Middle Kidbrook - barrage balloons

 

A couple of months ago I did an article about the source and early stages of the Middle Kidbrook stream as part of a series on Kidbrooke and the streams which gave it its name. I must apologise for how long it’s taken me to get through to this second one and taking some easy options instead. This Middle Kidbrook article has meant I needed to look up various things and so has been much more time consuming. So, anyway, here we go ...

I left the previous article at St John Fisher’s church in Kidbrooke Park Road, having taken the Middle Kidbrook down from Shooters Hill Road where the private house which was once a pumping station stands in front of the site which was once the Brook Hospital. Michael Egan, who wrote so much about Kidbooke commented about St John Fisher’s Catholic church that it has a very suitable name for a church next door to a little stream! Cross Kidbrook Park Road and then amazingly the stream  runs out in the open air.  You can’t really see it because it’s behind a fence and it runs along the boundary between housing and Thomas Tallis School and I guess if you want to see the stream itself you need to be able to get into the grounds of the school to have a look -  but I’m not even sure you can see it then.  But it goes along out in the open for a short distance really down to the Casterbridge estate which I will get to eventually.

Back in Kidbrooke Park Road - on the other side of the fence to the north of the stream, and the school, is a continuation of the line of semi detached houses which have been a feature of the road. However the detailed analysis of these buildings which is in Neil Rhind’s book, Blackheath 2 ,does not extend down Kidbrook Park Road past St James Church. However on the other side of Kidbrook Park Road from St.John Fisher and adjacent to the Middle Kidbrook are the new buildings of Thomas Tallis School.

Thomas Tallis school was rebuilt in 2011 on a different site slightly to the north of the original buildings as part of the Greenwich Building Schools for the Future programme. The school was officially opened by David Miliband in May 2012. The architects were John Mcaslin and Partners and there was an aspiration in the design of the school to express the ambitions of the old school through exhibitions on the walls. It has over 2000 pupils and supports autistic children and also has a support centre for integrating deaf pupils into the general life of the school.   The original comprehensive school buildings, which have now been demolished, were to the south and it had been opened in 1971.  The school is named after Thomas Tallis the 16th century English composer who wrote music for the court and undertook a number of other music related initiatives.  The school was recognised from 1998 as a specialist arts college and was awarded Leading Edge status in this field and was part of a creative partnership network of schools. In 2000 it was awarded the very rare status of a ‘School of Creativity’.

The school was built on a site which was the northern section of a large stretch of land owned by the Royal Air Force and previously had been fields of Lower Kidbrooke Farm. It was established in 1917, as a Royal Flying Corps storage depot, situated on both sides of the railway line close to Kidbrooke Station.

I will return to the Royal Air Force area when I get to write about the Lower Kidbrook stream but here i will stick with the site of Thomas Tallis School and it's predecessor organisations. It is thought likely that there was once some sort of Great War prisoner of war facility on the site of the school although there seems to be little known about this. It is said that the prisoners of war were used to construct the Royal Air Force buildings.

 

The school site itself was previously used by what became the Joint Services School for Linguists which operated out of the RAF Kidbrooke site between 1949 and 1953. This highly secretive Cold War military program was established to rapidly train British servicemen and women in Russian; prompted by the need to provide greater numbers of interpreters, intelligence and signals intelligence officers due to the Cold War, and, later, the Korean War.

RAF land south of the Middle Kidbrook and north of the railway was the site of the Barrage Balloon centre.  In 1937 the Kentish Independent reported the opening of this unit by referring to the beginnings of the Royal Navy locally and the Woolwich district as the ‘present day centre of Great Britain's armament production’.  It would now also have a ‘special place in the all-important scheme of defence against air-raids’ as the ‘ first centre for the organisation of a balloon barrage for the air defence of London. The object of the balloons being to force enemy aircraft to a higher altitude  than they would normally go’.

No 1 Balloon Centre was established at Kidbrooke in 1937 and operated throughout the Second World War.. It was equipped with new hangars and workshops to maintain and repair the balloons, along with winches and gas equipment. There was a large open space for training and test inflation’ They also managed, trained and equipped Auxiliary Air Force Balloon Squadrons to0 be based in the local area, each with five flights of nine balloons on sites spread across SE London. Initially staffed by men, from late 1941 a majority of the staff were women. Hydrogen gas for the balloons was supplied from the local gas works with specialist equipment, and conveyed in cylinders by a fleet of lorries.

 

On 18^th June 1944 two direct hits by  V1 rocket bombs led to many deaths. The first  landed on the HQ hut of Sqadron 901 standing on the site now covered by the allotments. Photographs taken of Kidbrooke Park Allotment site at the end of the war show a crater in the narrow road at a spot that is now in the allotments area. Five days later a second V1 made a direct hit on the HQ of ‘E’ Flight Squadron 901.

In this part of the RAF site there was also an Installation Unit for Chain Home Radar masts. This was the code name for the ring of coastal early warning radar  installations used to detect and track aircraft.  This was the first early warning radar network in the world and the first military radar system to reach operational status. It had a  major affect on the Battle of Britain and other aspects of the Second World War.

Writing this I have become very aware how long ago this all is. To me – and  I was a war baby - barrage balloons and V1s are only too familiar.  In connection with this article I talked to the people I deal with every day at home - mostly people in their 40s and 50s or younger asking what they know about barrage balloons or V1s. Not a single one of them had any idea what I was talking about!

There is, hopefully, a blue plaque at Thomas Tallis School recognising local RAF connections, in particular the RAF Linguists' Association, which was unveiled in 2008 and re-dedicated in July 2014. Also there is hopefully a memorial to the No 1 Balloon Centre, and the 40 servicemen and women who gave their lives in service there, set up by the Barrage Balloon Reunion Club, in Royal Aeronautical Society Heritage.

After the war part some of the Balloon Squadron buildings were acquired by the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich for storage of exhibits.  Visitors were frequently told by staff that the buildings had originally been an emergency war hospital. I am reassured by senior staff from the museum that there is absolutely no evidence for this but it is a story which persists. More recently, the high-tech Prince Philip Conservation Centre was built on the site by the National Maritime Museum and opened in 2019.

And so - back to the open stretch of the Middle Kidbrook as it runs westwards from Kidbrook Park road between thevschool site and the sports fields of Blackheath High School for Girls – a private school founded in 1880 as part of the Girls Public Day School Trust.

Further south down Kidbrooke Park Road there is a right turn into Old Post Office Lane which runs roughly parallel to the south eastern border of the school site.  Much of this route is  commercial buildings on a large trading estate.  Why is it called Old Post Office Lane when there is no sign of a post office down it and now indication that there ever was? I understand that Greenwich Council assessments of the site say that there was some sort of warehouse near Kidbrook Station where parcels and so on were dealt with and I vaguely remember something about this myself.

More importantly further the lane, past the trading estate is the site of the Greenwich Council owned Kidbrooke allotments. The Kidbrooke Park Allotment Association dates back over  30 years and evolved from the Kidbrooke Park Allotment and Garden Society. The allotments are managed  by a voluntary committee of plot holders who set and use the rental income to run and improve the site and act quickly if the need arises. The demand for sites is so high the waiting list is closed to new people.