By Dominic O’Malley, Curator, Laleham Heritage Centre
Most residents will be familiar with the Lale-ham connections of the Lords Lucan and the Arnold family; after all, we have a graveyard full of ‘em. But what of lesser well-known past residents of Laleham, or their visitors, who have nevertheless left their mark…
At the time of his death in April 1801 Maurice Nelson was leasing The Coverts on Abbey Drive. Maurice’s younger brother, due to an unforeseen engagement at Copenhagen, was out of the country at the time. Nevertheless, he’d written to Maurice’s widow “I beg that you will stay at Laleham, with horse, whiskey, and keep every convenience there to make your stay comfortable… Your affectionate friend, Nelson and Bronte. I send a hundred pounds”. After his return to England in June 1801 and whilst staying at The Bush Inn, Staines, that same younger brother, Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, visited his sister-in-law in Laleham and topped up the “small pittance” left by his brother with a two hundred pound annui-ty. What a nice guy.
In October 2016 our Parish Office received a long email from 96 year old Gertraude Portisch (photo left), then living in Tuscany, Italy. Gertraude had taught at Laleham Abbey’s school in the 1940s and was enquiring about the graves of the Abbey’s nuns in All Saints churchyard. Unfortunately, the Heritage Collection didn’t hold anything relevant. However, I replied to Gertraude, asking if she could provide more memories of her time in Laleham. I didn’t hear back. Some years later an elderly local resident mentioned a ‘German’ lady, Mrs Reich, who’d taught at the Abbey school, and that prompted further investigation. Gertraude Portisch/Mrs Reich was Austrian children’s author and writer Traudi Reich (I’d missed that one). The chilling story of her father’s concentration camp incarceration, then release and expulsion from Austria, and her own evacuation from Vienna by the Quakers can be found online. Traudi died in January 2018.
The Verity family lived at Yew Corner, on The Broadway, from 1954 to 1965. Conrad Verity was a distinguished engineer (C.Eng, FICE, FIMechE, FIEE) who ultimately be-came a director of Rolls Royce and of the Foster Wheeler/John Brown Consortium. Dur-ing World War Two, as a target specialist, he working closely with the ‘bouncing bomb’ inventor Barnes Wallis and played a signifi-cant planning role in the Dambuster raids. Later in the war (with RAF Group Captain rank) Conrad was assigned to Washington as Senior British Officer on the Joint US/UK Target Group Far East. This unit determined the targets for the atom bomb attacks on Ja-pan.
Not wishing to end on such a sobering thought, let’s raise a cheer for an animal lover. A civil ser-vice memoranda of 3 June 1929 states that Treasury official A.E. Banham authorised the Office Keeper “to spend 1d a day from petty cash towards the maintenance of an efficient cat” (1d is a pre-1970 old-penny). So, the next time you see the ‘Downing Street cat’ gate-crashing a news bulletin, it’s heartening to know that this moggy’s upkeep results from the initiative of Arnold Edward Banham, Secretary of Foreign Transactions Advisory Committee. Perhaps Arnold had kept a cat at his home, Osman-stead, on Condor Road, Laleham.
These stories, and the reminiscences of other resi-dents, are more fully related in Laleham’s Heritage Collection. Dominic O’Malley, curator.