FROM THE SHADOWS OF WAR  - AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY - BY RAY KEMP

 

THE FOLLOWING ARE THE DRAFT EXTRACTS FROM RAY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY THAT HAVE BEEN SELECTED BECAUSE THEY CAPTURE MEMORIES OF INCIDENTS AND PLACES IN TOTTENHAM. TO HELP FURTHER UNDERSTANDING OF THESE MEMORIES  WE HAVE ADDED A NUMBER OF PHOTOGRAPHS TO ILLUSTRATE THE SUBJECT MATTER.

WE HAVE ALSO INCLUDED SUB-HEADINGS TO INTRODUCE EACH  TOPIC. 

 

MY EARLY MEMORIES

My first real memories on planet earth are of steam trains, the royal family, the glorious game of football and poverty. In their own unique ways, they all played a very important part in my life.

One of the first sounds I can remember was Spurs scoring a goal. The cheers from the crowd crammed into the football stadium at White Hart Lane were just audible above the noise of an ageing locomotive train whistling its way past my home en route to the nearby Seven Sisters junction.

The house into which I was born was a good two miles from the football ground. But when Tottenham Hotspur scored a goal the noise from the crowd carried on a stiff north wind could clearly be heard as the sound shook the rickety sash windows of my Victorian terraced home. If it was an evening match the flickering floodlights from the ground would light up the smoky sky and the cheers would seem even louder as I snuggled down into my bed pulling the rough, ex-army blankets around me trying to keep warm. 

I was probably still in my cranky old pram with its big hood and rusting wheels when I first heard the cheers. But over the years I would stand countless times with my dear old dad on a Saturday afternoon cheering on the “Lilywhites” while cracking the shells from a bag of Percy Dalton’s roasted peanuts clutched tightly in my freezing cold hands.

 “While my mum had a difficult war my dad fared no better. At the beginning of the war my dad’s home was a small and cramped two bedroomed terraced cottage in Tottenham’s Summerhill Road. He lived there along with my grandparents and his two unmarried sisters, Vi & Olive.”

 “The hearts of my fellow Londoners were big and generous. For many their shoulders were heavy having suffered terribly during the Blitz. They were good, hard working people whose lives had been tough and rough. In the main they were very honest and they were also very smart. Today nothing makes me angrier than to see plays and films from the fifties – and even more recently - made by snooty producers and directors who had lived cushioned, privileged lives making fun of the working class who were the backbone of London and who worked to make it one of the greatest cities in the world.

 I remember sitting laughing in a big black pram being pushed by my eight-year-old, beautiful half-sister, Pam under the railway bridge near my home. She and I would roar with laughter as she let the pram go and it rolled away down the gentle slope in the road under the bridge. Then a steam train would come hissing and roaring over my head like a dragon lured out of its lair.”

 

 

CORONATION MEMORIES

My first real memory was not of football but of the royal family.

I suspect that it was more than fortuitous that my very earliest memory of all was as a one-year-old being held in my mother’s arms at a street party held to commemorate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

 


CORONATION STREET PARTY SEAFORD (LITTLE) ROAD

It was wet on the day, so the celebrations planned for the streets were held instead in the wooden stairwell leading up to the platforms of Seven Sisters station. I can remember the union jack bunting strung from the ceiling over the lines of trestle tables. Rationing was still in force in 1953 so the bright green jellies, the frosted biscuits and the luxury items on the tables would have meant real sacrifices for the families involved to make sure the day was truly memorable.

RAILWAYS

It is not surprising that steam trains played a big part in my life for most of my childhood because my dad was working on the railways. With his big, strong hands and powerful shoulders before the Second World War he had been a platelayer. The job involved working with large teams of men lifting heavy steel rails by hand into place on top of the rough wooden sleepers. In those days there was no automated machinery to help them put the rails in place.

