family to move into a finished house. Our father then had to help finish the other houses.
We lived at 13 Woodlands Rise and our neighbours were; Derek & Christine Barnes and their parents who lived next door to us (at No 15) along with Ivor and Audry Tatton in the bungalow next door(at No 11) The Oakland’s, Bill (who was an accountant at the Coal Board) and Jean with their children David and Jane, who lived at No 18, Ann Pole a friend of Jacquelyn’s, lived at the top of Woodlands Rise on the corner with Haven Close, Carol Jewel was a good friend of Susan’s and they lived next door to the Oakland’s at No 14 . Derek and his father Bill Lassiter lived at 1 Woodlands Close (whose back garden backed on to ours) and apparently Bill during the war was an aircraft mechanic who sometimes worked on Douglas Bader’s plane (Douglas Bader was a WW2 spitfire pilot fighter ace with false legs which he lost in a flying accident- (Wikipedia him for more info).
Good friends of our parents were the Ebbutt’s; Neil & Jean they had 2 boys; Roger who is the same age as me and his younger brother Paul who is the same age as Susan. They had a mongrel bitch called Minnie who was a lovely, friendly dog. When I would go round to their house as I turned the corner from Woodlands Rise into Woodlands Close, if Minnie was at the front gate she would practically turn herself inside out before I got up to where she was, but she would never run down to meet me.
Mums parents Elizabeth(Lily) Dodds (nee Bradley) and Sydney Dodds moved down from Shotley Bridge near Newcastle to 44 Swanley Lane, Swanley Kent in around 1956/57. Dad spent a bit of time at the house doing repairs and maintenance to get it ready for them (Dad was trained as a Master carpenter before WW2 ). He installed a bath in the kitchen with a worktop over it as the house was a basic 2 up 2 down with a rear kitchen extension and an outside toilet.
On Saturday afternoons I can remember spending time at Grandma’s picking winkles out of their shells with a pin and putting them in a bowl and scraping the skins off new potatoes. It seemed like a lot of work for very little reward. We would do this while watching the wrestling on TV, with people called “Mick McManus (a bad guy) Billy 2 Rivers, Giant Haystacks, Catweazle and Big Daddy to name a few.
I used to go shopping on a Saturday morning for Grandma and she would give me 6d for going. Grandma would save up three penny bits during the year and give them to us as holiday money
Our other Grandma was Dad’s mum was Violet and she lived at 30 Oliver Crescent, Farningham, Kent with Dad’s youngest brother David (Dave) and his wife Helen. My Grandfather on my father’s side died in 1936 having fathered some 20 children from 2 marriages.
Mum worked at the Market Gardeners called Woodger’s which was on the back lane behind Haven Close on the way to Five Wents. This was a flower nursery and it supplied flowers to florists in the area and probably Covent Garden market in London. I worked there one summer holiday from school disbudding chrysanthemums (I never really got the hang of this and probably got many wrong) The summer I worked there was hot and I can remember the transistor radio playing “Baby Come Back” by a pop group called The Equals. Jacquelyn also worked there for a couple of summers. The smell in the flower shed first thing in the morning was very fragrant and slightly overpowering and the water in the galvanised buckets for the flowers was very cold.
Mum spent many years in the local Women’s Institute (WI) and was head of the local committee for a while.
She was also part of a local drama group called; Swanley Theatre Group and they put on quite a few shows at the local community hall. Dad used to help build the stage sets. They mainly put on old time musicals which were good sing-alongs. They put on a play and they asked Dad to play a part of a gay man. Dad was not an actor and was not keen but eventually decided to do it. The local paper reviewed the show and the local paper drama critic was not very complimentary about Dad, Mum was annoyed and took issue with the critic.
There was also Margaret Lodge who lived in one of the big Victorian house in Birchwood Park Avenue who formed the Swanley Light Opera Group (aka SLOG). She proposed putting on Benjamin Britten’s “Noyes Fludde” I had a good singing voice in those days and somehow got volunteered to play the part of Ham. I was not looking forward to this and was thankful that it never came to fruition although I did have to attend rehearsals for my part for a while.
We had a Mr Sykes from the Co-op Insurance society who came round once a month to collect the premiums. He was quite a large man with a jovial disposition and a small beard. Mum would invite him in for a cup of tea. He could make a “farting “sound by squeezing the palms of both hands together. This fascinated me and it took me quite a while to master this trick.
There is a concrete lamppost on Swanley Lane just round the bend near Homefield Close and not far from a bus stop which has a rust stain at head height. My sisters and I thought that it was a blood stain from our Dad, absent mindedly walking into it on his way home from work.
