A Festive Childhood
Author: Walter F. T. Plummer
After recently seeing the lights being put up for the festive season, my mind wandered back to when I was a child, the days when my parents used to take me around the shops.
The main three stores at that time were Kennards (now Debenhams), Allders and Grants and they always used to put on a good show at Christmas, even in the 1930s.
All of them were illuminated from end to end. Grants had a Peter Pan theme one year which consisted of a model ship which was made to appear like it was moving by revolving scenery at the back.
When it stopped you stepped out onto a bridge which crossed a large pool and on the bank was a seven foot dummy crocodile among the tropical plants complete with a loud ticking clock, which we were meant to think it had swallowed in keeping with the I classic story.
Kennards' theme one year was a workshop with moving models of elves and fairies who appeared to making toys.
Being only seven or eight at the time, the effect this had on me was magical !
I saw all of these shows well before the Second World War. Allders one year used the nursery rhyme "the old lady who lived in a shoe" as a theme for their window display. A giant shoe, some 25ft high was the largest item of footwear I had ever seen, and we were also told we could take the lift up to the roof of the building to see a bear, although where this animal fitted in to the festive period, I do not know !
The lights also remind me of a time when Croydon Council set up illuminations in Grange Woods in 1937 to mark the coronation of King George VI. It was a fantastic show after dark and I think most of the population of Thornton Heath was up in the woods to see the spectacle. I have never seen so many people up in Grange Woods since.
Hundreds of people must have turned out to see the butterflies, peacocks and models depicting nursery rhymes flickering in the trees and on the ground. Just behind the gatehouse on your left of the entrance gate, St George battled it out with a large dragon and in the sunken garden at the top of the path around a pool was a model village with many small houses and a church with organ music.
All the windows of the houses were lit up and it was simply a fairyland to me, and to a lot of other children.
At the top of the large hill, on a large lawn in front of the old mansion (which has long since been demolished) was a fountain lit up in different colours which changed as the water danced up and down.
I made so many visits to the woods, mostly in the evening after school that I got to know the maintenance technician who told me that all the lights and set pieces had been hired from Southend Council by Croydon Council.
He must have been a very tolerant man as I followed him around while he checked wires answering the questions of a 12-year-old boy.
Even now, to see Croydon lit up once again it has a similar effect on me.