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The birth of an 88 year-old retired solicitor living in Worthing, West Sussex was connected chronologically with an infamous maritime disaster.
'I was on the way when the Titanic went down (and wasn't actually born until six weeks later, on Oak Apple Day 29 May 1912.) I was born at home in a first floor maisonette at 21a Glen-field Road, Balham, S.W. quite near Balham Station which one passes through on the way to London.
My earliest recollection is of being carried in my pushchair down the stairs leading from the back of the maisonette into the back garden. The only other thing I can remember of my time at that address is running away from my visiting Irish grandmother on Tooting Beck Common which is very near.
We moved sometime in 1914. I'm not sure whether this was before or after the outbreak of war, probably before, to 24 Claverdale Road, Brixton, S.W. There we were quite friendly with neighbours, the Rie fam-ily next door, who had a boy and a girl just like myself of the same age and whom I later went to school with, for a time.
On the other side was a retired Post Office worker and his wife who later were very badly hit by inflation. Though very badly off with a pretty poor pension, he managed to keep going but that has always impressed on me the need for inflation-proofing for pensions, which the Post Office did not do at that time.
One house further away lived a builder and his family, a nice couple they were. I remember at one time she asked me and probably my sister and others round to tea and the father said 'What would you like on your bread - butter or jam?' To which the mother replied 'Tell him both!' They had a boy who must have been about eight or ten years older than me who I never knew very well but did have casual acquaintance with.
A few years later, after the war, he teamed up with an Army Captain returned from the War and they founded a little Electrical Company that made rather specialist apparatus, which had to be stamped with the initials of their firm to authorise its use. The name of the firm was the British Broadcasting Company that has become rather famous since!
Harold Bishop, a leading Director of that television company even-tually retired to Angmering (near Worthing). I did once catch a glimpse of him in the Pavilion at Worthing but I never managed to get in touch with him.
To go back to the 14-18 War years, in those days there were of course a few air raids, some of them doing quite considerable damage but not the sort of damage the Germans liked to boast about as they just didn't know exactly where their bombs had fallen.
There were air raid wardens but unlike the wardens of the second war their instructions were in case the air raid siren goes, take cover in the nearest house. Now this happened one night, I was sleeping upstairs, as indeed were my parents, on a little bed of my own and when the warning went I was moved to the downstairs sitting room. My father fetched me, complete with mattress and put it on the floor - I was fast asleep all the time.
There was a knock on the door and two air raid wardens asked to take shelter in our house so we invited them in and at some point I woke up and became conscious of the fact that from my mattress I could touch the floor instead of being up on my little bed. So in a rather curious logic, I saw these two men and asked 'Why have these two men taken away the legs of my bed?' This caused some amusement.
One of the bombs which did fall was aimed apparently at Streatham Hill Station which wasn't very far away, but it fortunately missed because at that Station the main Brighton Road passes over a fairly important sub-urban railway and could of course, cause very considerable chaos.
Round beside the station were two houses. One of them was occu-pied by the Headmaster of a small private school and the other was occu-pied by the school itself, but fortunately on this night raid the only thing hit was the actual school, which was largely demolished, but nobody was hurt. The headmaster's house next door was untouched.'
The next memorable event happened when young Brian Minchin was then evacuated to Glasgow, and his next resume of early recollections can be found in the Scottish section of this website.
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