The Herne Hill Society blog

An interview with Colin Wight, outgoing Chair

Colin joined the Society at the Lambeth Country Show in 2004. He was recruited to the Committee a year later and became Chair in 2012. After nearly eight years in the role, he stood down on 6 January 2021 to hand over to Rebecca Tee.

What skills did you bring?

I came in with a modern perspective. My long career at the British Library had given me a thorough knowledge of publishing, marketing and communications, running events and creating websites. All very relevant. And working for a large public-facing organisation had taught me how to be diplomatic! 

What have you enjoyed most from your time as Chair?

Without doubt the most satisfying experience was planning and completing the Remembering Herne Hill First World War project, to budget and on time. I confess I knew little about the war at first. I threw myself into it, quite obsessively to be honest.

So I was elated by the success of the first Remembrance Sunday commemoration, which we held at the Station on 11 November 2018. We also produced an online database of Herne Hill’s casualties and a book (Grace’s Story). That same evening Laurence Marsh and went to the Armistice Centenary service at Westminster Abbey. It was a memorable culmination to the project.

It was by sheer luck that I'd met, while on holiday in Italy some years before, David Statham, who  became Chief Executive of Southeastern Railway. Without his support we would not have been able to get the memorial slate installed and unveiled by Helen Hayes MP in November 2019. I could not have dreamed that we would go on to achieve so much. 

What have you enjoyed least?

There have been occasional disagreements which I have had to try and resolve. I have possibly given too much time to the Society to the detriment of other important things in my life – but if you want to achieve something you have to put the hours in.

What do you consider to be your achievements?

When I joined the Committee I made it my mission to modernise every area of the Society’s work. There was never much opposition, but there was something of a skills gap amongst the members at that time. Fifteen years on I think I have taken it as far as my knowledge and abilities – and energy – allow.

I remember that when I went to my first monthly talk there was no PA and the presentation was delivered on a 35mm slide projector. The audience struggled to hear what was being said. One of my first tasks was to specify and purchase the equipment. Again. there was a website that worked, but you couldn’t do much on it, like become a member or buy books. I had to start again from scratch. We had no social media and no e-newsletter. I sat at home one wintry Saturday, creating a template and a mailing list while it snowed all day. The quarterly newsletter had excellent content, but it deserved better presentation. It felt like a major achievement when the Magazine was redesigned and – a couple of years later – printed in colour. Of course I can't take credit for that! 

I set up annual planning meetings where we agreed what we would aim to do in the forthcoming year. We started to collect data about, for example, how many people attended our events and bought each of our books, month by month, so we could measure our achievement.

What were your challenges as Chair?

I soon became aware of the regard in which the Society was held and how much work had gone into building it up and keeping it running. I knew I had to take my new role seriously, as well as dedicating time to building a team. This meant establishing a relationship with each individual. Perhaps I was a bit arrogant at first but I have learned that I need to admit when I have got it wrong. Not everything I wanted to do has worked. 

I was always conscious that I needed to set a high standard. We are a group of unpaid volunteers but I believe that we should act “professionally”. For example, a few years ago we decided to post our minutes on the website, although initially not all the Committee were in favour. But the majority agreed that we had to be seen as open and democratic. Sometimes you have to lead, to say “this is a bad idea” or “we must do that”. The Chair has to try to help the Committee reach a consensus and I don’t think I’ve ever used my casting vote. 

Why have you decided to stand down?

Principally because I need to dedicate more time to my elderly parents who live over 200 miles away. And there are a lot of other things I want to do. I also believe there comes a time when you should move over and let other people have a go, which is easier said than done!

Who do you want to thank?

I would like to thank Sheila Northover, long-serving Chair before me, who encouraged me to join the Committee. Sheila is a remarkable person. She said that she was available for advice, but did not intend to interfere. She stuck to that and it helped me get on with the job in my own way.

My fellow Committee members have been great. It’s impossible to run a Society like ours without such a team. Many of them have become friends. I don’t want to single anyone out… but I really must thank Laurence who has been a brilliant colleague and so hard-working.

What single piece of advice would you want to offer the new Chair?

Try to create your vision for the Society and then work out how you are going to achieve it. But always accept that you need to be flexible and it's OK to change your mind. Make yourself known in the community.

If the Herne Hill Society were to be created today, what do you think it would look like?

I have thought about that. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be a subscription-based membership organisation but an internet-based group. But having a steady income has been helpful in enabling us to plan ahead. Actually, membership is on the up and we have more members than we had two years ago. It’s a good time to hand over to a new Chair.

Colin was speaking to Val Suebsaeng. He is a Life Member and intends to support and help the Society in the future.

Brockwell Park Festivals Proposals

We learn that Lambeth Council’s plans to allow music festivals again in Brockwell Park are well advanced, all subject of course to COVID-19.

