Three authors write on WW2 air raids in Forest Gate

This article looks at the way in which World War 11 air raids in Forest Gate have been approached and described from three very different perspectives. They are from the local fire chief of the time, a school boy, recollecting later in life and from the fictional work of an author born in West Ham.

The Fire Chief was Cyril Demarne and we have quoted from his work about Forest Gate before, here. The school boy was actor and film director Bryan Forbes, who spent his childhood in Cranmer Road and the novelist is Mike Hollow, who has authored three books about the Blitz Detective, DI Jago. Full details of the books can be found in the footnotes.

We have covered air raids in Forest Gate in previous articles, here and here, but not directly in the words of victims/witnesses.

Bryan Forbes' autobiography  - Notes for a Life

We covered Bryan Forbes' recollections of Forest Gate life in the 1930's in a previous blog (see here). Part of his childhood recollections focussed on his experiences of air-raids experienced from his Cranmer Road house, in 1940 - before the family moved from the area.

What follows is a graphic and direct quote of recollections of youth, from his first autobiography.

The early nights of the Blitz were not all that frightening. I felt curiously, irrationally secure in the fetid darkness of the small shelter and devolved a method of determining the distance from our own house of the bomb blasts. I would put my cheek against the sweating concrete walls and calculate by the intensity of the vibration carried in the earth.

We listened to Lord Haw Haw in the Anderson, searching the dial of the wireless until that arrogant, rasping voice filled the small enclosure. 'We shan't be dropping bombs on Earlham Grove tonight' he said once, in a reference to the Jewish Quarter of Forest Gate, 'We shall be dropping Keating's Powder.' Keating's was a brand of dustbin disinfectant. In repeating the remark here I am not trying to perpetrate that distant vicious smear, I merely wish to record the absolute amazement and fear I felt at hearing my own locality mentioned by the remote voice of the enemy

On the Saturday afternoon, when the second phase of the Blitz began in earnest I was inside the Odeon, Forest Gate, watching a matinee of Gaslight. Half way through the performance the audience became conscious of what seemed to be a hailstorm beating on the roof. The projector lamp died and the house lights came up. The limp manager, in black tie, came on to the stage and announced that the audience should disperse in the interest of safety.

We trooped without undue haste into the bright sunshine outside and stood in groups on the pavement watching pattern after pattern of sun-silvered Dorniers winging high overhead. Urged on by the police and wardens I ran the length of Woodgrange Road and along Godwin Road straight into the arms of my distraught mother.

We went immediately into the Anderson and except for hurried forays into the house for food and the use of the toilet during the rare lulls in the bombardment, we stayed in the garden shelter for the best part of two whole days and nights. During the night hours the sky was swollen red enough by the monstrous Dockland fires to make the regulation blackouts meaningless.

Sticks of bombs fell across Wanstead Flats, cutting a path through Cranmer Road at the top end, but the Anderson never shifted.

Our experience was nothing out of the ordinary and we were far luckier than most, for when the last bomb with our number on it found its target the Anderson shelter still held, but our life in Cranmer Road was over forever.

Cyril Demarne's Fireman's Tale

This short memoir was published almost 40 years ago. Cyril joined the West Ham Fire Brigade in 1925 and spent the much of the war serving in the district. He was later appointed Chief Fire Officer for West Ham and was made an OBE in 1952.

The book describes life as a fireman in the area during the war. Below we reproduce two extracts about places very familiar to Forest Gaters.

Writing of July 1944, Cyril says he got a radio call:

"V1 explosion in Blake Hall Crescent, Wanstead, sir. Your car has been ordered"

Oh, God: here we go again. What frightful scenes should we encounter this time? We had become accustomed to rows of shattered houses and shops and the back street factory with a dozen girls entombed; to the heart-rendering cries of the bereaved and to children screaming for their parents; to the torn and hideously mangled bodies to be recovered from the debris; and to the little corner shop, a heap of ruins, with customers slashed by flying glass, laying amid bundles of firewood and tins of corned beef.

