Memories

One lodger was sent to prison for kidnapping guttersnipes; the next a drunkard who hit his wife and was beaten to death.

Henry Ebner was founding partner in the firm Myers, Ebner and Deaner for 40 years, and also twice President of the Hammersmith Rotary Club and raised many thousands of pounds for charity.

Before powerful tools like the internet and social media, the drum beat around race activism in Britain, as well as globally, was generated mostly by radical print media, writes Will Brook.

When Joseph Conrad, below, wrote The Secret Agent, he recalled a South London incident which was the inspiration for its main character.

Five generations of a family have worked to keep the lights on across London for almost 100 years, and there’s a possibility of a sixth generation continuing the tradition in the electricity industry.

The trial of Ada Williams became a sensation in 1913 when, in response to the taunts of her husband, she killed her own son, born before she married him.

The National Maritime Museum said it will not meddle with its displays on Lord Nelson, despite the fact he was an avowed opponent of the abolition of slavery. One national newspaper in particular seemed to think acknowledging this fact was a dangerously subversive, leftie idea.
TOBY PORTER looks at the victor of Trafalgar’s links to South London…

The Aylesbury Estate, with 2,704 flats, and built from 1963-77 and is home to 7,500 people, is currently undergoing a major regeneration programme. On September 27, 2005, Southwark council decided that rather than spend £350million updating it, it would replace them with 4,900 flats in blocks built by a housing association. The sale of half would fund the whole scheme.
Author MICHAEL ROMYN makes a passionate plea for its survival.

Ladywell Cemetery contains the grave of an army officer who died in a famous shootout in Dublin 100 years ago last week, as the war between Irish republicans and the British reached its conclusion. MIKE GUILFOYLE tells the story…

Wednesday of last week marked the 80th anniversary of a Second World War German bomb striking Balham Tube station. Here TOBY PORTER recounts what happened.

Peckham Rye Park partially owes its existence to cricket.
When locals wanted to play the game in Victorian England, they converged on Peckham. Some of the matches descended into vicious acts of revenge and other passing pedestrians were in fear of being struck by the sloggers at the crease.

John Archer, London’s first Black Mayor, reversed Churchill’s claim that “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.” He moved to the left as he got older. He was first elected as a Progressive – or Liberal, but joined Labour by 1919 and was the election agent for Britain’s first Asian MP, a Communist, by 1922.

Maurice Dorfman manned the counter of his haberdashers’ shop for 60 years until he was taken to hospital and died two months later in February, aged 87. He left hundreds of mourning customers but no relatives, so the premises will now become a set of units.

On the evening of October 14, 1940, one of the worst wartime domestic disasters took place in Balham.

He battled disease during much of his distinguished career at St Thomas’s Hospital and was one of the driving forces behind the drive to clean up London’s sewers.

In 1871 and 1872, there was a series of ghost scares in Peckham and its vicinity. In November and December

As Lambeth seeks to rid itself of street names which recall the memory of prominent slavers, one name has stood

George Balleine made his name as a historian but before that, he was a pioneering social reformer in South London – as vicar of St James’s Church, Bermondsey. The poverty he saw there inspired him to join the social reform campaigns of his friends Ada and Alfred Salter.

A cemetery historian has received his father’s posthumous medal for his service in World War Two.

In October 1897, many people saw a ghost flitting about near St James’s Church and school, Plumstead. Sensitive little girls