1915 London Tram Strike in New Cross

A hundred years ago this week, tram workers in London were sacked for going on strike and sent off to war. The London tram strike was prompted by the rising cost of living - the 7,000 strikers demanded a 'war bonus'.  The response of the employer, London County Council (LCC), was to sack all men of military age, telling them to volunteer for the armed forces.

The strike of drivers and conductors started out on Friday 14 May as an unofficial walkout at the New Cross depot - now the bus garage on New Cross Road - and soon spread across London (Sunday Mirror, 16 May 1915). The strike united workers from two rival unions - the London and Provincial Union of Licensed Vehilce Workers (known as the "red button men" ) and the "blue button" Amalgamated Union of Tramway Vehilce Workers'  (Daily Mirror - Monday 17 May 1915).

Pickets at New Cross depot (Daily Mirror, 17 May 1915)

The trams were the main source of transport for many workers to the Woolwich Arsenal, and it was reported that  'The New Cross men have made an offer to the L.C.C., which has been refused, to work cars each day to Woolwich for war munition workers without pay. The one condition was imposed — that the Council should allow the men to travel free'  (Liverpool Echo - Tuesday 18 May 1915)

Some trams did run to Woolwich:  'Extraordinary scenes were witnessed in South London yesterday morning as a  result of the tram strike. Heavy rain had been falling since an early hour, and thousands of people waited at different points in the hope of getting omnibuses, but the majority were doomed to disappointment. At New Cross, where cars labelled ' War munitions workers only" were running to and from Woolwich, great resentment was occasioned when only those producing Arsenal passes were allowed to board the cars'  (Newcastle Journal, 19 May 1915).  Strikers picketed the New Cross depot throughout the strike.

New Cross Road in the strike, by the depot (Sunday Pictorial, 16 May 1915)

On the last day of the strike, 'At New Cross about 1,200 strikers attended the Hatcham Liberal Club, when a resolution was adopted expressing confidence in the joint committee of the unions and determination 'to fight to a finish'.  One speaker complained that what was started a a 'strike' had now been made a 'lock-out' by the Highways Committee of the L.C.C. The men were advised to go back in the belief that their grievances would be dealt at once, but the L.C.C. were really taking the place of the Government by insisting on conscription' (Birmingham Daily Post, 1 June 1915).  The Daily Herald also reported 'a meeting in the Five Bells, at New Cross, the storm centre of the tram-men's strike'  (Daily Herald - Saturday 22 May 1915)

The strike took place at a time of increasing social tensions. In the same week there were anti-German riots in different parts of the country, in which shops run by Germans (or those with German-sounding names) were attacked, including in New Cross and Deptford:  'One result of the riots is a severe bread shortage. Near New Cross Gate so many bakers’ shops have been smashed that the police had be called yesterday to regulate the crowd which surged round the only shop in the neighbourhood where bread could be obtained' (Birmingham Daily Post - Monday 17 May 1915).

The Story of the London Bus: history talk

Coming up tomorrow, Friday 26th September (7:445 pm), Lewisham Local History Society present a talk on the history of the London Bus by John Wagstaff. It takes place at the Methodist Church Hall, Albion Way SE13.

London Bus Garage Models

Perhaps a bit of a niche product, but if you're stuck for a present for the public transport enthusiast in your life you could always buy a model card building kit of Catford bus garage...

...or Nunhead bus garage (now demolished - was at 20 Nunhead Lane):

...or Peckham bus garage (demolished in the 1990s, it was on the site of the current bus station by Morrison's):

(all from Kingsway Models)

SE London Strikes and Protests Round-up

A quick round up of strikes and protests...

Staff at Goldsmiths and other universities are staging another one day strike next Thursday in the ongoing national pay campaign. The last, two hour, strike on January 28th, was reported in Goldsmiths paper The Leopard:

'As the nation-wide strike began, protesters took the opportunity to address the large mass of students and staff that had gathered on Dixon Road after being evacuated from the Richard Hoggart Building due to internal flooding. With the aid of a megaphone, Goldsmiths’ UCU President Thomas Henri began with a light hearted joke, thanking the plumbers for their solidarity action and recognising that the evacuation had given the protest a larger audience than expected. After an impassioned speech from Henri in which he highlighted the reasoning behind the strike, Henri invited the crowd to join UCU members in the SU for a debate. Within five minutes over 250 people had gathered inside the Students’ Union...

