The Land-Wyatts of Eltham
At the tail end of 1987 a discussion with my mother threw up some more information on her side of the family. Here is a more organised set of notes from those scribbled down at the end of the eleventh journal.
My mother, Ethel Winifred Land, was born at an infirmary in Southwark on July 15th 1915 as the fourth child of James Land and Louisa Wyatt. Her father had a brother Len, a sister Florrie and another sister Hilda Land who is still alive and living in Bognor Regis with another Land (May).
On her father’s side (through her father’s mother) there are the family names of Hogg and Crump. My mother never knew her mother’s mother but did know something about her father’s mother who had the Crump name and was somehow ‘mixed up with gold mining in South Africa’. Her mother Louisa Wyatt…my maternal grandmother…had two sisters who ‘went into service’, one of them in a large house in Blackheath. Apart from this sister, my mother remembers nothing of her mother’s people and does not remember having anything much to do with them.
My mother’s memory of my grandfather’s family centres on two characters. There was her own grandfather James Land who was ‘mixed up with show business’ and was in charge of a big annual charity concert at the London Palladium. And then there was the memorable Aunt Priscilla and a Lylie Hogg of whom she told me a little.
Aunt Priscilla was ‘mixed up with the Crumps’ and ‘had pots of money’. She lived in a big old Victorian house in the Old Kent Road, shopped at Harrods and ‘had shares in a South African diamond mine’. My mother and her brother Ted used to love going there and she has many memories of ‘fun and mischief’. ‘Everything in the house was musical’. My mother once showed me a photograph of her. She was a ‘big woman’…large, stern and dressed in black in the way of Victorian portraits. Her husband John is dominated by his wife in the photograph.
My mother has vivid memories of John and Priscilla. ‘Dear John,’ Aunt Priscilla would say, ‘go down to the basement and fetch some wine. Go straight down. Don’t touch a thing. And come straight back!’ When Aunt Priscilla died John threw open the house and the wine cellars to the whole of the Old Kent Road…and drank himself to death in four days flat! Attempting to accommodate this into a family tree leaves us with something like this:
My mother’s marriage to my father, William Franklin Etherden, was her second. Her first was to Les Rash from Bow in London’s East End who was reported missing and eventually presumed dead in the disastrous 1941 invasion of Greece…there is a record at the allied cemetery in Piraeus. On the mantelpiece in my mother’s (and my father’s) bedroom was a photograph of her first husband mounted upon a camel with the pyramids as a backdrop. During the 1950s my mother would travel across the River Thames once a month to visit ‘Nanna Rash’…her mother-in-law.
We knew my mother’s siblings and their families. But apart from them, the only relatives we knew well…because they lived close to us on Dumbreck Road in Eltham was another of my mother’s aunts…Florrie. She was my grandfather’s sister and emigrated to Canada after her marriage to Will Woodstock, who survived her by many years well into his late eighties.
A visit to Aunty Florrie and Uncle Will was obligatory at Christmas. We had afternoon tea and always came away with half a crown each. Aunty Florrie played the piano fairly well, playing from sheet music many of the Tin Pan Alley musical favourites of the early years of the century…songs like ‘How much is the doggie in the window?’ are ingrained in my memory as a perennial feature of Christmas at Aunty Florrie’s. She had a dog…a white fluffy scotch terrier…and was the only relative I remember that had any animals in her house…a dog and a budgerigar.
Peter Etherden
2nd June 1989