 It was an extremely dangerous job. If the rails were not handled carefully or proved to be too heavy for the team of platelayers, they would twist and turn uncontrollably as they were taken from a waggon and lowered onto the line. Any worker unlucky enough to be standing too close to the rails as they whipped through the air would be killed or seriously injured. 

 The railways always featured in many of my activities.  Not only did we live near a railway junction - the fact that my dad worked for the railways allowed him to buy a number of cheap “privilege tickets” each year. It meant that as a family we were able to travel on the railways to visit our relatives in Sussex without it costing too much money. 

   

SEVEN SISTERS BRIDGE 1958 - HEAVY ENGINERING WORK




SOUTH TOTTENHAM STATION 1950s - WAITING FOR SOUTHEND TRAIN

 The big highlight of the year would always be a trip to Southend. Along with hundreds of other passengers we would stand on the crowded wooden platform of South Tottenham station waiting for the train to take us to the seaside. The trip meant a change of trains at Barking and there was always a rush as the locomotive pulled in from London’s Fenchurch Street to try to get a seat on the train.

 It was a magical mystery trip to the seaside. We first saw the sea from our carriage window as the train arrived at Benfleet station and beside it the creek separating Canvey Island from the mainland. A few years earlier a much-loved aunt and uncle of mine had lost the bungalow they owned on the island when the Thames and the East Coast had flooded. I didn’t know it then, but both the Thames and flooding would play a major role in my later life.

 

COME ON YOU SPURS !  MY INTRODUCTION TO BEING A LIFETIME SUPPORTER

 For all my childhood years I was never far away from White Hart Lane and the sounds of the football terraces. I was with my dad the year Spurs won both the FA Cup and came top of the league. We joined thousands of others in the packed streets of Tottenham looking up in awe as Danny Blanchflower, the captain, stood at the front of an open topped bus and held the gleaming FA Cup, decked in the blue and white ribbons, high in the air as the vehicle slowly made its way through the cheering crowds 


SPURS CAPTAIN DANNY BLANCHFLOWER 1961


But, just like life, football is a game of highs and lows and after the happiness of victory the sadness of defeat often follows. One of the saddest nights of my life was when Spurs were knocked out of the European cup by the Portuguese side, Benfica. As I left the ground with thousands of other slumped shouldered supporters it was one of the longest and hardest walks home as I made my way from one end of Tottenham to the other.


ORIGINAL TICKET & PROGRAMME -Alan Swain

In my teenage years I would go to the ground with Barry Troyna one of my best mates. Often the fighting on the terraces was more entertaining than the game on the field and we would be more interested in counting the numbers arrested than the goals being scored.

 As a spotty seventeen-year-old my mates and I would sometimes sneak out of our grammar school at lunchtime to enjoy an under-age pint in our closest pub. It would be unthinkable now but often we would stand at the bar shoulder to shoulder with some of my footballing heroes…. Dave Mackay, Jimmy Greaves, Cliff Jones to name just a few .... we would sit there cautiously sipping a half pint of “Double Diamond” hoping none of our teachers would walk into the bar.

 My school was in White Hart Lane and an old boy of the school, Bobby Buckle, was the founding captain of the Spurs.

 

BATHDAYS AND WASHDAYS

 At the end of a sooty day all my Dad would be given to clean himself was a bucket of cold water. It wasn’t as if he could wash himself when he got home. For our metal bath hung in the yard outside. Once a week and usually smelling of cat’s pee it was brought into the kitchen and it would be filled with water from the copper boiler …. we could only afford the gas to light it once a week.

 


All five of us in my family, my brother and sister, my mother and I would use the same bath with my dad always being the last to step into the already dirty and by then tepid water. Occasionally when he was very dirty, he would go to the municipal public baths but with money in such short supply they were a luxury as a family we could ill afford.

If it was a hard life for men it was just as hard a life for women. Keeping clean was a constant problem. My mum had been brought up in the Sussex countryside where the air was pure and fresh, and clean water was always available from the springs and wells of the High Weald.