I asked my driver if she knew where we were going. Yes, she knew, and we were there in a few minutes. All the trees in the vicinity had been defoliated by the explosion and the pungent smell of chlorophyll mingled with the musty odour of mortar and other dusts. Only the stench of blood was missing, something, at least, to be thankful for. A number of houses had been demolished and women and children were being removed from the debris.

As we toiled, several V1's roared across the sky and there came a chorus of "Seig Heil, Seig Heil," from hundreds of German throats in the POW camp a few hundred yards along the road. How I prayed for one to come down smack in the centre of that compound, but my prayer went unanswered and the bombs flew on, to crash in Poplar or Stepney, or points west.

The houses in Blake Hall Crescent lay in a hollow which restricted the area of the blast. Casualties, relatively, were light and we were able to clear up rather more quickly than usual and make our way home. There was no knowing where or when the next buzz-bomb would dive.

The POW camp came near to disaster about a week later, when a flying bomb crashed on the anti-aircraft rocket installation on the opposite side of Woodford Road (ed: near the current Esso garage, on Aldersbrook Road), killing a number of gunners and ATS girls. The blast set fire to dry grass on the site and it was by a narrow margin only that the NFS (National Fires Service) stopped the fire before it reached the magazines, crude corrugated iron sheds, with openings screened with hessian curtains protecting the rockets laid out on racks.

It was a close shave.

Cyril Demarne

And the second extract, describing events a little later that month:

It was during the scalded cat raids, when fast flying aircraft roared over London, dropped a load of bombs and hared away as fast as possible. A number of isolated fires had been started in Manor Park - Forest Gate area - and I found myself in a temporary fire station, manned by part-time fire crew, at midnight. The firewoman on duty reported that her crew had been ordered out to a fire at the Manor Park Cemetery and had been gone for three hours. I could not imagine a fire in a cemetery occupying a crew for anything like that time and I passed the place twice during the evening, observing no sign of fire. However, I had better investigate: it was not unknown for a fire pump to have become engulfed in a bomb crater.

The cemetery gates were wide open and we drove in, following the main drive until it narrowed into a single width road and terminated in a sort of roundabout, with four or five paths leading in different directions.. The glow of the distant fire was the only light we could see as we stopped. I got out and had a look around and there was no sign of a fire or the crew. ...

I was soon out of sight of the car and I started to hear a voice out of the silence of the night.

"I wouldn't go down there", it said, "something has come down" It was the cemetery keeper. I shone my torch ahead and saw a number of shining incendiary bombs, none of which appeared to have fired, lying scattered over graves and paths. I picked up two of the bombs, and walked back towards the car. The keeper told me that firemen  had been in the cemetery some hours ago to deal with a fire in a heap of discarded wreath frames but had left before the second fall of incendiaries. ...

The missing pump turned up, eventually. It was manned by a crew of part-time firemen, who attended for duty one night per week. ...  After dealing with the cemetery fire they chased after another showing a light at Manor Park; then to another, arriving home at their station about 1 a.m., tired out, but happy with their evening's performance."

The Blitz Detective series of novels, a review by Sandra Walker

I found this series enjoyable and very surprisingly, rather compelling. I can happily recommend it to anyone interested in WW2 east end, ‘popular’ social history (especially local Newham people) who likes an ‘easy, undemanding, lightweight’ read. Mike Hollow, the author, was born in West Ham.

Mike Hollow

The stories are full of local interest, with housing and historic building references and descriptions including car journeys along roads that no longer exist - during some of the bombing raids of the Blitz which actually destroyed them. Descriptions, venues and events are based on Mike Hollow’s family oral histories and local and national topical news at the time.  The author successfully conveys a sense of the hardship, stoicism, humour, disruption, trauma, community and ‘stiff upper lip’ attitude with which we have become familiar and associate with the events of the time.

