Please Help The Children

Among my oldest photographs is this fascinating image, probably from 1907. The pretty girl marked with an X is my lovely grandma, or Nanna as we called her, who would then have been 11 or 12. I previously wrote about her here.  

I do not know the names of the others in the picture. The surly young lad lounging suspiciously against the wall behind them would probably be questioned these days, but that is just how ordinary people would have looked in their working clothes then. 

Like her father and many others at that time, Nanna was an active churchgoer: Methodists. The group are collecting for charity: the placard shows pictures of impoverished children, some with crutches, and says “Twelve branches - London, Provinces, Canada” followed by the names of clergymen. “Please help the children to-day”. The light-coloured box appears to say “Children’s Home Appeal 1907”. 

I can identify the location precisely. This second picture, also from the early 20th century, shows it to be at the top of the underpass - we called it the subway - outside Goole railway station. I am informed that the chimney in the background was that of Short’s ginger beer factory in Pasture Road, long gone. 

The pub on the far left is The Station Hotel. This can be seen more clearly in these two later photographs from the 1950s or 1960s judging by the cars. In one, the wall inside the top of the subway is visible. There was also another subway at the other side of the road. Pedestrians did not always use them, though. 

Together, the photographs identify the location of my grandma’s group beyond doubt. 

Today, the subways remain, but the railway station (I refuse to call it a train station) has been rebuilt, the sidings and goods yard sanitised and pedestrianised, and the railway gates replaced by half-barriers. The Station Hotel, a scene of my misspent youth, has been converted into flats. The part of the wall where the young lad stood remains, but beyond, where my grandma’s group were, has been demolished. 

No one from the 1907 picture can still be alive. My grandma died aged 58 in 1954. She would have been a strong positive influence; she was caring, intelligent, easy to talk with, and full of sound advice. Her mother died in 1910 when she was 13, she lost friends during the First World War when she was in service in Southport, Lancashire, she brought my father through polio and his sister through rheumatic fever which left her with a heart condition, and lived through the Second World War. Apart from possibly a couple of quite distant cousins, I am now the only one who can directly remember her, and they are only vague impressions. 

Lastly I ask - now old and chill -
If aught of her remain unperished still;
And find, in me alone, a feeble spark,
Dying amid the dark.