Emmanuel church (2) - rapid rise and fall of the Church of England in Forest Gate

This is the second of a two part article on the Church of England in Forest Gate.  The first, immediately above, traces the story from the establishment of Emmanuel church in 1852 until the 1880's when church building expanded rapidly in the area.

Emmanuel Church, in 1907

Rapid population expansion, from the 1880's lead to the building of three "daughter" churches to Emmanuel in Forest Gate: St James;' in 1882, St Saviour's, in 1884 and All Saints in 1886 - although All Saints had started life as an "iron church" on the site - donated by the local MP - six years earlier.

St James' church, completed 1882

The original St Saviour's, on
Macdonald Road, completed 1884

All Saints, built in 1886

A fourth - St Mark's - began life in a cattle shed, now 65-67 Tylney Road, before becoming an established church building, in its own right, in 1894.

St Mark's church, completed 1894
Before then the congregation met in
a former cattle shed in Tylney Road

These were days of a religious boom that scarcely seems conceivable today. The Congregationalist church (now the Azhar Academy) on Romford Road was completed in 1880 and its Sebert Road counterpart, later that decade. 

Romford Road Congregational
 church, built in 1880

Woodgrange Baptist church, on Romford Road was built in 1882 and the original Methodist church on Woodgrange Road, the same year. St Antony's of Padua Catholic church was completed, in Upton in 1891.

St Antony's - built 1891

Further extensions were built to Emmanuel, itself - increasing its capacity to a little over 800 - and finished in 1891.

At around this time the "high church"/"low church" tensions previously referred to came to a head and wrought havoc and division within the parish.

The "low church" attacks on the high church incumbents of Emmanuel were lead by M GG Poupard - supported by the Sunday school teachers and pupils. They left Emmanuel and built an "iron church" (iron framed, with corrugated iron walls and roof), Christ Church, the Free Church of England in Earlham Grove (see photo). It cost £4,000 to build and seated 450 people.

Another dissenter, Mr Haslet built another rival church, Ridley Hall, in Upton Lane, see photo - which still exists as the Ridley Christian Centre.

The Earlham Grove breakaway tried, but failed, to get Church of England recognition: instead it was accused of having committed a schism. The breakaway fizzled out and in 1911 the iron church was bought by the parish of St James' in Southampton for £225 - and moved, girder by girder, to be rechristened St John's, where it remained, until demolished in 1950.

St John's, Shirley, Southampton - which
previously had been Christ Church, in
Earlham Grove - an early 20th century
break-away from Emmanuel

Meanwhile - back in Forest Gate - the population continued to expand and in 1892 work began on the construction of St Peter's Upton Cross, in the grounds of Upton House (see photo), which had been bought by the Diocese of St Albans in 1885.

Interior of St Peter's, Upton Park

Upton House, itself, the one time home of Lord Lister, (see photo below), became the vicarage and parish rooms of St Peter's. And still demand for church space in Forest Gate grew.

Upton House - former home of Lord Lister -
became the vicarage of St Peter's Upton
Cross, the church, itself,  was built in its grounds.

In 1906 and iron Mission Hall, belonging to St Peter's was built on the junction of Plashet Road and Gwendoline Avenue, for £360, and remained (see photo), until bombed during WW2.

Partially obscured by the tree in the front
 left, the iron mission hall built on the
corner of Gwendoline Avenue and Plashet Road

And the flats that have replaced it

The last church to be built in the Emmanuel family was St Edmunds, on Katherine Road - which became a parish in its own right in 1901. This was probably the high point of Church of England significance in Forest Gate's history.

St Edmunds,
Katherine/Halley Roads

There are scant surviving records for the Emmanuel church for the early decades of the twentieth century, other than the fact that electricity was installed within it, at a cost of about £250, in 1929.

The 1930's saw another outbreak of "high church"/"low church" disputes and by the middle of the decade the church's congregation had declined to about 170 - considerably fewer than the 800+ attendees of the 1890's.

Joost (pronounced Yoast)de Blank was Emmanuel's shortest-serving, but probably most prominent, vicar. He was only there from 1937 - 1940.  Born in Holland, he moved to England aged six months. After university, at Cambridge, he had a couple of minor ecclesiastical appointments, before moving to Emmanuel.

He was a dynamic priest. For example, he hired the near-by Odeon Cinema (now the Idara Minhaj-ul-Quran mosque) on Romford Road, for recruiting purposes. He soon attracted national, as well as local attention.

