This is a poor picture of the side of the Trinity square we moved to, dated 1951.
The Collins family at that time consisted of our Mum Louise, Dad Frank, oldest brother Tony, next brother John, then me, then my sister Francis, brother Jeffrey had not been born yet.
My memories of that move are scant as I was only three years old, but I am sure we were helped by my Dad's brother, our Uncle "Titchy" given that nickname because he was anything but a titch (small). Anyway I am sure he had a lorry and helped us move. We shared the house with the Linton family, Mr & Mrs Linton and their daughter Marion. As you can see form the above picture it was a large pre- Victorian style house, consisting of a basement area of two rooms, a front "area" and two large coal cellars, this whole area was supposed to be shut and not lived in due to damp, but we kids made good use of it in the coming years. The next floor at street level comprised two rooms, one front and one back, plus a toilet and access to the basement and small garden. Stairs then led up to two more rooms, again one front and one back, plus you passed an addition to the original house, a bathroom and toilet.
Climbing more stairs two more rooms as below and up the last staircase again two more rooms in the attic. All the rooms had large sash windows ( the type you pull up and down) and the original fold away wooden shutters, which could be latched to keep out burglars and the rent man etc.
Research has shown the Square to have been built around 1824 just before the Victorian era (1837 - 1901). The reason we found ourselves living in such a large, but run down house was due to the shortage of housing after the war, a system called controlled rents meant landlords had to give over vacant houses to local council control, and the rents were controlled to allow the working class to afford them, strangely, at the same time the working class were being allowed into these run down properties, some of them were still occupied by the "upper classes" which made for some interesting mingling of kids from different ends of the social spectrum, more on that later.
Our family occupied the two ground floor rooms, and the two rooms on the next floor, plus we had the downstairs toilet. Now according to my sister Francis, the ground floor back room was the bedroom of myself, brother John, and sister Francis, the ground floor front room was brother Tony's bedroom, mum and dad slept in the first floor front room ( which doubled as a living room ) and the first floor back room was the kitchen.
Now we come to a hotly disputed ( at least by me ) item, according to Francis we never had use of the bathroom, and the old man (dad) would drag in a tin bath from the garden once a week, mother would boil up buckets of water on the gas stove, and in we would go, Francis, Johnny, and me first, then everyone else would take their turn, now this is supposed to have gone on until the Linton's moved out ( after Charlie Linton died, I remember the ambulance men carrying him out on a stretcher) 1960 according to Francis, now that would make me 10 years old, and I have no memory whatsoever of tin baths, I do have memories of having a bath every Saturday night....in the bathroom, the bathroom had a big gas water boiler that Mother called the copper, she would light that, heat up the water, and we all had a bath, so we must have shared the bathroom with the Linton's.
Now on the other subject, dust sheets, yes I remember sleeping on dust sheets the old man had pinched from work, trouble was they still had dried paint and plaster on them, I think that's where I acquired my hatred of painting and decorating.
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| Bath night at the Collins House |
As stated above Trinity square was located between London Bridge and the Elephant & Castle ( more on those later) but to get a real feel for the area in the 1950's imagine setting off for a walk from the square, within ten to fifteen minutes you could be at the river Thames and the still working docks, the Tower of London, Borough market when it still was a fruit and veg market, Billingsgate fish market located just over London bridge, Petticoat lane, Smithfield meat market, the City of London, Fleet street, and the west end of London, to name but a few, plus all the supporting industry, also at that time London was still covered in bomb sites from the war, so within a couple of minutes walk we had the bombed out ruins of a court and its cells next to the appropriately named Jail park, plus a couple of bombed out public houses and whole streets that were flattened, so at night, the street lights, which had only been changed from gas lights by the addition of a bulb, gave out little light, hardly any vehicles moving or parked, the whole scene was almost Dickensian, and at any moment you expected Oliver twist or worst, Jack the Ripper to step out of the shadows.
So the year is 1953, apart from the Collins family moving what else was happening. Well it was the year of the Queens coronation, the climbing ( you don't conquer a mountain ) of Everest, a young boy in the Midwest of the USA named Robert Zimmerman was just 12 years old and maybe was looking down highway 61 and dreaming, the double helix of DNA was about to be unravelled, Aldous Huxley had just written the "The doors of perception" (not sure where Jim Morrison was...the doors, yea that's where they got the name) Stalin died but not before he had murdered 11 million of his own people
And a couple of thousand miles away, in a country called Vietnam, that almost no one in Britain or America had ever heard of, in a place called Dien Bien Phu, that no one outside of Vietnam had EVER heard of, events in the on going French colonial war, were leading to a battle that would become legend, a battle synonymous with bravery, courage, and bitter defeat. A battle that would echo down the years, and come to haunt the American military in a war that started for them 4 years later, that would take the lives of over 2.5 million civilians, 50.000 American dead and 300.000 wounded, it would cause riots and death on the campus's of America, and scar the American psyche for years to come.