Apart from the notorious London smog which hung around for days and coated men, buildings and horses still pulling carts through the streets with yellowish black soot we lived near to a railway junction. Sometimes on washdays my mum would hang the heavy linen sheets and the clothes of a family of five on the line. No sooner were they all carefully pegged in place than a train making its way from Alexandra Palace to Stratford East would be held up by a semaphore signal at Seven Sisters junction.

 If, while the train was waiting, the fireman decided to stoke the locomotive’s boiler it would send out plumes of filthy black smoke from its coffee pot chimney. It would mean my mum’s washing would be coated in smut and soot and she would have to start the laborious task of making it clean all over again.

Once the heavy washing had been pegged and unpegged and then brought into the house it all had to be ironed from the sheets to every tiny handkerchief. In those days no self-respecting housewife would allow a single item of laundry to remain un-ironed. On wet winter days the washing would have to be hung on a clothes horse around the open fire with the ever-present risk that a cinder would spit out from the flames and catch the clothes alight .... or at best burn a hole in a prized skirt or cardigan.

THE COALMAN

 The coal itself would be brought into the house through the front door by burly coalmen who in those days still arrived in a horse and cart. Living in a terraced house it meant the heavy coal bags had to be carried through the living room and unloaded into the coal bunker in the scullery. The coalmen often scraped the wallpaper with their dirty sacks and it would be almost impossible to remove the dirty marks from the wall.

 
 
With the weight of the sacks on their shoulders the coalman’s heavy hobnail boots also left dents in the lino where they walked. In those days it was hard for a woman to be house proud and fitted carpets were an unheard-of luxury for in any case they would have been ruined by the boots.

TOILETS AND SANITATION

 We had no inside lavatory. So when I was a small child every time I wanted to go to the toilet my mum had to walk me out into the yard and around the back of the kitchen to the lavatory. Sometimes it would be raining and spending a penny meant getting a soaking. Although my mum did her best to keep it clean because the toilet was outside it was always full of spiders hanging from the ancient old, rusty cistern above my head.

As a three-year-old I can remember sitting in the toilet with agonising stomach pains desperately calling out for my mum. She was in the kitchen at the other side of a yard. There were two doors in between, and she could not hear my cries for help. It was a long time before she came to see where I was and then realised I was seriously ill.

 Eventually the doctor came and was soon followed by an ambulance. I can still see the stumps of pollarded trees in Braemar Road near my home flashing by through the green windows of the ambulance as I was driven to Tottenham’s Prince of Wales hospital.


 

MUM’S WARTIME EXPERIENCE

 In later life I was to learn that during WW2 my mum had been conscripted into the army. During her induction into the army her quick mind and ability with figures stood out. Not long after joining the army she was selected to work on what we now know as the “Enigma Project” based at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. 

 
 

 She underwent some of her training on the Isle of Man. Her initial task was to monitor the codes being sent by German bomber pilots as they took off from airfields in Europe to blitz Britain. Her skills were so finely honed that she could identify individual German pilots and track them from the moment they took off to the moment they landed. She did this by monitoring the subtle, small but marked differences in the way each pilot sent their morse code messages back to base.

 In 1943 my mum became pregnant and was discharged from the army ... even though there was a war on pregnant women were not allowed to remain in the services. 

 During the war, my Mums first husband Fred was in the RAF and stationed in many different locations that were a long way from London. They included Stranraer in Scotland, Valletta during the siege of Malta and Little Snoring in Norfolk. With Fred away on missions and my mum given very little leave time they were only able to see each other infrequently. Sadly, her first husband Fred, who had joined a top-secret pathfinder squadron that was busy pinpointing targets over Germany, was killed in November 1944 in a flying accident,

 When the war was over my mother was invited to Buckingham Palace where she was presented with Fred’s Distinguished Flying Cross by King George VI.