[After the debate] Students and staff then marched down to Deptford Town Hall in protest and urged Goldsmiths’ Warden Pat Loughery to come out of the building and address the crowd. When he did not make an appearance, the protest marched into Deptford Town Hall and spent ten minutes relaying several different chants including “Who’s education – our education” and “They say cut back – we say fight back.”

Another two hour strike took place on January 23rd, with 150 people marching through Goldsmiths in support.

Strikers and supporters outside Goldsmiths offices in the old Deptford Town Hall, New Cross Road (January 23 2014)

Strikes are also planned on the London Underground this week (Thursday and Friday) in protest at plans to close all ticket offices by early 2015, with the loss of 750 jobs.

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Meanwhile over at the Harris Boys Academy secondary school in East Dulwich, teachers are threatening to strike on Thursday. Members of the National Union of Teachers and NASUWT have issued notice that 'if there is no progress in negotiations over “the unreasonable frequency of full scale external observations, workload and the failure of the head to meet with unions to try and resolve” then the first day of joint strike action will be on Thursday 6th Feb, with other dates to follow should no progress be made'.

Last Saturday 25th January, around 150 people took part in a march from Peckham Square to Camberwell Green called by Southwark Benefits Justice Campaign to oppose the benefits cuts (particularly the Bedroom Tax) and related evictions. See report at Peckham Peculiar

Last Thursday 30th January there was a protest in Deptford against plans for a tunnel site at Crossfields Green as part of the Thames Water 'Super Sewer' project. As reported at Crosswhatfields?, protestors 'had come to meet the Planning Inspectors charged with making the decision on all the proposed Thames Tunnel sites in London. The Inspectors, accompanied by two Thames Water representatives and a Lewisham Council planner, had been walking around the area to acquaint themselves with the site's environs before they arrived back at the green to face the angry and very vocal residents'. The same blog has done a detailed analysis of the traffic impact of this and other planned local schemes in the Deptford Church Street area.

Bus, NHS and Workfare Protests

On June 22, New Cross bus garage was shut down by the London bus workers strike in support of a bonus for Olympic Games working comparable to other transport workers. Pickets were outside the garage and judging by the endless beeping were getting plenty of suppport from people driving past.

(picture from East London Lines)

Workers on some bus companies were stopped from striking by court injunctions, but a few days later  (on 27 June) buses were delayed at some of these by demonstrations by strike supporters. This included the London General bus depot on Mandela Way, SE1 - buses for the 1, 453, 507 and 521 routes operate from there. 

(picture from Willo31)

South London Healthcare Trust went into financial meltdown last week, with the Government threatening to put it into administration. NHS Trusts don't sell stuff, apart from some privileged services to private patients, so if they are losing money it generally means that they are not getting enough funding to provide health services. And/or, as in this case, they are paying millions of pounds out each week to private companies for the use of buildings built under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) scheme.

Socialist Party supporters protested outside Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich on Saturday, proclaiming 'Scrap PFI, cancel the debt'.

Next weekend (Saturday 7 July), there will be another anti-workfare protest at Blackheath Holland & Barrett shop, meeting at 1 pm  (see reports of previous actions here). Further details on facebook.

[update 7 July - the Blackheath protest has been cancelled after Holland & Barrett announced yesterday that they were pulling out of the workfare scheme]. 

Robin Gibb and the Hither Green Disaster

Many of the obituaries for Bee Gees singer Robin Gibb, who died at the weekend, mention that he escaped death  in the Hither Green rail crash. On 5 November 1967 a  Sunday evening express train from Hastings to London derailed shortly before the train crossed the St Mildred's Road railway bridge, between Hither Green and Grove Park railway stations. Most of the carriages overturned, two of them having their sides torn off. 49 people died.

Robin Gibb was on the train, along with his fiancee Molly Hullis. They were returning from visiting her parents in Hastings. Gibb recalled 'the carriage rolled over and big stretches of railway line came crashing in straight past my face'.  At the time he was only 17, but the Bee Gees had already had their first big international hit earlier that year - New York Mining Disaster 1941. He reflected: 'If our hits were not making so much money, I would not have been able to buy first-class tickets. Most of the people who died were in the second class compartments, which had no corridor to protect them'

Recovering immediately after the crash, Gibb wrote the song 'Really and Sincerely':  'It doesn't mention anything about a train crash but it does reflect the mood I was in' (quotes from The Bee Gees: Tales of the Brothers Gibb by Andrew Hughes).

