Smith, anything but common

My mother-in-law (you can read her sweet love story here) has always said she never cared for her surname, Smith, as it was so very common. But I find her grandfather, Joe Smith, anything but common. 

Joseph Edward Smith was born on 31 March 1873 in Whitechapel, and was baptized 24 August 1873. He married Emily Maud Foster in Hackney on 3 August 1896. His occupation at the time was cheesemonger’s assistant. Five years later, in the 1901 census, Joseph is a baker’s assistant and he and Emily are living at 7 London Road, Hackney. Like many, Joe appears to have fudged his age when he enlisted in WWI on 12 December 1915.  

Joseph was devoted to Emily and they celebrated their 50th Wedding Anniversary in 1946. They had four children, three of whom died without issue. His activities in the trade union movement brought him in contact with the family of William Adams: William's daughter ended up marrying Joseph's youngest son: Thelma and her sister Kathleen are the result, the only grandchildren to Joe and Emily.  

Kathleen passed on some reminiscences of their grandfather:

Joseph was a small man, even as a child he looked short to me. The most he would have been was 5 ft , 7 inches tall. I remember he was someone who liked to be outside in the company of other men. He used to go the park and play bowls and he liked to go to cafés for a cup of tea, and I think he met up with his friends there. He smoked a pipe but Emily would not let him smoke in the house. I remember him going into the garden to smoke. He was a nice man with a quiet temperate nature.

Children perceive their family members one way, while adults see things through a different lens. Joe died in 1953, and his legacy earned him several column inches:

[Feb 1953]

TRADES UNION PIONEER DIES

Within 24 hours of being admitted to Langthorne Hospital, Leytonstone, following a short illness, Mr. Joseph Edward Smith, of 18, Coronation-gardens, Leyton, died last Thursday. He was 79 years of age.

Born at Whitechapel, Mr. Smith had lived in Leyton over 40 years. A member of the Leyton and District Committee of the Tobacco Workers Union, he was employed as a tobacco stripper until his retirement in 1938.

A keen trade unionist, Mr. Smith served on Walthamstow Trades Council early in 1900, and during the 1914–18 war contested Leytonstone Ward – then a conservative stronghold – in  the Layton Borough Council elections. In 1893, he was a member of the Socialist Democratic Federation, a forerunner of the Labour Party, and was a founder member of the Shop Assistants’ Union which is now incorporated with N.U.D.A.W.

During 1920, Mr. Smith was actively associated with the Layton and Leytonstone Poor Children’s Outing Fund, a body which had the patronage of a local mayor. 

He served with the Royal Scots in the First World War. 

A widower since March, 1950, He is survived by two sons and a daughter. 

The funeral was at Queens-road Cemetery, Walthamstow, on Tuesday, the service being conducted by the Rev. R.W. Sorenson, M.P. for Layton.

Joseph Edward Smith

Potatoes and pen pals

In 1951 in postwar London, a young woman was working as a bookkeeper and decided to take a holiday in the fresh air. She and a girlfriend from the office chose to go to a student’s camp in Warehorne, Kent in September, 1951. They travelled by train from Victoria and were picked up by a lorry which took them to the camp. They arrived there on a Saturday morning, and were told that there were a group of German students already there. Indeed, these were the first Germans she had ever seen in real life.

On Monday morning, their group were taken to a farm to help a farmer harvest potatoes. On the field were big weighing machines which had a sack fixed to it. They had to fill the sack to one hundred weight, (CWT), and tie the top up and pull it away, and then put another sack on the hooks. They had two metal baskets to fill and it was hard work. Our young woman, Thelma, took Tuesday and Wednesday off because she had twisted her ankle, but was back at work on Thursday. Everyone--English, German, French, and African--got on well together and had a healthy holiday. 

On the Friday evening before the girls left to go home there was a dance and she danced with a blond, blue eyed young man who she had seen now and again to speak to during the week. He spoke very good English. The next morning the girls were packed and ready to leave, but Thelma wanted to take a photo with her Brown Box Camera of the girls they had met. Just as she took the picture, the blond man came and stood behind them--what we would call a photo bomb today. She then asked him whether he would like a copy of the photo and he said yes please and gave her his name (Alfred) and his home address. 