 

MY DAD’S WARTIME EXPERIENCE

 My dad was like most cockneys of his time. All they knew was city life.  Before the war he had never been to France or travelled anywhere more than fifty miles from London for that matter. But all that was soon to change.

 During the war my dad was employed by the London, Midland and Scottish railway, the LMS. Often he would work through the night repairing lines that had been bombed during the Blitz. He was in a protected occupation which meant he thought he was unlikely to be conscripted into the armed forces. In a whirlwind wartime romance he married a beautiful dark brunette called Ethel Crick and whose family came from Barnet.

 When the papers came through for my dad’s older brother, Will Kemp, to join the army my dad bought a box of chocolates to wave Will off on the troop train. But it was Will who waved off my dad on the train with the same box of chocolates. This was because my dad’s call up papers with orders to report to the barracks at Winchester came through before Will was due to depart. My dad was conscripted into the infantry, the Kings Royal Rifle Brigade, and introduced to the world of the warrior.

 By the time he joined the infantry, plans were well underway for D-day and the invasion of France. My dad was taught to use a rifle, kill pigs with a bayonet and take a bath afterwards in the animal’s blood. Every tooth in his mouth was pulled out and he was given a set of ill-fitting false teeth … learning from the lessons of WWI senior officers didn’t want any men to be pulled back from the front line because of dental problems. The attitude of the high command was that most of the men in the infantry were going to die fairly soon so they would have no need of teeth in later life.   

Somewhere along the line a senior officer must have realised that my dad was a very gentle soul who would not want to kill anyone. Faced with a German soldier in his rifle sights he would be one of the least likely of human beings to pull the trigger.

 My dad was taught to use a rifle but his main training was as a medic and it was as a medic that he landed on D-Day on a Normandy beach. He would rarely talk about his wartime experiences but when he did he would describe what it was like to disembark from the landing craft and onto the beach. The first bodies he saw were floating in the water and the first casualty he attended to was just a teenager. The young man was still alive but a bullet had taken off his testicles. My dad did what he could to help him. 

 
                                                                 

 

The medics during the D-day landings have been described by the historian and writer Max Hastings as “the bravest of the brave” and from some of the stories that my dad has told in his modest, quiet way I am sure that he was.  Within six weeks of landing on the beaches he was seriously injured when a shell exploded beside him and killed his best friend.

 He was evacuated back to England for convalescence, but the explosion cost him half a finger and left him with a giant and deep purple scar on the left side of his chest. A month after arriving back in England he received the news that his wife, Ethel (nee Crick)  had died in childbirth. She had given birth to a healthy baby son .... my brother, Roger. An air raid had been taking place while she was giving birth in Barnet hospital and the word “neglect” was written on her death certificate.

 But even having lost a wife and with a young newly born son after he had recovered from his injuries my dad was still sent back to fight. By the time he arrived his company were battling their way through to Germany …. and all the men he had trained and enlisted with had been killed.

 My dad could talk unemotionally for most of the time about the war – which was rarely – but his eyes would always fill with tears when he talked about the liberation of a concentration camp and the horrifying conditions he encountered. As a medic he did what he could to help the former prisoners but he would describe how most of them were beyond salvation

 After the war he was also tasked while based in Flensburg with the medical care of senior Nazis and SS officers after they had been captured and interrogated. It was an experience he also found very hard to talk about.

 When I was young my dad frequently woke up raging and shaking the bed with nightmares as a result of his wartime experiences. But in those days post-traumatic stress was rarely recognised. So many other returning servicemen also had endured horrifying experiences which kept them awake at night and so little consideration was ever given to the suffering they endured.

  After Germany was defeated my dad remained in Hamburg with the army. He did have a German girlfriend while he was there. But his last and final memory of his girlfriend was her being taken away on a Russian truck when they moved into the sector as British troops moved out. He never heard from her or saw here again.