Later in 1967, The Bee Gees played in Lewisham at  a charity show in aid of the Hither Green train disaster fund.

Immigration Fishing Expeditions

Last week in New Cross Road, there was a combined police and Borders Agency operation. A witness from South London Solfed describes: 

'On my way to work this morning I found the bus stops around New Cross bus garage swarming with police and UKBA immigration officers. I saw a man being questioned by immigration officials and surrounded by several police under the bus shelter... a bus stopped and people started piling out. I spotted a plain clothes officer (see hoody in pic) eyeing someone up and start moving so I shouted at him. I asked if he’d seen someone he didn’t like the look of and made everyone aware that he was an immigration officer (probably police in hindsight)... The most interesting part of our discussion was when I asked him on what basis he was stopping people. He told me that they were stopping men from African countries such as Ghana as there is a “big problem with them around here”. 

'According to UKBA enforcement guidance and instructions Chapter 31.19 pg 21. “an Immigration Officer (IO)may not stop an individual based upon their racial appearance and race or colour can never be the basis of the IOs “reasonable suspicion” that someone has committed an immigration offence”... So the hooded man was probably police, picking up people based on race to hand over to the Immigration Officers with clipboards. This is known as a Crime Reduction Operation (aka a CROP) and seems, unfortunately, to be legal'. 

I have seen similar operations in New Cross before, as well as in Peckham and at the Elephant and Castle. They are essentially fishing expeditions which rather than responding to crime are focusing on people going about their daily business. People who left their kids at school and set off to work can find themselves suddenly detained because they don't have the correct documents. Of course they are self-justifying in that if you trawl through a group of people you are bound to be able to find some minor ticket offences, drug possession and immigration paper irregularities so that a press release can trumpet that 'X arrests were made', but these do nothing to address the real problems of burglary, rape, robbery and other violent crime that most people would view as priorities.


Another fishing expedition was carried out at the Coronet at Elephant on February 25th, when Latin American people waiting to see Puerto Rican singer Don Omar were targeted. According to a report in community newspaper The Prisma 'a short while before the concert room’s doors opened people were already queuing to go in. Suddenly, they saw how the police began to arrive and walk along the queue line, and all of a sudden they started to ask for ID... they started to separate those who did not have ID and put them into vans'. Around 90 people were detained, and an unknown number were deported (further discussion of this at People's Republic of Southwark). Since when have people in the UK had to carry proof of ID?

There is clearly at the very least an element of racial profiling which determines where these operations take place and who gets viewed as 'suspicious'. No doubt rounding up Australians going to a rugby match would find a fair few overstaying on their visas, but I can't really imagine it happening.

London Anagram Map

Like this London Anagram Tubemap - the South East London section includes No Screws (New Cross), Aleph and Tentacles (Elephant and Castle), Yes Quarry Us (Surrey Quays), Lame Wish (Lewisham), Wing Cheer (Greenwich), Fib Port Dredged (Deptford Bridge), and Blood Rending (London Bridge).

(full map is here)

Sydenham Hill Station

On a sunny day outside of the morning and evening rush hours is there a more pleasant way to get around London than on the overground train system? Some of the stations are oases of calm and beauty, probably none more so than Sydenham Hill Station, with its long platform surrounded by trees on both sides.



The station straddles the social divide at that the far south end of Dulwich, with one platform approached from College Road, home to the public school, and the other approached from the back of the Kingswood Estate, managed by Southwark Council (click map to enlarge).


The station opened in 1863, and its location is a testament to the local politics of land ownership - Dulwich Estate fought to keep railway lines only at the edge of its estate.

Pissarro painted a scene nearby in 1871. The vantage point is evidently just north of the station (looking in the direction of West Norwood cemetery) and although the station itself is not shown the smoke from a train as it makes it way along the cutting can be seen on the right of the picture. The picture is known as 'Near Sydenham Hill'.

See also: Camille Pissarro's Lordship Lane Station.