She had the photos printed and sent them to him. He was so pleased to get a photo which he liked of himself. At that time Alfred was 25 and our young woman, Thelma, was 17. It was nearing Christmas, and she sent Alfred a book of John Milton poems. He sent a parcel as well: his mother had baked German Christmas cookies. When she opened the parcel there were only crumbs but they were delicious. They wrote to one another now and again--both were busy, he at university and she was working long hours, making her own clothes and taking some evening classes.  

But they kept writing to each other. Their friendship deepened, and they managed the odd visit: he came to England and they camped out overnight and waited for the Queen's coronation procession. They continued to write, and their letters took a personal turn. Alfred's family invited her to visit their little village. It was her first trip abroad.

She went to Victoria station by bus, then by train to Dover and boarded a boat from there to Ostend. From there, she took the train to Stuttgart, and her Alfred came to pick her up. She was welcomed in Betra by his mother, father and sister and spent two weeks with them. Alfred took her to go see Lake Constance. They had a lovely day and returned back again in the evening. There were no lights on the walk up the hill back to his home and it was raining, but Alfred had an umbrella with him. However, his father did not know they had an umbrella and thought he would come and bring one. Alfred took the chance to steal a first kiss. Just at that moment Alfred’s father shone a flashlight on them! 

The visit went all too quickly and Thelma had to go home again. By now they realized that they wanted to stay together. It took several years of study and work, many letters, and a few visits, but in the summer of 1958, Alfred came to England, this time to marry Thelma and take her home to Germany. 

Yes, she baked the cake and made the dress herself!

A modest piece of land

 My husband's Auntie Kath started writing up the family history before she was incapacitated by a stroke; these were working people, living through the depression and WWII. But they managed to put money aside and buy a piece of land not too far away from their London council house. Kathleen and her sister Thelma speak of the place with obvious affection:

Before WW2 my father became a carpenter and bought the fencing that was being replaced by iron railings round Queens Road Cemetery in Walthamstow.  A quarter acre of land had been purchased In Doddinghurst in Essex. I can’t imagine it would have cost much to buy in those days as they didn’t have much money. With the fencing he built a two-roomed bungalow that the family used to go to at weekends and holidays. 

It was called Thelmadene and after the war this was a place in the countryside that I came to love. It was a very carefree place, among farms, with just two shops at different ends of the road. They were both “General Stores” and one included a café. The one we used most was closest to the bus stop at the green. The store smelt of bacon and paraffin and you could buy just about everything there. The bus close by would run a few times a day to the bigger town of Brentwood. I am told that before I was born my father used to bicycle there with my sister in a sidecar.  

I remember it as a place of freedom where you could be out all day adventuring and someone would come looking for you at tea time. But this was later after the war. I remember my mother telling me that they used to go there during the war when I was a baby until the time the army located an anti-aircraft gun on the front of our piece of land and kept firing away all night and no one could get any sleep. 

The bungalow consisted of one living room and one bedroom. There always seemed to me room enough for everyone to sleep no matter how many people stayed. I remember the old iron bedstead that I used to sleep in with Thelma or any other children who stayed. It was all so warm and comfortable. One morning I awoke to a big cow poking its head through the open window sniffing my bedclothes. 

Whenever we would arrive and unlock the door, something would always scurry across the floor out of sight. Rabbits burrowed under the house so sometimes mum would lay a snare at night and we would have rabbit casserole the next day. My mother cooked on a coal range or sometimes outside in a fire built in a hole dug in the ground. We had paraffin lamps for light and in the evening we used to play a lot of card games. We had a fancy carved old chaise longue which would be worth a fortune today, and a huge mirror with a twisted carved oak frame that covered the dividing wall between the two rooms, and came from a tailors. I wonder how they got that there?

Mother, daughter and cousins having tea with a half-built Thelmadene in the background