Tread Carefully

By George Edward Bramley and White Magic Studios

During the 1960s, George Bramley, a dyslexic boy, born in the East End of London before the Second World War, opened a tyre shop in Stratford. At that time, for an East Ender with a business, there were three things to be wary of; The Kray Twins, the normal Old Bill and particularly the corrupt Flying Squad. This led him to mix with gangste

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maple Publishers
• Release date: Jun 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914366239

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Tread Carefully

Author: George Edward Bramley MBE

Copyright © George Edward Bramley (2021)

The right of George Edward Bramley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First Published in 2021

ISBN: 978-1-914366-22-2 (Paperback)

978-1-914366-23-9 (Ebook)

Book cover and Book layout by:

White Magic Studios

www.whitemagicstudios.co.uk

Published by:

Maple Publishers

1 Brunel Way,

Slough,

SL1 1FQ, UK

www.maplepublishers.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or translated by any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Introduction

I was born in Walthamstow E17 and who could have possibly believed that one day, a dyslexic boy from a working class family would go on to visit Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street to meet two of the most famous ladies in the world; Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the first lady to be Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

My first job was working in a factory, but over the years I went on to make millions of pounds and by the time I had reached my 30s, had bought a wonderful property called The Coach House from a Professor Thring, which I developed into a five-bedroom house with a swimming pool, summer house and a sauna.

I had lots of friends and went on to mix with gangsters, murderers, con men, thieves and some real characters.

All my kids went to private schools and the two older ones to the most expensive school in the world, Millfield, in Somerset, where they mixed with some of richest kids in the world.

Over the years I have met many different types of people and during conversations, have related stories about what happened to me, and the things that my friends and I got up to. Many of them have said, ‘You should write a book,’ so here it is!

Chapter 1 – Growing Up

I was born on 15 May 1937, three days after the coronation of King George VI, hence my name, George, Edward.

My Mum, Alice, was 37 years old when I was born, so I think I was a mistake! My Dad’s name was Arthur.

I had two sisters, Lily, the eldest, then Grace and a brother Arthur who was eight years older than me. There had also been a sister called Lally, but she had died before I was born. When aged about ten, she had been on the back of a motorbike with my Dad, came off it and badly hurt her leg. I don’t know what happened exactly, but possibly gangrene set in.

My Mum had four sisters and two brothers, Ted and George. Ted was a shoe repairer who only had one leg. His wife died of breast cancer, which was unusual because everyone died of tuberculosis in those days. In fact, my Mum’s mother died of TB at around the age of 40.

Ted had two children, George and Steve who, after his wife died, were brought up by my Auntie Emm. I don’t know why, but she loved George and hated Steve.

Shortly before I was born, the family had moved to 44 Warwick Road, Walthamstow, London E17, a new, rented, end of terrace council house that had three bedrooms, a kitchen and pantry, a front room and a bathroom, which was very rare in those days, as people did not have their own baths. And no one bought a house at that time.

By the front door was a fairly big garden and at the back, a massive field where people kept horses. My Dad raised chickens in the back garden and would feed them up until Christmas, when he would sell them.

Also living in the house was a woman called Rose and her daughter Patsy. She was a friend of my parents and had left her husband and didn’t have anywhere to go. And so my Mum and Dad had one room, my sisters slept in the same room as Rose, and I shared another room with my brother.

When Patsy was about two-and-a-half years old, it became apparent that she had an extraordinary talent. She would listen to a tune a couple of times on the radio and then play it on our piano. However, at that age she would not play in front of strangers and so to get her to do so, we would hide in the kitchen and listen. Everyone was amazed at how well she played.

Rose and Patsy stayed in that house until my Dad died in 1963. Later on, I discovered that Rose had been my old man’s bit on the side. She ultimately had a baby daughter, Irene, who I found out years later was indeed my half-sister.

