Lives in Cricket No 25 - Tom Richardson

13 Chapter Two Mitcham The family home where Tom spent his formative years was 8 Hancock’s Cottages, one of a row of eleven on Mitcham’s Commonside East. Some of the cottages were demolished and rebuilt as Alston Cottages in 1906 and have now been renumbered with Commonside East addresses. A stone’s throw away is the Three Kings public house and the Three Kings pond which coaches used to recontract the expanding metal and re-expand the contracting wood of their wheels. Literally across the road from Hancock’s Cottages is the northern tip of the vast expanse of Mitcham Common, flat and grassy here, an ideal play area for children provided they didn’t go too close to the pond, while further north, the terrain becomes steeper and overgrown with bracken and other dense shrubbery. The Richardsons’ neighbours included a gardener, a carpenter, a factory labourer, a painter’s labourer, gasworks labourer, dressmakers and laundresses, so the area was respectable, solid working-class: no evidence here of gypsy blood. Those who had that flowing through their veins were across the road on the Common. The 1881 Census of Population reveals a number of gypsies living in tents and caravans whose professions are described as hawkers, pegmakers and general dealers. It is likely that the Richardson children would have played with the Romany children and this social interaction may well have led to the unsubstantiated rumour that the family had gypsy blood. Gypsies continued to live on Mitcham Common well into the twentieth century and were regular visitors to Mitcham Fair, held every August, not very long after the Derby meeting on nearby Epsom Downs. In between the travellers would look for work picking the local lavender and some settled in an area known colloquially by the locals as ‘Redskin Village’ because of the number of tents pitched there. According to the late Ralph Barker, 13 the Richardson family also lived in Redskin Village, but the evidence is against this. They appear on successive censuses as resident at Hancock’s Cottages and Redskin Village was, according to local historian Eric Montague, near Phipps Bridge, some way to the west of the Common. Nor does there seem to be any support for Barker’s statement that Richardson lived in a ‘slum cottage’. The 1881 Census of Population would not have been available to him when he was writing in the mid-1960s, but Hancock’s Cottages 14 seem to be home to respectable, if not affluent, artisans. 13 Ten Great Bowlers p 97 14 There is a local legend that the Cottages are haunted, the Mitcham News and Mercury reporting in February 1962 that images of cavaliers, grenadiers, women and young children had appeared on the walls during replastering. The cottages are very close to Rose Cottage which is also alleged to be haunted.