Year: 2015

Aldersbrook primary school has had a glowing Ofsted report and is now rated “excellent” by its inspectors. “Standards have risen rapidly over the past few years and are above average,” the report says. Its last inspection had said that it required improvement, and going back to 2001 it was rated as having serious weaknesses.

Clearly a significant turnaround has taken place – this is the key paragraph in the report, but you can read the whole thing here. Congratulations to staff, pupils and parents!

(Thanks @E11Wag)

This moment of quiet contemplation – or just over three minutes to be exact – was found by artist Lisa Elen Atkin. It’s filmed at the Birch Well just beside Eagle Pond within sight of Snaresbrook Crown Court, for the appreciation of a Facebook group about holy wells and sacred springs of Britain. The Birch Well is, according to the Friends of Epping Forest, a

natural spring within the gravelly deposits here and is now surrounded by a ring of dressed granite with a small overflow leading to a ditch. It is surrounded by evergreen vegetation, mainly holly… In an age before piped water, wells like this one provided a source of water for the local inhabitants. Winifred Eastment in Wanstead through the Ages, 1946, quoted an elderly inhabitant of the area who claimed that “no water was ever as fresh, cool, sparkling and reviving as that which was drawn from Wanstead’s well”.

Enjoy it. But best not drink the water.

 

Don’t be alarmed by the look of our recently restored headline feed (pictured). It’s our old friend Wanstead, Barbados, that’s had trouble, not our beloved sleepy hollow.

The tale of Winston Churchill’s relationships with Wanstead and his wider constituency – as seen through Wansteadium’s reading of David A Thomas’s increasingly interesting Churchill the Member for Woodford - is getting to the heart of the matter… war.

Episode four

Churchill lost the India issue. So he went back to the US for another three-month visit, a book and speaking tour. If nothing else, he had to make back some of the cash he had lost in the Wall St Crash. He got knocked down by a motorbike on Fifth Avenue (Manhattan, not Walthamstow). He took a long time to recover and spent 1934 warning “Germany is arming”. His relationship with his constituency was at times troubled – not everyone liked his lack of support for the government. He wrote: “There’s some trouble in south Chingford. Loughton chilly. Woodford magnificent.” Wanstead supported him solidly. Buckhurst Hill opposed him, and this especially irritated him. “The worst place is Buckhurst Hill,” he wrote, which here is completely taken out of context for effect.*  Others praised him as the “the most high profile opponent of socialism”. In the 1935 election, he again toured every inch of the vast Epping constituency, and again warned  widely of the dangers of Germany. He won his largest ever majority – and was in the seat for the next 10 years (there was no general election between 1935 and 1945). Later, in 1936, as more people became aware of the nature of the threat of Hitler, he said: “I hope you will not forget the speeches I made two or three years ago when Germany began to rearm. But none outside Epping listened to me then.”

*The fuller quotation is” [M]uch perturbation has been caused to many of our best friends in our constituencies. Hawkey has been very worried about the Epping Division… Epping is disaffected… The worst place is Buckhurst Hill where the Branch Committee is thoroughly disgruntled…”

(<a href=”http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/071464143X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1634&amp;creative=6738&amp;creativeASIN=071464143X&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=wansteadium-21&amp;linkId=LGJOX5AWPUPHZTS2″>Though out of print, the book can be bought from Amazon here, in physical or electronic form.</a>)

Geoff Wilkinson writes on Wanstead Daily Photo: “I was out the other evening and was really drawn by the effect of the street lights and the illumination spilling out of buildings.  I spotted the light glowing from these three windows, unusual because the building is the old Police station now closed and empty. So what were the lights all about ? The spirit of former policemen and villains ? Who knows but I’m sure I heard the clinking of cell keys….”

To mark the 50th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s death, Wansteadium is blogging its reading of Churchill: The Member For Woodford by David A Thomas. The first two episodes are here and here.

Episode three
After yesterday’s description of women as “flappers”, another Churchill phrase enters the debate – his description of himself “purring with delight”. Wansteadium seems to remember something similar in another context. Maybe someone knows their Churchill?

Something which Churchill was definitely not purring about though was the size of the available meeting halls in Wanstead in the run-up to the 1929 general election. Thomas tells us: “So small were the halls in Wanstead and Woodford that Churchill ordered two large marquees, each capable of accommodating five times the number of the largest halls.” A common frustration then as now – though since those days the new library has been built which does have a meeting room next to it (whatever it’s called).

His campaigning efforts paid off – he was re-elected OK, but the Tories were turfed out of office and he himself faced a decade in the wilderness. Thomas tells us this was “a period in which he increasingly alienated himself from almost everyone, assailed by friends, colleagues, opponents, some of his constituents and of course his enemies”. So he went on a big tour of the US and Canada. When he returned the big issue was Indian independence. “He spoke and wrote about it interminably,” says Thomas. But his constituents were in a “bright film of enthusiasm” in supporting him. Churchill was particularly suspicious of Gandhi, calling him “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir… a malignant, subversive fanatic”. Phew. (Much later, towards the end of the war, Gandhi wrote to Churchill saying that he had decided to take the fakir comment as a compliment.)

Anyway, the voters (including flappers this time) of Wanstead, Woodford, Epping and throughout this part of the world was ‘loving, ardent and unanimous’ – he won a majority of more than 20,000.

In the next instalment, just around the corner were the twin threats of mass unemployment and the rise of the Nazis.