 

POST WAR TOTTENHAM

When he was demobbed my dad returned home to live with my grandma and grandad in Summerhill Rd,

Tottenham. His young son Roger had been looked after by his maternal grandparents and Alf Kemp was unhappy with the conditions that his son was living in with his wife’s relatives so brought him back to live with my grandparents in Summerhill Road.  So there they all were my two maiden aunts, my dad, my brother and my grandparents all living together in a tiny two bedroomed cottage.

It was not until well after the war that my mother met my dad, Alfred Kemp. They had met because her then work-friend, Elsie Kemp, introduced her to Alfred. (The younger brother of her husband Will Kemp) So, it was through Elsie that my mum and dad met and in 1948 they were married in St. Margaret’s church in the grounds of Buxted Park in East Sussex. My mum was born Nellie Muddle and for five hundred years the Muddles had lived in and around the villages and hamlets in the heavily wooded and beautiful Sussex high weald.,

  When my mum married my dad she immediately lost her widow’s pension. But my mum and dad did scrape together enough money to obtain a mortgage. With their mortgage, which they so often struggled to pay, they bought 20 Seaford Road in Tottenham. The house was directly opposite Seven Sisters School.

                                 

THE STREET WAS MY PLAYGROUND

 We would often play with our friends out in the street until long after dark. Playing games of chase and tag around the old gas light on the other side of the road. Chalking up the pavements with numbers for hopscotch or playing fives on the granite stone kerbs. We collected stamps and animal cards from packets of Brooke Bond tea.

 

The best playground was the school opposite my home. At night we would climb the walls and break into the school. Sometimes we would walk along the roof tops. The outside lavatories at the school had glass roofs. One slip as we walked along the edge and we would have fallen through the glass with possibly deathly consequences.

 We scrounged some old orange boxes from the local greengrocer and made camps inside the school grounds. One of our favourite camps was on the top of the old air raid shelters that still existed in the school playground. No-one had been on top of them for years so when we had finished playing, we were absolutely filthy. But we were hidden away there making our own adventures.

 Playing out on the streets as children we had no real knowledge of what was right and wrong. We just knew fear and excitement. The police were few and far between and we hardly ever saw them.

 On one occasion builders had constructed scaffolding up the side of the three-storey school. My friend Colin and I managed to climb up the scaffolding outside all the storeys of the building until we were on the main roof of the building which was at least a hundred feet high. Then we made the perilous journey up a rusty old iron ladder to the pinnacle of the building which was one of two bell towers. We were only nine or ten but we felt when we got to the top as if we had climbed Everest.

 Of course there were very real dangers climbing over the school buildings. One dark night in October I fell headfirst from a twelve-foot-high wall. I toppled off the wall after some passing boys threw a banger firework in my face. This resulted in me badly breaking my arm and wrist.

 Having made my way by foot to the nearby Prince of Wales Hospital and was detained for a eek having had major surgery. After I was released from hospital, I spent most of that winter with my arm in plaster. The surgeons had done a good job stitching my wrist back together again. But from then onwards my wrist was always going to be weak and it left me with a slightly twisted left arm.

 

THE WINTER OF 1963

 Unfortunately, my arm in plaster coincided with the worst winter to hit London during my lifetime. 1963 was a very, very cold year and there was snow on the ground in London for over eight weeks.

For the next few weeks, the streets of London were covered in snow. There were great piles of dirty snow in the road where householders had scraped it off the pavement. Just before Christmas my poor old dad had bought his first car, a second-hand Ford Popular. But there was his pride and joy stranded in the snow out in the street. The battery soon ran flat because the car did not move. Every so often he would go out and use a starting handle which he inserted into a special hole in the front of the car. Sometimes the cranking would work but sometimes the engine just would not start. He had put old coats on the inside of the engine compartment to try to stop the parts from freezing.  


