lily catherine mallindine + baden powell johnson
1922
Lily was born in Canning Town, Essex on 6 September 1897, the youngest daughter of Joseph Mallindine and his wife Alice Manhood. Her father had contracted tuberculosis and only nine months after her birth, he died at the family home at 54 Tucker Street in Canning Town. Lily’s eldest siblings, Alice and Joseph, left home to work as domestic servants when she was only a baby and her two brothers Alfred and Stephen were placed in the Barnardo’s home a short time later.
Lily stayed with her mother in Canning Town and months before her third birthday, her mother gave birth to twins, Algernon and Jenny. The twins died of measles one year later and her mother had another baby the following year but he too died in infancy and Lily was again alone with her mother.
In 1911, Lily and her mother were living at 29 Seymour Road in Tilbury, Essex with Frank Talbot, a labourer who worked in the nearby docks. The census record notes that Frank and Alice were married but they did not in fact marry until 1914.
On 22 May 1922, Lily married Baden Powell Johnson in Romford. Baden was born in West Ham in 1900 to Arthur Johnson and his wife Rebecca Owen Sharp.
Arthur Johnson was born in Orsett, Essex in 1869 and worked as a hammerman in a blacksmith’s shop in Rotherhithe where he met and married Rebecca. They had five children in addition to Baden — Lily born in 1892, Rose in 1893, Margaret Amelia in 1896, Cissie in 1898, and Edith Rebecca in 1904. In 1911, the family was living at 6 Avenons Road in Plaistow and Arthur was working as a Police Constable.
Lily and Baden settled in West Ham following their marriage and had two daughters and a son. Baden’s family moved to Newbury in Berkshire in the early 1920s but Lily’s mother and step-father remained nearby in Tilbury. In July 1940, the German Luftwaffe began its aerial bombing campaign of Great Britain that became known as the Battle of Britain; the blitz began with the bombing of shipping convoys and ports but later extended to military and industrial infrastructures and finally to the sustained bombardment of populated areas in an attempt to break the morale of the British forces. The bombs began to fall in Plaistow in October 1940 and over the next 9 months, over 1300 high explosive and parachute bombs landed in the district of Newham which included Plaistow, Canning Town and West Ham.
Lily, Baden and their three children were forced to leave West Ham due to the bombing and moved to Newbury to live with Baden’s family. When the war ended, Baden got a job as a machine setter with Kodak and the family moved to a new housing estate in Watford in Hertfordshire; Lily died in Watford in 1979 and Baden in Newbury in 1984.
