The Dulwich Society Journal for Summer 2014.
No two years are the same. Last year spring was late and this time round it has been early with a virtually frost free winter. This should give our garden birds a chance to fledge more than one brood and populations should be sustained. In order to sustain a population each species should have at least one surviving fledgling per year. A mild winter should have enabled this so we shall have to see.
There have been a few reports of sightings of Buzzards both in and around the woods and overflying. These large raptors are now thought to be the most numerous bird of prey countrywide, having spread from their stronghold in the west country. As their main food items are rabbits we are not likely to see many in Dulwich but their incidence here does indicate a change in the distribution of our various raptors. Kestrels that were most common have had a population drop and are probably now no longer resident in Dulwich. Their last known nesting site was on St Peter’s church tower at the Dulwich Common junction with Lordship Lane but there was no sign of them this year. Kestrels normally eat small rodents and beetles but when they nested on the tower of Dulwich College the biology boys analysed their pellets and found that they were mostly eating Sparrows. And now Sparrows have largely gone.
Kestrels have been replaced by Sparrow Hawks which are much more efficient bird catchers and will take anything from Pigeons to Blue Tits. The population of Sparrow Hawks as also other raptor species were decimated by pesticide poisoning but the banning of DDT has resulted in a raptor recovery of the bird hunters so that Sparrow Hawks are the most commonly seen birds of prey over London. Peregrine Falcons are now nesting on high rise buildings in the metropolis and can occasionally be seen overflying Dulwich and Hobbys, once a rarity, are reported every year.
There are indeed other changes in our local birds. The RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch in January noted a fall in the numbers of Starlings counted. There were of course Starlings seen in the winter but these were likely winter visitors from the continent. In years gone by nesting Starlings could be seen emerging from holes in the eaves of many of our houses and old Woodpecker holes in the trees. A springtime walk through Dulwich in the week of this article failed to reveal a single bird. Suddenly another species we all grew up with seems to be disappearing. And like the demise of the House Sparrow there is no ready explanation.
On a more cheerful note some of us may have seen an unusual and attractive goose on the Dulwich Park Lake. This was an Egyptian Goose, not an immigrant from the Middle East but one of a feral population that has come from collection escapees. Their stronghold was East Anglia but they have spread into the Thames valley and a few appear in London parks. They are a great deal more elegant than the Canada Geese which also derive from feral populations and will hopefully not become a menace. Some feral birds such as Mandarin Ducks we like, but some like the Parakeets we shall have to learn to like, but perhaps the Egyptian Geese who have the most photogenic goslings can be accepted without question.
Peter Roseveare Wildlife Recorder (telephone: 0207 274 4567)
In April, Sydenham Hill Wood’s volunteers were at last rewarded for surviving an extreme winter in the Wood. January saw historically wet workdays, and for those not wearing decent wellies it was the case of sodden socks and shoes. But in the space of a couple of weeks the warm early spring weather had dried up most of Sydenham Hill Wood’s famously muddy and waterlogged pathways. Butterflies have appeared in good numbers and diversity, with the early Brimstone (the butter-coloured fly) cutting across the margins of sunny glade and shadowy wood, Peacocks have sunned themselves on the warm soil of the footpaths, whilst Commas and latterly the Speckled Wood have made their first forays of the year. Most strikingly, a Buzzard has been observed duelling with embattled Carrion Crows over the clearings of the Wood, as well as the Gun Site Allotments. The African migrants, Chiffchaff and Blackcap made their returns to favoured hedges on the 20th and 13th of March respectively.
Volunteers completed the final part of the three-year-long Ambrook and Dewy Pond restoration project in the final quarter of the financial year by installing a pond dipping platform and attractive palisade gate by the Dewy Pond in Dulwich Wood. The project was funded by the SITA Trust and the Dulwich Estate. This will enable school groups to enjoy pond dipping activities in a safe and comfortable manner. Volunteers have also tried their hand at pond dipping, conducting two dusky amphibian surveys of the Dewy Pond. In March, common frogs were observed in their highest numbers (6) for some years, a direct biodiversity enhancement from the restoration of the Dewy Pond. Eight smooth/palmate newt (only identifiable in the hand) were observed swimming amongst the aquatic vegetation.
