Snippets

Did you know...

A number of older street signs in Brentham have the end with the postcode chopped off. It was thought that if Nazi spies were parachuted into Brentham during World War II, they would be foiled by not knowing where they had landed.
In March 1907 George Bernard Shaw invested £2,500 in Ealing Tenants loan stock, and £200 in shares. He hung on to his investment until his death in 1950.
The first houses in Brentham to have the suburb’s characteristic small-pane windows were 5, 6, 7 and 8 Brunner Road.
Fred Perry played his first game of tennis at the Brentham Club.
The May Day procession nearly did not take place in Brentham in 1981, when a London-wide ban on marches was imposed. The organisers of Brentham May Day had to go to the High Court to gain an exemption from the ban.
On 20 August 1944 a bomb fell on 45 Meadvale Road. Four people were killed and 26 houses, in Meadvale Road, North View and Holyoake Walk, were totally demolished.
In 1910 S.B. Hocking of 9 Meadvale Road organised the first meeting of the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon group. PSA meetings always had the same format, with an address on an ecumenical topic, such as ‘Life’ or ‘Hope’, and musical solos with piano accompaniment.
When the site between Woodfield Avenue and Brunner Road, which had been used as a bowling green, became an allotment during the First World War, a local poet was inspired to write in The Brenthamite: ’Where once the bowls so lively sped, the cabbage plant will raise its head’.

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