Lives in Cricet No 33 - Jack Robertson and Syd Brown

15 Chapter Two Beginnings: Syd Sydney Maurice Brown was born in Eltham on 8 December 1917 in a cottage on Middle Park Farm, an area which had once been part of the vast parkland of the former medieval royal palace. Eltham is in south- east London, about eight miles from Charing Cross; until 1889 it was in the county of Kent. It is now part of the Royal Borough of Greenwich. For a long time an attractive village on the highway between London and Maidstone, its transformation into a twentieth-century suburb following the growth of the railways was given further impetus by the need to house increasing numbers of munitions workers from the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich; and by the 1930s Middle Park Farm was no more, as housing development continued in the area. Fourteen years before Syd’s birth, an even more famous son of Eltham, Bob Hope, had been born there, and in 1915 the great W.G.Grace, who had retired to the area, died there. Another sporting claim to fame for the area was the Middle Park stud farm, after which Newmarket’s annual Middle Park Stakes is named. Sydney’s parents were Edward William Brown and Edith Hannah Brown (formerly Fisher), both east Londoners. The family led a fairly peripatetic life. At the time of the 1911 Census they had been living in Halley Road, Manor Park, part of West Ham on the Essex side of the River Lee. 13 Edward, then aged 31 years and born in Leyton, was employed as a ‘rectifier’s clerk’. (A rectifier is somebody who distils alcoholic spirits.) Hannah, four years younger, had been born in Plaistow. They had married the previous year and at the time of the Census had an eight-month-old son, John Edward, Syd’s only sibling. They then moved to Haringey, and then in 1917 to Eltham where Edward was a ‘milk carrier’. The family subsequently moved to another, presumably larger, cottage on Middle Park and at the beginning of 1923 Syd followed his older brother to Eltham Church of England School. (The school admission records shows his father’s occupation as ‘groundsman’.) Syd’s stay there was short and he left at the end of the following year, Edward having found employment at the Motor Union Sports Ground at Perivale in west London, presumably as a groundsman and with accommodation provided with the job. 14 No doubt a budding sportsman like young Syd put the facilities available to good use! The family next moved to Harrow in north-west London where from 1929 to 1932 Syd would be educated at Headstone School and his 13 Which may account for the fact that, whilst Syd spent most of his life in north London or Hertfordshire, he always supported West Ham United. 14 I have not found evidence of the family’s whereabouts in 1925 and 1926 but, based on their location in 1927, have assumed that they moved directly from Eltham to Perivale.