Perhaps the most historically unique wildlife news is of the arrival of a new breeding bird for the Dulwich and Sydenham Hill Woods. In the crevice of a y-shaped sessile oak in the Dulwich Wood borders near the entrance to Cox’s Walk a pair of Jackdaws have made a nest. This is the first time in over 60 years that the birds have nested in the area. Records from 1874-1909 regard the ‘daw’ as a rare visitor to Dulwich. The Dulwich jackdaws (also being spotted on the Village playing fields) are symbolic of the fluctuations amongst bird populations, especially after such steep declines in viable habitat for many wild creatures. Some visitors lament the appearance of the Ring-necked Parakeet in our local parks, woods and gardens, but it should be remembered that their long term presence is by no means assured.
In April we conducted a bat roost survey of the boxes installed throughout the Wood. Our resident Bat Ecologist, Huma Pearce, joined the workday to take bats from their roosts, to weigh them, measure their wingspan and to return them to their dwelling unharmed. Leisler’s bat and Soprano Pipistrelle were found, including 13 pipistrelles in one box. This could be a potential maternity roost and is a huge fillip for those who have given so much time and energy working to protect and promote bats in the Wood.
London Wildlife Trust’s conservation activities have not been contained merely to woodlands. In March, volunteers teamed up with the Dulwich Society to plant more than 20 metres of native hedgerow in the grounds of the Edward Alleyn Club on Burbage Road. This will boost local Blackbirds, Robins, Wrens and butterflies in need of food and shelter in the years to come.
Summer of 2014 is set to be a very busy one for London Wildlife Trust staff and volunteers, with numerous events planned for Sydenham Hill Wood and the surrounds. There will be a Wildflower Walk on Sunday 8th June at 14:00, a Butterfly Walk on Saturday 28th June at 14:00 and the hotly anticipated Bat, Moth and Owl Prowl on Friday 4th July at 21:00. All the events are free and donations are welcome. In 2013 we raised £600 through events which went towards tools and equipment for the direct management and maintenance of Sydenham Hill Wood. If you would like to join our events and newsletter mailing list you can contact me by email:
Daniel Greenwood (Conservation Project Officer, Sydenham Hill Wood, London Wildlife Trust)
News from the Upper Wood - Farquhar Road
In rugged, sub-montane Upper Dulwich Wood winter eventually gave way to spring. Cold-weather visitors like the Redwing were last seen in March. By mid-April the birds of the Wood were actively protecting territories established earlier in the year, with at least 5 Wren territories counted in the Wood’s 2.4 hectares. The 2007-11 BTO Bird Atlas records the Wren as one of the UK’s most abundant species, though numbers are very dependent upon winter weather conditions. The mild - albeit wet - conditions of last winter have surely helped the Wrens in UDW get off to a good start. I cannot recall a time when I heard so many singing.
Nesting activity was apparent amongst the Wood Pigeon population and I also spotted a pair of Song Thrush collecting nesting material. After a decline of over 50% in Song Thrush numbers since 1970, more recent data shows a slow recovery of this lovely species - perhaps because we are better at managing pests than in the past. Our parks and gardens are more pleasant places for the presence of the Song Thrush:
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
The Wood holds 3 species of Corvid: Carrion Crow, Magpie and Jay were all regularly seen this spring. The habitat is also attractive to the common titmice: Long-Tailed, Great and Blue Tit. I know Coal Tits are around, as are Goldcrest, but they are more elusive. Being common is no bad thing; I was bird watching on the Tagus Estuary during mid-April and spotted a Blue Tit amongst the cork oaks; my guide advised me that Blue Tits are relatively scarce in Portugal.
What else is there? Well you can see Blackcap and Chiff Chaff, both of which I think are resident all year; I have certainly seen both in the Woods during the winter months. Green and Great Spotted Woodpecker are around and the usual garden birds, Robins Blackbirds and Nuthatch amongst them.
It was not actually stated, indeed it could have been a coincidence, but the programme for the Dulwich Choral Society’s Spring concert might easily have been uplifted from such a one produced a century ago in the months before The Great War. Then, it would have been just the programme which might have been assembled to stir the hearts and minds of the audience in order for them to face the forthcoming war. The audience, at St Barnabas Church were stirred indeed by the large choir, under the direction of Aidan Oliver, accompanied by the Dulwich Festival Orchestra, a 50 strong professional ensemble.
