In Conversation with Don Walter
Don Walter is long term resident and leading Local Historian. He has published numerous books on the history of Harrow including ‘Look Back at Harrow: 150 Years in Stories and Pictures’ (1995), ‘Harrow: The Story of a Millennium’ (1999) and ‘Harrow Then & Now’ (2011). He has also been a part of numerous events and projects including the new Gantry with the image of King Henry VII on the Green in Harrow on the Hill, guided walks and tours of Harrow on the Hill, numerous articles in the Harrow Observer and exhibitions at the Harrow Museum.
The following is taken from an interview with Don in his home on Harrow on the Hill.
Have you always lived in Harrow?
Yes, I was brought up in South Harrow in Eastcote Road. My late wife and I always liked the Hill and always said wouldn’t it be nice to live there. When we got married in 1951 we couldn’t get afford to have a house so we spent a great deal of time up on the Hill and then instead of buying a house or a flat we brought this piece of land. I made agreement with the people who sold it to us, who lived next door, that we would have to keep the piece of land in good shape and not let it get covered in weeds. So long before I had a house I had a garden here!
We had great difficulty with the Local Authority in getting planning permission because they kept saying you must build in keeping with your surroundings; well when you look around, the surroundings here cover every single period! We persevered.
Did your family come from Harrow?
They moved to South Harrow when I was born, they were Devonians, it must have been work that brought them both to London. My mother had been a school teacher but I don’t think she ever taught in London because in those days even with people of very limited income the wife very rarely went out to work, she was seen as a home keeper.
How did you get into the history of Harrow?
Well, I was always interested in history. Probably in about the 1960s I joined a newly formed joined group on the Hill, still going strong, called The Harrow Hill Trust. They existed to try and preserve the Hill as it had always been and they’ve been really quite successful. If you look around at various parts of the Borough and then old pictures of the Hill, it is still recognisably the Hill. Probably in the very early 1970s there was a woman historian, Elizabeth Cooper, who hit on the idea of taking people around the Hill on escorted walks. The idea was to show people just how much there was up on the Hill that was worthy of conservation.
Professionally, I have been a writer all my life and for the last 30 or so years in advertising, so I took it upon myself to publicise her walks. So after sometime I thought why don’t I see if I can do one myself. Quite daring, you just have to mug up on the subject and hope that you know just a little bit more than the people you’re taking around! And so that really started me off on my career on local history!
The walks were enormous success, I remember one year in the Spring, Summer months the Harrow Hill Trust organised 16 walks! So one thing led to another and out of the blue a publishing company wrote to the Harrow Hill Trust saying there had never been a book exclusively about Harrow on the Hill and did they know anyone who might be interested in writing it. It was referred to me and in about 1988 I wrote ‘The Book of Harrow on the Hill’ and before I knew it really I was launched into a career of writing local history books!
One of them was commissioned for St Mary’s Church and their 900th Anniversary which was in 1994 and I wrote the first and only hard back history of St. Mary’s. Another quite major thing I suppose I did was for the Millennium the Borough gave me the job of writing a Millennium history. In between times I worked closely with the Harrow Observer who were very interested in local history and I started to do a weekly column and then a Harrow A-Z series, which was published in a book. All in all now, it’s quite absurd, I can’t quite remember how many books I’ve written! Must be about 11.
Along with that, because over the years my picture collection has grown and grown I started to do exhibitions. I’m going to do the next exhibition at the Harrow Museum at Headstone Lane on Roxeth, although I’m not sure exactly when that will be happening, it’s still early days.
I suppose there is a slightly sadder aspect to it all. I retired from advertising in 1991, like a lot of people looking forward to doing a lot of travelling with my wife and within a year sadly she died of cancer. So I suppose really I threw myself into it, well it was lovely to have things to do. One little thing that I’m pleased and proud about, is the bench on the Green outside what used to be the Kings Head, it was put there in memory of my wife. If you look there’s a little plaque there which says something like “In Memory of Sheila Walter Long Time Friend of the Hill”. The marvellous thing is, it’s never been vandalised and it’s always in use, there’s hardly a time I go by without someone sitting there.