Conscientious objectors, fifth columnists, local council corruption, inequality, early feminism, the evacuation of children, poor quality housing and healthcare, food shortages, harsh living conditions, lack of sleep, trauma of witnessing dead bodies and the impact on local communities as they are disrupted and fractured forever are just a few of the issues the reader is confronted with – this in addition to ‘murder most foul’. Yet this is skilfully woven into stories of day to day life (and murders) which continue in spite of and add to the difficulties and horrors.

I found myself quickly comfortable and easily able to relate to the somewhat familiar stereotype   principal characters of the ‘Old Bill’ of the time. The emotionally repressed bachelor, DI Jago with WW1 baggage who is our principal character is immediately likeable because he is so sensible, rational, fair minded and indeed forward thinking for his time (for example regarding women’s inequality and what the post war future holds for them). 

Jago’s trusty, novice, sidekick DC Cradock is uncomplicated and keen. The awful pompous, bumbling  DC Superintendent  ‘Soper of the yard’ and the faithful old Victorian Cockney Copper Tomkins, hauled out of retirement for desk sergeant duties are all stereotype characters readers  of a certain age will immediately recognise. 

The plots were credible however some of the relationships and links which assisted in discovering clues and gaining information were frankly rather ‘incredible’ or unlikely –very  lucky strikes!

There is, of course, the potential for  romance - provided by attractive, exiting, confident, worldly wise, female American journalist, go getter Dorothy and dependable, maternal, East Ender cafe owner, Rita. Both likeable ladies!

Originality? Well, dare I mention two similar series here; Anthony Horowitz’ Foyle’s War for characters and plots and Barbara Nadel’s local Newham based WW2 amateur sleuthing by troubled undertaker Francis Hancock for local interest?

All said and done, I liked the series and I will certainly be reading the next book scheduled for release in 2018.

Footnote  The books reviewed are The London Blitz - a Fireman's Tale, by Cyril Demarne, now out of print, but originally published by the Newham Parents' Centre (now Newham Bookshop - who may still have copies buried away) in 1980. Bryan Forbes' autobiography Notes for a Life, was published by Collins in 1974. The Three Blitz Detective novels by Mike Hollow are: Direct Hit, Fifth Column and Enemy Action, they are published by Lion Hudson

Forest Gate-born Bryan Forbes recalls his local origins

One of Britain's cinematic greats, Bryan Forbes, was born and brought up in Forest Gate, as this site recalled, when it marked his death in 2013 (see here).

He first hit the entertainment headlines as question master for BBC's Junior Brains Trust in the 1950's, was later head of production at EMI, and founder of a film production company, Beaver Films.

It was however, his role as actor in and writer and director of such films as The League of Gentleman, The Railway Children, Whistle Down The Wind, The Stepford Wives and the L-Shaped Room, that he is best remembered.

This article provides a potted biography of him and in particular of his roots in Forest Gate. It relies heavily on his first autobiography: Notes For a Life and his Wikipedia entry (see footnotes for details). He used his autobiography as an aide-memoire to pen an article for the short-lived Forest Gate Times in 2011, which is also quoted, below.

Bryan Forbes' first autobiography,
 upon which much of this
article is based

He was born, John Theobald Clarke on 22 July 1926: "in the sullen aftermath of the General Strike", as he recalled in his autobiography. He had a sister six years his senior and the family lived at 43 Cranmer Road - "destined to be destroyed in the early days of the Blitz" - he told the Forest Gate Times. 

43 Cranmer Road, today. Forbes
 told the Forest Gate Times that it
 was "destined to be destroyed
 during the Blitz". Hmm ...

His stage name, Bryan Forbes, was chosen at random by the man who gave him his first professional job, as Equity rules at the time required that he could not perform under his birth name, as another actor was already registered under it.

He went to Godwin Elementary School, as it was then called, and later recollected. "That establishment was approached through a long corrugated iron covered way which held more dread than all the tombstones in Wanstead Cemetery (ed: he probably meant Manor Park Cemetery)." 

Godwin school - Forbes' first

After winning a scholarship, he went to the old West Ham Secondary in Tennyson Road, Stratford.