Elgar’s Imperial March, composed to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria and first performed at the Crystal Palace in 1897 opened the concert in grand style. Then followed Songs of the Fleet, the setting of five of Sir Henry Newbolt’s powerfully patriotic poems to the music of Charles Villiers Stanford, initially intended for the Jubilee Congress of Naval Architects in 1910, by which year Britain had won the naval arms race over Germany - “Stand to reckon up your battleships - ten, twenty, thirty, there they go. Brag about your cruisers like Leviathans - a thousand men below” goes the first verse of The Little Admiral. Particularly successful was the atmospheric and technically difficult Song of the Sou’Wester which did the choir much credit.
Two excerpted pieces, scored for strings only, from the 1944 movie, Henry V by William Walton opened the second half. They were followed by a neglected piece, the setting to music of Robert Browning’s poem, The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Charles Parry and rediscovered by Aidan Oliver. This piece for choir and soloists has not been recorded despite its success from the time it was written in 1903 until well into the 1930’s after which, along with many other Victorian and Edwardian choral works, fell from fashion. It was an excellent and amusing piece and the audience were able to follow the text in the programme. Guest soloists, Timothy Robinson tenor and Grant Doyle baritone sang the parts of the Piper and the Mayor respectively. The effect was slightly marred by the eighty strong choir being occasionally overpowered by the large orchestra.
The next Concert by The Dulwich Choral Society will be ‘ WHITE NIGHTS; A RUSSIAN CELEBRATION on Saturday 5th July at All Saints Church, West Dulwich at 7.30pm .
The concert takes inspiration from the famous ‘White Nights’ Festival in St Petersburg, where for two months at the height of summer the sun never fully sets and the city is filled with a spectacular extravaganza of the arts. Crowds pack the Mariinsky Theatre to hear Russia’s finest opera and ballet stars, while the streets are thronged for the outdoor celebrations including the celebrated Scarlet Sails pageant on the River Neva.
This celebration of Russian music and culture will rove from opera house to cathedral, from concert hall to the open steppes. Join us for an exuberant feast of music…and a Russian-themed party afterwards!
To include music by Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Chesnokov, Rachmaninov, Gretchaninov and Rimsky-Korsakov amongst others.
All tickets £14 (£7 for under 17s) from The Art Stationers, Dulwich Village SE21;South London Music, Grove Vale, East Dulwich SE22; or call 020 7274 2349.
The next production of the Dulwich Players will be The Comedy of Errors by Wlilliam Shakespeare, which will be performed in the open air at both Dulwich Picture Gallery garden and in Dulwich Park in July. The production has been accepted to be part of the Royal Shakespeare’ Company’s 2014-5 Open Stages Project. This project, part of the RSVC commitment to transforming the relationship between amateur and professional theatres invited groups undertaking Shakespeare and Shakespeare related productions to become part of a wider group. The Dulwich Players are one of 96 groups (out of 250 who applied) taking part, with each company receiving training, director mentoring, feedback and support from the RSC and partner theatres. The directors and cast of The Comedy of Errors have taken part in a range of workshops run by RSC professionals in preparation for their summer production.
The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare will be performed in the garden of Dulwich Picture Gallery Saturday 5th July at 12 noon and Sunday 6th July at 12 noon and 3pm. Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th July in the American Garden, Dulwich Park 2pm and 5pm.
It will also be performed by The Dulwich Players on Saturday 30th August in the Dell, the RSC’s open-air space, in Stratford-upon-Avon.
This new week-long event, the brain-child of David Walkman, a teacher at the Harris Girls' Academy, East Dulwich runs from Thursday 26th June until Thursday 3rd July and presents an Open Air family performance of 'Treasure Island' by Rain or Shine Theatre Company, contemporary Peckham-set film ‘Gone Too Far!’ screening + Q&A with director Destiny Ekharagh, a lecture on Muriel Spark’s 'The Ballad of Peckham Rye' by Dr Martin Stannard, Sparks' official biographer, poetry reading and talk by National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, a reading with local author Evie Wild and will finish with one man Dickens show. Full details can be found on (http://www.harrisdulwichgirls.org.uk/98/east-dulwich-literary-festival-2014), where a programme can also be downloaded.
