Brian Evans (4)

Having lived in Grays Thurrock until my twenties, I was looking forward to looking through this book - essentially it's a photograph album with an essay introducing 20th Century Britain and an essay introducing Thurrock, a borough in riparian south Essex, to the east of London. My recollection of the 1950s and 1960s was not one of excitement but where was excitement to be found in those grey post-war years when one was still a boy?

The production of the book itself is something of a disappointment. It's part of a series of similar volumes by Sutton Publishing but this copy, which I thought was new, is actually printed by Amazon - a print-on-demand edition. It should be fine, of course but, while it looks good on the library bookshelf, the photographs give the appearance of a well-put-together photocopy of the original book. I complained and, without ado, Amazon did refund the cost.

As with many books of this type, it cries out for an index but the publisher couldn't be bothered. Likewise, a map of Thurrock would be helpful but none is provided. In particular, a map showing the location of a photograph - even an approximate location - would be good.

Some photographs have no place in this book - Paddington Station, Buckingham Palace and Carnaby Street, for example! Some of the photograph captions are fine but some are not, some inaccurate.

There's a photograph (page 21) captioned "Tilbury Ferry at its mooring, c.1903". The caption tells the reader that the ferry goes to the Kent side but why does it not say it goes to Gravesend? It's a rather full Tilbury Ferry and the ss Rose is not really at her mooring, she's alongside the landing stage taking on passengers and about ready to leave for another crossing. At the bottom of the page is a photograph of large merchant ships in Tilbury Docks - no attempt is made to date it and no information given as to when the docks were opened - it was 1886. The caption states that a named storage van is on the jetty - perhaps in the original photograph it can be seen, but not in my copy of the book!

There's a great photograph of diverse shipping on the River Thames (page 50) at Tilbury in c.1912 but, unfortunately, the quality of the reproduction of the photograph is not good enough and I can't identify the ships. The two-funnelled passenger liner looks like she's a classic P&O ship of the time, the white-hulled three-masted steamer is almost certainly a warship and the vessel steaming fast towards the photographer - eight letters in her name but not clear enough in this reproduction - is presumably the Tilbury Ferry.

My heart sinks when reading such captions as '... the HMS ...' for it's never 'the HMS' - such language just does not make sense ('the His Majesty's Ship). Likewise 'the British Navy' (also page 54) - Royal Navy would be good (the book is hardly aimed at a readership overseas!). The sectional drawing of a German submarine and the map of the German naval blockade are interesting but out-of-place in a book of Thurrock photographs. The same is true of all the illustrations on pages 56 and 57 - they are wartime generic not borough specific.

The photograph on page 67 is captioned 'South Ockendon station' but there is no such station; as the name on the platform clearly shows, it's Ockendon Station, on the Grays to Upminster line (and why does it not state that?).

As I carried on reading this book, the number of criticisms, sadly, increases. One almost gets the impression that the writer started to get bored, yearning to complete the book and move one, so that any old photograph would do and any old tosh for a caption. The bizarre thing is that the author praised the local history facilities - Thurrock Museum Service - yet has not made best use of their services.

I have mentioned the need for a map. I have some of those classic, generally widely available, prints published in the 1820s and 1830s - obviously some are inappropriate to a book about 20th Century Thurrock. However, George Virtue's 1832 work of Bell House, Aveley, is certainly fitting for the seat of Sir T B Lennard was little changed in the first two decades of the 20th Century; a picture of Belhus House being demolished in 1957 is included but no picture of the house when standing proud - nuts! The pictures of The Knight of Aveley public house will jog memories but, again, no photograph of the wider location - the council estate of Aveley, Belhus or South Ockendon (the same place had each of those names, all a tad confusing back in the 1950s!). An old print of Tilbury Fort would have been good - one can easily be found online. And no mention of Ford Place, South Ockendon or the mental hospital.

Palmer's School for Boys was founded in 1706 and the only picture is one of an empty classroom in the early 1900s. Why no picture of this landmark grammar school, perhaps of the boys in their uniform? No picture of the girls' school, or of girls from Grays Convent in their summertime boaters or of the of the then new Technical College - there would all evoke memories for boys and girls brought up in Thurrock.

Other images missing would also have helped paint a picture of the Thurrock now mostly gone and served as a reminder to lives lived - the 370 bus (Romford to Tilbury Ferry), the 723A Green Line double-decker coach (London Aldgate to Grays) and the only Eastern National route in the borough, the 40 (Brentwood to Tilbury Ferry). There is a photograph of the inaugural single-decker Green Line coach on page 71 but the caption is poor, albeit not inaccurate - the vehicle is fleet number GF103 (later renumbered GF140B); the route seems to have no letter or number, but Green Line coach routes were given letters (Z was London to Grays) when services resumed post-war and, not long afterwards, all Green Line coach routes were numbered in the London Transport 700 series (services to Thurrock from London Aldgate were 723, 723A and 723B). How good it would have been to have a photograph of one of the five cycle-carrying buses (fleet numbers TT1 to TT5), built especially to take cyclists through the Dartford Tunnel when it opened in 1963; the 'Dartford Tunnel Cycle Service' was, sadly, ahead of its time and little used and the buses were withdrawn and sold. Buses were important in Thurrock owing to relatively poor railway connections (even before the Beeching cuts of the 1960s).

