Bits

There are many things which contribute to the 'feel' of daily life in Southall in the 1950s and 60s which are not particular to it alone, but which serve to illustrate life in the area as it was.

I have already spoken of 'George', the mobile greengrocer, who used to come door to door with his horse and cart selling vegetables - and things like locally sourced eggs - every week. The electric milkfloats which delivered milk (very quietly) would also be familiar from then. The Fowler's bread vans delivering on their rounds: locally baked bread delivered locally by horse and cart. How ecological was that? Then, on Sunday evenings a man would come on a trycycle boxcart and sell shellfish street by street. He'd come a bit of the road and ring a bell and people who wanted winkles, cockles and such would go out to him. Someone else came from time to time selling watercress from a large tray which they carried over their head. A 'Breton onion man' would come door to door on a bike laden with strings of onions and dressed in a beret. I remember a man walking very slowly down the middle of the road singing and collecting. The proverbial man with a suitcase full of cleaning things would put in an occasional appearance on doorsteps.

There were also various collectors who came to the door: Co-op, Pearl, the 'rent-man', salesmen. Coal was delivered by coal-cart (again sometimes horsedrawn) and carried in on coalmen's backs. My cousin did this for a while and clean and easy it wasn't. When I was young we separated the household waste into 'the bin' and 'the pig man', who came in a lorry to collect all the organic stuff. Presumably it went to fairly local pig farms as swill. Milk came in varieties of bottles: gold, red and silver tops, pint and half-pint. Milkmen also delivered orange juice in similar bottles. Bottles were washed and recycled.

Bin-men tended to live and work locally. They lifted heavy metal bins on their backs to throw into the carts. Likewise the streets were swept by hand and locally, by men who came with carts they pulled along.

Until 1965 Southall had its own council and the Town Hall and the administration in the buildings around it were quite accessible to most people, on foot. I think the old Manor House was used by the council as well. I remember the mayor of Southall coming to my school in regalia and chains. The Cottage Hospital, near the Manor House, was used for small injuries and day procedures and was very intimate. As a child I was there a few times.

I used to go to a GP surgery which had a group practice and a surgery-clinic, very novel at a time when most GPs worked alone and from houses. My surgery was staffed by three Jewish doctors of radical and intellectual bent, with a social agenda. The oldest was Doctor Ginsburg, then Doctor Cline and lastly Doctor Freeling. I knew them all over the years. They had differing 'techniques': Ginsberg was fatherly and retiring; Cline could be perhaps a little overdirect; Freeling was gentle, had a great clientel among children and was more than a little involved in the lives of those in trouble. In years gone by, before the NHS, when people paid for GPs, Ginsberg was also known to treat and not charge when the situation demanded it.

Music Places

Growing up, I remember some of the local pubs used to have music. The best known was the White Hart, which had music in the back bar most weeks. It was a main venue during the trad jazz and skiffle booms. Chris Barber's band was a regular and other well known jazz bands, such as Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, played there, as well as Lonny Donegan. Later it hosted alternative rock and folk and the Freeman Syndicate ran a weekly club there. The Red Lion once had dance music in its back bar, almost a ballroom, which I remember from when I was very young. There was a beer garden outside. The Northcote Arms, which was surrounded by houses and off the main road, had rock music on a regular basis for a while. You went in along the side. They used to have a big dog which lived upstairs and would come out onto the flat roof and bark. I was in school with the son of the pub and going upstairs to the living quarters was a slightly exotic experience. From time to time there was trouble there, with 'visiting' teenagers. Other pubs had the occasional gig.
What there wasn't was a regular club with live music, even in a rented hall. There was one even in the depths of Belfont in Hayes, which had quite well known groups like the Steam Packet (Rod Stewart among others) in the early 1960s, but never in Southall, which certainly had enough people to go to gigs. So we used to travel: to the Ealing Club (Mann Hugg Blues Brothers, later Manfred Mann), Goldhawk Road (the Who), the Crawdaddy in Richmond (Rolling Stones I think) and Eel Pie Island (too many to mention).
Southall never produced any real bands in this period (it did produce Jim Marshall, who made the amps all the bands used) and maybe the lack of a regular venue contributed to that. Earlier, Cleo Lane, the jazz singer, had the benefit of the White Hart as a starter.
Later, of course, the Hamborough Tavern became notorious for music of an altogether different kind, but in the late 50s and 60s I don't remember music there.

Churches

Well within my lifetime, long before the landscape of Southall was altered by the topography of religion, as well as race, before there were temples, gurdwaras and mosques, but in real terms not that long ago, the various christian churches were intimately integrated into the life of the area, although one might not think so now, ill-used and stranded as they are, or just plain gone.

The big Church of England bases were St George's, at the top of Lancaster Road; Holy Trinity, across from Southall Park and the old church on the corner of King Street and Western Road. The Methodist centre was the impressive King's Hall on South Road and I remember Baptist, Congregationalist and other non-conformist churches, I think in Villiers Road. I also remember seeing people dressed up on Sundays to go to church. I used to go to Sunday school in the Ebeneezer Hall, which was off The Green, I think in Kingston Road. It smelt of polished wood, there was a trap-door beneath which was a bath for baptism and it had a harmonium. My religion at that time, like most of the children who went there on Sundays, was far from strict Baptist, but you could also get bars of chocolate for remembering scripture and there were girls.

My family, like most, was nominally C of E, which meant the vicars were called upon for marriages, christenings and deaths. I might have attended church once or twice with the cubs, school societies or harvest festivals, but that was it. I do remember there was quite a good choir in St George's with which I had a very brief acquaintance. There were active members of the church around us, but their beliefs did not impinge on daily life for most people.