Originally a pacifist, he changed his opinions and joined the war effort as an enthusiastic army Chaplin/captain, in 1940. He was posted to Egypt the following year, which effectively ended his incumbency at Emmanuel.

de Blank returned to London at the end of WW2 and was appointed Bishop of Stepney in 1952. Five year's alter he became Archbishop of Cape Town, where he became a leading Anti-Apartheid campaigner.

Joost de Blank, as the Bishop of Stepney, in
the early 1950's.  To his right, the late Queen Mother

Emmanuel, itself, was bombed during WW2 - but did not suffer the destruction of the near-by Princess Alice, Queen's cinema or Woodgrange Methodist church. Its roof was damaged, windows blown out and the spire lost its then-famous striped tiles.

Congregations dropped to around 100. The church shored up its ailing finances by letting out its Institute - opposite - to the emerging local authority Youth Service.

Post war activity focused on physical reconstruction and building its own youth groups. Central heating was installed at Emmanuel in 1949.

The old vicarage in Earlham Grove was in bad repair and sold in 1950 for £2,600. A replacement, 2b Margery Park Road (see below), was purchased for £100 more.

The Margery Park Road vicarage, that
replaced the Earlham Grove one in 1950

A declining local population and congregation meant contraction and changes for the Church of England in Forest Gate. In 1962 the parishes of Emmanuel and St Peter's (see above) were merged.

The first physical casualty was the splendid vicarage of St Peter's. The Archdeacon of West Ham challenged a preservation order on the building and the site was sold for £17,000. It was demolished and is now occupied by Joseph Lister Court (see below).

St Peter's Hall, in Neville Road was next to go. It was sold for £6,750 in 1971 to the local Sikh community, and is currently the Ramgharia Gurdwara.

Next - St Peter's, itself. This was demolished in 1972 and the site sold for £15,000. The intention was to rebuild it on the site of the old Gwendoline Avenue Mission hut (see above) - but money was too short. That land, too was sold - in 1980 - for £35,000.

St Peter's Hall, Neville Road,
now a Sikh temple

St Peter's was merged with Emmanuel and the combined congregation had slumped to a mere 50, by 1982.

One response by the local clergy was greater ecumenicalism - with more joint ventures launched between Emmanuel and the nearby Baptist and (rebuilt) Methodist churches.

There were discussions of the also declining St James' church merging with Emmanuel, but in the event, it merged with St John's in Stratford.

The interior of Emmanuel church was reshaped in 1980, to take account of the declining congregation, and changing church lay-out fashion - at a cost of £83,500. These changes made the Institute - opposite - redundant and it was sold to Wag Bennett as a gym in 1982 for £60,000 (see here for details of the use he made of it).

Further consolidation continued in 1989, with the establishment of the Forest Gate ministry - a closer grouping of the remaining local Forest Gate churches - Emmanuel, St Mark's, All Saints and St Edmunds. The church yard and graves were re-landscaped in 1991.

The church was given Grade 11 listed building status by English Heritage in 1984.

All in all, a fairly spectacular rise and fall in Forest Gate of an institution that was once the backbone of English civic society.

The church has moved on to serve the community in different ways this century. It hosts Faithful Friends - a forum for understanding other faiths - not aimed at conversion. A breakfast club for homeless people is hosted and the church sponsors a group supporting people with mental; health issues.

Footnote: This article is almost wholly based on a now out of print booklet That big church on the corner - a history of Emmanuel church, Forest Gate, by Andrew Wilson (then assistant curate, now rector of St John of Jerusalem church, Hackney), 1995, to whom we are most grateful.

Schwarzenegger's on-going Romford Road legacy

We publish this article as images of Arnold Schwarzenegger are about to feature prominently in a major UK government advertising campaign to persuade people to take up their rights for compensation for mis-sold PPI insurance.

To reach the top of your chosen profession - particularly in the USA - is some achievement. To do it in three very different disciplines (body-building, the movies and politics) is almost unheard of. To do it, with your professional and social skills being honed in Forest Gate, is unique.

We have written before about Arnold (the name by which he and those closest to him prefer him to be known as - we'll follow suit)Schwarzenegger and his Forest Gate connections: his training and stay with Dianne and Wag Bennett on Romford Road (here) and his gratitude to them and the area, expressed in his autobiography - see footnote for details (here).

