The 10-pound Poms who stowed away

David Green was from Knockmullin, New Ross, Ireland. He married Mary Ronan, also from New Ross and they had 11 children. They came to London during the War and by 1949 were living at No.1 Lanhill Road, near the Chippenham Road. They had moved near Paddington Recreational Ground, renting a cramped two rooms and a kitchen at 168 Kilburn Park Road (since demolished), when they emigrated to Australia in 1956 on the “10-pound Poms” assisted passage which required them to stay there for two years. The cost was £10 per adult, the children travelled free.

The Greens sailed on SS Strathnaver and arrived in Fremantle on 7 July 1956, and then travelled on to Ballarat, (about 70 miles from Melbourne). Molly soon found she was unhappy with life in Australia. She said it did not stop raining in the promised ‘land of sunshine’. ‘We imagined Australia, being a young and growing country, would be progressive. Instead, it’s so quiet here in Ballarat, it’s just like Ireland.’ In Australia David Green was working six days a week, and with overtime he earned £19. Their rent was £3 a week. Molly said he earned the same in London, but the cost of living is higher here.

Molly Green with ten of her children

On 22 October while David was at work as a roof tiler with their eldest son, she took her 10 other children, aged from 14 months to 12 years old, and hid on the SS Orsova, in an attempt to return to England. Once the ship was at sea, Molly told the purser they were stowaways. The crew were very kind and the family were given food and a cabin. The crew even managed to raise £480 of the £880 the Australian Government wanted for the return trip. Unable to raise the full amount, the family were taken off at Adelaide and returned to Ballarat.

Molly Green takes six children back to school in Ballarat

The publicity resulted in questions being raised at local government level and the Green family were offered a plot of land and a house for £500. However, they said they had no hope of raising that much money. Despite this, the family decided to stay in Australia where the children grew up.

Between 1947 and 1955 Australia accepted 479,000 people from all over the British Isles. Of these 28,000 (6%) returned. By 1982 there were over a million immigrants from Britain.

Comments

False Arrest: the Allum and Hislop Case

Trinidadian Desmond Allum came to London to study law in 1958. He worked in hotel kitchens and the Post Office and studied law at night. He qualified and was called to the Bar in the summer of 1962 and then got a job with the Inland Revenue. In 1964 and 1965 he lived at 116 Greencroft Gardens in West Hampstead. His friend George Hislop was born in Tobago. He played cricket for Trinidad and represented the West Indies at the Empire Games held in Cardiff in 1958. The following year he came to London to train as a teacher. In September 1962 he started work as a PE teacher at the Hillcroft Secondary School in Tooting Bec. The Incident On the evening of 31 January 1963 Allum and Hislop had visited friends at 351b Finchley Road (now redeveloped as part of the JW3 Centre). They left and were walking down Finchley Road towards the underground station on their way to Balham. At 9.25pm they were stopped and questioned by two plain clothes detectives who asked them to turn out their po...

The 1994 IRA Attack on Heathrow: the West Hampstead connection

Just before 6pm on Wednesday 9 March 1994 four mortars shells hit Heathrow Airport . Earlier, news agencies had been telephoned by a man with an Irish accent and using a known IRA code word he said, ‘In one hour’s time, a large number of bombs will be going off in Heathrow Airport . Clear all runways. Stop all flights’. The Anti-Terrorist branch of the Metropolitan Police and airport officials decided not to close the airport after a sweep of the terminal buildings and the runways found nothing suspicious. About 45 mins after the mortars landed they closed Heathrow. The missiles had been launched over the airport fence from 6ft-long tubes fitted in the back of a red Nissan Micra parked about 400 yards away in the Excelsior Hotel car park, just outside the airport. After launching the missiles, a charge inside the car set it on fire and the blaze spread to surrounding cars. The Nissan had been stolen in Kilburn the previous Saturday night and fitted with false number plate...

Kilburn National Club

This popular music venue was at 234 Kilburn High Road, on the corner of Messina Avenue. Many famous musicians including Johnny Cash and David Bowie played there. We look at the original building which was the Grange Cinema, and what happened when the National closed and was taken over by two different church groups. Grange Cinema The Grange was a large mansion standing in grounds of nine and a half acres and with a frontage to Kilburn High Road. It was the home of Ada Peters the widow of a wealthy coach builder who made coaches for Queen Victoria . Following Ada ’s death in 1910, the property was sold. The new owner was Oswald Stoll, a major name in the entertainment world who had already built the London Coliseum in St Martin ’s Lane, near Leicester Square . Stoll wanted to erect another Coliseum theatre in Kilburn. In fact, progress overtook him and instead of a theatre, the 2,028 seat Grange cinema opened on 30 July 1914 . This remained the biggest cinema in Kilburn until the...

History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

Search This Blog