There is an elegant building in Gunnersbury Lane, Acton which used to be a hospital, nursing institute and invalid kitchen. It was opened to mark Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1989, founded two years earlier by an extraordinary philantropist, Passmore Edwards. You can read some of his autobiography by visiting this website, but I cannot resist sharing this sweet excerpt with you:
'At school there
was only one room for boys and girls, and I fell deeply in love
with a schoolgirl. There was no doubt about it. For a year or two
before I left school, and a year or two after, she was "the
goddess of my idolatry." In consequence of helping her mother
at home, she generally came to school late, and I was much more
interested in watching the door to see her enter than attending
to my lessons. I wrote her love-letters, some of which she received,
and others were never sent, because I stood in fear of her big brother,
who threatened to thrash me if I wrote to his sister. Sometimes
I picked the best and largest strawberries I could find in my father's
garden, folded them neatly in cabbage-leaves, and walked round her
father's house at evening times in the hope of seeing her; and when
I did, and was sufficiently fortunate to give her the strawberries,
I went home more in love than ever. But I made little or no impression,
and for a good reason: she was a year and a half older than I was,
and loved another who was about a year and a half older than she
was. I nevertheless did my best, and made the most of myself to
win favour. On Sundays I took little stones in my pocket to chapel,
and put them under the heels of my shoes when I stood up to make
myself look taller. I also made myself a young, cunning, and not
very scrupulous diplomatist, and used all the means within reach,
or that I was capable of inventing, to sow suspicion and produce
dissension between my adored one and my rival. But I made no progress,
and the result was my unrequited affection gradually decayed, and
left me none the worse for the consuming ordeal through which I
passed.'
And you you fancy a walk around South Acton this coming Sunday, 6th November 2016, join the Ealing Walking and Talking Group. Here are the tour details.
I wish I had attended a talk by #Dean Evans about this great Victorian man back in 2011. Mr Evans is the man behind the website I linked in this post. He also wrote a book titled 'Funding the Ladder - The Passmore Edwards Legacy'.
You may like to know that John Passmore Edwards founded a library in Acton as well. This excerpt will tell you why he was so keen to found libraries:
'My father rather
discouraged than encouraged reading, and particularly in the daytime.
On winter evenings the room in which the family mostly lived was lighted
by a single candle, similar to what miners used underground. Such
candles in those days required frequent snuffing, but they rarely
got it. I, however, by aid of such light, managed to read while others
were talking or moving about; and hundreds and hundreds of times I
pressed my thumbs firmly on my ears until they ached, in order to
read with as little distraction as possible. In this way I managed
frequently to entertain myself and pick up fragments of knowledge.
These recollections of early days, fresh and vivid as those of yesterday,
have encouraged me in after years to promote the public library movement,
so that poor boys and girls, as well as men and women, may enjoy educational
or recreative advantages denied to many during the early and middle
parts of the last century. I have in several instances, when building
public libraries, provided reading-rooms for the special use of boys.'
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