I was born in number 28 Laburnum Road in January, 1949. There are around 50 in the picture, so my Nissen Hut must have been in the middle somewhere. My father, a former commando, had been captured in Crete and spent four years in a POW camp in Silesia (Stalag VIIIB). My mother had been ‘bombed out’ as she used to say, and was trapped for 13 hours in a collapsed house in Morden Road after it was struck by a ‘Doodlebug’. They met through my mother’s brother, who had been in the Royal Horse Guards together with my father, before they both transferred to the commandos. They served together in the Middle East, before both were captured in Crete. My father was hospitalised for 6 months, and my mother would visit him in hospital with her brother. My parents married in 1945, and lived with my mother’s parents at 21 Raleigh Gardens. They were ‘rehoused!’ to the Nissen Huts between 1947 and 1949 (my brother was born in Raleigh Gardens in 1947 and I was born in the Nissen Hut in 1949).
I remember the very big house / building to the left of the picture near the railway line in the picture (Nursery Cottage) as being very spooky. I used to go there with my brother, so he would have been 6 and I would have been 4. I also remember my brother being collected in a big cream Daimler ambulance,which drove between the Nissen Huts, to pick him up and take him to hospital when he contracted Scarlet Fever. The Nissen Hut was divided into three rooms – two bedrooms at the back and an open plan kitchen, dining area and a lounge. The open area floor was painted black and there was a ‘copper’ for washing clothes under a curtain next to the sink. The bedrooms had lino on the floors. The toilet was outside, where the tin bath was kept. The tin bath used to be filled with water from the ‘copper’ once a week, and my brother and I would use the same water, being bathed one after the other. Everything was very spartan and cold during the winter. My sister was born in 1951, but I don’t know if that was at the Nissen Hut or in a hospital. My father had an allotment next to the road, which you can make out in the picture you mention. I buried my Dinky toy sand tipper lorry and never found it…. A little bit of my history is still there!
We were rehoused to the new Pollards Hill estate, probably in 1953. I suspect I must have been about 4 years old when we moved. I remember visiting the house under construction at 15 Hertford Way before we moved there, in particular walking across a scaffold board over the footings trench to get into the house. My sister must have been about 1 year old by then. My parents lived in Hertford Way until they both died, in 2003 (mother) and 2004 (father). I lived there until 1972. My mother’s brother, Johnnie, and his wife and four children, lived in the Nissen Huts at Wide Way. Their Nissen Hut backed onto the Alfred Mizen Primary School, which I attended. By the time they moved out, many of the Nissen Huts had been demolished and the area was very run down. I suspect they moved out around 1955, and went on to live in Lavender Avenue, near Figges Marsh. The change in the Wide Way area was substantial! After the new houses were built where the Nissen Huts had been, a famous Crystal Palace and England footballer of the time, Johnny Byrne, moved into a house positioned where the final Nissen Hut stood on Wide Way until 1956 – I don’t think he would have lived in a Nissen Hut! I used to see him when I was walking to school.
The Nissen Huts can be viewed on these links:
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