The museum are very lucky with the donations we receive and last week the family of Ron Harper sent us his wonderful collection of 1950s programmes and some rare, we'd neve seen many of them anyway, original press photographs.
We asked them for more details on Ron and this is what they told us.
Ronald William Harper
Born 13 September 1933 Deptford
Died 24 March 2023 Brockley
Served in the Royal West Kent Regiment on National Service in Malaya between 1951 and 1954.
Bookbinder by trade from 1948 until 1995.
Keen amateur footballer who played for Old Oarolians (not sure if this is a typo or not HI) FC until he could not play when he chose to become a referee!!
He enjoyed watching local football including Charlton and Millwall and he would alternate between them depending on who was playing at home.
He was involved in a re-enactment group with the Royal West Kent Regiment based in Maidstone and was a regular at the march past in November at the Cenotaph usually pushing a wheelchair !
We'll put some more of the photos Ron's family passed on to us soon but this isn't about Ron Harper but two photos that he had owned that stood out and intrigued us.
Comments
A scratch Charlton side are facing Reading. Some Charlton regulars are in the Army and stationed in the north. Duffy, Shreeve, Robinson and Chilton have been in the "thick of it" EG fighting in Europe although Chilton has been wounded, Harold Phipps and Sid Cann are said to be "chasing the Hun out of France".
Sadly, Geoff Reynolds death, following wounds suffered in Normandy, is announced.
The programme tells fans there is a spotter present who will alert the ref if a V1 rocket is spotted so they can take cover.
V1 rockets had been targeting London since June 1944.
As @Blitzwalker has informed us this was a real threat.
A Civil Defence spotter on the overgrown East Terrace looking out for V1 rockets as the game goes on below. He is looking south over the open end as that is where the rockets would be coming from.
If you look to the right you can see the bomb damage to the Covered End roof.
The info from the back tells us his name is Harry Goldfinch.
But who was Harry?
Thanks to @Blitzwalker and his records we know quite a lot about him
He died in 1966.
He served in WW1 with the East Surrey Regiment and then the Labour Corps. This suggests that he was wounded in some way but while not fit enough to fight he could still do manual work in the Labour Corps. His medal card tells us he won the Victory Medal and the British War Medal or Squeak and Wilfred as they were nicknamed.
In 1939 he is registered as an Air Raid Precaution Warden (later changed to Civil Defence hence the CD on his uniform in the pictures above) and is living at 606 Woolwich Road, roughly where Charlton Lane meets the Woolwich Road so the Horse and Groom would have been his local.
His warden's post was Wardens' Post "Common 1", which just a short walk from his home, adjacent to The Victoria Public House, 757 Woolwich Road. It is now a pizza parlour.
Was he a Charlton fan? It seems possible but who knows?
We'd love to trace some of Harry's living relatives, if there are any.
It is an unusual surname so maybe not too hard to track someone down.
Do you know a Goldfinch?
And BTW, with so many of the first team away fighting or serving elsewhere we lost 2 - 8 to Reading.
The original owner of this programme helpfully pointing out what the team would have been had they all there.
Key Charlton players not available! Some things never change.
We tend to look at the Air Raid Wardens today through the prism of Bert Hodges from Dad's Army - a man who enjoys his newly-found importance just a little too much. Strangely enough (and this is why Dad's Army is so superbly written) this was exactly how some people viewed the Wardens at the beginning of the war, especially during the so-called "Phoney War" period, when the public resented being told off (or fined) for forgetting to put their blackout up properly. This all changed once the bombs began to fall, as they realised that the Wardens were just local men and women (about 1 in 6 wardens were female) doing their bit to defend their local neighbourhood.
When bombs were falling, Wardens were still out on patrol and were expected to take charge of individual incidents and co-ordinate the response, so they weren't just shouting "Put that light out!" at hapless members of the public.
Harry wasn't alone in being a warden and having served during the Great War. If we look at this group of Lewisham Wardens below, we see that they are mostly men and women of "a certain age" and many of the men are wearing their First World War "three". Most of them were unpaid volunteers who were only paid expenses - the only full time, paid wardens tended to be the senior men and women located at Borough Control centres.
Going back briefly to Dad's Army, apart from being a comedy that still stands up well today, a fair bit of research went into it. In the first series, Hodges is a peripheral character but is seen wearing his civilian suit and wearing an "ARP" armband but by the later series, he becomes one of the main characters and his uniform evolves as they did in real life. By the end, he's wearing his blue battledress and wearing a "CD" (Civil Defence) badge, the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) service having been renamed in August 1941 as part of the general reorganisation of Civil Defence arrangements in the UK.
It was great seeing the photos of Harry - one of the many ordinary heroes of the Home Front.
What was her first name?