Arnold and Wag Bennett, outside
 the Bennett's home, at 353
 Romford Road, in the late 1960's

This article looks at his on-going relationship and influence with the Bennett family who did so much to launch his careers.

It was a two-way street. Wag Bennett
 used AS to promote his gym, products and
 techniques, after his rise to fame, as illustrated
 in the adverts, above and below -
taken from the Liberty Clinic

Arnold's journey is an interesting one - with very little formal education, he propelled himself from a small town in Austria to the world stage, driven by self-belief and hard work. These - and a capacity to innovate and inspire people -  are characteristics he learned and developed in the home of the Bennetts of Forest Gate.

Arnold and Wag - after Schwarzenegger
 had moved on to his second career

Arnold was effusive in his autobiography for the help Wag and Dianne Bennett gave him, in the mid 1960's, when he slept on their couches and floors as he honed his body-building skills.

He expressed his gratitude to the family not only for training him as a body-builder - but for providing the social skills that were to become so important in his two subsequent professional careers.

Wag Bennett (the unusual first name was an inherited, family one) was born in Canning Town in 1930 and brought up in the district during the war years. He used building rubble caused by German bombers as some of his first weight-lifting equipment.

He developed as a body builder, and had a business head on him. He married Dianne, who was from a Portsmouth, gym-owning, body-building family. She was famous in he own right, and trained and managed a troop called "Dianne Bennett's Glamour Girls", who performed as body-builders.

Wag opened his gym, originally in the house of the recently restored 335 Romford Road, before acquiring the Emmanuel church hall, next door, and using that as his operating base.

The pair spotted AS in 1966, as a rather gauche, poor, non-English speaking, recently demobbed Austrian army conscript. He was a 19-year old body builder who entered (and came second in) the Mr Universe competition. Wag was a judge, and the couple recognised his potential. They took him under their wings and became what Arnold calls "my English parents".

They brought him back to 335 Romford Road and looked after him - and their six children - for a couple of years - during which he achieved his then goal, of becoming Mr Universe, in 1967.

Dianne Bennett with three of her children
(Luke in the middle), in part of the world
the family introduced Arnold to, in 1966

Wag - who had already achieved fame in the weight-lifting/body-building world (he was the first man in England to bench-press 500lbs), introduced Arnold to some of the sport's finest - including AS's hero, Reg Park.

Part of Wag Bennett's board of fame (now in the
 Liberty Clinic), of body-building characters
 he introduced Schwarzenegger to.
NB - mis-spelling of Park

Reg, as Arnold was to do himself, had moved on from international championship winning body-building to movie stardom - in a string of movies based around Hercules. Reg then established a series of gyms, from which he was to make a good living. Schwarzenegger saw himself as following suit, but his career took another turning.

AS, with another of his body-building
 role models - Reg Park

Having moved to the USA in the late 60's and picked up more body-building accolades, Arnold switched to the movies and became Hollywood's biggest box office star with his portrayal of The Terminator, in the 1980's.

Reg Park in a Hercules movie role:
an inspiration that took Arnie to Hollywood

It was about this time his thoughts turned to politics - and he married a Kennedy (they have subsequently divorced). But his politics were not that of the famous family.  In the 1990's he began to work with the first President Bush and by the millennium was ready to make his own pitch for political power.

He was Republican governor of California from 2003 - 2011, but in many ways his politics sat equally comfortably with the Democrats. It was, perhaps, only the USA's constitutional insistence that its presidents had to be US-born that prevented AS from entering the White House in the top job (as fellow Hollywood actor, Ronald Regan had done before him).

AS wins the California governorship,
 for a second time

Although the man reached giddy heights, he never forgot the part that the Bennett family and Forest Gate played in his rise to fame - and both proudly reciprocate the admiration.

For example, he recalls, in his memoirs, that the Bennetts made him improve his bodybuilding moves to music - mainly the film track from the movie, Exodus. Dianne Bennett, who meets with Arnold regularly (annual visits to California and meet-ups in London whenever he is in town), recently dug up her original copy of the long-player record and sent it to him, as a reminder, for his 70th birthday (at the end of this July).

A recent photo of Dianne, in her Southsea gym
 - note image of Arnold from his Pumping
 Iron film, behind her (Photo: Stefani Gratz)

Schwarzenegger also expressed gratitude in his autobiography to Dianne for reminding him of the importance of recognising and acknowledging the help given by supporters and well-wishers in his body-building career  - social skills, so important in his second and third careers.

