Jimmy Burns - Editor Mike Bates - Production - Battersea Park

The journalist and historian
Tom Pocock died on May 7th
2007, aged 81. Tom started
work as the youngest war correspondent
of the Second World
War before his career blossomed
as a naval and foreign correspondent,
joining the Daily Mail, then moving to
the Times, and later the Daily Express,
before settling at the Evening Standard
where he spent many years as defence
correspondent and for a decade as
travel editor. His literary output included
books on Nelson and his naval contemporaries,
and more modern figures
such as the Victorian writer of adventure
novels Rider Haggard. Tom lived much
of his life near Battersea Park, on the
north bank of the River. He edited the
Chelsea Magazine, and together with his
wife Penny was hugely supportive to the
Friends of Battersea Park from its foundation
in 1988. As a tribute, we reprint
below an edited version of an article he
contributed to one of the first issues of
this Review nearly twenty years ago.
It looks so lush and drowsy on those
summer days, that it is difficult to realise
that the tranquillity of Battersea Park
cannot be taken for granted. Always, it
seems, somebody seems to know better
than those who planned it as a haven of
open air rest and recreation for Londoners,
or somebody wants to make money
out of it.
Sometimes it almost seems as if the
real owners of the Park - the people for
whom it was designed and built - have
been forgotten for the moment. It was
built for Londoners and to remember
just how deeply it is rooted in the past
life of London, it is worth looking back
IN MEMORIAM
Tom Pocock
a little. Of course, there is nobody now
who remembers the opening of the Park
by the Victorians and probably nobody
who remembers the craze for bicycling
around it in the 1890s. But some of us
can remember a very different Park
when, at a time of sharp social stratification,
it was crowded with Londoners of
every kind.
I was born in a flat overlooking the Park
in 1925 and my earliest memories are.
of being pushed around it in my pram.
In those days, middle class families of
modest means could afford a nanny for
the children, a living-in maid and probably
a daily help as well. On summer
mornings, the nannies sat on the benches
along the south side of the lake, chatting
amongst themselves and occasionally
wheeling their charges around the
pleasures of the Park. These included
the Old English Garden, which we still
have, and the Sub-tropical Garden. Near
the former was the Pheasantry, full of
bright-plumed birds, and, beside what
was called the Ladies’Lake, sleepy owls
perched in a cavern - the artificial rocks
are still to be seen - of another aviary.
As the children grew older, there was
boating on the lake in wooden skiffs -
both pairs and sculling boats, some of
them built by the Greaves boatyard at
Chelsea - and cruises in motor-boats for
a penny, one of them a remarkable craft
with its prow carved like a swan.
There were chats with the park keepers
12
- there seemed to be, and probably
were, dozens of keepers in
brown trilby hats and old men
who sat in the Park all day and
fed the birds. I can see across
more than half a century the
twinkling eyes and waxed moustaches
of Keeper Knight (late of the Guards)
and the curly beard of Mr.Lawrence, the
retired carpet-layer, who fed the pigeons
by the bandstand.
Of course, the Park was not only for the
middle classes. Sometimes in summer an
open horse-drawn carriage would sweep
around the outer drive and my nanny
would say, “Take your cap off, Tommy.
It’s the little Princesses.” And Princess
Elizabeth and the infant Princess Margaret
Rose would whirl past with their
nannies, taking the air.
Battersea Park offered almost the only
recreation available to those Battersea
families living in the cramped streets
of “the slums” to the south of Battersea
Park Road. They were brave, resilient,
friendly people and I remember my parents
being appalled by the conditions in
which they had to live and wondering
how they managed to survive and bring
up children.
On summer Sundays and Bank Holiday
they would crowd into the Park and
sit on the grass in their thousands, covering
the field: where the Festival Gardens
were later laid out. They could afford no
other entertainment but sat and talked
and played on the grass in the open air .
In this above all, Battersea Park justified
the faith of its founders.
It was a beautiful, immaculate park and
was said to be the favourite of Queen
Mary, who had an eye for gardens. Be-
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