On one occasion he cranked the engine to start it forgetting that he had left the coats lying over the engine. Unfortunately for him on this occasion the car did start. It was only when wisps of smoke started to blow out from the engine compartment, he remembered that he had not removed the coats. He very nearly lost the car in a blaze of glory on the snow-covered road.





END OF SWEET RATIONING

 Unfortunately for me the broken arm coincided with my family having a little extra money and for the first time I was able to buy the sweets that I wanted from the corner shop at the end of the road. Walking into the shop with precious pennies in my hand was like walking into a wonderland. On the walls were jars full of old-fashioned sweets such as cough candy, aniseed balls, liquorice sticks, jelly babies, banana splits, acid drops and wine gums. Under the counters with glass displays there were black jacks, fruit salads and lucky bags.


The lucky bags contained a surprise variety of sweets which could include sherbet dabs and liquorice wheels. But my mum always told me not to buy them because it was rumoured they were filled with sweets swept off the factory floor.

Around the corner from where we lived in Seven Sisters Road there was also an old-fashioned sweet shop where my dad would sometimes take me as a special treat. The sweets were made on the premises. I would watch with fascination as the shop owner pulled out long strands of hot, sticky cough candy canes from an oven and cut them into mouth size pieces. My dad would buy a bag of still warm candy and share a piece with me as we walked home

.There were several sweet factories not far from where we lived. They included the brands Maynards and Barretts which are still around today. But when I was very young my uncle Will worked at the Clarnico factory in Hackney. The only sweets I had as a child from a big tin were misshapes which he gave to my family. My mum gave them to me as a small child and it meant I soon had very bad teeth.

 

LOCAL PARKS OF TOTTENHAM

 There were plenty of parks and lots of bomb sites to play on. Our nearest park was Downhills which had once been the estate of an elegant country house. There were the usual swings, a witches-hat roundabout, a sand pit and slides. There was also a pond where we fished for newts until we were chased away by the park keeper.



In the adjoining Lordship Recreation Ground there was a model traffic area where children could hire bikes and model cars. There were real traffic lights and real policemen and it was where I learnt to ride a bike. In those days we were too poor for me to own a bike of my own. The model traffic area had been opened a year before the war.

 At the time none of the adults mentioned that, not far from the model traffic area where we played so happily, a German bomb had fallen on an air raid shelter in the Lordship Recreation Ground during the war. 

The bomb killed 40 people sheltering inside and seriously injured another 100 of its occupants.

WARTIME BOMB SITES

 Another place we used to play were the old bomb sites. Tottenham had been badly bombed during the war so there were still lots of sites that were lying derelict. One of the favourite places was the ruins of a pub called the Dagmar Arms which had been destroyed by a direct hit from a V2 rocket. The old basement had been filled with water and the pond it had created was a haven for wildlife. In the summer the land was full of wild flowers and butterflies and it was a great place for making hideouts. The old pub sign which somehow had survived the blast still swung in the wind.

Of course, we should not have been on the old bomb sites but we were skilled at breaking and entering and climbing up and over fences. The other areas we often broke into were the railway embankments. We would climb on each other’s shoulders to get over the walls and fences and then pull the person still standing on the pavement up and over.

 

TRAIN SPOTTING

One of our favourite pastimes was train spotting. We would sit for hours on the embankment overlooking Finsbury Park station watching steam trains racing by on the tracks below …. steaming their way to towns and cities we have never been to but had only heard about. Strange places like Derby, York, Leeds and Edinburgh.

 The locomotive we always wanted to see was A4 class Mallard which was still being used on scheduled runs to and from Scotland and to this day still holds the record as the fastest steam train in the world.  One hot summer’s day we were rewarded for our patience as Mallard came thundering along and blasting its whistle as it passed us by sitting on the railway banks overlooking Harringay West Station.