Dianne - now in her 80's - still runs her family's gym in Southsea, having separated from Wag in the 1990's (he died in 2008). It is, in many ways, a shrine to her former protégé, as shown by some of the photographs in this article.

A tribute to Schwarzenegger, in Dianne Bennett's 
Southsea gym (photo: Stefani Gratz)

The AS connection is still maintained more locally, however, at the Liberty Clinic, 394 Romford Road, barely 300 metres from the former Bennett gym.

Luke Bennett's base, today -
The Liberty Clinic, 394 Romford Road

This has been run there for 30 years by Luke, the Bennett's fourth child, who has spent almost all of his life living and working on the road of his upbringing.

Luke is an osteopath, and is dedicated, as his parents were - to the care of the human body. His osteopathy works with damaged human tissue, and the small gym in the clinic is used to help people work on some of their physical and bodily needs.

Luke, lifting weights in his gym -
with more an eye to a healthy
body, than a "beautiful" one.

He was equally well at ease with a couple of older women who were using the gym, when we visited, as he was with a couple of former Forest Gate Community school youngsters (he has worked at the school as a personal trainer), in the relaxed, but disciplined environment of the clinic.

A motto for Luke's gym

It would be entirely wrong to describe his clinic/gym as a shrine to Wag and Arnold, but their presence and influence is there for all to see.

The Schwarzenegger memories linger,
 in the Liberty Clinic - this and the images, below

A major difference between Luke and his parents' style and approach  - perhaps - is that their efforts were dedicated to the body beautiful, while his is to the body healthy. 

Luke's mission is to work with the body and its tissues to improve and repair themselves. So, no health supplements and additives here, but more than a passing endorsement of Voltaire's observations that:

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient, while nature cures the disease

Footnote: Arnold's autobiography is: Total Recall - my unbelievably true story, by Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Peter Petre, published by Simon and Schuster, 2012.

Educating Arnie: The Terminator in Forest Gate - in his own words

Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of Forest Gate's most famous adopted sons. His stay in Forest Gate was the subject of this website's first-ever, and most visited, post, see here.

Arnie was in London recently, posing with one of the city's "Boris bikes" - see photo, below. So, we thought it would be timely to give his account of his days in Forest Gate - from his autobiography: Total Recall (see footnotes for details).

Arnie, posing recently in London, on a 'Boris bike'

We pick up the story in 1966, when Arnie has just spent some time in Munich, in pursuit of his body-building career:

Three months later, I was back in London, laughing and horsing around on a living room rug with a jumble of kids. They belonged to Wag and Dianne Bennett, who owned two gyms and were at the centre of the UK bodybuilding scene. Wag had been a judge at the Mr Universe contest, and he'd invited me to stay with him and Dianne in the Forest Gate section of London (ed: in what is now the burned out house on Romford Road, opposite Emmanuel's church) for a few weeks of training. They had six kids of their own, they took me under their wing and became like parents to me.

Arnie, Dianne and Wag with some
of the Bennett children, referred to above,
 posing outside his temporary Forest Gate home

Wag had made it clear that he thought I needed a lot of work. At the top of the list was my posing routine. I knew there was a huge difference between hitting poses successfully and having a compelling routine. Poses are like snapshots, and the routine is the movie. To hypnotise and carry away an audience, you need the poses to flow. What do you do between one pose and the next? How do the hands move? How does the face look? I'd never had a chance to figure very much of this out. Wag showed me how to slow down and make it like ballet: a matter of posture, the straightness of the back, keeping the head up, not down.

This I could understand but it was harder to swallow the idea of actually posing to music. Wag would put the dramatic theme from the movie Exodus on the hi-fi and cue me to start my routine. At first I couldn't think of anything more distracting or less hip. But after a while I started to see how I could choreograph my moves and ride the melody like a wave - quiet moments for a concentrated, beautiful three-quarter back pose, flowing into a side chest pose as the music rose and then wham!, a stunning most muscular pose at the crescendo.

Dianne concentrated on filling me up with protein and improving my manners. Sometimes she must have thought I'd been raised by wolves. I didn't know the right way to handle a knife and fork or that you should help clear up after dinner. Dianne picked up where my parents Fredi Gerstl and Frau Matscher had left off. 