Calton Avenue is named for Sir Francis Calton who sold the manor of Dulwich to Edward Alleyn in 1605. Unlike some streets in Dulwich, for example Ildersly Grove, with its large number of people connected to India, or Sydenham Rise, with its substantial German community, Calton Avenue’s residents were quintessentially British, though not usually from Dulwich. They hadn’t come far though, most of them were born in London and the Home Counties with very few from further afield and only one family from outside the UK. By the time Calton Avenue was being built, there was great social change in the Dulwich area. The demand for housing was being driven by demographics: over the 50 years from 1851 Dulwich’s population grew from 1,632 to 10,247. The peak period for Victorian house building on the Estate was 1878-90, a little later than for London as a whole; the expansion prompted by the Dulwich Estate’s need to build the Lower School (now Alleyn’s) following the rebuilding of Dulwich College. The Estate began to build considerable numbers of semi-detached houses for the lower middle classes. Most of Calton Avenue was built later still, from 1898 onwards.
Wealthier people began moving out to the commuter belt of Surrey, partly due to the amount of speculative building around Dulwich. People of the ‘middling classes’ began moving in. The days of middle class families having a large retinue of staff were past when Calton Avenue was ready for occupation. Despite the large size of many of the families most houses had just one live-in servant and some had none, though there would also have been ‘dailies’ and gardeners. The residents held a wide variety of jobs, reflecting their wider social backgrounds, and there were very few ‘living on private means’, i.e. an unearned income. Among the typical Dulwich occupations of merchants, stockbrokers, civil servants, teachers and, of course, clerks, we also have a retired farmer, stationer, a draughtsman, motor engineer, draper, carpet-buyer, four milliner sisters, commercial travellers and a tie and umbrella manufacturer. The ‘lower grade salaried classes’ as Charles Booth, the great Victorian social commentator, called them.
Calton Avenue however, seems to have been a road for the Victorian upwardly mobile. Plenty of its residents started out in quite humble occupations before working their way up the career ladder. Take John Stark, who was born in Camberwell where his father was an upholsterer. He started out as a shipbroker’s clerk but progressed to senior partner in Henry Langridge, West India merchants. When he died in 1926 he left nearly £50,000 in his will, equivalent to about £2.5 million today.
Edward Kingston was a butcher living with his large family including his son, Charles, who was born in the road and who was the grandfather of the actress Alex Kingston. Edward Kingston did well for himself and had a large number of butchers’ shops in South London including one where Pizza Express is now, one in what is now Jane Newbery and a couple in Lordship Lane. Albert Lampard was another resident who worked his way up, this time from a junior grocery manager to company director. One of his descendants is Frank Lampard, the footballer.
Calton Avenue resident Frederick Jackson started the Hollingsworth Telephone Manufacturing Company in West Dulwich in 1915 and it grew into a successful multinational company. By 1920 they were advertising cutting edge products, e.g. the ‘Laryngaphone’, a throat microphone ‘the size of a wristwatch’, designed for use in aircraft to enable the crew to communicate clearly despite background noise. Even during the Second World War its British subsidiaries traded at a profit as did their European subsidiaries, though they did not have exact figures since they were in countries overrun by the enemy. They were forced to sell the Australian business in 1940 however. In 1960 Hollingsworth was taken over by Pye Electronics and is now part of Phillips.
Henry Newton Knights was another self-made man. He started his engineering firm in 1908 and by 1914 had munitions contracts from the government and a factory in Peckham. He became Mayor of Camberwell before becoming a Coalition Unionist MP and how proud he must have been when his young daughter, Mary, presented a bouquet to Queen Mary when the King and Queen passed through Dulwich on their way to visit the Crystal Palace. The Times noted that “Dulwich, at the entrance of its charmingly rural village, prominently displayed its confident and cheerful motto, All’s well.” However, in the economic depression following the Great War, Henry’s business affairs did not prosper and in 1921 he had a nervous breakdown while on a business trip to Folkestone and went missing. His disappearance was covered extensively by the press and he was found a week later near Dymchurch in a state of collapse and unable to give any account of his movements. His doctors diagnosed overwork and over the next year he gave up many of his responsibilities including his parliamentary seat. Sadly, he went bankrupt in 1922 and died in 1959.