Some background
Before Magellan, before Marco Polo or the great Khan, there was an early man, dark skinned and dwelling in caves, he walked, upright, from Central Asia towards Australia and stopped off in the jungles of Hoa Binh in North Vietnam. Then came Bacsonian man, wielding double edged axes and felled the ancient hardwoods. Other migrations added cattle, irrigation, and art for it's own sake. Temples were erected to ancient gods. Men harnessed themselves to the plow. Hinduism, Buddhism, pagan worship - all emerged as Asia's races mingled. In 111 B.C., China invaded and stayed over a thousand years. Nearly a millennium after the coming of Christ, when the mapmakers were marking the void of what would become the Americas with the Latin inscription " here be monsters," The Champa Empire peaked in south Vietnam. Rice was so abundant in the Champa Empire that areas had been allowed to lie fallow. The viets, who had originally come from an area in China called Nam viet, were packed into poor hard land in the north, broke out of the Red River delta and overran the Chams.
Five hundred years before Pol Pot committed Genocide with his Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Chams disappeared, traces of there DNA linger in the Montagnard tribes of Vietnam.
The Chinese were run off by a peasant army led by an emperor who called his state the Kingdom of the Watchful Hawk. Another great emperor repulsed the invading Mongols in the thirteenth century. Emperor Le Loi, whose legend equals that of King Arthur, using hit-and-run tactics routed the Chinese once and for all in a battle west of Hanoi in 1426. That triumph bought a brief golden age of scholarship, art, and peace. In the sixteenth century Europeans arrived after pepper and spices, Portuguese, Dutch, then in the seventeenth century the French arrived who proceeded to mislead cartographers with three distinct divisions of Vietnam. The south was labeled Cochin China; the middle was named Annam; and the north, Tonkin.
While explorers inventoried huge timber, rubber, and mineral reserves, priests counted souls and saw a whole new flock ripe for conversion.
By 1887 France had created the Indochinese Union, encompassing Cochin China, Annam, Tonkin. and Cambodia, Laos soon followed. Even as the French tried to pacify the country with "baguettes and ceramic sewers" the old order unravelled. Ancient clan rivalries were set aside by a hatred of the foreign oppressors. In this time of corruption, manipulation, oppression, and inequality was born, in 1890 in central Vietnam, the son of an itinerant medicine man.
The child was named Nguyen That Thanh - Nguyen Who Will Be Victorious.
Nguyen That Than, who would become a man of many aliases, wrote these words in a Chinese jail:
"Neither high, nor very far
Neither emperor, nor king
You are only a little milestone,
Which stands at the edge of the highway.
To people passing by
You point the right direction,
And stop them from getting lost.
You tell them the distance
For which they must journey.
Your service is not a small one.
And people will always remember you"
The world would remember him as Ho Chi Minh
Fast forward to the end of the second world war in indochina. I advise you read:
The last valley by Martin Windrow.
Hell in a very small place by Bernard B. Fall
Street without joy by Bernard B. Fall ( absolute must reads )
To precis the situation, the French were trying to re establish colonial control of Vietnam against a background of a Nationalist uprising, the Viet-Minh ( League for the revolution and independence of Viet-nam) which had a clear Communist manifesto. After the French botched the political negotiations they embarked on a "small scale war". The French were always looking for that one big set-piece battle to defeat the Viet Minh ( echoes of the American war in Vietnam ) that search was to end seven years after the French first took on the Viet Minh, when they found there "set-piece battle" in a small mountain valley whose English name would be " Seat of the Border County Administration" Its Vietnamese name was Dien Bien Phu.
The build up to this battle started in 1953 and culminated in defeat for the French in May 1954.
Near the end of the battle in march, ( it ended on 7th May) the garrison of Dien Bien Phu had around 15,000 effective fighting men, casualties up to the 5th May were 7,000 dead or wounded, the total estimate for dead at the end was 12,000.
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| Dien Bien Phu |
At the end of the battle the Viet Minh took some 9,000 prisoners a third of whom were wounded or sick, there captivity only lasted 4 months by which time half of them "disappeared"
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| POWs being marched away from Dien Bien Ph |
The American involvement escalated, the vietnam war had truly started.
What has this to do with me as a three year old moving to Trinity Square. Not as much as some other children, not as much as thousands of Children in America who would grow up to fight that war, not as much for instance as the twelve year old son of the Hollywood legend Errol Flynn, Sean Flynn, or perhaps a child from Tunbridge England named Tim Page, and certainly not the hundreds of thousands of children in that whole region of Indochina who would suffer and die in that war, but for me, being a teenager during that war, it would have a profound affect from a distance. It was the first " TV war " the first real "war photographers" war, and those pictures were shown in the picture magazines of the day, and one picture flashed around the world would affect me most, a picture of self immolation by a Buddhist monk, an horrific picture of self sacrifice, but totally calm and serene, how could this be, how could someone have such an unfettered mind to do this, it would take a lifetime of study and learning to find the answer.
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| Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc self Immolation |
"Fortune and disaster do not come through gates, but man himself invites their arrival"
The Tao