His grandparents lived in Odessa Road, where he went once a week for family tea. Writing of the street and house in the 1930's, he said in Notes for a Life:

This was a dismal thoroughfare, bordering at one end on the London and North Eastern Railway, which ran, below street level behind a blackened wall, topped with jagged bottle glass. ... Pollution being then undiscovered, the belching tank engines were merely an accepted fact of life, menacing every wash-line and delighting only small boys - for to remain fearless on the wooden pedestrian bridge while a train shuddered beneath it was a considered a supreme test. One of the punishments meted out to the bullied (of which he was one) was for the victim's face to be pushed between the wooden floor slats of the bridge while a slow goods train passed jerking and clanging below. Apart from the terror produced by the noise, the sufferer was choked by thick yellow smoke which took minutes to disperse.

He later told the Forest Gate Times, that his grandparents' house was:

A humble house, sandwiched between two other identical houses with front gardens just big enough to take a pram lengthways, separated from the road by a privet hedge, the stems cankered by years of vintage dog pee, the leaves sooted and crisped to the texture of dried holly.

Writing of his own, Forest Gate home during childhood, he said: 

The gentle flow of life in Cranmer Road were seldom disturbed. It was a peaceful neighbourhood with pretensions to what used to be called the 'genteel' : neat, undistinguished but solidly built rows of terraced houses, carefully painted every year on the outside, and the women used to hand striped canvas sun-blinds during the summer months to protect the front doors.

Of Forest Gate, in the 1930's, he wrote:

Forest Gate was a pleasant place to live in those days. Originally a hamlet lying to the north of Upton at the edge of Wanstead Flats, it was as its name denotes, the southern entrance to Epping Forest.

He had this to say about Wanstead Flats:

Cranmer Road bordered on the Flats, the savannah of my formative years which I was forbidden to explore beyond a certain limit and which, in consequence, appeared to me to be as mysterious and boundless as the entire continent.

In reality it was a large area of sparse grassland dotted with irregular plantations of thin trees and some sand hills humped around what I assume must have been a derelict gravel pit.

 It had a pathetic boating lake, like something out of Toy Town, with half a dozen rotting paddle boats for hire, and a small bandstand where, some Sunday evenings, we were taken to hear the music, sitting on hard slatted seats and surrounded by discarded peanut shells. I thought it was one of the most romantic places on earth.

Bandstand on the Flats, a few years
 before Forbes was taken to hear
 music on Sunday evenings

 Running parallel to Cranmer Road", he noted:

were four other roads named after the martyred bishops - Latimer, Lorne, Tylney and Ridley. They were considerably posher than my own, and Lorne was the poshest of the lot.

My dallion days on Wanstead Flats were for the most part totally uncomplicated: it was football in the mud during winter and cricket until the light faded in the summer.

Bryan Forbes had his first - unwanted - sexual encounter on Wanstead Flats, when he was approached by a flasher, who offered him 6 pence if he co-operated. Forbes ran off, cutting his thumb on a broken bottle as he stumbled and later recalled:

The gentleman in the raincoat proved to be an escaped lunatic (it would appear that Forest Gate had more than its fair quota in those days) and apparently, was swiftly apprehended.

The episode was completely erased from my mind until 1969 when I went back to Cranmer Road with a BBC camera team who were shooting a biographical Man Alive programme around me and visiting my childhood haunts to capture celluloid nostalgia. 

Bryan Forbes on a return visit to
 Forest Gate, in the 1950's

I stood again on Wanstead Flats, the limitless vista now reduced to its true scale, shivering in the winter dusk while hoards of turbinated immigrants played hockey in the Giant's Basin - not the canyon I had remembered, but just a slight dip in the arid terrain. It was only then that the memory of the naked man returned, though the physical scar has always whitened the skin beneath my left thumb.

Bryan Forbes recalled fascism in Forest Gate, during the 1930's

Mosley came to Wanstead Flats some Sunday evenings. He came in a sealed truck with a wire cage set into the roof. Surrounded by a black garland of close-cropped, scrubbed and wax-like body guards, he stood within his cage and screeched his British upper-class impersonation of Streicher to an audience that mostly consisted of children, derelicts and policemen.