Peter Porteous was a manager at a paper factory. He lived with his family, including his sons, Douglas and James, pupils at Alleyn’s School. Douglas was killed in action in France in 1916. James went on to have a son, Peter, who died when he was shot down over Leipzig in one of the first serious raids to use Lancaster bombers.
When the houses in the road were built the first people to live in them named them. For those residents who had moved into London, the name they chose usually reflected the place they had come from. The Canes lived at Bungaree, which is Aborigine for hut and is in not far from Melbourne. Mrs Cane was born in Nottinghamshire but married and moved to Australia where she had her children. At some stage they all came back to England as her youngest was born in Camberwell but they named their house to remind them of Australia. Mr Gregg had grown up in the City in the apple orchard parish of St Martin Pomeroy where his father was a portrait painter and his mother kept a boarding house. When he married and moved to Calton Avenue he named his house St Martin Pomeroy. The Lampards named their house Hollingborne after the village they came from in Kent. Mr and Mrs Hipkins named their house Tyneside probably because Mrs Hipkins had been born and bred in Newcastle and Mr and Mrs Davies named their house Velindre after the place they came from in Cardiganshire (now Ceredigion).
Two brothers and their families lived in adjoining houses in Calton Avenue. Sidney and John White were the grandsons of Robert White who in 1845 had started making lemonade and ginger beer at home and selling it from a barrow in Camberwell with Mary, his wife. R. White’s the business proved phenomenally successful and provided a living for many family members, including Sidney and John who described themselves as ‘mineral water manufacturers’. There used to be a playground song: 'R. White's ginger beer goes off pop; a penny on the bottle when you take it to the shop’. The ‘pop’ was not a reference to the fizziness of the drink but to the potential explosion caused by secondary fermentation and the challenge of adequately stoppering the bottles. To counteract this by 1885 R White’s was using glass bottles for most of their drinks which sadly carried no deposit. Codd’s patent bottles, referred to in their adverts, were an ingenious solution to the problems of fastening and storing fizzy drinks. It was said that in the Great War R White’s gave half their horses and vans to the war effort without impacting their output. The company later became almost as famous for its marketing as its product, with the ‘I’m a secret lemonade drinker’ campaign. Ross MacManus wrote and sang the jingle; his son Declan, aka Elvis Costello, provided backing vocals.
Arthur Linton was a very successful cyclist at a time when cycling was a hugely popular sport. Born in 1868 in Wales, he started work as a miner aged 12 but soon made a name for himself in the cycling world. He won the Bordeaux-Paris road race in 1896, then regarded as the world championships, and broke several records, including the world one-hour cycling record. He was also one of the first cyclists to be suspected of doping. Linton trained at the Herne Hill Velodrome in the early days where he also attempted to break his own record for the World One Hundred Miles but there were some peculiar goings-on. The pacemakers did not turn up, the bike kept breaking down and the pistol repeatedly misfired, all of which prevented a successful assault on the record. Rumours abounded that the event had been sabotaged. The Times reported it seemed ‘entirely incredible’ that ‘interested parties’ had deliberately interfered with the race, as ‘Londoners were always sportsmanlike’ and added that the manager of the Velodrome, Mr Lacey-Hillier, was ‘a gentleman of unblemished reputation’ who would never have been involved in such dark deeds. The Times asked that messages of support be sent to Mr Linton at Calton Avenue.
The 1896 Bordeaux-Paris race was 350 miles long and highly eventful with Linton being beset by more bad luck. His bike lost a nut causing a fall and a serious head injury. With his bike now unrideable, he walked the next ten kilometers, before continuing on an unfamiliar bike. After a while he was able to replace that bike with a more suitable one but he then took a wrong direction as the race route had been changed without informing all the riders. He crashed into another cyclist, suffering another head injury but still went on to win the race. It was remarked at the finishing line that Linton looked in terrible health. After the race Linton was too ill to continue racing and returned to Wales where he died two months later. The following year rumours began to surface that Linton had died due to doping. He shared a trainer with Jimmy Michael who had been banned from racing due to doping. Their manager, Choppy Warburton, used to give his cyclists a swig from a ‘little black bottle’, widely speculated to contain either strychnine or trimethyl. Doping was not illegal at the time and indeed was fairly common. In fact Linton died of typhoid, probably exacerbated by the gruelling feats he had undertaken to win the 1896 title.