We had tattered, dog eared books full of the lists of locomotive numbers that were published by Ian Allen. Sometimes just one locomotive in its class would be missing from our list and it felt like a real triumph when we finally spotted the train and could add it to our list. The railways and the railway embankments were exciting places for us to play. Often, we climbed over walls and fences for there was little to stop us. There were plenty of “Do Not Trespass” signs which we always ignored.  We would often be no more than a few feet from the lines as steaming monsters raced by.

 

THE END OF STEAM TRAINS

 But times were changing, and the age of steam was coming to an end. We were delighted when we spotted one of the first diesel trains to come into service. The platform on Finsbury Park station throbbed as the heavy Deltic diesel thundered by at the end of its long journey from Edinburgh to London’s Kings Cross station.

We didn’t realise then that it would herald the end of the steam trains we loved so much. The only diesels we knew up until that time were the little engines that shunted carriages in and out of the marshalling yards. 

Meanwhile in Whitehall Dr Beeching was swinging his blunt axe cutting railway lines and isolating towns and villages that never really recovered from losing their stations.

 

LOCAL SHOPS IN WEST GREEN

 Our main shopping area was the parade of shops in West Green Road in the stretch that met Tottenham High Street.  As a child it was a place of magic and mystery. You could smell the freshly cooked bread coming from the oven of Caves the bakers or see live eels sliding around the zinc tank in the fishmongers before they were taken out and chopped into pieces. At the shop where my mum bought her haberdashery I would marvel as the money she handed to a shop assistant was put in cannisters which disappeared in vacuum tubes which ran around the shop. We would wait while my mum’s change arrived back in the same cannisters. Shopping could be a lengthy experience,

 One of my favourite shops was “Rudds” where there were dinky toys on display. As I got older I would save up my pocket money to buy the miniature model toy cars. I always envied my country cousin. He had been given a proper toy garage with a wind-up car ramp. I only ever had a make-believe garage which my dad had built from bits of old wood and cardboard boxes.

There was also the “Swap Shop”. Its windows were covered in bright red metal grilles and just looking through them was an adventure in itself. There were military swords and helmets, binoculars, cricket bats and golf clubs, garden tools and medals. All seemingly piled together and displayed in no particular order. There were also a number of guitars and air guns and rifles. I still have the guitar I bought from this shop and as for the air gun ... well it had quite a good range.

Alongside the more conventional shops there was a record shop called Dyke and Dryden. It was owned by Jamaican immigrants and is credited with being the foundation stone for being the first multi-million-pound black business in the UK. With music blaring out of the door and its colourful window display it was certainly different from any other shops at the time.

 

ALEXANDRA PALACE

As I grew older one of the favourite places my mates and I liked to play was in the grounds of Alexandra Palace. From my bedroom, as I went to sleep at night, I could see the red light from the 600-foot-high BBC transmitter at Alexandra Palace as it beamed out news bulletins around the world.

 

 

The palace was a cycle ride away. By the time I was about nine I had a bike of my own. My dad bought it for me from a second-hand shop and it gave me the freedom to explore further afield than the immediate streets in my neighbourhood.

 

MY FIRST BIKE

 At first only the boys with richer parents could afford bikes. Instead we made do with jiggers. We put the jiggers together from bits of old prams that we found on bomb sites. The prams often stank but the wheels went around and we pushed each other along the streets in them. Once my brother pushed me a bit too fast and the jigger went straight into a wall and overturned. Apart from a huge cut on my eye I escaped otherwise unscathed. As November 5th approached we would stuff the jiggers with crudely made effigies of Guy Fawkes and stand on the streets begging for a penny for the Guy.


HETCHINS BICYCLE FRAME WITH UNIQUE REAR WHEEL ASSEMBLY
 

Most of the boys I knew had second hand bikes and it was a constant battle to keep them in good repair. From an early age I learned how to put in a new chain link, grease a sprocket, replace worn ball bearings and mend the frequent punctures. The bike shop of our dreams was Hetchins on Seven Sisters road. A Hetchins bike had won the 1936 Olympics and we would stare in the windows at the glistening hand-made frames on display there.