*

During the war, Warwick Road had its fair share of bombs and our windows were blown out a few times. Perhaps the reason was because the house was situated near Billet Road, where a lot of factories made aeroplane parts and ammunition. There was also Holmes Brothers making gliders and over by the River Lee (which came under Edmonton) was the gasworks. They were all targets for the Germans.

On one occasion, my Mum was ironing and would always put her washing on a big chair (I still have that chair to this day). The air raid warning sounded, but almost immediately bombs began falling in the road. She screamed, pushed me into the washing and threw herself on top of me just as the windows were blown in. There was smoke and soot everywhere. However, with my Dad being a painter and decorator, and my brother a plasterer, it didn’t take too long to repair the damage to the windows.

I was just over three and a half years old when, wearing a brand new sailor’s suit, I fell into the pond at the bottom of the garden. We called it the pond, but it was a bomb crater filled with water. I had to be dragged out and was very lucky not to have drowned.

Both sisters worked for Gilson and Company Ltd, which made brass shell and bullet casings. You could not imagine two entirely different sisters. Gracie was scruffy and bad news all the time, while Lily was spotlessly clean, neat and tidy and got up early for work; my Mum always had to shout at Gracie to get her out of bed.

Every week Lily put sixpence on the shelf as pocket money for me. I was spoilt rotten; especially getting the sweet coupons off the ration books, which varied between two and three ounces a week during the war years and that was a small bag!

*

At four years of age I went to Roger Ascham Infants School in Wigton Road. The subjects that I was good at were nature study and art, as they interested me most of all. In the afternoon you had to have a sleep in a little bed. There was a girl there called Pat Fuller and we used to lay on top of her and say, ‘We’re having do!’ Where on earth that came from I don’t know!

Near the school was a piece of land known to us as the ‘little field’ that had an Air Raid Precautions hut. One day, and I must have been about five or six years old at the time, I was playing around the back of the hut with three other kids when we discovered a big wooden chest that had been hidden under some grass and debris. Naturally, we opened it! Inside were some registers, papers and quite a lot of money, so we carried it across the field to the pavement, knocked on someone’s door and told them about what we had found. They fetched the police and some time later we were each given five shillings reward, which was a very large amount of money, especially bearing in mind that there was a war going on. All our families were really proud of us.

Just after getting the reward, my first and only theft took place. There was a company called Britains in Billet Road that made lead toys. Before selling them, what Britains actually did was take these toys to people’s houses and with money hard to come by, people would paint them and get paid for a gross (144) at a time. All the family would muck in and paint them and on a Friday they would all be collected.

A friend of mine, Terry Gregory, lived more or less next door to Britains and when I was around there his brother John said, ‘Follow me.’ We went to the back of the factory and there was an open window that was just large enough for us to get through. So the three of us climbed in. It was a kids paradise! All types of animals, soldiers on horseback and cannons. We stuffed as many as we could into our shirts, but when it came to getting back through the window, we couldn’t! So Terry took the toys out of his shirt, climbed through the window and we passed them out and then got out ourselves.

When I got home with all these shiny, silvery toys I received the third degree. ‘How did you get them?’ ‘We found them, Mum.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Behind this big building.’ ‘Are you telling me the truth?’ ‘Yes Mum.’ ‘Cross your heart and hope to die if you’re lying. Ok? Is that the truth?’ ‘Yes.’ It was also my first lie! I hate lying and only do so when I’m forced to. I’m not good at it even then!

That’s the only time I can recall stealing. I’ve had lots of fiddles but never nicked anything.

It was also about this time that I and some other kids began collecting shrapnel. We would walk around the streets with an old bucket and when a fair amount had been collected, hand it in to the ARP, who would send it back to be recycled and made into shells or something else. There was a great shortage of metal and if you had iron gates they took them as well. The other thing you could do was find horse dung in the field at the back of the house and sell it for a tanner (6d) a bucket. Once, I saw some just as another kid saw it too. ‘I spotted it first!’ ‘No you didn’t!’ So I said, ‘Fuck off! I saw it first’ and my Mum, who was hanging the washing up about 200 yards away, heard me and shouted ‘Geeoorrggiiee!’ When I got home she hit me so hard I could see stars. ‘Don’t you ever let me hear you use language like that again.’ However, I’ve always been a foul mouth.