At the top of Woodlands Rise and at the junction with Haven Close there was a bit of wasteland which had a narrow track through it. This led to a lane which ran along the back of the houses in both Woodlands Close and Haven Close. This track in the summer was full of tall stinging nettles on both sides so you had to be very careful as you weaved your way along it. When I was about 6 years old I jumped off a tree stump in this waste land with my hands in my pockets and fell forward onto my face giving me a severe nose bleed and as I grew older it became clear that this broke my nose. As you crossed the lane (which if you turned left took you to Birchwood Park Avenue and turning right down to Five Wents) and through a small gap in the hedge you ended up in old abandoned allotments (it is now a housing estate). In the summer we would pick fruit such as raspberries, gooseberries and both red and blackcurrants which we would bag up and sell to our neighbours. There was a large brick wall near the entrance to the old allotments which we could climb and sit on the top of. At the back of the allotments was small woodland where we could play hide and seek and ride our bikes around. There was a small hill in the woods with and oak tree at the top which somebody had thrown a rope over a bough and made it into a swing which was great fun. We were very sad when this was turned into a housing estate
Woodlands Rise turned into Woodlands Close on the left and Haven Close on the right. At this junction we would play games such as “Hop scotch”, “tin can tilly” and “British Bulldogs” with the other children in the street. In those days (1964) there were not many car owners in our streets
There was an old abandoned hospital called “Kettlewell” situated roughly where the new ASDA supermarket is today. This was a great playground and we spent many happy days exploring. My sisters and I scaled an external fire escape and looked through a window only to see a black sheet over a bath, we ran back down the stairs as we did not like to think about what might have been under the sheet. There was a chapel attached to the hospital by a covered corridor ( I am not sure if the current chapel is the original, as the covered walkway had no stone sides only a pitched timer roof) and when we went in it was a beautiful sunny day with the sun streaming through the chapel windows and it looked like the place has been left in a bit of a hurry with a few chairs knocked over and a few hymn books and bibles scattered about. To our surprise on the altar there were 2 silver candlesticks and a silver cross. As we came out of the chapel walking back to the hospital we heard footsteps so we ran and the footsteps got quicker, our dog Rex had followed us over there and was chasing us but we thought it was something more sinister. We told our parents about the candlesticks and they rang the police. We never heard anything more about them and never a got a reward.
During the run up to bonfire night we would buy bangers and other fireworks to play with in the old allotments. We would tie a few “bangers” together and stick them under an old tin can and when the bangers went off, the can would shoot up into the air. We used old vacuum cleaner pipes as a gun for bangers. We jammed one end into the earth to seal it up then lit a banger and dropped it fuse first down the pipe. When it went off the banger flew out the end of the pipe.
When I was around 15 I went to the cinema (the Corona but more commonly called the bug hutch) and saw two films “Seven Deadly Sins and Dracula Prince of Darkness. Stupidly I walked back home from the cinema down Birchwood Park Avenue and past the old Kettlewell Hospital. Needless to say I ran home from there as fast as I could as I could imagine Dracula (Peter Cushing ,actor) looking down from the rooftop of the hospital.
There was all sorts of junk thrown away by people on this wasteland and we put some of it to good use. I found the remains of an old pram which had huge rear wheels. I took these and used them on a go kart which I fashioned from bits of wood in our shed. The front wheels were from a pushchair and it was steered by a rope and had no brakes. On its maiden run I took it up to the Ebbutt’s and proceeded to hurtle downhill till I got to the corner into Woodlands Rise, as I turned the corner at quite a speed with the steering rope the rear wheels promptly folded in half and I stopped. The pram wheels were obviously not meant for cornering fast.
White Oak Primary School
I started school in September 1959 at White Oak Primary School in Swanley. The headmistress was Miss Frennie and my classroom was in the Annexe. The class teacher was Mr Zobel (or Mr Snowball as we joked). I was made art monitor and had to get all of art equipment out of the cupboard. Mr Zobel called me Pooh Bar for this task (it was not till I was much older that I found out that he is a character from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado and who is titled as “The Lord High of Everything Else”) Just to be called something with word pooh in the title gave my classmates much merriment. In those days free school milk was provided in half pint glass bottles and was served in a separate room which on warm days stank of milk that has gone off. The first book I can remember is Old Lob.
In the first year at the school I met a boy called Gary Smith who lived in Laburnum Avenue Swanley and we become close friends and although we were separated when I got moved by my parents to another school aged 8 (Wilmington Primary School) we met up again at Secondary School and continued our friendship. We still keep in contact and even now at 65 years old and we can pick up again as if we never moved apart.
