hampstead in the 20s

The Surrealists found striking new vistas opened by Freud's discoveries. But Paul Valéry was not a fan (Celeyrette-Pietri 1984), nor was Joyce, who said of psychoanalysis that it was "neither more nor less than blackmail" (Barnes 1922, 299). A darker drama is to be found in the ambivalent relation of Virginia Woolf to psychoanalysis. She made merry about Freud's doctrines throughout much of the 1920s, before changing her mind in the 1930s and finally going with her husband Leonard to meet Freud for afternoon tea in his Hampstead home eight months before his death in 1939. Upon her arrival, he presented Woolf with a narcissus. Two years later she drowned herself in Sussex.
”Socialism,” George Orwell famously wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier(1936), draws towards it ”with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.” His tirade against such “cranks” is memorably extended in other passages of the book to include “vegetarians with wilting beards,” the “outer-suburban creeping Jesus” eager to begin his yoga exercises, and ”that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.”
WHEN Winnie Potipher died one of the last surviving links with an old and very different Hamp­stead vanished with her.
Winifred Mary Potipher, who died last month aged 84, was a lifelong tenant of number 13 Mansfield Place, Hampstead.
Her parents had been its first occupants a century ago.
Built as married-quarters for local policemen, they were in fact let to working-class families such as Winnie’s whose mother Minnie was in service and whose father Charles was a carpenter.
The houses had outdoor toilets – landlords only fitted Winnie’s with an indoor WC in the 1980s – and families used public baths in Flask Walk, though a lucky few had zinc tubs.
Born in 1927, Winnie, an only child, went to school at nearby New End School. In the mid-1930s Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts used to meet near Whitestone Pond and Winnie sometimes joined her father heckling.
Occasionally blackshirts were tossed into the pond.
By wartime Winnie’s mother was suffering from agoraphobia and refused to shelter from the Blitz in Hampstead Tube.
Winnie stayed with her mother even after a bomb hit the nearby New End Hospital laundry – fortunately without casualties, completely destroying the front of their home.
Toward the end of the war she worked as a telephonist at the Black Cat cigarette factory, Mornington Crescent.
After peace broke out Winnie met Alec, a handsome engineer who had been a promising athlete before flying in Lancaster bombers, and they married in 1951.
They had two children, Gilli in 1952 and Simon in 1967.
Between, Winnie worked as a telephonist in Roland Smith Motors, then on the corner of Hampstead High Street and Gayton Road.
In the 1950s Mansfield Place also felt the touch of Hampstead’s bohemian world.
Social campaigner and co-founder of Child Action Poverty Group Peter Townsend moved in with his family and it became something of a mecca for intellectuals such as Tony Benn and a young Frank Field.
Slum clearances in Camden Town during the 1960s led to hard-up families being rehoused in nearby New Court, Luton Terrace.
“Many were desperately poor,” Gilli recalled.
“For some reason we didn’t mix much but mum and dad always turned a blind-eye when the kids pinched our milk bottles because they knew they were hungry.”
By the mid-1970s Winnie was working as a receptionist at a doctor’s surgery in Rosslyn Hill, from which she retired in the late 1980s.
An avid reader, she was often in Keats Library, Hampstead, but after being widowed in 1981 suffered deteriorating mobility, leaving home less often.
She continued “holding court” at Number 13, Gilli said.
But Hampstead was now awash with money, the number of council tenants fast dwindling.
In Mansfield Place, Winnie was the last of the original tenants.
She had been a “cornerstone of Mansfield Place”, said Gilli.
“Mum came from a generation that always had to cope.
"Her views might have been a little dated but her advice was common sense – sometimes with a wry smile.”