In 1944, at the age of seven, I went up to the Roger Ascham Junior School. Here, the cane was used for being naughty, or after a warning for being late a few times. It was about a year before I was first sent to the Headmaster for doing something wrong (I can’t recall what it was). When I got to his office, there was another boy waiting to see him and when he was called in, I listened at the door to what was being said. It was this boy’s second warning for doing something wrong and he was told to hold out his hand. I then heard a WHACK! He had got a ‘one-hander’ and was told that the next time he went before the Headmaster he would receive four. I was terrified and nearly did a runner, but when I was called, I plucked up the courage and went in. Fortunately, I was only told off and given a warning.

In the summer of the same year, the V1 ‘Doodlebugs’ started coming over. One occurred while I was playing in the garden. The air raid warning went off and I didn’t know where my Mum was, so I started to make my way towards our shelter at the bottom of the garden. I looked up and in the beautiful blue sky, saw a Doodlebug right above my head. Then the engine stopped, it dropped and exploded. Black smoke billowed up into the sky and it seemed to be so near that I thought it had landed on the shop directly opposite our house, but it had actually fallen on some houses in Carlton Road, about 300 yards away. We went to see the devastation. There was a huge crater where the houses had stood. Seventeen people were killed.

Later, in the field at the back of the house, there was the tail end of another V1 that had missed our house by about fifty yards and we would play on it.

*

I had a friend whose name was Ronnie Udall, but every one called him Yossel. His sister had died of Tuberculosis, another one had got it and a brother, Reggie, was about to die when Streptomycin came out, so fortunately he was cured.

I went around to their house, which wasn’t clean; our house was spotless. I had a bath with Yossel and caught an infection from him. I subsequently had blisters on my feet, on my fingers and on my dick! Everywhere I touched! I was given a ‘red paint’ (which also had some sort of gold colour in it) to put on the infected areas. As the infection was contagious, I was unable to go to school for about ten weeks and when I finally got back, in that time they had all learned to read. To add to this problem, what I didn’t know was that I was dyslexic. No one even knew what it was back then.

*

I don’t remember any of my Dad’s family ever coming to visit us except Uncle Roy, who was 24 years old and serving in the Army. He was just a lovely person, who would come around quite a lot and sit at the piano and sing. Three months before the war ended, Grandad came around and told us that Uncle Roy had been killed in Italy and although at that age I didn’t really understand, I went behind an armchair and cried.

When the war ended, every road had a big party. Large fires were built and a stage erected where various people got up and performed. There was a piano and a microphone so that everyone could hear. Most of the kids wore fancy dress. A boy called Teddy Taylor and I were dressed as clowns. The tables were laid out with homemade cakes, jellies, trifles, sandwiches and lemonade and you could have as much as you liked!

*

I learned from a very early age that you needed money if you wanted to buy sweets and comics, so me and my mates got into quite a few scams. In the summer, we would get sand and make a cross on the pavement and then take some flowers from our neighbours’ gardens and lay them on top of the cross. When the factory girls finished work on Friday and left with their pay packets, we would ask them for ‘A penny for the Grotto.’ If they didn’t give us anything, we would pull their dresses up to show off their knickers! They would scream and try to run past us, but we would catch them and they would pay up. We usually got a ‘tanner’ from them. (To explain the old money; 2 farthings was a halfpenny; 4 farthings a penny (1d). For 3 pennies (3d) there was the threepenny piece; for 6 pennies (6d) there was a sixpence, known as ‘a tanner.’ 12 pennies were a shilling (1/-), known as ‘a Bob;’ 2 shillings was ‘a florin’ – 2 Bob (2/-); 2 shillings and sixpence was ‘half a crown (2/6d).’ 2 half crowns was 5 shillings (5/-) or a dollar (There were 4 US dollars to the pound). 10 shillings (10/-) was the first note. 20 shillings was a £1 note and then there was a £5 note. 10 shillings was a cow’s calf, half; a pound was a ‘Nicker’ or ‘Cherry Picker’; £5 was a ‘Jacks.’ 10 pounds was a cockle, ‘a cock and hen’; £20 ‘a score’ or an ‘Apple core.’ £50 was ‘a Bulls eye’, £100 a ton, £500 ‘a monkey’ and so on. You could buy a three-bedroom house for £300-400. It was a very different world!).

