“The Common Story” makes an excellent Christmas present for any body interested in the history of Tooting.
Now in it’s second edition, The Common Story is a comprehensive history of Tooting Common. The book was published with lottery funding and Tooting History Group members played a major part in doing the archival research.
The Historical Association in it’s review said: “This book traces the development, and survival, of this open area and its surrounding neighbourhood. Its remarkable escape from developers in the 1870s is a crucial turning point in its history.”
If you are interested in a copy for £10, please fill out the form below and Tooting History Group delivery elves will swing into action and deliver/post a copy to you in time for Christmas.
Copies are also available for sale from Sprout Arts, 74, Moyser Road, Furzedown, SW16 6SQ
John Hayward was a 20th Century stained glass artist. Born in Tooting in 1929, he went to Bec Grammar School (now Ernest Bevin School) in Beechcroft Road. Inspired by his art teacher, Jack Elvin, he went to St Martins School of Art. There are over 200 churches in Britain which have stained glass designed by John Hayward.
In the 1950s, John Hayward designed three windows for Bec Grammar. They are now mounted above the entrance to Ernest Bevin College and are shown below.
John Hayward died in 2007. For a full Church Times obituary, see here.
For a gallery of his work around the country, see here.
Lanfranc of Pavia by John Hayward. Displayed at Ernest Bevin CollegeStained Glass Window designed by John Hayward. Displayed at Ernest Bevin College.St. Anselm of Aosta. Stained Glass Window designed by John Hayward. Displayed at Ernest Bevin College.
This is the Tooting Parish Boundary as described in 1884 at a meeting of the Tooting Ratepayers Association. We will be walking it on Saturday July 6th 2019.
J B Morton (“Beachcomber”), born in Tooting 1893 (Photo licensed from National Portrait Gallery)
“Beachcomber” was a long-running 20th Century newspaper columnist born in Tooting. Local resident Jesse Honey has written for us about his life and achievements.
John
Cameron Andrieu Bingham Michael Morton, better known as J B Morton, and even
better known by his pen-name of Beachcomber, was born at Park Lodge, Mitcham
Road, Tooting on 7th June 1893. The house where he was born, now
demolished, was on the site of what is now the Morley’s store on the corner of
Franciscan Road.
The
son of a journalist and drama critic, it must be admitted that Morton didn’t
stay long in Tooting. Though his father appears at Park Lodge in the 1891
Census, two years before J B’s birth, the family are no longer Tooting residents
by 1901 and seem never to have returned. The young John attended prep school in
Bromley and then went on to Harrow, which he hated and later satirised as
‘Narkover’. He fought in World War I, gradually drifting into journalism
afterwards. Ironically, he neither invented the name Beachcomber, nor was he the
first to use it. Rather, he took over the eponymous column in the Daily Express
from a colleague in 1924; the reason it is now Morton who is remembered as
Beachcomber is because he wrote under the name for another 51 years, only being
dropped in 1975.
Why
was Beachcomber so important and why does he deserve to be remembered? It’s
because his column was pioneering in terms of comedy and satire. He was among
the first to employ genuinely surreal humour, long before the Goons and Monty
Python. Spike Milligan named Morton as one of his heroes. He also influenced
Raymond Briggs, author of Fungus the Bogeyman and The Snowman, who chose Morton’s
complete works as his Desert Island Discs book. Evelyn Waugh, no mean humourist
himself, described Morton as having ‘the greatest comic fertility of any
Englishman’.
Beachcomber’s
satire was ground-breaking and daring. He was the first columnist to poke fun
at the very paper he was writing in (though this would be easy today, the Express
was at the time a far more serious paper). Morton’s taste for parodying press
pomposity was a major inspiration for Richard Ingrams when he helped set up
Private Eye, showing you can trace a direct link between Beachcomber and humour
of the present day.
Among
the recurring characters he invented in his column were Mister Justice
Cocklecarrot, Captain Foulenough and Doctor Jan van Strabismus of Utrecht. Famed
in Fleet Street as a practical joker, Morton used to speak loudly into pillar
boxes, pretending a friend was trapped inside- once a concerned crowd had
gathered, he quietly slipped away. He was also known for laughing uproariously and
dancing after finishing each paragraph he wrote, explaining this behaviour to startled
colleagues by asking ‘if I don’t find it funny, who will’?
After
marrying Mary O’Leary, an Irish doctor, in 1927, he moved out of London and,
after the Second World War, settled in Worthing, from where he continued to
post his column into London. He died in a nursing home there in 1979 and is
buried at Windlesham in Surrey.
The latest edition of The Wandsworth Historian has an excellent article by Neil Robson about the Boer War memorial which you can find in St. Nicholas Church, Tooting. The memorial records the names of thirteen soldiers from Tooting who died in the Second Boer War of 1899-1902. Neil has traced the origins of the memorial, the events surrounding it’s unveiling on 23rd August 1903 and details of the 13 men commemorated on the memorial.
The article is not available online but you can find details of how to join The Wandsworth Historical Society and get a copy of the Wandsworth Historian here. Neil Robson spoke at our November 2017 meeting about Ted Foster ,VC. You can see his talk on You Tube here.