During the Second World War, the Royal Air Force housed their barrage balloons at the corner of Calton Avenue and Townley Road. The balloons or ‘blimps’ were tethered to the ground by metal cables and were designed to protect against aircraft attack either by obstructing the aircraft or by damaging the aircraft on collision with the cables. The balloons only interfered with low flying aircraft as the cables made them impractical for higher altitudes. The balloons were huge; they overshadowed Alleyn’s main building and sometimes landed on the roof itself. Former pupils of Alleyn’s remember avoiding a barrage balloon when it came down in flames during a football match. The balloon site is now the school memorial garden.
Gerald Wilson Kingsland, soldier turned mechanic turned journalist turned editor of a sex magazine, lived in Calton Avenue for many years. He was living there when he was made bankrupt in 1963 but despite this in the 1970s his bank lent him £89,000 which he later persuaded them to write off. The whole matter tipped his bank manager into changing career and becoming an estate agent, a successful one as it turned out. Kingsland lived in Dulwich with his second wife and three sons. He founded a magazine called Curious, ‘the sex education for men and women’ which got him fined for publishing ‘obscene content’. One edition of the magazine had a young David Bowie as its cover star, wearing the same ‘man dress’ he later wore on the cover of his record The man who sold the world.
In 1980, aged 50, Kingsland secured a book advance to undertake a real life Robinson Crusoe adventure. He advertised in Time Out for a ‘wife’ to spend a year with him on a desert island. From 56 replies he chose Lucy Irvine, then half his age, and left Calton Avenue to be cast away with her on Tuin Island, 70 miles off Papua New Guinea. Irvine later wrote a best-selling book, Castaway, about the experience which was turned into a film with Oliver Reed as Kingsland and Amanda Donohoe as Lucy Irvine.
Kingsland also wrote a book which was much less popular and went on to undertake other adventures. He made an unsuccessful attempt to sail with his sons from Colombia to England in a dug out tree. In 1994 he tried to sail to the Indian Ocean starting from the river Severn with a 21 year old Girl Friday on a raft he made himself. The vessel sprang a leak 200 yards into the trip and he and the girl parted company. Kingsland continued to recruit young female assistants and island hopped around the South Pacific, ending up in Western Samoa. When he was diagnosed with cancer he left his fifth wife and returned to Calton Avenue and his second wife, Rosemary. He died in 2000 aged 70. Described by Brian Green as a ‘happy-go-lucky man with curly ginger hair and beard’ and by himself as ‘the sex pest of the South Pacific’, Kingsland left 5 wives, 7 children and a string of escapades. One of his sisters-in-law said that for him life was a ‘relentless and disturbing house party’.
Prior to 1922 Calton Avenue was known as Calton Road. The name was changed, at the London County Council’s request, to avoid confusion with another Calton Road in Enfield. The first section of the road, named after the family that sold Dulwich Manor to Edward Alleyn, was built around 1880 and connected the Village end of Court Lane with the newly constructed Woodwarde Road. A dotted line on the 1886 Estate Map shows a projected route north-westwards over the fields towards Townley Road but, until the mid-1890s, there was only a footpath - fenced in 1887 to provide a secure route for pupils walking from the Village to the new Alleyns School. Construction of the Townley Road end of the road began in the mid-1890s specifically to provide better access from East Dulwich to the newly completed St Barnabas Church.
Prior to 1860 Court Lane ran directly into Dulwich Village (or High Street Dulwich as it was then) between the burial ground and the Long Pond, one of several reservoirs in the area. This pond was filled in between 1859-60 using the spoil generated from the construction of the Southern Relief High level sewer which runs through the centre of Dulwich Village and up through the Alleyns School playing fields towards Lordship Lane.
The current block of shops and flats on the corner of Calton Avenue and Dulwich Village dates from1922-23. Built to the design of the Estate Surveyor, C E Barry, it replaced the forge and the blacksmith’s house which had stood on the site from the C18. The blacksmith’s house was formerly known as the ‘White House’; in the 1820s and early 1830s it had been a grocery and milk store run by the parents of local character (and artist) Tom Morris. The lease on the old buildings had run out before WW1 and there had been several proposals to demolish and replace them with a petrol station and garage, but in the end the Estate decided on the current building. It was developed by local builder Mitchells and remained in the family ownership of G A Dean, the managing director, until 1968 when the Estate acquired the lease for £35,000.
