Thursday 16 July 1953

Where is the flag?
More than 40 years earlier the schools of Mitcham, England, and Mitcham, Australia, had exchanged national flags. On the Tuesday, Mr A. W. Bowdery of the local British Legion asked what had happened to the Australian flag when Mr Charles H. Honybun, from the Australian Mitcham, visited the branch; Mr Honybun said the flag sent from the British Mitcham was still used on A.N.Z.A.C. Day, and offered another if the Australian flag had been lost.

Thursday 20 August 1953

HOUSING THIRD BEST IN COUNTY
Figures beaten only by Croydon and Guildford
2,239 HOMES BUILT IN MITCHAM SINCE WAR
Since the war, 2,239 new houses and flats had been built in Mitcham. Up to the end of June the council had completed 1,384 permanent houses and flats and 345 temporary houses, private builders had put up 41 new houses, and 469 war-destroyed dwellings had been rebuilt, 411 of them by private builders. Only Croydon, with more than 3,000 new homes, and Guildford, with 1,411, had built more post-war dwellings in Surrey. Mitcham had 323 dwellings under construction and over 2,000 on tenders approved.

Friday 28 August 1953

TOM FRANCIS, THE MAN WHO WAS MITCHAM, DIES
Mr Thomas Francis, head of a Mitcham family of four generations, died at his daughter’s home at Warlingham on Saturday, aged 81. Born over his father’s shop in London Road, he lived in Mitcham for nearly 80 years until he retired in April 1951. He had been a member of the old Parish Council, a former chairman and a vice-president of the Mitcham Civic Society, a former president of the Chamber of Commerce, and a long-standing member of the Society of Friends. He remembered drives in broughams and wagonettes, one ending stuck in a pond in Morden Road and another through about a foot of water at Hackbridge, Quaker meetings at Mitcham Manor House, cycling with Alfred and Ernest Mizen, performing bears at Mitcham Fair, and the “Old Squirt,” the village fire engine kept in a cage on Lower Green where the Town Hall now stands. The London Road business that bears the Francis name was started by a Mr Fitt in 1830, taken over by his parents in 1870, and he joined it in 1886. His Quaker funeral at the Cricket Green Methodist Church on Tuesday was attended by the Mayor of Mitcham (Coun. E. E. Mount), Ald. and Mrs T. L. Ruff, Mr S. Chart (former town clerk), Dr A. H. Shelswell, Mr C. J. Farrell (divisional education officer), Mr H. J. Dorrett (Rotary Club), Mr Dick Gifford (chairman of the Civic Society), Messrs R. Culmer, J. Pillinger and F. Cole (Mitcham Cricket Club), Mr S. Taylor (Horticultural Society), Mr and Mrs A. H. Bailey, Mr W. Dalton, and representatives of the Society of Friends School at Saffron Walden. He left Mitcham Borough Libraries a collection of historical slides, largely from his own negatives from about 1890, with older wet-plate views of about 1865–70 by a photographer named Drummond and by John R. Chart. His first camera was a mahogany box with a rack-work lens of the sort once used by beach photographers. He played regularly for Upper Mitcham against Lower Mitcham and, after the Wednesday XI was revived in 1925, rarely missed a match; between the wars he and his son Tom both played. During the last war he was injured when his house was bombed and later had an eye removed. “He was Mitcham. He lived for Mitcham,” said Mr Stephen Taylor, an employee of many years. He served on the Wilson Hospital committee from its foundation until the hospital was taken over by the State, and part of his education was at Mitcham Lodge College, next to the London Road schools, where Dr William Smith was the principal.

Monday 2 November 1953

TREE HIT BY GALE KILLS WOMAN
Forty-five-year-old Olive Taylor was killed when gales and heavy rain hit southern England; she was found among the branches of a tree blown down near her home at Chartham, Canterbury. At Hastings, 78-year-old Mr William James Town, of Bulwark Street, Dover, was blown into a boating lake and taken to hospital suffering from shock. Roads were flooded in Hampshire, Dorset, Surrey, Sussex and London, and families were driven out of their homes in Phipps Bridge-road, Merton, Surrey, by the swollen River Wandle.