The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 26 .......... Wishy Washy, a wet November playtime in Edmund Waller and a history lesson

Me circa 1956

The story of one house in Lausanne Road over a century and a half, and of one family who lived there in the 1950s.*

Now I often wonder what happened to Wishy Washy.

He worked at Glenton’s on Brabourne Grove and got his nick name because he did the night shift in the summer washing the coaches ready for their turn around in the morning.

I never knew his real name, and doubt that many did.

Only now with the passage of time have I made the connection with the pantomime Aladdin which in 1861 first featured Widow Twankey and her son Wishy Washy who was Aladdin’s brother but had no more than a walk on part in the early shows.

I remember him as a thin man of medium height who lived with his mum off Evelina Road.

But it was his train set that captured my imagination, that and his tendency to take a short cut across the railway track to get home that bit quicker.

Dad took me to see it once and it was magic.  The train set filled a back room of the house and all the accessories from the stations, out houses and landscape had been made by Wishy Washy.

Edmund Waller School, 2007

It had a profound effect on me, but now nearly 60 years later I cannot picture the man, the train set or the house, only that memory of walking to Evelina Road one winter’s night with my dad.

And I suppose that is the trouble with childhood memories, they are at best just a momentary snatch of things, vivid enough at the time to stay with you but too flimsy to tell you more.

Like the day the workmen put in those big heavy metal radiators at Edmund Waller School.

Of course the details are lost but I remember the open fireplaces in the classrooms and one particular wet playtime in late November when I passed the time with a second hand copy of the Eagle comic watching the steam gently rise off the jumpers of some class mates who had been daft enough to get caught in the downpour which had flooded the playground.

Orak Speaks to Andrew, November 1956

The comic was all engrossing but was a one off and it would be another thirty years before I came across the set covering the story and caught up with that moment on a wet day in November 1956 and finished the story.

And it has opened up a shedful of memories of that classroom, a few of the teachers and snippest of lessons long forgotten.

Edmund Waller was a Board School built to a proven design which delivered a building which was warm in winter and cool in summer with windows mounted high enough up the wall to deliver great shafts of sunlight but too high to look out of.

Now that made the school perfect.  As someone who spent his career in schools built in the 1950s I yearned for the solid brick built schools of the late 19th century.

The architects of the post war period may have thought they were doing something bold and new with designs which used masses of glass, but they never had to work in them.  In winter they leaked heat and in summer turned the rooms into infernos which did nothing for concentration.

The Eagle, 1956

Added to which the distractions of a net ball game in the playground proved fatal to an explanation of the causes of the Great War.

But a tleast the classroom walls then and in my time as a teacher were places to advertise the achievements of students, although the walls of class 3b seemed for ever dominated by rows of multiplication tables and key spellings.

Forty years later the fashionable and expensive experts brought into tell us teachers how to do a job we had been doing for twenty years and more hit on the idea of visual learning all of which Miss Prentice had mastered all of those decades ago.

And that in a round about way brings me back to Wishy Washy who like Miss Prentice knew what worked and what would captivate an eight your old.
Pictures;

Pictures; me circa 1956, Edmund Waller School, 2007, Colin Fitzpatrick, and The Rogue Planet, Eagle, May 25 1956 Vol 7 Nu 22, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The story of one house in Lausanne Road http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road