The S G Smith garage and workshop site was originally occupied by a row of houses. In the early 1860s, following the filling in of the Long Pond, the Estate had put the area of land behind the forge, then known as Russell’s Field, up for sale to speculative builders to construct small houses. The only bidder had been local builder J W Sawyer and between 1866 and 1868 he built 16 houses and cottages either side of what is now Gilkes Place (then Elms Road).
Charles H Pickup had been running a garage in Elms Road since 1913 and when he wanted to expand after WW2, all the houses on the current garage site were demolished. The petrol station that used to be here was opened in 1967 - it had been used as a builder’s yard until 1960 when S G Smith took over Pickup’s garage and rebuilt the large workshop behind.
The houses on the corner of Gilkes Place and Calton Avenue date from the 1980s - this site was derelict for most of the 1960s and 70s. The four cottages, numbers 11-17 Calton Avenue were built in the early 1870s while, on the opposite side of the road, the Dulwich Cottage Company’s scheme for working class housing was completed a few years later. An article in the magazine ‘Builder’ dated 29/01/1876 noted that ‘there is a probability of a large number of dwellings for the industrial classes being shortly erected on the Dulwich College Estate. Between 1876 and 1879, the company built a terrace of small houses north-east of the Court Lane/Calton Road junction designed by Estate Surveyor Charles Barry Jnr.
The completion of St Barnabas Church in 1894 had, as noted previously, led to the construction of the new road from Townley Road specifically to provide decent access for the congregation from East Dulwich to the new church. In April 1898 builder J H Cooper of Worcester Lodge, East Dulwich Grove, agreed to lease a 170 foot frontage ‘south of the Presbyterian church parsonage garden fronting on the north-western part of the future Calton Road’. He contracted to build two pairs of semi-detached houses to a value of £550 each (Nos 93-99). He had a reasonable track record building on the Estate - his first development had been on the south side of East Dulwich Grove in 1887 (Nos 156-164 remain), moving on to the north side in 1888 (only No 181 remains).
The first four houses had clearly sold well as by February 1899 he was offering to take an additional 180 foot frontage at 5s per foot with a contribution to the standard sewer charge of 8s a foot. He agreed to build three further pairs of semis on 30 foot frontages to cost £650.
In May 1901 he offered to take a much longer frontage and build a further seven pairs of semi-detached houses to cost not less than £675 for a 30 foot frontage and £550 for a 25 foot frontage. The frontages were slightly amended as, in the following month, the Estate’s Surveyor reported that ‘the houses will have a frontage of 26 feet and will contain, on the ground floor, drawing room, dining room, kitchen, scullery and other offices and a conservatory. On the first floor three bedrooms, bathroom and separate WC and, on the second floor, two more bedrooms and a box room. The house will have red brick fronts with the flank and rear walls in stock bricks with tile roofs. They will cost £900 -6s’. There was further discussion about the appearance, particularly of the side elevations. This was resolved by the builder agreeing to the Estate Surveyor, Charles Barry Jnr’s suggested design.
In June architect A E Mullins, of 48 Peckham Road wrote to the Estate with a proposal. Mullins said that his client was prepared to build in the gap but that he thought that the older ‘working class’ dwellings opposite the site would impact on the desirability of his larger style of house, and asked for permission to reduce the size and value of the houses on this last section. The Estate was initially unwilling but, after some discussion, probably involving money, they changed their minds. The following month they agreed to allow three houses valued at £350, and a builder’s yard, so long as the building fronting the yard looked like a house. No 23 remained a builder’s yard for many years and, until relatively recently, had garage style doors at ground level.
The last three houses to be built in Calton Road before the outbreak of WW1 were ‘White Cliff’, the former doctor’s house and surgery on the corner of Woodwarde Road, and No 36. The former dates from 1906 -1908 and was designed by architect W J Almond for local GP Dr Parrott. No 36 dates from 1911-12 and was originally built for a Miss C E Milner and designed by architect Treacher & Sons - Sharon O’Connor’s Journal article in Winter 2009 gives more details. The St Barnabas vicarage was completed in 1915 to the designs of William H Wood, the original architect of St Barnabas.
