John Barfoot

During my National Service in the armed forces, I spent a Christmas Day on duty. Memorable? It was for me!

Readers of the Ilford Recorder may be familiar with my trips down memory lane, in the History & Heritage column.

Two youngsters sat holding hands in the Capitol cinema, Barking, one Sunday afternoon in 1949.

As an Ilford boy in the 1930s, I enjoyed seasons of simple inexpensive pleasures. Autumn always heralded the conker season, I cannot recall the last time I saw schoolboys playing with conkers on a string.

Wilfred Chalmers Jameson, a Royal Naval Reservist, resident at Woodlands Road, Ilford, had been called to active service in August 1914.

Local historian John Barfoot remembers just what domestic bliss meant in Ilford in the 1930s.

I will never forget that Christmas Eve many years ago, walking home with my dad; it was cold enough for snow.

Once upon a time, when the Ilford Town Hall building housed the adult, children’s and reference libraries, all the books in the adult section were covered with rexine, giving them an expensive uniformed brown leather look, with the title and reference number in gold block.

In this week’s heritage column, historian John Barfoot tells the story of Alfred de Bathe Brandon, who brought down a German zeppelin while based at Hainault in 1916.

During 1916, a German Zeppelin the length of a battle cruiser, filled with highly flammable hydrogen, narrowly avoided dropping a blazing inferno on Chadwell Heath.