We spent a lot of time playing in bombed out houses, looking for anything that might be useful or sellable, anything to earn some money. Two weeks before Guy Fawkes Night on November 5th, we went out with a Guy. Three weeks before Christmas it would be carol singing, and that was our best little earner. On a good night we could make up to ten shillings, so I always had money to buy my Mum a Christmas present.

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Bomb sites like these are typical of those where we used to play.

Christmas itself was brilliant. Beforehand, I could not get to sleep for three or four weeks just thinking about it. On Christmas Eve I would go to bed early, hang up my pillowcase and try to keep awake in order to see Father Christmas, but I always fell asleep. The next morning, I would wake up early to see what presents I had. There was always an apple, an orange, some sweets, a paint book, a Beano or Dandy Annual, a toy gun and a big present like a woodwork set. There was always one more under the Christmas tree, but you had to do a forfeit to get that, i.e. sing a song or tell a joke and this was after lunch, which in our house was normally turkey. Most families we knew had chicken because turkey was hard to come by and therefore expensive.

The neighbours would come in and wish everyone a merry Christmas and people in general seemed to be much more friendlier in those days. Consequently, I knew nearly everyone that lived along our road (and can still remember their names to this day). Everyone knew everyone else. Now, my kids hardly know anyone that lives near them.

We never went without food in our house. If I took a friend home, my Mum would make a cup of tea and provide a bit of bread and jam or syrup. If you went into somebody else’s house, you wouldn’t get anything. They didn’t have anything to give.

My Mum made her own jam and was a very hard worker. There was an oak table on which she made her pastry. When the cloth was pulled back, it would be pure white and she would always scrub it clean. My Dad earned a fiver a week through his painting and decorating and I never knew him to have a day off work.

I was always after bananas and remember getting excited when I saw some hanging up in the greengrocers, but they were imitation! No one had them. I had had one banana during the war that our next door neighbour’s, the Mitchells, had given me, but it was green. Instead I used to buy a halfpenny spec from the greengrocers, which was an apple with a bruise mark on it, as you didn’t need a ration book for them.

And so I clearly remember the first time that bananas became available. I came out of the Saturday morning pictures and was told ‘They’ve got bananas up the road!’ I ran all the way home, about three miles, then ran back with the ration book and got in a queue that must have been 300 yards long. That was the first time that I ate a proper banana.

Overall it was brilliant growing up in Walthamstow and I had a marvellous time. It was posh!

*

At about ten years old I got my first bicycle. It was an old Roadster and seemed to weigh a ton, but I loved it. Three doors away lived a girl whose name was Maureen Colman. She was twelve and had a bike that was fairly new and looked quite smart. One day she and I decided that we would cycle down to Southend! After a couple of days, we put our plan into action and got up very early in the morning, made some sandwiches and got some bottles of drink to take with us. It was a beautiful, sunny day and we set off at about 7am. By the time we had gone ten miles, the food and drink had gone, so we picked plums and apples from the orchards that were along the side of the cycle path. We eventually arrived in Southend at about 2pm, had a cup of tea and a cake, then went to the beach where I filled my saddle bag with seaweed, because I knew that no one would believe us when we got home. Our stay could not be long in order to get home before it became dark.

