Rivers Rememberd. Pat Manning. Cont…
After WW2, the ground was taken over by Thomas Meadows and efforts were made to stem the R. Pool by building up the land 8ft. This buried the elegant semicircular red brick steps of the pagoda-style pavilion but prevented the flooding. Today, visitors to boot sales at the Footsie Club can be barely aware of the river of my childhood, flowing as it does now deep down between the banks.
Now that the river had lost its flood plain, it exaggerated the flooding of the Chaffinch Brook at Clockhouse. Many alive today will remember the rainfall of Friday night 15.9.1958 when the flooding of our local streams fed by the rain in the Shirley hills caused the Beck to pour out of the Kelsey Park gates like a bore 4ft high. Clockhouse station was flooded twice; first by the Chaffinch coming from the direction of the up line and then by a tidal wave from Elmers End. Large lakes appeared all over the borough: – Shortlands, New Beckenham, Birkbeck, Lower Sydenham, Worsley Bridge, Rising Sun, White Hart at West Wickham and Sparrows Den where the downpour had revealed the forgotten streambed of the Bourne.
The club house in the 1930’s
2 responses
just a comment for good orders sake. Its been discovered that John Cator didn’t intend to develop the estate requesting in his Will that it shouldn’t be broken up, but his nephew and heir, John Barwell Cator and other estate trustees acquired an Act of Parliament permitting leases and exchanges of property from 1825 and the Cators moved their main estate to Woodbastwick in Norfolk.
Pat was instrumental in us becoming aware of this and her childhood memories probably sparked her interest in local history….. and passed the interest on to us and others. Thanks Pat.
Great