The Legend That Was Clapham

In The Legend That Was Clapham, Donald Bullock gathers his boyhood memories and household gleanings of Clapham, the parish of his birth in the early 'Thirties.

Some of the happenings portrayed in this book were originally published as magazine articles in the mid-eighties, whilst other fragments have been extracted from the manuscript of his forthcoming book Hovels and Haydust, and endowed with greater local detail.

'Hovels and Haydust', the author's complete boyhood autobiography of his life in the parochial Gloucester of the 'Thirties, with its then tiny, earthy and bustling market town, its rolling countryside of family farms, its meadows rich with colourful wild flowers and chirping insect life, and its wealth of rivers, streams and pools, is considerably wider ranging. It is due for publication by The Wheatley Press in the near future.

Synopsis

The Legend that was Clapham, as a complete and self-contained volume, arose from the 'Clapham' chapter of Hovels and Haydust, my forthcoming childhood autobiography set in the tiny, parochial and earthy Gloucester of the 'Thirties.

Clapham, where I was born in 1932, had already been an established local community within Gloucester for over a hundred years, occupying about a dozen purpose built streets of hundreds of tiny, identical back-to-back terrace houses, with two rooms up, two down, a lean-to scullery and an end-of-backyard privy.

Set among the terrace rows were a number of tiny courtyards, each accessed from the pavement by a narrow alley or covered passage, each lined with half a dozen similar terrace-built houses. None of these had their own scullery or privy, however. Instead, in each courtyard there was a single open-topped privy and a yellow clay sink under a cold tap.

The parish of Clapham was created by a far-sighted councillor on a central expanse of grassland in the Eighteen-twenties, to accommodate the hundreds of Midlands workers which, he anticipated, would migrate to Gloucester to find work in its anticipated industrial expansion with the coming of the industrial age.

The workers duly arrived with their families, took the jobs that came available, and formed a new and self-contained working-class society. It developed into a respected culture of decent, caring, unpretentiously open and communally supportive folks, completely devoid of guile. But when the industrial revolution was completed their livelihoods went with it, and they were reduced to eking out their livings as best they could with whatever menial work came.

With its communal spirit, its poverty, its legion of characters and its open optimism, Clapham became a legend, and its culture continued until the mid-fifties, when the council of the day decided that it was a sprawling slum, ideal for demolishment under the post-war slum-clearance scheme.

So they razed the entire area to the ground, and dissipated its society to a variety of soulless new dwellings around Gloucester's distant periphery, where, robbed of their culture, their comradeship and their mutually supportive and integrated society, the older folks among them died in their hordes.

By way of researching the chapter, I sought out the few surviving Clapham folks to check some of my facts. For instance, during my childhood Clapham had been alive with pubs, and I needed to check all of their names and which was where - something that few children would have absorbed at the time. And as well as telling me these things the old-timers imparted their tales and memories. It was whilst perusing all of these that I saw that in addition to learning what I had set out to learn, I had a collated history of Clapham's conception, life, and destruction, and this, together with my own family and social memories – particularly those of its many characters – prompted me to set it on record.