Streatham Soc

From Thursday April 25th, Streatham Theatre Company are trialling daytime play-readings, aimed at adults who are free during the day and may be feeling isolated. Come along if you like reading plays, or if you'd just like to listen. Well-behaved babies welcome. Sorry, no dogs or unaccompanied children.

The initial venue will be Carvalho's Café, 106 Natal Road, Streatham, SW16 6HZ, from
2 pm to 4 pm. The space is fully accessible. The first play will be Home I'm Darling, Laura Wade's dark comedy about s*x, cake, and the quest to be the perfect 1950s housewife.

The first play-reading is free. Subsequent events will be free to STC members and £3 to non-members. The emphasis will be on feel-good, uplifting and comedic material. A group leader will facilitate the event and encourage people to get the most out of it. Participants will be invited to suggest plays, and we will provide the scripts. If you are interested or for any enquiries, please email [email protected].

Edward John Tarver died On This Day 7th June 1891.
Educated at Eton and Bruce Castle. Lived at 25 Killieser Ave
In 1877, the contractors Sutton & Dudley approached Tarver to undertake a commission involving in excess of 120 individual designs in the Telford Park Estate.
At this time, the Queen Anne Revivalist movement was in full swing in its reaction to the Victorian Gothic style of design. Along with people like C A Voysey, Tarver was a leading light in this movement.
The houses that remain in Telford Park (over 90 per cent of the total) are a stunning memorial to Tarver's success in creating a uniquely harmonious development in every sense of the term. Completely at variance with the traditional style of Victorian architecture, the houses all have generous ground floor areas, plus in many cases an effective use of wide staircases and split-level to achieve variety and light.
No two houses in the estate are exactly the same: there are Dutch gables, turrets, double and single fronted versions with an astonishing range of external decoration. However, all these houses with original windows demonstrate that the linking feature of the estate is it’s distinctively Queen Annefenestration. Thus, although the estate stretches over a considerable area, taking in Telford, Criffel, Killieser, Thornton, and Sternhold Avenues and Kirkstall Road in Streatham Hill, Tarver's window layouts are always clearly recognisable.
(Lambeth Council: Telford Park Concervation area)

Edward Victor Johnson, singer and radio presenter was born 4 September 1919

Singer who, in a duo with his wife Pearl Carr, represented the UK in the 1959 Eurovision song contest with Sing, Little Birdie

Teddy Johnson was born in Surbiton and worked in an office after leaving school at 14. Aged 18, he landed his first
professional booking, as a drummer and assistant steward on the P&O liner SS Corfu. “We played a wide variety of music,” he recalled. “Everything from popular songs and dance music of the day to classical pieces and light opera.” Johnson made his first broadcast in 1939, for Radio Ceylon, which provoked a fellow musician to tell him: “You are a very good singer but a bloody awful drummer”.

After the war he joined the resident band at the Locarno dance hall in Streatham, south London, and broadcast as a singer with the bandleader Jack Payne. Johnson worked with several more dance bands before he was hired in 1948 as chief announcer for the English language programmes of Radio Luxembourg.

(Guardian)

On This Day 5th June 1939 Christina Broom died. A resident and shop owner at 87 Streatham Hill.

Christina Broom [née Livingston], [known as Mrs Albert Broom] (1862–1939), was a photographer born on 28 December 1862 at 8 King's Road, Chelsea, seventh of the eight children of Alexander Livingston (1812–1875), a master bootmaker, and his wife, Margaret, néeFair (1826–1884).

On 15 August 1889 Christina Livingston married Albert Edward Broom (1864–1912), who worked in the family ironmongery business at Brompton. They lived with his parents in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and when Winifred, their only child, was born they moved to Napier Avenue, in Fulham. Albert's sport was cricket and he became captain of Battersea Cricket club. In 1896 he was hit by a cricket ball and suffered serious disablement. At about the same time the family business failed and Albert and Christina invested in a stationery and toy shop in Streatham; Albert's trade card described him as an 'accountant and auditor, specialising in laundry accounts'. By 1903, however, the shop had failed to thrive.

While producing postcards Mrs Broom had become an established press photographer.

Unusually for a woman, Christina Broom became official photographer to the household brigade, with a darkroom in Chelsea barracks.

Because she lived near the Thames, Christina Broom also became the regular photographer of the annual Oxford and Cambridge boat race. Her most memorable pictures, however, are probably those of the women's suffrage movement taken between 1908 and 1913, which comprise a virtually unique record of the less flamboyant moments of their campaign. These include photographs of Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst, and Louisa Garrett Anderson in the Women's Sunday procession and meeting in Hyde Park on 21 June 1908, in which a quarter of a million women took part, and of Christabel Pankhurst at the International Suffragette Fair, 1912 (both Museum of London collection).
(Shirley Neale)