One of the few times she ever got mad at me was when she saw me shove my way through a crowd of fans after a competition. The thought in my head was 'I won. Now I'm going to party'. But Dianne grabbed me and said 'Arnold, you don't do that. These are people who came to see you. They spent their money and some of them travelled a long way. You can take a few minutes and give them your autograph.' That scolding changed my life. I'd never thought about the fans, only about my competitors. But from then on, I always made time for the fans.

Even the kids got in on the Educating Arnold project. There's probably no better way to learn English than to joining a lively, happy London household where nobody understands German and where you sleep on the couch and have six little siblings. They treated me like a giant new puppy and loved teaching me words.

A photo of me during that trip (see below) shows me meeting my boyhood idol, Reg Park, for the first time. He's wearing sweats, looking relaxed and tanned, and I'm wearing my posing trunks looking star struck and pale. I was in the presence of Hercules, a three-time Mr Universe, of the star whose picture I kept on my wall, of the man on whom I'd modelled my life plan. I could hardly stammer out a word. All the English I'd learned flew right out of my head.

Arnie, with his idol, Reg Par, at the Romford
 Road Bennett gym, 1966. The 'W' on his vest
 stands for 'Wag'. Courtesy Schwarzenegger archives

Reg now lived in Johannesburg, where he owns a chain of gyms, but he came back to England on business several times a year. He was friends of the Bennetts and had generously agreed to help show me the ropes. Wag and Dianne felt that the best way for me to have a good shot at the Mr Universe title was to become better known in the United Kingdom.

Bodybuilders did that in those days by getting on the exhibition circuit - promoters all over the British Isles would organise local events, and by agreeing to appear, you could make a little money and spread your name. Reg, as it happened, was on his way to an exhibition in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and offered to bring me along. Making a name for yourself in bodybuilding is a lot like politics. You go from town to town, hoping the word will spread. This grassroots approach worked, and the enthusiasm it created would eventually help me to win Mr Universe. ...

Arnie and Wag, by the recently
 removed lamp post outside the
 now dilapidated Romford Road
 house that was home
 to Schwarzenegger in 1966 

My initial success in London had reassured me that I was on the right track and that my goals were not crazy. Every time I won, I became more certain. After the 1966 Mr Universe contest, I won several more titles, including Mr Europe ... 

I knew I was already the favourite to win the 1967 Mr Universe competition.  But that didn't feel like enough. I wanted to dominate totally. ...

So, I poured my energy and attention into a training plan I'd worked out with Wag Bennett. For months I spent most of my earnings on food and vitamins and protein tablets designed to build muscle mass. ...

Arnie went on to win his second Mr Universe title in September 1967.  Forest Gate and the Bennetts slip from his story for a while, but Dianne, in particular, is back making an impact with him in 1971. After four more years of success, following his second Mr Universe title, he was passing through London. The autobiography picks up the story:

On my way through London, I called Dianne Bennett to say hello.

'Your mother has been trying to find you', she said, 'Call her. Your father is ill.' I called my mother and then went home quickly to Austria to stay with them. My father had suffered a stroke."

His father died soon afterwards, when he was back in Los Angeles.  The outline of Arnie's story from there is well-know: after the body-building came Hollywood stardom and a marriage into the Kennedy family then the governorship of California. You can read the detail in the autobiography.

Wag (centre) and Arnie in 2001

Forest Gate and the Bennetts do not get a further mention in Arnie's book, but the close contact between him and his Forest Gate mentors remained, as the photo of him and Wag, celebrating his election as Governor of California in 2001 illustrates (above).

Footnote: Total Recall - my unbelievably true life story, by Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Peter Petre, published by Simon and Schuster, 2012. Available from all good bookshops and Amazon, pb £8.99. Thanks to all concerned for being able to publish the above - and make the story available to a wider, local audience.

On reflection

This marks the first anniversary of the establishment of this blog, so a bit of reflection and a progress report is called for.

We've published 50 posts, on a wide range of ... well, Forest Gate-related issues, past and present, to date.

We are upto an average of 200 -250 hits per day on the site, which given the relatively small geographic area of its focus and the fairly eclectic nature of the content, isn't bad.

We've established a complementary Twitter account (@E7_NowAndThen) which now has in excess of 380 followers.  This is used largely to announce new postings on this blog, and many of the Tweets are retweeted and favourited - many with generous comments - which is satisfying.