Nos 30, 32 and 34 date form the 1920s. Ernest Cole, who also designed the St Barnabas Parish Hall in the Village, was the architect, and they were built for the prolific local developer H A Willmott. The last house to be completed was No 28- it stands on a former allotment site and dates from 1961, Austin Vernon & Partners were the architects.
June 2014
Wednesday 4th Dulwich Picture Gallery Exhibition opens- Art and Life -Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray. Curated by the Nicholson’s grandson, Jovan.
Sunday 8th Dulwich Helpline - Cake and Book Sale at 97 Dulwich Village
Tuesday 10th Dulwich Picture Gallery Lecture - Muhummad’s Biography: Islam and Revisionist History- by Mailise Ruthven. Linbury Room 10.30am £10.
Talk by Bernard Victor - History of the Hollywood Musicals from1920-195 0 illustrated with music and pictures. Lecture Hall, Dulwich Library 2.00pm. Admission Free. Tea and biscuits served.
Wednesday 11th Dulwich Society Public Meeting - Making the most of our road space - Crown & Greyhound, Dulwich Village, meeting room 8pm.
Thurs 12th Dulwich Decorative & Fine Arts Society lecture: Art & Illusion: Picture Puzzles from Mesopotamia to Magritte. James Allen's Girls' School, 8pm; see www.ddfas.org.uk
Sunday 15th Dulwich Helpline - Garden Safari - map and tickets £5 to visit all 5 gardens, from Fountain House, 17 Sydenham Hill SE 26 2pm-6pm refreshments available.
Dulwich Helpline - Open Garden - North House, Dulwich Village, 5pm-8pm
Tuesday 24th Dulwich Society Garden Group annual visit, this year to the RHS gardens at Wisley. Booking essential.
Dulwich Picture Gallery Lecture - Shakespeare: Playwright and Prophet- Jenny Stevens. Linbury Room 10.30am £10
Sunday 29th Dulwich Helpline - Sunset Soirée- 39 College Road, A summer evening in a beautiful garden with wine, music and canapés.6.30pm - 8.30pm
July 2014
Tuesday 1st Dulwich Picture Gallery Lecture - Joseph Lister: Medical Revolutionary - Lord McColl of Dulwich. Linbury Room 10.30am £10
Saturday 5th Dulwich Players present The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare at 12 noon in the garden of Dulwich Picture Gallery Tickets £12 seated, £7 on the grass/bring your own chair.
The Dulwich Choral Society Concert ‘ WHITE NIGHTS; A RUSSIAN CELEBRATION at All Saints Church, West Dulwich. 7.30pm Music by Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Chesnokov,Rachmaninov,
Sunday 6th Dulwich Players present The Comedy of Errors at 12 noon and 3pm. In the garden of Dulwich Picture Gallery
Tuesday 8th Dulwich Picture Gallery Lecture - Galileo: Science, Religion Philosophy : Maurice Finocchiaro. Linbury room 10.30am £10.
Thursday 10th Dulwich Decorative & Fine Arts Society lecture: The History of Gardens through Art & Society from the Nile to the Seine. James Allen's Girls' School, 8pm; see www.ddfas.org.uk
Saturday 12th Dulwich Players present The Comedy of Errors at 12 noon and 5pm in the American Garden, Dulwich Park. Tickets £7 on the grass/bring your own chair.
Sunday 13th July Dulwich Players present The Comedy of Errors at 12 noon and 5pm in the American Garden, Dulwich Park
Visit Application Form (also in “Dulwich Gardens open for charity” booklet)
To: Ina Pulleine, 1 Perifield, London SE21 8NG. Telephone: 8670 5477 (after 11.00am)
Please reserve ….... place(s) on the June 24th Garden Group outing.
Price £25 includes transport, tips and a guided tour. Please make cheques payable to Ina Pulleine, not to the Dulwich Society. Important - admission is free to RHS members (who must produce their membership card). Each member may also take in one guest without charge. We hope there will be enough members to get everyone in without charge. If not, some non-members may have to pay the £11.85 entry fee.
Name(s):
Address:
Telephone number:
RHS member: YES/NO Delete as appropriate
N.B. Please enclose a stamped, addressed envelope if you require an acknowledgement