Jean Fullerton

As I said on a previous page my heroine Ellen O’Casey lived at number 2 Anthony Street and that it was in fact the house I lived in as a young child.

This is a picture of me outside the house.

Although this picture is blurred - I still can't sit still for a moment - it does show the back of Anthony Street and with the coal hole on the left of the picture.

This is a rare picture inside 2 Anthony Street of me with my mother. Note the hat. It was freezing cold in the upstairs bedroom and I had a Twizzle hat - for any of you old enough to remember Watch with Mother - to keep me warm.

This is a view of the Thames in the early 1950s from Shadwell Gardens. The barges in the front of the picture could be heard making a booming noise at night as that knocked into each other – hence the phrase, empty barges make most noise!

This is a view of the Tower of London (from Tower Bridge). Anthony Street was only a ten minute walk from the Tower and most Sunday afternoons we would stroll along for hour or so.

This picture is of my Grandmother Ellen, (Little Nan) along with my aunts Martha,   standing in front of her elder sister Nell, and my Uncle Arthur (standing at the back) and Jimmy kneeling.

This was taken in the backyard of their house in Jane Street around the corner from  Anthony Street. It was probably taken in the early 1930s. Note the narrowness of the yard and the ladders stacked at the back. At one point the family comprising of nine children occupied two houses in Jane Street opposite each other.  Also, notice my grandmother’s brawny arms caused by a lifetime of taking in butchers’ aprons to wash.

Both sisters were machinists in the local clothes factory of Drayton and Giles while thebrothers, including my father, were decorators for the estate. The Regency cottages that we lived in were swept away with the massive redevelopment of the area after the Second World War when the old communities were re-housed in blocks of flats.

The children in the Fullerton family spanned almost thirty years from 1903 an older brother Francis, who died as a baby, right the way through to my uncle Bobby, who was born in 1928.

Of the ten children born to my grandmother only seven survived into adulthood. This picture is of my aunts Nell and Millie with their younger brother Ernie, just before he died. It was taken in the backyard of Jane Street probably in the early 1920s.

Ernie was playing bare foot in the mud by the river and cut his foot on rusty metal. He died of the infection some three days later.

This set of cheeky lads in their school uniform are my father and his two elder brother’s. Arthur is at the back and Jimmy to the right and my father in the boy on the left.

I would date this photo to the early 1920 as my father looks about five of six. They all look very smart and clean and although its, not easy to see in this very old photo, they all have boots on.

This is my youngest uncle Bobby with his mother.  

They are sorting the hops into the basket. The whole family would pack up and go to the Kent hop fields to pick the harvest.

The Fullerton family went each year in August to a farm in Sevenoaks in Kent.

This is picture of them all at a family get together.  I know my mother was expecting my brother so this must be in 1958. As you can see they have all come up in the world. This was taken at my eldest Aunt’s house in Ilford.  I am the only child in the picture standing in front of my grandmother. Although my father –on the far left - was one of seven, only he and his brother Arthur – kneeling beside me- had  any children. My cousin Edie, named after a sister who died, is standing behind her father.

My Aunt Marie was one of the Marriot Family and the Pearly Queen for Finsbury.

This is her dressed in her full regailia in honor of the Fullerton family's cousin Helen and her husband's visit from America in 1971.

This is a very early picture of me in the backyard on my grandmother's house in Jane Street with my Aunt Marie and Uncle Jimmy.

They lived with my grandmother until she died in the late 1960s.