Not so, for example, with the Salvation Army (which had a hall, The Kingdom Hall, on the Uxbridge Road, near Hamborough Road I think. They were out on the street with their band around Southall, holding meetings and giving out leaflets, or collecting for their work. One of the leading figures was Councillor Haigh, who was also active in the Labour Party. I went to school with members of the Haigh family, I remember him coming to our door with family members to canvas for re-election.

The Catholic church was St Anselm's, on The Green, which also had schools attached. This tended to separate Catholic children who went there from the rest of us, although not totally. In later years (the 1980s) nuns from St Anselm's, who worked with older people in the area, had a very good relationship with my grandfather, who was a convinced atheist. They didn't mind, he liked discussions and the Church of England, of which he was nominaly a member, was nowhere to be seen. St Anselm's always had a more scattered membership which was also more involved. I knew people of Irish, Scottish and Polish extraction who went there and on the odd occasion saw a priest or curate in school, (not all Catholic kids went there).

My memories of the Kings Hall are of using bits of it as temporary classrooms when I was in school and singing in massed choirs for Christmas there. It had a more circular structure than C of E churches and the roof was quite high.

The public rituals of christianity, such as christmas services, harvest festivals, easter and so on, as well as war remembrance services, were still part of growing up in Southall, I would say, well into the 1970s and perhaps later. There was a march on Remembrance Sunday, to the local cenotaph by the Manor House, with British Legion, scouts, Boy's Brigade and others taking part. Schools would collect food and other things for harvest festival and take them to old and 'needy' people via the churches. Christmas was an occasion for school plays and visits to carol services (how many people were Joseph, an angel or, perhaps, Mary?). These things linked my generation, the post-war baby boomers and the half-generation which followed us, to hundreds of years of tradition.

The 1960s saw changes and decline in Southall churches, like many other things. As we 'baby boomers' came onstream we had other priorities.

Various Halls

Among the places I encountered growing up there were a number of halls where weddings and suchlike took place. I have already mentioned Shackleton Hall but there was also, at the corner of King Street and Featherstone Road, the Co-op Hall, which was above the Co-op shop (more of that another time). This was a square and spartan place with a boarded floor, a few supporting pillars and a low stage at one end. I remember it had an upright piano. I was there for weddings and meetings of various kinds. Not far from it, along Featherstone Road, was the Working Men's Club. This was a club of the old type, with a bar and a social area. I vaguely remember that there was sometimes music there (and possibly comedians) but it was more frequented by my father's generation than mine. Back towards the railway, off the Green and quite near the old Gem cinema was the British Legion, another club and bar, I was only in there once or twice, it was mainly for ex-servicemen and their wives. At the top of Lady Margaret Road, just behind the old Town Hall, was a hall which I think belonged to Holy Trinity church. I think it's now a Hindu temple. In my day it was used for social, family and other gatherings as well as church things. Sideways from it, again behind the Town Hall and reached through a lane that ran between the Town Hall and the old Fire Station, was the Conservative Club. I can't remember ever seeing the inside of that although my father was there.

My point of reference was more the old Labour Club, on the Broadway next to Woolworths, a very substantial affair. It had a bar and social area downstairs, various meeting rooms, upstairs and down, where Labour coouncillors, party members and trade unions met until 1965 when Southall became part of Ealing. Upstairs was also a large hall with a high and large stage which had proceneum arches and heavy curtains. The Labour Party never officially 'owned' the Labour Club. That role was taken by a committee which was essentially linked to the trades unions. The big ones were the AEU, the rail unions and the general unions. The Labour Party itself had a glorified nissen-hut behind the Club in the car-park, quite adequate, with two office rooms and a meeting room. My grandfather, who was active in ASLEF (train drivers' union), was a founding member of the Labour Club. He told me it came from a time when the unions could find nowhere to meet in the Southall area. ASLEF had had a strike during or just after the First World War and used to meet in the King's Hall Methodist Church on South Road. But there were Australian troops stationed not far away and there was a confrontation, with furniture being used. Other unions had similar problems and an orchard plot, on the Uxbridge Road, was acquired and a hut erected on it. From that the Labour Club grew. The Labour Club had a long drawn out civil war over admitting non-white members, which ran from the mid-1960s. Later, after the Labour Party itself had shifted premises, it became the Southall Club for a while, but its support base got very old and dwindled.

The Town Hall itself had a large room upstairs, the old Southall Council Chamber, which was used for meetings and other functions from the late 1960s. Scattered around southall there were other huts and places for church members, scouts and the like. I remember the Air Training Corps (ATC) had a hut on Featherstone Road.

Shackleton Hall

In the mid to late 1950s, when rock and roll arrived in Britain and David Jacobs, brylcream and all, was huge on black and white TV at 6PM on Saturdays, some of the real action locally was to be found in the Shackleton Hall, at the junction of Greenford Avenue and Shackleton Road. There were dances there where the strains of the Everly Brothers and Elvis could be heard way down the street. I was a bit young to actually get in, but some of us would hang round the outside of the Hall and listen and watch. This was a time when six inch turnups, winkle-pickers, purple mohair sweaters and haircuts such as the 'Tony Curtis' held sway.

The Hall itself was also used for other functions. I attended family weddings there and things like children's parties. It was a strange industrial-Tudor confection of a place really, a giant prefab, with wooden struts and probable white asbestos panels on the outside, windows very high up, so there was no view in or out and a vaulted roof about the height of a house, with bare metal strutwork on the inside. From time to time political meetings, bingo and so on were also held there. Why a road in Southall came to named after an Irish explorer would make an interesting story, none of the other roadds in the area are like named.