The Story
Nine chapters, as far as the record carries
What follows is drawn only from documents that have been seen. Where a thing is inferred it says so; where only the family remembers it, it says that too. The story stops where the evidence does.
A name and a trade
The oldest Randall we can name is a man called Henry Randall, and he is a greengrocer. That is the whole of it. He appears once, in a single line written by his son on a marriage register in 1893, in the column headed “Father’s Name and Surname”. No age, no birthplace, no address. The clerk did not write “deceased” beside him, which was the usual practice when a father had died, so he was very probably alive that August — and then he is gone again.
Where he was in 1891 is not known. He has been searched for and not found.
Peckham, 1871
In the autumn of 1871 a son is born to him and registered in the Camberwell district — September quarter, volume 1d, page 581. The boy is also called Henry. Across the whole of his adult life he will give “Peckham” as his birthplace, three times, twice in his own handwriting, and never once vary it.
Only three Henry Randalls were registered in the whole of England and Wales that quarter, and only one anywhere near south London. A second Henry Randall, born nine months earlier in the neighbouring district of St Olave Southwark, belongs to a different family altogether — a mistake this history made once, and corrected.
The shop in St Leonard Street
On 6 August 1893, at St Peter’s, Pimlico, Henry marries Ellen Willby. He is twenty-one and already a greengrocer, living in St Leonard Street. She is the daughter of George Willby, a stonemason’s labourer whose own people came from Walpole in Suffolk. Both of them sign their names in a clear hand; neither makes a mark. Two Hawleys witness it.
St Leonard Street ran off the Vauxhall Bridge Road, among Gillingham Street, Hindon Street and the Tachbrooks. It does not exist today. Whether it was renamed or swept away has not yet been established.
By the census of 1901 Henry is thirty and the return records him as a greengrocer and an employer — his own shop, at number 7. There is a servant in the house, Anney Willby, almost certainly Ellen’s sister, and three boarders paying rent. This is a family with a business, a staff and a spare room.
It would be neat to say he inherited the shop from his father, and this history said so for a day. The 1891 census does not support it: no Randall of any kind lived in St Leonard Street then. He came to the street some time between 1891 and his marriage, and the shop became his later. Whose it was before him is unknown.
Nine in three rooms
Then it goes wrong, and the census records it without comment. By 1911 Henry is still a greengrocer, but the return calls him a worker. He is no longer his own master and the shop is gone. The family has crossed the river to 450 Garratt Lane in Battersea, where nine people live in three rooms.
Ellen’s portion of the same return records eight children born alive and six then living. Two have died in the intervening decade, and they are not named anywhere.
By 1921 he is a greengrocer’s assistant, working for a Mr Hancock on the Wandsworth Bridge Road. Employer, worker, assistant: his own trade, three descending steps, twenty years. What caused the fall is the largest unanswered question in this history.
The children scatter
The 1921 census catches the household at the moment the children go out into the new century’s industries, and none of them into the fruit trade. Ivy Vera, twenty-one, is polishing gramophone records at the Columbia works in Earlsfield. Lillian, nineteen, makes gas mantles for the Welsbach Lighting Company. Thomas Arthur, sixteen, clerks for a drapery on Friday Street in the City. Edward Joseph, twenty-four, makes cases in Fulham.
And the youngest boy, Alfred William, fourteen years and ten months old, is a hand at a saw mill on Townmead Road.
Alfred
Alfred’s life is short and almost entirely legible. Born in Battersea about August 1906. Out of school and into the saw mill at fourteen. By twenty-five he is an asphalter — hot, heavy, outdoor work — living at 14 Este Road.
On 2 August 1931, at Christ Church, Battersea, he marries Mildred Woodstock. Her brother George signs as a witness. She comes from a music-hall family: her father, John Richard Woodstock, painted scenery for the London Theatres of Varieties at the Islington Empire, her brother followed him into the same trade, and her sister sold tickets at the Grand Palace, Clapham Junction.
In the second quarter of 1939 Alfred dies. He is thirty-two. The death is registered in Lambeth. There is no grant of probate: he left nothing to prove. His son Alan is not yet three.
Winstanley Road, September 1939
Three weeks before the country goes to war, the National Register finds what is left of them. At 101 Winstanley Road — the house the Woodstocks had held for more than thirty years — Mildred is recorded as a widow of thirty-one, working as a sewing machinist.
Beneath her name sits an entry the government still keeps closed, because the person may yet be living. On the family’s record that is Alan. Below them both is her mother Catherine, seventy-three, and against her the enumerator has written that she is incapacitated. Three generations, no man in the house, and the Blitz a year away.
Cornwall
Battersea, with its railway lands and its power station, was heavily bombed from the autumn of 1940. At some point after that, mother and son were evacuated to Cornwall, and Alan was taken in by a family there.
He stayed. Long afterwards, and after the marriage that closes this history, he married the daughter of the family who had taken him in. They live in Cornwall still.
This chapter rests on the family’s own account and no document has yet been seen for it. The Register places them still in Battersea on 29 September 1939, so the move was later than the first evacuation. A school admission register in the receiving parish would evidence it, since evacuee children were entered with their home addresses.
Wandsworth, 1962
In the June quarter of 1962, at Wandsworth, Alan William Randall marries Ann Brydges — and this history joins the other one, the four centuries of Herefordshire record that ends where her surname does.
Two families arriving at the same few square miles of south-west London from opposite directions: hers descending out of Hereford gentry through five generations of city trades, his coming up out of Peckham greengrocery. There is even a moment when they nearly touch. In 1911 the Brydges family lived at 130 Townmead Road, Fulham. Ten years later Alfred Randall worked at a saw mill in the same street. It is a coincidence and nothing more — but they were within yards of one another, forty years before anybody married anybody.