We must have arrived back home at about 10pm. The whole of the street had been out looking for us and our parents were so relieved to see us that I didn’t get a spanking. No one believed our story about where we had gone until I produced the seaweed. They were amazed that we had travelled nearly eighty miles on our bikes. Maureen and I were the talk of the street.

*

Just before my eleventh birthday I knew that I would be going to William Elliot Whittingham, an all boys school in Higham Hill Road. This school had a reputation for being very strict and I was dreading going there, so when the time came, making sure not to be late, I got there nice and early. The bell went and we all walked into the assembly hall. When the prayer service was over, we were told which classrooms to go to. The bright kids went to Class 1A, the not so bright to 1B and the dummies to Class 1C. As I could not read, I was in Class 1C. The teacher was a Mr Blake who was not strict and a very nice man. I’ll never forget that he kindly bought me a book about birds.

Nearly all of the other kids could read, but in the front row desks sat a boy called Donny Barrett who had been in Class 1C since he was eleven. He was now fourteen and had not moved up because he never did any work! He couldn’t read or write and the school had given up on him. Donny wore a gabardine suit and had a semi-Boston haircut. He had a beautiful drop-handled bike that as a kid you could only dream of. It was like a Rolls Royce. To even see one was a feat.

He lived opposite our house in Warwick Road and had a brother, Derek, who was two years older than him. They both liked greyhound racing and regularly went to Walthamstow dog track. After one visit, in the morning, we had just sat down in the classroom, ready to start our lesson, when Donny pulled out a great wad of white £5 notes and started to count them. The whole class was gob-smacked and so was Mr Blake! A white fiver was very rare, so rare in fact that one side was blank and if you wanted to change one and the bank did not know who you were, you had to sign your name on the back. Donny had about £80 on him and bearing in mind that a teacher’s wages were about £8 10s a week, it was no wonder that it caused a bit of a commotion. He and his brother were very successful because they were getting inside information on the dogs.

This ‘wad counting’ happened on numerous occasions, but there was nothing the school could do about it. They had his mother in, but all she said was, ‘Well it’s his money. He can count it if he wants!’ He ended up leaving school at 15. Both Donny and Derek died of heart attacks in their forties.

Although our school was indeed very strict, it was a great one to go to. The Headmaster’s name was Mr Acres and the Deputy Head was Mr Watts, who always wore a dark pin striped suit and bowler hat. He also had a double rupture, which looked like he had a marrow stuck down his trousers. All the kids took the piss out of him when he was not looking. The other teachers were Misters Baker, Jenkins, Blake, Tebethe, Kantes and my favourite, the nature study teacher, Fred Speakman, who went on to be a professor. Of all these, the severest was Mr Tebethe. He had the same moustache as Adolf Hitler and looked a bit like him! He was so strict, never smiled and was a horrible man. When you went for a lesson in his classroom, if you were caught talking or doing anything other than your work, you got the cane. You couldn’t even sneeze without him giving you the cane. There was never any warning either and the minimum punishment was two ‘handers’ across the palm.

In the class was Terry Hurlock, who was known as ‘chitter’ (father of the Terry Hurlock who later played football for Millwall and Rangers). Hurlock and another boy called Tony Townsend would always fight with Tebethe. They would be about to get the cane, but then pull their hand away at the last second and roll all over the floor while Tebethe was trying to hit them with it!

Mr Kantes was a different kettle of fish. As you lined up to go into his class, he would select one of the kids and tell him to go and fetch the cane. When he got back from the Headmaster’s office, he would tell whoever it was to stand in front of the class and pick out two kids. These two chosen kids were told to hold out their hand and both would get a ‘one hander’ while the rest of class would laugh and cheer at the two poor bastards who hadn’t done anything wrong. It was a regular thing. However, it was all taken in good fun! When it went quiet Mr Kantes would say, ‘Let’s keep it like this or else.’

In those days, kids were taught to be respectful and have good manners. (Today, they can swear at their teachers, kick, punch and even stab them and they cannot do a thing about it. If a teacher does touch them, their parents are up the school threatening them;