Oswald Mosley, a visitor to Wanstead
Flats in the '30's - caged in his white van

I remember listening without comprehension (ed: Forbes would have been about 10 at the time). It was merely a strange, but not unwelcome diversion from the sameness of everyday life. I can remember seeing bottles breaking on the white cage close to the thin drawn face of Mosley and hearing his lunatic-amplified voice bouncing back from the houses behind him.

Mounted police waited in the shadows beside the empty bandstand, edging their restless horses forward as the bully boys started on the really important business of the evening. Mosley looked like Mighty Mouse in his mobile cage and departed the scene as battle commenced to spread his gospel to another corner of a foreign field.

His early encounters with the cinema were in Forest Gate

Most of my contemporaries patronised the 'Tuppenny Rush' at the Splendid, alongside Forest Gate railway station. (His Forest Gate Times article embelished this a little: I also haunted the old second hand bookshop close to the cinema. I have no idea how the old bookseller kept his head above water, because he operated on a barter system.) There on a Saturday afternoon, we would rush the doors to tread the threadbare carpets inside that dark and welcoming cave. For three pence you could join the ranks of the elite and sit upstairs in the balcony, a privilege which carried with it the bonus of being able to hurl your ice cream carton on the unruly audience below.

The Splendid cinema - Bryan Forbes'
introduction to his later, illustrious, career

To this day I can recall the agonising delight of those afternoons, the bliss of coming out of the darkness into sunlight and crossing the road to Paterson's (sic) Dolls' Hospital on the bridge, to spend what remained of our pocket-money on a penny bomb. This was a small, but effective device, made of some cheap alloy and shaped like a hand grenade.... There was a satisfying explosion when it fell to earth.

Pattinson's Doll's Hospital, mentioned
 by Bryan Forbes, above - facing Forest
 Gate train station. Note correct spelling

The simplest and most effective ploy at the poor old broken-down Splendid was to raise money to buy one ticket. Once inside, the owner of the ticket would then work his way to the remotest exit, carefully open the door, where his partners in crime would be waiting outside. 

They would dart in like rats and occupy the nearest vacant seats., The aged usherettes were too bored and poorly paid to give chase, but from time to time a new manager (pathetically attired in some second-hand dress suit) would brush the dandruff off his collar and attempt a purge.

But if the Splendid was my village church, the Queen's at the top of Woodgrange Road was my Westminster Abbey. This superior palace, glorifying the Cunnard liner of British cinema architecture, demanded greater respect and the collection started at six pence. It was there on Friday nights, that blissful childhood day of the week, when school can be pushed to the back of your mind, that I became addicted.

The Queen's cinema, Romford Road -
bombed during WW11 - Forbes' "Westminster Abbey"

 His main local enthusiasm, apart from the cinema, seems to have been his membership of the St John's Ambulance cadet force. He wrote:

I joined the St John's Ambulance Cadet Force, since the uniform had more attraction to me than the Boy Scouts. Albert Herbert accompanied me to a series of lectures at Barclay Hall, Green Street ...

On other occasions I did duty with my father at Upton Park. Football crowds seemed just as violent then and I always considered myself lucky to be on the touchline with the police.

An abiding, and unfond, memory of the area, was the railway:

Trains from Forest Gate were appallingly dirty, the third class being little better than upholstered cattle trucks, and it was quite normal to have eight people standing in bleak proximity in each crammed compartment.

His last local connections

He was evacuated for the first time in 1939, but his parents soon brought him home:

It was now, when the war seemed suddenly much closer, that my parents decided I should return to London. I thus went back to Cranmer Road just as the Battle of Britain was beginning, a piece of timing which perhaps perfectly illustrates the most baffling piece of our national character.

My second exodus from London took place in September in September 1940. This time I travelled with the bulk of West Ham Secondary School to Heston in Cornwall.

Bryan Forbes went on to describe life in Cranmer Road during the Blitz. We will draw on these writings in our next article, which will be looking at how three writers described Forest Gate during that period.

