Cricklewood Childhood 3

This is the final part of the Wardley article from the same source as the previous two. Nothing about the chapel as such.[Pic: The Avenue Cricklewod Lane]

When Mother was a girl she said she seldom had meat to eat. We had it once week - a glorious sirloin of beef, hot on Saturday, cold on Sunday, made into shepherd's pie on Monday. For Sunday breakfast we had Dad's home made sausages, the most delicious things you can imagine.
Grandfather was a preacher in the 7th London Circuit of the United Methodist Free Churches. We have a photo of him with 28 other worthies. His heart was in his preaching and not in business, and he liked nothing better than travelling on horseback to preach.
When he died in 1899 he left Father with debts. The folk in the large houses thought nothing of running up large bills, and not paying them. Costers in the cottages were cute, sending their children to buy one ha'porth of pickle in paper or a ha'porth of jam, and the scales in those days did not balance but must go down.
I remember when Princess Christiana (of Schleswig Holstein, sister of the Princess of Wales, who was later Queen Alexandra) came to open the newly built Institute (June 30, 1896). Dad made an archway of greenery from Granville House to our Corn Shop (what was the Men's Institute in Cricklewood Lane is now Childs Hill Library).
I remember going in the wagonette to take Grandma and Grandpa to the Wesleyan Church opposite Willoughby Road. We went along the Finchley Road, up Frognal and through to Church Row, where we had to pay at a tollgate. We walked over the West Heath three times on a Sunday to go to Heath Street Baptist Church and Sunday School. As we walked up from The Castle to the top of the Sandy Gallop the fields belonging to Mr Rickett of Sunnyfield were on our left. (Mr RIckett was a JP and a benefactor of the churhc in the early days). The Hermitage (pulled down in 1974) was on our right, followed by the horses' drinking trough (very much needed, specially on the nights before Bank Holidays when the fair people with their caravans and swings and roundabouts moved slowly up the hill) and Telegraph Hill on which was Miss Schroeder's cottage. My eldest sister had an allotment on the top of that hill, where the artist Sir Frank Salisbury later built Sarum Chase.
Grandpa died in 1899, aged 80, and Grandma in 1904, aged 92. Our family consisted then of Gordon 3, Winifred 5, Bernard 9, (darling twins had died in between), Alfred 12. I was 15, Alice 17, Grace 20. Winifred remembers walking with Gordon down Cricklewood Lane to a private school in Elm Grove called Sparkbrook College. A sweet shop opposite The Tavern sold "wiggy waggy toffee" at 8 oz a penny. You could get a good-sized bag of the black wafery stuff for a farthing. Further down, on the left, was the Home of Rest for Horses.
In 1908 the trams came down to Cricklewood, and Granville House was pulled down to widen the Lane into a road. Trams with open wooden-lath seats and open tops ran down the Lane. Later they went all the way to Barnet. Horse buses went along Finchley Road from The Castle, all the way to Oxford Street for 4d. In 1974 the shops opposite Granville House were pulled down. Our house and garden at Ridge Road is now part of the site of two rows of maisonettes with a road in between. Our house and long garden next to the Hermitage, where we lived after Ridge Road, is now the site of a large block of greyish Council buildings. But I still see things as they were.

Cricklewood Childhood 2

More from the Wardleys (see here)

Down Cricklewood Lane was farmland. Mr Dicker's farm stretched away to West Hampstead and there was another farm opposite Cricklewood Midland Station, which had originally been called Child's Hill Station. Halfway to the station on the right was The Tavern public house, (now the Cricklewood tavern I think) and beside it a little low cottage. This is the only building standing today exactly as it was in 1860. Our Mother said it was a Dame School to which she went in 1861 when she was 4. A pathway opposite, called The Avenue, led to Mr Dicker's farmhouse.

Our Mother was born in a cottage behind The Castle Inn. Her mother had a very large family and took in washing. Mother remembered when she was about 10 walking all the way to Oxford Street with her brother, carrying laundry. When it was paid for they could buy a bun or something to eat. Mother also remembered going to a little fountain in the Sandy Gallop (see footnote) to buy drinking water.
When she was 11 she had a job as a servant in a dairy in Albany Street. She helped the women to put on their wooden yokes and attach the full pails of milk. After a time she asked for 1s 6d a week instead of 1s 3d. When it was refused she left, and obtained a job as a "tweeny" in a large house. There she rose to be cook. Then she became a cook in Grandfather's house and Dad fell in love with her. Although their mother had been a cook too, the aunts did not think their brother should marry a cook! So Mother ran away, Father followed her and they were married.