Then along the line, it’s amazing how these things develop, I found myself starting to do lectures on local history. I did one last February, my family managed to persuade me to update myself and I did one with a PowerPoint! I hadn’t done one for several years, I did it at St. Mary’s Church Hall and to my pleasure and amazement they ran out of chairs so many people showed up!
Are you writing or researching for a book at the moment?
I have an unpublished work; I have written the first outsiders history of Harrow School. Over the centuries Harrow School have had a lot of histories, but they have always been insider jobs. Quintessentially the Schools own view of how they wanted to present themselves. Although the last thing I want you to think is I’d be trying to rubbish the School just trying to present a rather more honest viewpoint from that of the town where it’s been all these centuries.
The problem at the moment is that all that the local history sections at publishers want is little picture books which are so easy to do. They have a set format, you give them the pictures you give them the captions, there’s no layout, there’s no design and really the poor author does all the work. They’re not quite so interested in taking a gamble on a bigger book. Or they do School books but they do ‘Official Histories’ where the School virtually guarantees to take all the copies.
Your book include many pictures, are these from your own collection?
I’ve got probably one of the biggest collections of pictures of Harrow in private hands. A great many of them came from the archives of the local newspaper, the Harrow Observer. My very first job was with the Harrow Observer, I always wanted to be a writer and I was quite interested in doing press work. I was given an indentureship – like an apprenticeship, to the Harrow Observer and I started working for them as a writer before my 16th birthday. In the 1940s they had huge printing works in Harrow, they also had a large photographic department. There was a large fire there and they were incredibly lucky not lose the prints and negatives but a decision was made to chuck them all out and I was allowed to take them over! So that’s how the collection started with great big envelopes of old pictures of the Borough!
The Local History Library have got an unbelievable number of pictures of every road, every building really in the Borough. They allowed me to borrow them and copy some images for use in my books or exhibitions and I always retain the copies. Then of course over the years people knowing your interest find all sorts of old pictures and give them to me.
Do you have a particular interest within local history?
One of the things I’m very aware of is conservation. After the War I think there was very much the feeling of out with the old and on with the new and the Borough lost a number of really interesting old buildings which in today’s climate people would have made a tremendous attempt to save.
Roxeth has changed enormously. One of the few things that remains is the old Roxey Hill School, the building is the original, but all around it there’s been massive changes. Harrow had its very highly regarded Cottage Hospital – that’s gone, the nursing home – that’s gone. I’m very glad to see the Salvation Army Citadel has just been restored.
Is there a particular area you think has changed the most?
I wrote an article once for the Harrow Observer called ‘Harrow’s most changed road’ and I chose Northolt Road, it’s totally utterly different to when I was brought up. So much of it has gone, the Gasworks of course which is now a Waitrose, the Station that’s there now well I can remember the older station. It’s still there today. If you walk up South Hill Avenue it’s the big building on the right, I think they use it for storage now; you used to be able to come straight from the platform direct onto a path at the top of Eastcote Road.
On the corner of Shaftsbury Avenue there was the most amazing Parish Hall built sometime in the Victorian Era, I remember seeing my first entertainments there; magic lantern shows! Higher up on what would have been farm lands there was the Great Roxeth Barn which was the biggest surviving barn anywhere in Middlesex. It was damaged slightly during the War but by no means destroyed.
What about Harrow on the Hill?
Every property around the Green has a history. Woodwards the Estate agents is the fire station, Café Café has long been a public utility; it was built first as the Hill’s public hall, then it was turned into the Hill’s one and only cinema. I saw some films there as a child, its greatest claim to fame was to be assured to have an audience by running a free coach service from Harrow Met Station to run patrons up the hill to see the movies! Sometime during the 1930s they decided to have a competition to let people rename it, they came up with the name of The Cosy, which seemed very appropriate. The nice thing is the Hill is to a high degree the place that it was.
______________________________
I would like to express my kind thanks to Don for allowing himself to be interviewed and providing much useful help and information.
Remembering Harrow 