Published documents now available on Brixton Buzz show that a Summer Event Series 2021 is envisaged, with up to six large / major event days taking place over two consecutive weekends, and medium / small community event days taking place in the weekdays between.

Final decisions will supposedly be made next spring. But the Council has naturally been in discussion with the operators already, and appears disposed to grant permission. So, pandemic permitting, the park will again hold a major event organised by Mighty Hoopla, plus other events.

The occupation of a large area of the park would start on Wednesday 26 May (when the contractors are admitted) lasting until Sunday 20 June 2021 when the derig ends. Allow several more weeks for repairing any damage done to the ground of the park, though the festival organisers pay a deposit in advance for making good any damage caused.

On "Major Event Days", planning will be in place to accommodate 25,000 on site each day. On "Large Event Days" (mid-week community days), planning will be in place to accommodate up to 10,000 on site.

Divisive?

As in previous years, the prospect of such events provokes controversy.

Some people are content to see the park used in ways that brings fun to mainly young(ish) people, and some financial benefit to the Council and some local businesses. Others are opposed to offering this public amenity to what are, in effect, commercial operators whose events can damage the park, create noise disturbance and disrupt local streets.

According to a recent Brixton Buzz article, The Friends of Brockwell Park, in particular, are leading the outcry and inviting people to protest to Lambeth Councillors by 8 December, and to the events team at Lambeth Council at [email protected]. Any local resident is entitled to comment of course.

Never such innocence again

Half Moon Lane is a chilly place at this time of the year but I am basking in the warm glow of a job well done. It's nearly a week since a very successful event at Herne Hill Station and I am still asking myself how we did it. In less than six months we planned and delivered something that even a year ago would have seemed highly unlikely: a hand-carved memorial slate in prime position in central Herne Hill’s most important building. But there it now is, fixed to the wall.

A new 1914-18 war memorial for Herne Hill was on the agenda two and a half years ago when we were sketching out our research project with the Charter School but… where would we put it, what would it say, who would design it, what would it cost? With no clear answers and so much else to do, we put the idea to one side.

A year ago we published the memorial website and our little book to schedule, then held Herne Hill’s first ever two-minute silence on Armistice Day: an event that left many close to tears. A perfect way to celebrate the completion of the project. Except that it wasn’t complete; there were literally hundreds of casualties left to investigate. One fine June morning Dave Statham, Managing Director of Southeastern and a great supporter of community projects in Herne Hill, said to me “How about a permanent memorial in the station? You commission it and we’ll pay for it”. No committee, no fiddling about with our proposed text (though we did check that we had got the name of the railway company right!). We were trusted to get on with it.

Through the Lettering Arts Trust the name “Mark Brooks” was suggested. When we met him at the station, Laurence and I were sure we had found our man. Southeastern liked his work as much as we did and I wrote a letter of appointment.

So here we are. Websites and books come and go but a big lump of Welsh slate is as permanent as it gets. It will outlive us all.

War Memorial Stone for the Station

The Herne Hill Society, in association with Southeastern Railway, who run Herne Hill station, has commissioned a hand-engraved Welsh slate plaque in memory of “all the people of Herne Hill” who suffered as a result of the 1914-18 war.

Calligrapher and stone-carver Mark Brooks is designing a hand-carved Welsh slate plaque, financed by Southeastern Railway and to be unveiled by Helen Hayes MP at the station ticket hall on Remembrance Sunday.

Everyone is welcome at the unveiling: 10:45am on Sunday 10 November.

Currently based in Canterbury, Mark's formative years were spent in Kennington, Walworth Road, Stockwell, Crofton Park, Honor Oak, Forest Hill, East Dulwich and Crystal Palace!

Mark says: “It is a wonderful opportunity for me. I am delighted to be making something beautiful, interesting and appropriate for this important memorial”.

Southeastern, whose Managing Director David Statham is a former Herne Hill resident, have been strong supporters of the Society’s “Remembering Herne Hill 1914-18” research project.

There are several individual memorials in churches to men who lost their lives, but nothing to commemorate all the people of Herne Hill. The station, at the heart of our community and a place through which countless men must have passed on their way to the Channel ports and thence to France and Flanders, seems the most appropriate place for a permanent memorial.

David Statham says: “During the First World War the railways played an important role in the transport of troops and resources to and from the front. It's a fitting privilege that, come November this year, Herne Hill station will serve as the site for a permanent memorial in commemoration of all those residents who died, were wounded or otherwise suffered in that terrible conflict.”

Colin Wight, Chair of the Herne Hill Society says: "When we began our National Lottery-funded research project together with the Charter School North Dulwich two years ago I never imagined that it would lead to the creation of a new First World War memorial. I would like to thank Southeastern, who have generously funded this superb artwork."