Buckinghamshire Connections
Mrs. Poulton, wife of the Baptist Minister, had come from Great Missenden, Bucks, and this led to a close connection between our family and the farms and little Chapels there. My earliest recollection, when aged 5, was being taken by Father in the pony van which was used to take orders to the big houses. We carried a magic lantern and cylinders of gas for Father to entertain at one of the little Chapels in Great Missenden. I remember staying in a beautiful farmer's house and seeing my hostess wearing a lace cap.
Mother worked tremendously hard, not only looking after us but cooking for all the assistants in the shops. There was no Shop Closing Act then. When the Red Lion closed at 10 pm people thought of the food they needed and we were busy until we closed at 11 pm. I remember Dad waiting up for the van to return from Smithfield Market or from the Surrey Docks where it had gone for sugar, etc. If the roads wore icy it was very late. Even if it were midnight Dad would wait to rub down the horses and see them comfortable for the night. He loved his horses and pony. I watched him doctor them, give them medicine, rub them with. Ellimans Embrocation or poultice them with linseed or mustard. He used to treat us in the same way, with no mercy!
Sugar and flour came in hundredweight sacks and had to be weighed out. I used to watch my aunt cut blue paper into squares. She would then take a square and twist it into a cup, fill it with 1 lb. of sugar and press in the top. I saw Father open a large wooden box of eggs in shavings. He would take each egg separately and test it at a light to see if it was fresh. There would be many broken ones, with which Mother used to make custard and sponge cake. There wasn't much profit in those days. We couldn't afford to eat the biscuits, jam and sweets Dad sold, unless it was the broken biscuits which came in a large wooden tub, almost as tall as I was. I well remember climbing up and reaching down into the tub for a special favourite.
Original editor's footnote: Sandy Gallop is Sandy Road today, - it runs down to the Leg of Mutton pond and the West Heath. The "fountain" was on the opposite side of Sandy Road from the Pond, about half way down the road from West Heath Road. It has vanished now, but when we looked for it in 1977 we found the ground marshy where it had been, and many water-loving plants still growing there.

Cricklewood Childhood 1

In a newsletter originally produced in 1979 and available here the Misses Wardley (Ethel speaking, Winifred writing then adding her won recollections) came up with this piece. Part 1:

I was born in 1888 at 2 Cricklewood Lane, opposite the Castle Inn, Childs Hill. When I was 4 years old Father and Mother and my two sisters Alice and Grace moved down the steep hill a little way. Grandfather, a cheesemonger, had come there in 1860 from Kensal Green to live in Granville House, an imposing building (next to the chapel) with two shops below and two storeys of living rooms above, as well as cellars and stables. He and Grandmother, who came from the North and had been a cook had a family of 4 girls and a boy (our Father).
Grandfather built five little shops opposite, with one-storey living rooms and stables and mews behind, in about 1877, intended as businesses for his 5 children. These were Nos. 1-5 Ridge Terrace. We went to live over No. 1, which was a Corn Shop, called Wardley's Granary. No. 2 was Ironmongery and No. 3 Drapery, with Miss Button managing it. Grandfather, Grandmother and three aunts lived at Granville House and the shop below was Wardley's Stores, selling grocery, meat, bread and cooked meat pies, etc which Grandmother made. At the side of Granville House was a lane called The Mead (now called Granville Road and more recnetly Mortimer Close) but then Granville Road ran through fields up to the Finchley Road.
In 1877 the Baptist Church had been opened in The Mead and nurseries and laundries were there. There must have been wells and ponds behind. The laundries served the large houses on the Heath and along Finchley Road as far as Oxford Street. I remember the excitement when tents were put up in the fields opposite the Baptist Chapel for a Sankey & Moody Mission in the 1890s, at which I signed the Pledge. Beside the church there was a soup kitchen and Grandfather gave bones, peas, etc, for soup.
Beside Granville House in Cricklewood Lane was the Red Lion Inn and a row of cottages with long gardens in front. Clark's candle factory was nearby.
Opposite the Red Lion was All Saints Church and the National School with Mr and Mrs Harvey as the Heads. For two or three years before I was born Mother and Father had lived with them at Garfield House, No. 5 The Ridge, with a long garden and a gate at the bottom opening onto Church Walk and a quick approach to the school.