There is a picture of the last passenger train of a Light Railway in 1952 - it was to become part of the Mobil Oil Company's lines - but, again, the reader can only guess where this was, for the author can't be bothered to tell the reader!

As to shipping, a picture of a P&O liner at Tilbury Riverside, ready to sail in the 1950s and 1960s with 'ten pound Poms' would have been appropriate and, perhaps, a photograph of one of the five Russian liners that the Soviet Union built for inexpensive cruises from Tilbury (a way of earning that criminal state much-needed foreign currency).

South Ockendon parish church - St Nicholas of Myra - deserves a photograph for this attractive ancient church, dating from the 12th Century is grade 1 listed and one of a handful of round tower churches in the county. With an adjacent public house - the Royal Oak - it is one of the few classic village green church and pub views in the borough.

From this book, one would not know that huge council estates were built at Aveley, South Ockendon (Belhus) and Stifford Clays in the post-war years and early 1950s. They were clean and tidy when built but hardly exciting or particularly attractive - but my boyhood home from 1954 to 1967 in Cherwell Grove served me better than many of the old inner London homes would have done. The author ignores them! He does include a photograph of new housing in Ruskin Road, Chadwell St May c.1929 and a Thurrock Urban District Council housing estate in the 1930s (but the author can't be bothered to identify it!). It is good to see included a photograph of the ubiquitous Prefabricated Home - the Prefab - but, again, the author does not say the location of the home!

Also ignored - but mentioned obliquely ('where once ... old ships were dismantled' (page 120)) - is the shipbreaking yard of T W Ward. In the post-war years, many smaller warships - perhaps merchant ships too - were scrapped at the yard and it must have been an important employer for a good many years. Ships I know that were broken up in Grays include the escort destroyer HMS Melbreak (arrived 22 Nov 1956), the minesweeping sloop HMS Hazard (22 Apr 1949), the minesweepers HMS Maenad (18 Dec 1957) and HMS Welfare (1957/58), the patrol sloops HMS Puffin (16 Jan 1947) and HMS Guillemot (Nov 1950), the Flower class corvettes HMS Godetia (1947), HMS Honeysuckle (1950) and HMS Arabis (Aug 1951) and the Castle class corvette HMS Berkley Castle (26 Sep 1955). A few ships were scrapped at Purfleet and I wonder if this was a subsidiary of the Grays yard - the Flower class corvette HMS Gloxinia (15 Jul 1947) was broken up at Purfleet. I've no idea of the years between which these two shipbreakers' yards operated but I have no recollection of the Grays yard in the 1960s at all.

The Dartford Tunnel, not surprisingly, is mentioned but the photograph included (page 91) is pretty uninspiring. Instead of a photograph (say) of the opening of the tunnel on 18 Nov 1963, or the Purfleet end of the tunnel and traffic of the time (a chance to include tunnel traffic with Ford motor cars of the day - Ford was a big employer locally, at South Ockendon and nearby Warley and, of course, Dagenham), the author chose a dreary photograph of the tunnel under construction and the caption tells the reader that completion was scheduled for 1962, not bothering to tell the reader when this first tunnel was actually opened! This is, frankly, very poor authorship and lazy publishing.

Four dreary photographs of Grays Shopping Centre are included (pages 98 & 99), when two would have been more than sufficient. There are eight or more photographs (pages 102-106) of the Lakeside complex whereas one or two would surely have sufficed. Indeed, some of the photographs in the final pages of the book would not be out of place in that excellent book, 'Boring Postcards' (Phaidon, 1999). Ditto the last sentence in the paragraph above.

It should be almost impossible for any decent author not to make a book like this a treasury of memory-joggers, full of interesting illustrations and captions. Yet one's heart sinks when one finds a photograph of a memorial to Diana, Princess of Wales in Orsett - her connexions with Thurrock well-known (= zero, I expect). The memorial is tiny in the photograph, words illegible - the photograph is really a large blank white flank wall, a footpath, a bush and a lamppost and it's dull beyond words. A blank half-page might have been just as interesting. Two pages later, the author thinks a photograph of a car park is interesting!

I was pleased to see photographs of Tilbury Riverside Station (page 114).- one from the direction of the river and one of the inside (both, though, devoid of human activity). The author is wrong to describe the riverside landing stage as a floating dock (a floating dock is something entirely different) - it's a floating jetty, 1,142 feet long. The railway station is adjacent to the Baggage Hall. He is wrong too to identify HMT Empire Windrush as the Windrush (I'd not shorten the name of the author - ships' names should matter in a book about a riparian borough that covers such an important port as Tilbury!).

In short, this book could and should have been so much better - it is not hard to produce a book of photographs of almost anywhere in the UK. The author, a resident of Grays, has done a good job of producing a dull book and making the borough look boring (particularly the last thirty pages; he acknowledges that the borough has an interesting history and this book does not live up to it. There's too much white space on many of the pages and five blank pages at the back of my copy would have allowed for the index and maps that are so much needed! This book really is disappointing.… (plus d'informations)