The text of the memorial follows. You may recognise a short quotation from Philip Larkin’s poem “MCMXIV”.

Herne Hill 1914-1918
In memory of all the people of Herne Hill who suffered in consequence of the war, including more than 500 who lost their lives
Never such innocence again
This stone was placed here in 2019 on behalf of
The Herne Hill Society * The Charter School North Dulwich * London & South Eastern Railway Limited

 

***

The new memorial links to another important centenary with a local connection.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed 100 years ago on 28 June 1919. It is a little known fact (not mentioned in his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or in our own book Herne Hill Personalities) that local resident George Nicoll Barnes was one of the primary signatories of the Treaty.

His signature is there alongside those of Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Balfour.

Barnes was a Scottish Labour politician. He joined Lloyd George’s war cabinet in 1916 and it was for that reason he was present at Versailles. He is included (seated second from the right) in a famous painting by William Orpen, who was commissioned to capture the occasion in the Hall of Mirrors.

George and Jessie Barnes lost their youngest son Henry in the war, killed in France in 1917. His life and death are described on our Remembering Herne Hill 1914-18 website.

The following year they moved to 76 Herne Hill. It was George Barnes’s home until his death in 1940. The late-Victorian house at the junction with Kestrel Avenue, which would have matched the Herne Hill surgery next door, was demolished in the 1960s and replaced by a block of maisonettes.

The Architecture of the London Underground

This a review of a free talk arranged by the Herne Hill Society. You can find out about our events programme here.

We can all identify a London Underground Station from the easily recognisable sign outside, the blue-and-red disc with the name of the station or “Underground” across the middle. But how many of us take a good look at the building, inside and out, and appreciate its heritage?

Edmund Bird is a member of the Herne Hill Society and the author of five books on the architecture of Lambeth. He is the Senior Heritage Advisor at Transport for London, so he is responsible for protecting heritage of the Overground, the Underground, the bridges, the Commercial Estate of TfL, and the Docklands Light Railway. At our October meeting Edmund gave a very detailed illustrated talk on the history and architecture of the London Underground.

The Underground comprises 270 stations, dating from the 1850s, incorporating Victorian, Edwardian, Art Deco, and 20th-century designs. It is so easy to use the Underground without noticing the wonderful details. Edmund drew to our attention the buildings and contents of many of these remarkable stations.

The London Underground was first developed by private companies. You may recall that five years ago there were celebrations marking the opening of the first underground railway from Farringdon to Paddington in 1863. There were seven stations at this time built largely under the Euston and Marylebone Roads, using the cut-and-cover method: opening up the street and digging down to create the railway, then covering over the cutting again. This first line was built by the Metropolitan Railway. The company expanded into the suburbs of North-West London, and later even developed their own housing estates near their stations in Pinner, Rickmansworth, Neasden and Wembley Park — coining the term Metroland — and feeding new passenger traffic onto its services.

By 1908 most of today’s network in Inner London was in place, except for the Victoria Line, which was built in the late 1960s. It was served by eight different companies — although four of those had already formed a holding company called the London Electric Railways Company of London (UERL), running what are now the Bakerloo, Northern and Piccadilly Lines. The architecture of the stations built by the UERL in the 1900s is highly distinctive, thanks to its decision to develop a strong corporate style instantly recognisable to the public — an early example of company branding. The architect was Leslie Green, who designed 43 stations in four years. Note the facades of oxblood terracotta, with examples at Elephant and Castle, Covent Garden, Chalk Farm and Russell Square. Sadly, he worked so hard that he made himself ill and had to step down, dying a year later at just 35.

Not all of Leslie Green’s surviving stations remain in public use. His terminus of the branch line from Holborn to Aldwych (formerly known as Strand) was closed in 1994 but survives intact and is used for period film and television dramas, and London Transport Museum tours. Other long -losed stations include Down Street near Green Park, shut in 1932 and used as bomb-proof offices during the war, and Brompton Road, used for document storage.

The most famous architect, first commissioned in the early 1920s to design the Clapham to Morden extension to the Northern Line, was Charles Holden. He had already designed the Bristol Central Library, the Bristol Royal Infirmary and Senate House. For the Underground he produced modern designs faced in Portland stone and proudly displaying the roundel in stained glass or mounted on javelin style poles, giant art nouveau chandeliers in the ticket halls and striking interior tiling in black, green and white. One example is Clapham Common; built in the 1930s, the rotunda with its dome has changed very little since. Piccadilly Circus has an innovative circular ticket hall clad in travertine and bronze, fluted columns and panelled ceiling with glass light fittings. At street level it has simple stair enclosures with cast-iron railings, elegant lamps and the roundel at the top of the steps.

