Neil Innes, Desmond Dekker, John Motson & Learie Constantine - in one Lewisham street

This row of houses in Slaithwaite Road, Lewisham has some interesting connections - I believe the white house on the left is number 22, with number 20 to its right followed by number 18 and 16.

I am grateful to 'Kobra' for a recent comment on a post here about singer Desmond Dekker's time in Lewisham:

'I spoke to my Dad about Desmond Dekker as I had some sort of memory that he used to rehearse next door to where I lived in Lewisham. I lived in 20 Slaithwaite Road and the family in number 22 were the Powells. This was back in the 60s and 70s.....now next door the other way at 18 lived Neil Innes of the Bonzo dog doo dah band and Rutles fame.... The Scaffold used to pop in and out all the time with John Gorman and I think Paul McCartneys brother... Lilly the pink... etc....Opposite before I was born I believe John Motson lived too. My family name is Smith and the property was owned by my parents and my Dad's parents I think since before the war...'

Neil Innes, a sometime Goldsmiths student, was a member of the 1960s groupThe Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and also wrote songs for Monty Python. The Bonzos sometimes played with The Scaffold, the Liverpool band that included  Mike McGear (Paul McCartney's brother), Roger McGough and John Gorman.  So its not surprizing that they might have visited Neil Innes, and indeed The Scaffold played at Lewisham Odeon in May 1968, with Paul McCartney and then girlfriend Jane Asher in attendance.

The young Neil Innes

But what of football commentator John Motson? He apparently also lived at 18 Slaithwaite Road in the 1950s, between the age five and 11. His father, the Rev William Motson, was the Methodist minister at the Deptford Methodist Mission, having previously been Minister of Plumstead Common Methodist Church (the family lived in Burrage Road, Woolwich at the time). Whatever his religious affiliations, Motson senior was decidely non-sectarian in football, taking the young John regularly to both Charlton and Millwall games. John Motson went to Ennersdale Primary School in Hither Green, and he remembers queuing to get football legend Stanley Matthews' autograph when he appeared at a shop in Lewisham. 

As Motson recalls in his autobiography, Motty: Forty Years in the Commentary Box (2009), 'On one side lived Ada Smith - I saw Jackie Milburn win the FA Cip for Newcastle on her flickering set in 1951 - and on the other, another Methodist minster called Walter Ridyard; who had been minister of Albion Road Methodist Church in Lewisham, destroyed in the 1941 Blitz and then rebuilt.

The Ridyards 'often offered lodgings to West Indian cricketers when they were playing in England; and Motson remembers 'having tea with Colin Smith, the Jamaican all-rounder killed in a car crash, and also having a conversation over the garden fence with Learie Constantine, the former West Indian captain and fast bowler'. Constantine (1901-1971) was famously described by his friend CLR James as belonging 'to the distinguished company of men who, through cricket, influenced the history of their time' (among other things he won a legal case in the Second World War against a London hotel that refused to let him stay on racist grounds).

So if Motson lived in Number 18 (like Innes after him), and the Smiths were at Number 20 (according to our commenter), then the Ridyards and their cricketing guests must presumably been at Number 16. All of this plus Desmond Dekker popping into number 22.

Desmond Dekker - sometime Lewisham, Forest Hill and Thornton Heath resident