Wilmington Primary School
At the age of 8, I along with my younger sister Susan (Jacquelyn went to Dartford Grammar school for Girls) were moved from White Oak school to Wilmington primary school (Headmistress Miss Ravensdale). To get there we had to catch the 477 bus from Swanley Lane and the fare was 4d. The bus turned a sharp right hand bend at the school stop and we would try to jump off as the bus got round the corner while it was still moving. We found that you could save a halfpenny on the way home by walking/running to the next bus stop known as the “laundry”. We saw the bus go past us many times but the halfpenny saved enabled us to buy sweets in the sweet shop where 4 blackjacks or 4 fruit salads were 1d.
In the winter of 1964/65 the snow came down and our 477 bus could not get up the hill in Hextable and unfortunately for us a teacher used to catch the same bus so she rounded us all up ( around 7 of us) we walked to school from Hextable and along the top Dartford Road, the snow was quite deep. We eventually arrived at school a few hours later absolutely frozen. We were given hot milk and sent home at lunchtime.
I joined the cubs at around 8 years old and the scout hall was an old disused mortuary attached to St Mary’s church. It was adjacent to what was then called “the old school” as part of Swanley Secondary School
As a family during the summer we would often go to Dartford Park just off Princess Street we would catch the 477 bus to Dartford. We had a great time in the park and many times I got sunburnt. There is a little stream (part of the river Darent) which ran along one side of the park which had sticklebacks and minnows which you could catch with a net. There was also a boating pond and paddling pool as well as swings and a roundabout. Many happy days were spent there and we would sometimes have ice-creams. Dad had a sister Violet and her husband Alfred who had a tobacconist and sweet shop on Princess Street.
Swanley High Street
The “Spot” was a newsagents and sweet shop located just over the railway bridge as you entered the High Street. The was a Co-op, Post Office, Eaton & Hall hardware shop which sold Airfix models downstairs in their basement. There was a shop that sold records but I cannot recall the name (I bought my first record here “Bits and Pieces” by the “Dave Clark 5”), a carpet shop and Pricerite, the first real supermarket in Swanley. On the other side of the high street were the; doctors, the working men’s club, Rediffusion TV and repair shop, a pub called The Lullingstone Castle. There was a greengrocers next door to the pub on the road up to Swanley railway Station. On Station Road past the pub was a greengrocers and a little further up on the left just over the railway bridge was the Swan Paper mill. When I started going to work I London the walk from our house to the station seemed a long and lonely walk especially in the winter. On the way to Birchwood were; the Sugar Loaf Café and coffee bar, Betty’s Wool shop and IH Electrical which did electrical repairs and the cinema There was a Doctors Surgery with Dr Godfrey who was our primary family doctor and also a Dr Hyde.
Early Jobs as a child
The first job I got was with Express Dairy and I was around 10 years old helping the driver with his deliveries primarily of milk (he had orange juice and white sliced bread on board too) and collecting the old bottles for recycling. I did this for around 18 months as I recall and then got a job with a greengrocer delivery van which came out of the grocers shop Hextable.
The greengrocer van delivery was great fun and it went all round the roads off Swanley Lane. Behind Grandmas in Lullingstone Avenue there were a lot of old prefabs (these were prefabricated buildings built after WW2 and were only meant to be temporary but were still in use through the 1960’s). I used to go and collect orders from the old women and men who lived in these and get their fruit and veg from the van. I would often get a tip of 6d for doing this and this helped my 10s a day wages. The last stop was Longfield and Bean and this was usually around 3pm but before we went there we would stop in Swanley Village at a little café where we would have a hot milky coffee and 2 doorstep slices of hot buttered toast. While this was being ordered I would put the Beach Boys record Good Vibrations on the jukebox. Sometimes it was so cold doing this work in the winter that we would warm up our wellington booted feet using the van’s exhaust.
After the greengrocer round I started doing a paper round delivering newspapers up Woodlands Rise and Woodlands Close. A friend of mine was, John Puddle who lived in Haven Close and he did that road. I would pay John 6d out my money for him to collect my papers from the shop and leave them in our porch. This meant I could have an extra half hour in bed which was very important in the winter. This arrangement did not work for the Thursday evening paper as we picked up on the way home from school and not for the Sunday papers either as they were just too heavy for one person to carry 2 loads on a pushbike. There was another boy called Malcolm Elson and he lived in the last bungalow on the left hand side (before the houses) as you went down Haven close.
Dad stood as an Independent Parish Councillor in around 1969 and he was duly elected. He served on the council till he had to resign due to illness in 1972. And was well regarded Miss Chatting who lived in one of the bungalows in Woodlands Rise was heavily involved with the council and had a lot of respect for Dad.
My father died in July 1972 after a relatively short illness with throat cancer.
In 1975 I married a girl from Belvedere and we moved to Hempstead near Gillingham
Photo below - Me (aged 7) Jacquelyn and Susan at White oak School Iain Elliott
COPYRIGHT IAIN ELLIOTT