Between 1935 and 1940, as part of the New Worker Programme (a scheme developed to create work to boost the economy), much was done to improve the Underground. There were plans to build a station at Camberwell. The creation of the Green Belt stopped development at the borders of London, and post-war austerity stopped work from 1945 onwards. From 1948 to 1968 public money went instead into developing motorways and British Rail. These were fallow years for the Underground. But in the last 30 years there has been a huge increase in use of the Tube, although this is now beginning to plateau.

Surprisingly most stations survived the bombs of the Second World War. Only a few were lost — notably Blackfriars, described as a “magnificent Byzantine extravaganza which would not look out of place in Istanbul or North Africa”. It received a direct hit in the war, losing its beautiful pair of domes and upper two storeys.

Readers will undoubtedly be aware of new developments: Crossrail (the Elizabeth Line) and the new Northern Line extension between Kennington and Nine Elms. Edmund is currently engaged in planning for stations to be provided with step-free access — developments which must be in keeping with the original design.  

Next time you travel on the Underground take a closer look and appreciate what is around you.

This a review of a free talk arranged by the Herne Hill Society. You can find out about our events programme here.

Val Suebsaeng

Astrophysics in Tulse Hill

This a review of a free talk arranged by the Herne Hill Society. You can find out about our events programme here.

Astronomy was a popular pastime in Victorian times. We are aware of the telescope which was erected by Henry Bessemer in the garden of his house on Denmark Hill. At our November 2018 meeting Louise Devoy, Senior Curator at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, came to talk about two other notable people in the field of astrophysics who lived in this area.

As a young man, William Huggins (1824–1910) had been forced to take over the running of his father’s draper’s shop, but he later decided to sell the family business and pursue his scientific dream, using the money to set up an observatory at his home at 90 Tulse Hill. His work helped revolutionise our understanding of the stars. The house was demolished in 1960 and there is a housing block on the site today. It was a rural location when Huggins bought his house in 1852. The observatory was an elevated structure, rising above the trees, separate from the main house, and built of iron and brick. Huggins installed an adjustable chair to enable him to match the changing height of the telescope eyepiece as he scanned the sky.

The stars were used mainly for navigation and timing. But in 1859 Bunsen and Kirchhof made a crucial breakthrough. Together they built a spectroscope, an instrument designed to measure the wavelengths of light emitted by an object. They used it to analyse sunlight and were able to identify two of the missing wavelengths associated with sodium, thereby concluding that sodium must exist in the sun’s atmosphere. They went on to search for evidence of other materials such as the heavy metals in the sun’s atmosphere. When Huggins heard about the spectroscopic discoveries he was overjoyed: “This news was to me like the coming upon a spring of water in a dry and thirsty land”.

Inspired by the work of his neighbour, chemist William Allen Miller, Huggins took the laboratory technique of spectroscopy and used it with his telescope to determine the chemical composition of the stars, and to analyse their motion through space. The two collaborated in analysing starlight using the spectroscope. In 1863 they presented their work to the Royal Society. During the 1860s Huggins applied spectroscopy to the stars beyond the Sun and confirmed that they too contained the same elements that existed on Earth: “a common chemistry it was shown exists throughout the universe”.

In 1875 Huggins met and married Margaret Lindsay Murray (1848–1915), 24 years his junior. Margaret was a keen photographer. She encouraged him to apply innovative photographic techniques to astronomy. Working together the couple continued to develop and publish their work throughout their lives. They produced the Photographic Atlas of Representative Stellar Spectra in 1900. When William was aged 84, he relied on his 60-year-old wife to clamber around the telescope and make the necessary adjustments. “Astronomers need universal joints and vertebrae of India rubber,” she complained.

Together, Mr and Mrs Huggins developed an entirely new application for spectroscopy, one that would transform our view of the universe. Their new technique could be used to measure the radial velocity of any star and it could be applied to even the most distant stars. The idea relied on coupling the spectroscope with Doppler’s discovery that when an object emitting waves moves towards an observer a decrease in the wavelength is observed, whereas when it moves away an increase in the wavelength is observed. In 1868 William and Margaret Huggins detected a Doppler shift in the spectrum of the star Sirius. They could therefore calculate the speed at which Sirius was receding from the Earth. Their method had huge potential because any visible star could be analysed with a spectroscope and thus have its Doppler shift measured and its velocity determined. 

July 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and a Moon Festival is planned for London “celebrating humanity’s relationship with the moon across cultures, time and disciplines”. Hopefully the part played by Mr and Mrs Huggins, working so close to Herne Hill, will be celebrated as a significant step in the scientific journey.

This a review of a free talk arranged by the Herne Hill Society. You can find out about our events programme here.

Val Suebsaeng