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Born in London in 1912, young Brian Minchin was evacuated to Glasgow during World War One, and returned to the capital when the war ended. (His previous memories can be found under Glasgow in the Scotland section of this website.)
'Well, later we went back to London. One of my uncles had moved his household which consisted of two unmarried sisters and himself to Woking, Surrey, to a road which still apparently has big houses with gardens. The gardener there was called William Creature. He told me his name and I used to call him sometimes William Creature, William Creature and he very kindly used to do some sawing of this and that and I think was some kind of side line.
Anyway he saw I was very interested in everything he was doing and he constructed out of a piece of wood a model of a saw so that I could play with it. It was completely harmless because it wasn't sharp but it was quite authentic, a small saw with a handle and was a good piece of workmanship.
At that particular time I didn't go to school but my aunt, who was a University Graduate and a qualified teacher, though she didn't in fact go to teach, gave me lessons and I learnt quite a bit. I had a child's book of dogs and cats at different speeds, where the dog catches the cat; and an arithmetic book with mathematics puzzles.
I remember seeing a newspaper heading at that time saying 'Last hours of the War' and I had grasped the fact that when it said hours, it didn't mean hours but it was just near the end and I was a little hurt when my Aunt explained this to me because I had seen it already.
Anyway we used to occasionally go to London from Woking or to another uncle of mine who lived in Wimbledon where we had to catch a slow train instead of a fast one. One day we duly went up to London and we were standing on, I'm sure it was on the South side of the Strand, just north of Waterloo Bridge.
We stood there and tended to stand about being rather expectant and some clock struck eleven and then something happened at the building opposite. From above the shop, a specialist shop selling Swan Pens, fountain pens, just as the clock struck, the first floor window opened and people started putting out flags and cheering, then all along the street first floor windows opened likewise and people everywhere put out flags, cheering and everybody shouting.
It was all very exciting. This of course was the eleventh day on the eleventh month 1918 when there was such terrific relief at all the slaughter which the war had degenerated into had at last ended.
I should at this time explain that my Mother suffered from quite a lot of illness so the family rallied round and tended to take me and my sister off her hands when it could be done.
Graded C for Military Service because of his important Civil Service job, my father was never called up. He carried on working in central London -- so still lived in the same house in Claverdale Road, Brixton. He worked for the Inland Revenue, in Company Registration. In fact I think that was what it was throughout his career. He had to know all about companies and later on when there was a question of certain companies being liable to surtax as well as income tax it got more and more complicated of course, as time went on and he was a specialist dealing with this.
When he first came over from Ireland he was only 15, just in time for Queen Victoria's funeral (1901) which was the great free entertainment at the time. The extent of his work then tended to be to hold a file in your hand and see if you could kick it with one of your feet! But that obviously didn't occupy much of his time. He just did the filing then but later on he did become quite an expert in the job and grew up on it. He was still working but wasn't directly affected, though indirectly.
Oh yes, the other thing is much later, some years afterwards the London buses had a very detailed set of extraordinary prohibitions on all sorts of things you were not allowed to do on a bus and I rather think that people actually did do at the Armistice, with some rather riotous activity. Of course, I wasn't there as I had gone back to Woking.'
Brian Minchin's next recollections can be viewed under Brixton in the London section of this website.
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