Street echoes from the past
Tony’s Story
The flyover being built with St Paul’s Church on the left and the Gaumont Odeon now The Apollo visible on the right.
Tony lived with his family, four brothers and two sisters at 12, Charlotte House, Crisp Road, Hammersmith just off Queen Caroline Street.
November 5th 1960, Guy Fawkes Day was a Saturday. Tony, aged seven, looking for something to pass the time, followed ‘the big boys’ in his neighbourhood to a refuse dump at the end of his road left by the construction work on the A40 Hammersmith Flyover.
The boys started to drag a telegraph pole from the dump to the bonfire being built on waste ground in Queen Caroline Street. As they heaved it up towards the fire pile instead of falling forwards it fell backwards on to Tony’s leg crushing it below the knee.
He was taken to the West London Hospital, a few hundred yards away, just off the Broadway. He spent four miserable weeks there. He remembers being shouted at by a staff nurse because he wouldn’t eat bread and butter pudding which he still refuses to eat today. When his leg had mended, the local MP, Frank Tomney, who had been at the fire, invited him and his Mum to the House of Commons for tea.
Tony today
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