And so ended his local association.

Post Forest Gate life

Nanette Newman, Bryan Forbes's
 second wife, who survived him

Bryan Forbes went to Hornchurch Grammar school, after his family left Forest Gate. He then trained, briefly, as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.  He did four years of military service in the Intelligence Corps and Combined Forces Entertainment Unit, 

After completing his military service in 1948, he began to act, appearing on stage and playing numerous supporting roles in British films, in particular An Inspector Calls (1954) and The Colditz Story (1955). 

He received his first credit for Second World War film The Cockleshell Heroes (1955), while other early screenplays include I was Monty's Double (1958),and The League of Gentlemen  (1959), his breakthrough. 

In 1959, he formed a production company, Beaver Films, with his frequent collaborator Richard Attenborough.

Forbes's directorial debut came with Whistle Down the Wind (1961), again produced by Attenborough, a critically acclaimed film about three northern children who conceal a criminal in their barn, believing him to be a reincarnated Jesus Christ.

The L-Shaped Room (1962), his next film as director, with Leslie Caron in the female lead, led to her gaining a nomination for an Oscar, and winning the BAFTA and Golden Globe Awards. 

Bryan Forbes at the height of his fame

Forbes wrote and directed Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), and the same year he wrote the third screen adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel Of Human Bondage. 

In 1969, he was appointed chief of production and managing director of the film studio Associated British (soon to become EMI Films).

Under Forbes's leadership, the studio produced The Railway Children (1970). His tenure though, was short-lived and marked by financial problems and failed projects. Forbes resigned in 1971. 

From the early 1970s, Forbes divided his energies between cinema, television, theatre and writing. 

Forbes returned to Hollywood to direct The Stepford Wives (1975), it featured his wife Nanette Newman and was to become his best-known film. His final film as a screenwriter was Chaplin in 1992.

In 2004, he was made a CBE for his services to the arts. In May 2007, he was the recipient of a BAFTA tribute, celebrating his "outstanding achievement in filmmaking". 

In 1951 he married Irish actress Constance Smith and the couple travelled to Hollywood in the early 1950s. They divorced in 1955. Forbes went on to marry actress Nanette Newman the same year.

Forbes was diagnosed with MS in 1975, however, he revealed in a 2012 interview that it had been a misdiagnosis. He died at his home in Virginia Water, Surrey, on 8 May 2013 at the age of 86, following a long illness.

Footnotes and sources
1. Notes for a Life - Bryan Forbes , Everest Books 1974
2. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Forbes
3. Bryan Forbes Remembers Forest Gate, from The Forest Gate Times,  2001

Forest Gate - the new Hollywood?

 ... or so went the question in a recent Guardian feature on E7 - see last week's blog for details. And perhaps it had a point. The district can "claim" a clutch of current ground breaking film headline grabbers, who follow in a fine local tradition, as we show, below.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Well, as if to live up to the "New Hollywood" billing, the Bafta award for Leading Actor last night went to .... Chiwetel Ejiofor for his role in the "Best film" Twelve Years a Slave.

Chiwetel was born on 10 July 1977 in Forest Gate.

His parents left Nigeria after the civil war, in the early 1970's, and moved to England. His father Arinze was a doctor, his mother worked in a chemist's shop, locally. During the 1980's the family moved to Brixton.


A smiling, Bafta-winning, Forest Gate-born,
Crystal Palace-supporting, Chiwetel Ejiofor

In 1988, when Ejiofor was 11, tragedy struck the family during a trip to Nigeria for a wedding,. After the celebrations, Arinze and Chiwe, as he is familiarly known, were driving to Lagos when their car was involved in a head-on crash with a lorry. Arinze was killed, but Chiwe, badly injured and unconscious, survived.

He was educated at the prestigious fee-paying Dulwich College, in South London, where some of the local good taste affected him and he became a life-long Crystal Palace FC supporter.