 

ALONG THE RIVER LEA

 We used to play on the barges moored alongside Bambergers woodyards. The yards and the barges contained wood from all over the world and was used to supply the nearby Lebus factory which at one time was the largest furniture factory in the world. It was great fun jumping on to the barges and climbing down through the wood to the living area where the lightermen had a dirty old stove to keep them warm when out on the river during the winter.

 Of course it was dangerous - if any of the wood or logs had shifted while we were climbing on them we would have been crushed. Every so often the police would come along the tow path and try to catch us climbing on the barges. But somehow we always managed to escape them … we were fitter and could cycle faster along the tow path than they could.



Two days before my 15th birthday I was woken by my brother, Roger, in the middle of the night and told to look out of the window. The whole of the sky seemed to be alight as the largest of the Bamberger woodyards burnt to the ground. Roger was by then a London fireman. He had been sent home exhausted after fighting the fire for over eight hours. Over 400 firemen and 50 fire engines spent three days fighting the fire which is thought to have been started by an arsonist.

 The River Lea was where I spent many happy hours fishing. I was taught to fish by my friend Colin Taylor. Learning how to fish was one of several big debts that I owe to Colin. He had a sad childhood. His mum and dad had divorced and he had been rejected by both of them and sent to live with his grandparents, Mr and Mrs Axe in nearby Elmer Road.


 

EDITORS NOTES: These extracts have been taken from Part One of his Biography and largely concentrated on his early Tottenham memories. However, Ray has written  Part Two of his Biography that concentrates on his lifetime experience as a TV journalist .

Both of his books are available from Amazon and, in addition to a copy of the front cover for his second book 'Life Through The Lens', readers will I am sure be interested to read their 'Thumbnail ' description of  Ray's career in Newspapers, Television and Theatre. see below:  

AMAZON INTRODUCTION
Born on the back streets of London by the age of fifteen Ray Kemp had appeared on the West End stage and BBC TV before becoming a journalist. His career as a newspaper and television reporter took him to the wilds of Dartmoor and Exmoor, the coasts of Cornwall and to the top of the mountains in the Lake District.

For a time he travelled through the Borders of Scotland and Dumfries and Galloway before arriving in Brighton where he met and interviewed some of the most famous faces of his generation.

In this first part of his autobiography Ray describes his childhood and growing up in a city where people and places were still badly scarred by the shadows of the war. He tells how as a student he was tricked into travelling to the USA with a religious cult before becoming a newspaper reporter in the West Country. There he witnessed at first hand smugglers and shipwrecks and covered one of the most famous murder attempts and political scandals of modern times.

This is just as much the story of some of the fascinating men, women and children Ray met and interviewed as it is the tale of his own eventful life.

In the second part of his autobiography Ray describes how he moved from newspapers into the world of ITV news.. Working on the newsdesk at Westward Television he was involved with stories ranging from a major plane crash in Devon, to earthquakes in Cornwall and the tragic loss of the Penlee Lifeboat and its crew.

He describes how he became a TV presenter for Border Television covering stories in Cumbria, Southern Scotland, the Lake District and Northumberland. During his time in television Ray interviewed people from all walks of life ranging from Lords and Ladies in their stately homes, to Prime Ministers and murderers.

During the last part of his TV career he was based in Brighton with TVS covering stories throughout Sussex, Hampshire, Kent and beyond. He flew in Concorde, witnessed Margaret Thatcher signing the Channel Tunnel agreement in France and was in Berlin as The Wall came down.

He witnessed the tragic aftermath of an IRA bomb. Talked to some of the first victims of the Aids epidemic and filmed Princess Diana as she fell from grace.

This is just as much the story of some of the fascinating men, women and children Ray met and interviewed as it is the tale of his own eventful life.
 
 

 

 Article prepared for website using original text from Ray Kemp's Biography - Alan Swain Oct 2024