CHARLES H. WELCH
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When my mother held her infant son out of the window over the open space around St. John's Church,
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Horsleydown, to induce sleep in a very wide-awake youngster, he was not so wide-awake and beyond his years to
know or to note that, from that point of vantage he might have seen across the housetops the tower of Bermondsey
Abbey Church, famous in earlier days for providing sanctuary to more than one Royal Personage, but interesting to
us, for the fact that some years earlier Ethelbert W. Bullinger, later to be known and loved as Dr. Bullinger, acted in
this church as curate. Neither my parents nor the beloved Doctor knew that the paths thus unconsciously crossed,
geographically speaking, were destined to be blessedly associated in spiritual things some years later.
Tooley Street, about which we have already spoken, ends at Dockhead and then becomes Jamaica Road. A
glance at the map, which forms the end paper of the cover, shows not only these names, but the following streets and
buildings that now come into the picture. Flockton Street, Drummond Road, Cherry Garden Pier, Keeton's Road,
and Jamaica Road, Herold's School, Keeton's Road School, The Bermondsey Settlement, Peek Frean's Biscuit
Works and the Drummond Road Baptist Chapel.
`Jamaica Road, which lost many of its houses in the blitz of May 1941, is so called from an inn called the
Jamaica, which once stood in the immediate locality. Three years later, on 15th June, 1944, Numbers 123-169 of
Jamaica Road, including "Roses's Chapel" were completely destroyed by a flying bomb ... . On the south side of
Jamaica Road, at the northern end of Spa Road, is St. James's Church, a spacious building of brick and stone in
the Greek style erected in 1829'
The Face of London Harold P. Clunn.
Jamaica Road was so badly hit in the blitz that I could not verify the site of many of the shops with which I had
grown familiar. At the corner of Drummond Road stood Reason's the corn chandlers, with an intriguing smell of
cattle and poultry food and spice. Next there was an old fashioned tobacconist with a display of snuff, and then a
fishmongers, and then `Bonny the Butcher', a cut above our purse. After this came Cownley's, kept by two elderly
ladies who might have stepped out of Cranford, and where coloured rainbow wool could be bought and made into
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see page 16