After leaving school, he went to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and within three months he was offered the lead in Steven Spielberg's Amistad - and hasn't looked back since. Last night is surely just one more step in an illustrious career.  With good fortune in place of birth and good taste in football team, could it be anything else?

Idris Elba

Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom was shortlisted in the Best British Movie category of the Baftas last night and leading actor Idris Elba can claim a Forest Gate connection too. Idris was born in Hackney in 1972 to mixed Sierra Leone and Ghanaian parents, but spent most of his childhood and school days in Canning Town.


Idris Elba - local boy plays Nelson Mandela

He began to make his mark, seriously, in film when he got a leading role in the major US drama, The Wire, in 2002. He has moved on through significant roles until he was cast to play Mandela in the recent biopic.

The movie was premiered in London in November on the day Mandela died.  Idris was in town for the premier and stopped off at his uncle's garage in Dames Road, E7 before heading to the West End for the premier.



Idris visits family business
in Dames Road, last November.
Photo courtesy Newham Recorder

We are deeply indebted to the Newham Recorder for having had the presence of mind to record the visit and fully acknowledge their ownership of the photograph, above, that celebrated the occasion of yet another local boy making good.

Ben Drew - Ill Manors

We have featured Forest Gate boy, Ben Drew - more widely known as Plan B, before on this site (see here). He is perhaps most recognised as a hip-hop/rapper/song writer with a string of hits, prominent among them the exceptional album The Defamation of Strickland Banks and its smash single Stay Too Long.

Ben has, additionally, carved out a career in film; having appeared in Harry Brown in 2010 and as DC Carter in The Sweeney in 2012.


Ben Drew, on location, shooting Ill Manors

More recently he made his film directing debut, also in 2012, in Ill Manors, a grimy, violent film of sub plots. The themes are based around drugs and marginalised youth, all set - in, yes ... Forest Gate - that fast emerging local Hollywood.  Much of the action of the movie took place in the now closed Earl of Essex pub, on Romford Road.


Now closed Earl of Essex on Romford
Road, scene of much of the action
in Ill Manors

Bryan Forbes (1926 - 2013)

One of Forest Gate's most famous sons, Bryan Forbes, the dynamic actor, novelist screen-writer, producer and director of films such as Whistle Down The Wind, The L-Shaped Room and The Stepford Wives died last year, aged 86 (obituary here).

From his birth (as John Theobald Clarke) in 1926, to his evacuation as a 13-year-old in 1939, he was brought up in a terraced house in Cranmer Road - one of several obliterated in the early days of the Blitz.



Cranmer Road's very own Bryan Forbes

His grandparents lived in Odessa Road, and he was a pupil at Godwin Road Junior School where he won a scholarship to the former West Ham Secondary School - now Stratford School in Upton Lane.

Writing for the now defunct Forest Gate Times in 2001 he recalled a happy and carefree childhood in E7 ("to me they will always be halcyon days"): playing on Wanstead Flats, being captivated by the local movie theatre - the Splendide Cinema in Forest Lane - on a site now occupied by the Community School (see here for details of the cinema) and spending his pocket money on bits of Meccano at Pattison's Toy Bazaar and Doll's Hospital opposite the station.

Anna Neagle (1904 - 1986)

Anna was born Florence Marjorie Robertson on 20 October 1904 in Glenparke Road, Forest Gate. Her family later moved to Upton Lane. She attended Park Primary school and became one of the biggest and brightest film stars of her day.

Neagle proved to be a box-office money spinner in British films for over 25 years. She was noted for providing glamour and sophistication to war-torn London audiences with her lightweight musicals, comedies and historical dramas.

Forest Gate - born, Anna Neagle

She won several awards as Britain's favourite actress and biggest female box-office draw. Almost all of her films were produced and directed by Herbert Wilcox whom she married in 1943.

In her historical dramas, she was renowned for her portrayals of real-life British heroines, including Nell Gwynn (Nell Gwynn, 1934), Queen Victoria (Victoria the Great, 1937, and Sixty Glorious Years, 1938).

