Listening to music from 1968 and wondering what was happening locally when this music was new, I began to google the era and tweet my results. Soon @StephenBln and @kmflett joined in with their personal knowledge of the era…we dug up some info about the Tottenham Royal which hosted The Who and Status Quo among others in 1968 and you could have seen the Small Faces, Bonzo Dog Band, Joe Cocker, Amen Corner and many more at Ally Pally on New Years Eve. I also discovered the Leyton Buzzards ode to the era, Saturday Night (among the plastic palm trees) which has the immortal lines “I found my mecca near Tottenham Hale Station/I found heaven on the Seven Sisters Road”
The Delicious links that you click through to above show a serendipitous journey through Google, Flickr, Harringay Online and personal memory taken on a warm summer night 42 years later…
London Transport Museum - some local snippets
From a trip to the London Transport Museum, some local snippets
1. This early 20th century tramway map shows the stops in and around Harringay
2. Some side splitting humour from the Wood Green Tram station
3. I’m very reliably informed by IsarSteve in Berlin and former Harringay resident that these trolley buses operated along Green Lanes until 1961 along routes 629 and 641
4. Finally, small boy drives 341 to see the angels
Christmas Play by Arthur Astrop
This is a part of the school I attended from 1928 (when I was five years old) to 1933, when my family left Harringay and moved to Surrey. Memories of two teachers of that period still remain lodged in my (85-year old) noddle. Miss Clayton, who took the induction class for infants. She was a blonde ‘princess’ in my eyes, not least because she had a tall glass jar of boiled sweets on her desk. At going-home time, those who had been ‘good’ got a sweetie. Her colleague (Miss Osmonde) was a different type. Red-haired and with a very short fuse, she taught us arithmetic. A hard task-mistress, who could wield an ebony ruler to great effect. As a result, I can still recite all my tables (up to 12 times 12) to this day. Other memories of that school include Empire Day parades in the playground, and rigid observance of the two minutes silence on Armistice Days. If I can find them, I have two photos of the school in the 1928-33 period. One shows my class, most of the boys dressed in mishapen jumpers and the girls in pretty frocks, and the entire cast of the school’s 1930 (?) Christmas ‘play.
Arthur Astrop, Kenilworth
Harringay board school, between Falkland and Frobisher roads, opened in 1893. It accommodated 1,475 boys, girls, and infants in 1898, when they occupied separate floors and when there was also a temporary mixed department for 480, making it the largest of Hornsey’s schools. The school, called North Harringay from 1903, accommodated only 1,160 by 1932 and was reorganized into junior mixed and infants’ schools in 1934; senior girls were transferred, while senior boys continued to use the top floor as a secondary modern school, later absorbed into Priory Vale. In 1976 the upper floors of the board school building were occupied by North Harringay junior school, with 411 on the roll, and the ground floor and extensions by the infants’, with 258 enrolled.
Baroness Summerskill’s early political life in Harringay
Dr Edith Summerskill, Labour politician and feminist, began her political life in Harringay.
She entered active politics almost by chance when she was 32 and in practice in Wood Green…she was asked to fight the Green Lanes ward of Harringay in the Middlesex County Council elections, a safe Conservative seat, and she won with a healthy majority.
Obituary, British Medical Journal Feb 16th 1980
A fishy tale from the New River, Harringay
It was Mr Brigg, using rod and line who finally landed the monster in October 1907.
For two years it had been glimpsed in the waters of the New River between Wood Green and Harringay and had became the stuff of legend to local anglers.
When finally Mr Brigg, after struggling for a full half hour, pulled it from the water, it was found to weigh 18lb and to be 2ft 6in long.
For Mr Brigg had succeeded where so many fisherman had failed and captured the New River’s prize, a giant grey or lake trout. At the time, its weight was a record for a London water and amongst the biggest catches in England.
Mr Brigg’s fame spread as far as New Zealand where the Dannevirke Advocate of Hawke Bay, reported the catch in their hunting section on October 22nd 1907
Mr Brigg was reported to have said, “…but you should have seen the one that got away”
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