By John Lewington
My great grandfather, George Lewington (known as Tom) moved to Lee Common around 1900, where, with his wife Mary, he was a self-employed grocer / shop keeper. They had three children, the youngest of whom, Thomas Henry (known as Harry), was my grandfather.
Milicent Rachel Beeson was born at King’s Oak Farm, The Lee, in 1881. She married my grandfather in The Lee Parish Church on 11th June 1916.
He took over his father’s grocer’s shop at Lee Common around 1920. It was a thriving business so they lived well.
In 1921 they had a son Henry George Lewington – my father. The following are his recollections of life in Lee Common Post Office.
A grocer’s son
“The premises were quite old, and had been a shop for very many years. Quite early on I learned how to cut a side of bacon, how to weigh up sugar and so on. Sugar came in two cwt sacks, tea in chests and cheese in 80 lb. lumps. There was no fridge or even electricity, so we used a large deep cellar off the shop as a cool area.
It also had a busy Post Office and my mother ran a drapery counter selling everything from bolts of cloth to pins.
We had a horse and cart for some years and it was our only mode of transport. Once a week we went to Great Missenden Station to collect all the goods for the shop – no such things as lorries then! We used to take the goods off the vans in the goods siding and then sign for them…
When I was a nipper, walking was the order of the day if you wanted to go anywhere and some quite ‘main’ roads were only broken stone taken from the fields. I can still remember an old man sitting on a heap and breaking them before filling holes in the road.
We always had servants at home and boys to run errands in the evening. Early on my father showed me the right way to calculate their wages (at most, two shillings a week); then how to properly pay them and how to speak to them; this became a regular weekly job. Mind you, I can remember one girl’s wages were just 2/6d (12½ p).
Every year we had two tons of coal delivered (cost £1.50) by horse and cart. I was then taught how to write a cheque and pay for the coal. I was always called ‘The young gent’ or ‘Sir’ by people delivering and me paying them – age less than ten!
My parents were often called upon to write letters or read letters or answer all kinds of questions and as I became a bit older, I too had this job to do, having been properly ‘schooled’ on the right way to do it.
I can still remember the names of all the folk that lived round about for several miles…I remember the first lorry which came to deliver – it was a steam wagon!
When very young it was impressed on all of us that your aim in life was to give, and at six or seven I was always out collecting for one charity or another. One I remember was eggs for Great Ormond Street Hospital, very often leading to thousands of eggs (in those days almost everybody kept hens). These were packed in wooden boxes taking 250 to a box. My father used to take them to the local station by pony and trap. That would be 1927 or so.”
Thomas Henry died in 1941, aged 65. He was Sub Post-Master at the Post Office, Lee Common. His wife had died a year earlier.