Neagle and Wilcox then began an association with Hollywood. Their first American film was Nurse Edith Cavell (1939),another performance of a true-life British heroine, which had a significant impact for audiences on the eve of war.
She followed these with three musical comedies, all based on once-popular stage plays: Irene (1940), followed by No, No, Nanette (1940) in which she sang Tea for Two and finally Sunny (1941). Neagle and Wilcox's last American film was Forever and a Day (1943), a tale of a London family house from 1804 to the 1940 blitz.

Returning to Britain, Anna Neagle added another real-life British heroines to her gallery, as aviator Amy Johnson in They Flew Alone. She starred in a number of further biopics, playing roles of Odette, Florence Nightingale and Queen Victoria and Nell Gwynne (each for a second time). She starred in a number of quintessentially English films, featuring titles such as Mayfair, The Piccadilly Incident (best film of 1947) and Spring in Park Lane (best film 1949).

Neagle spent much of the early 1950s on the stage, but by the time she returned to films in the middle of the decade found that her fame and ability to attract good roles had faded.

She was a distant cousin of the Queen, via her descent from the illegitimate daughter of Queen Victoria's uncle, and lived in Brighton for many years with Herbert Wilcox. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1969 and died in Surrey in 1986 after a long illness. She is buried in the same grave as her husband and parents in the City of London cemetery.

Sir Alfred Hitchcock (1899 - 1980)



The unmistakable, Sir Alfred Hitchcock

Poor Sir Alfred - the nearly man! He was born just to the west of Forest Gate, at 517 Leytonstone High Road - on the site of what is now a Jet service station - opposite the Homebase store.  There is a Waltham Forest blue plaque on the wall of the petrol station, commemorating the fact, and of course there is the Sir Alfred Hitchcock pub, about half a mile away on Whipps Cross Road (see photos).


517 High Road, Leytonstone
- site of Alfred Hitchcock's birth


Waltham Forest Blue Plaque, at the service
station, marking site of Alfred Hitchcock's birth

Hitchcock clearly benefited from the Forest Gate air wafting over, as he emerged to be probably Britain's best ever film director, and one of the world's most distinguished cinematic movie makers of all time.


And the Whipps Cross Road pub named after him

E7 movie makers, one and all - we salute you.


Hollywood's Walk of Fame - Woodgrange Road next?

How long before there is a Walk of Fame on Woodgrange Road??

Death of Forest Gate's Bryan Forbes (1926 - 2013)

Forest Gate-born Bryan Forbes pictured in 1950, 
revisiting his old secondary school, 
now Stratford School in Upton Lane

One of Forest Gate's most famous sons, Bryan Forbes, the dynamic actor, novelist  screen-writer, producer and director of films such as Whistle Down The Wind, The L-Shaped Room and The Stepford Wives has died aged 86.

The Times - usually a reliable source of information - in its obituary and report of 9 May mentioned only Stratford when describing the formative years of the multi-talented Mr Forbes. But from his birth (as John Theobald Clarke) in 1926 to his evacuation as a 13-year-old in 1939, he was brought up in a terraced house in Cranmer Road - one of several obliterated in the early days of the Blitz.

His grandparents lived in Odessa Road, and he was a pupil at Godwin Road Junior School from whence he won a scholarship to the former West Ham Secondary School - now Stratford School in Upton Lane.

Writing exclusively for the Forest Gate Times ('Bryan Forbes Remembers Forest Gate' September 2001) he recalled a happy and carefree childhood ("to me they will always be halcyon days") playing on the Flats, haunting the local fleapit, the Splendide Cinema in Forest Lane - formerly on a site now occupied by the Community School's new multi-coloured bar-code block - and spending his pocket money on bits of Meccano at Pattison's Toy Bazaar and Doll's Hospital opposite the station.

Pattison's Toy Bazaar and Doll's Hospital, 
opposite Forest Gate station, destination of much
 of Bryan Forbes's pocket money, as a youngster

We will return to his wonderful first-hand account of pre-war Forest Gate as soon as time allows.

Author: Lloyd Jeans