John Clayden

My father Harry Clayden was born in 1905 his mother my grandmother was born in the poor house where her mother, who was a servant girl, was incarcerated. My grandmother later married dad’s father who was a carter who died in a flu epidemic just before the first world war. At thirteen my father had to leave school to work in a grocers shop to support his widowed mother. He told me that at the end of the war the first political activity that he got involved in was a local campaign by returning demobbed soldiers to close down the local poor house in Leytonstone in the East End where he lived. The campaign was directed by a returning army  major . The strategy was to surround the poor house with enough well organised people to stop it functioning and to block the board of governors from attending their meetings in the building. He told me the whole thing was organised employing military tactics by the major. It was a successful campaign and the poor house was shut down. Regrettably I never got to know my grandmother as she along with my aunt and uncle and two siblings were all killed by a bomb in the second world war not long after I was born in 1939.
It hit the Anderson shelter where we were living at the time in Odessa Road Wandsworth. My mother and me were visiting  my other granny  in East Ham and fortunately for us missed it. My father worked as a grocery worker for the London Cooperative Society all his life and was on its management committee from 1937 to 1964 and was president from 1964 till 1971 after defeating the notorious John Stonehouse.