Although we always invite comments, suggestions, recollections, additions, corrections to Blogs posted,;we've had relatively little feedback, which is slightly disappointing.  All comments submitted are subject to being overseen by a moderator before being published. The ONLY ones which are screened out are attempts by (often dodgy) commercial organisations to hijack the site for their own purposes, or responses which are potentially unlawful, or abusive (very few).

Below is a list of the hyperlinks to the eight most viewed posts, together with photos representative of the article.

Upper Cut Part 1

First week's bill at the
Upper Cut - magic!

Christmas Day in the Forest Gate Workhouse


The Forest Gate Industrial School, later maternity
hospital and now flats - scene of description
of Christmas day in the Workhouse

Forest Gate good (and not so good) pub guide



Forest Gate Hotel - part of the local pub trail

Rise and decline of local Jewish community


The old West Ham synagogue, Forest Lane

Fire guts famous gym  This was the first blog


Arnie and Wag, outside Bennett's gym
(now, sadly in tatters) on Romford Road, c 1966

Booming Woodgrange Road



Saturday markets at the junction of Woodgrange
and Sebert Roads, early signs of the
Woodgrange Road boom

Spotted Dog, still under threat Another very early posting


An undated woodcut of the Old Spotted Dog

Food hygiene in Woodgrange Road



A long-established local eaterie,
featured in the food hygiene story

24-hour Forest Gate gourmet trail One of the most recent posts, which has had a relatively huge hit rate in its short time on the site



CoffeE7 - the beginnings of the Forest Gate gourmet
trail and still less than 18 months old

The titles of the posts are fairly self-explanatory, and eating, drinking and being merry seem to provoke most interest! Also, not surprisingly, older posts get quite high hit rates, because they have been around longest and so have had more opportunities to be viewed.

To reinforce the popularity of the eat drink and be merry point, the least viewed posts (by a long way!) are the two on Forest Gate's local cemeteries, and their inhabitants.  Clearly, not much merriment there, but we think they are interesting!

Perhaps surprisingly the local good schools guide, with summaries of the Ofsted and other inspection reports of all local schools bombed a bit, in terms of viewership. 

Our small number of posts on Clapton FC (Walter Tull, the club history etc) haven't attracted too much attention.  I guess the club isn't huge and they have their own sites etc - but the are local, and having their best season for years - so give them watch - on line, but more importantly in the flesh, while the good times are here (as I, do elsewhere, unfortunately). 

As regular visitors will know, we've produced a monthly update on who featured at the Upper Cut Club 47 years ago, each month.  This has provoked a wildly varying range of  numbers of viewers, which it is difficult to understand, other than because of the popularity of the acts performing.  The two biggest sets of interest have been over the Jimi Hendrix gigs and the Stax tour with Otis Redding, Sam and Dave etc that we featured recently. We have a couple of interesting photos to update these with.

The first is a poster of the first Jimi Hendrix gig (Purple Haze, written while waiting to go on stage), on Boxing Day 1966.  The Emporium, next to CoffeE7  is selling a limited number of these, in frames (all repro, of course), a photo is reproduced below, for aficionados.


Jimi plays the Upper Cut,
after writing Purple Haze

For real geeks, we are delight to post a photo of the (rather undistinguished looking) complimentary tickets for the Stax tour, previously mentioned.  These were sent to us by attendee Brain Lovegrove.  Thanks, Brian.



Ticket to ride - or at least see the Stax tour,
with Otis, half price!

We did rather wonder how much material there would be around for further interesting(ish) posts for the future, but the options and opportunities just keep growing - almost exponentially.  So, there's a good couple of years of weekly posts left before repetition, deviation or hesitation kicks in.

Additionally, we'll try and Tweet a couple of photos, from the archives, each week from now, as nudges to view older pieces and to bring the photos to the attention to new audiences, perhaps.

Finally, some interim thanks.  It's been great fun, and an opportunity to meet up and discuss all kinds of weird stuff with lots of interesting people.  We welcome all of this. Many thanks to the authors, whose books we've plundered for information - and we don't object if we are the subject of the same (though a touch of acknowledgement would be welcome).

A very special thanks however must go to the over-worked staff at Newham Archives, whom we drive mad on a regular basis - particularly to Jenni, now back from a period of absence.

Enough of the introspection.  Proper stuff and service will resume next week!