| Notes |
- It is not clear how Walter D Topping (known as Jack) came to be born in Leytonstone since his mother was from Aberdeen and his family emigrated to Canada when he was very small. Nothing is known about how or where his parents met and married. His earliest years must have been very unsettling. His father died at the age of 41 in California. Walter, Mollie and Kelman were thereafter brought up there by their mother . At some stage, the whole family returned to Aberdeen where they probably went to live with Walter Darling's maternal grandmother. Later, for reasons unknown, the entire household moved to London.
The 1901 Census shows Walter, aged 13, living at 20 Belsize Crescent, Hampstead, just south of Hampstead Heath and close to what was the North Western Fever Hospital, now the Royal Free Hospital. Living at the same address were 7 other people : Marion Kelman, aged 61, listed as head of the family, living on her own means, born Aberdeen ; Catherine A Topping, aged 33, daughter of Marion Kelman, occupation type writer, working at home, born Aberdeen ; Agnes Kelman, daughter of Marion Kelman, aged 34, born Keith, Scotland ; Mary Ness, sister-in-law of Marion Kelman, aged 47, born Glasgow ; Molly Topping, granddaughter of Marion Kelman, aged 10, born Finchley, Middlesex ; Lucy C Hempson, boarder, aged 27, secondary school teacher, born Goudhurst, Kent ; Annie G Levell, servant, aged 17, domestic cook, born Windsor, Bucks.
Walter worked for a brief period for Spicer's Paper at around the ages of 14-15 and was then sent to Dean Close School in Cheltenham to complete his education. He started there in the third term of 1904 and left in December 1905. According to the archivist at Dean Close, his home address at the time was 29 Belsize Crescent, Hampstead.
We know little of Walter's life in his late teens and early twenties except that he was living in London in 1910 and appears on the 1911 Census aged 23 in a small boarding house at 5 Worsley Rd, Hampstead, giving his occupation as clerk for a paper manufacturer. At the age of 22, about a year earlier, he was a Sunday School teacher at St Jude's Church, Mildmay Park in Islington. One of the girls in his class, Winifred Wood, then aged 13, would become his wife a decade and a half later. In later life, Winifred admitted to having been in love with Walter in her early teens. But much was to happen before a relationship could develop.
By 1910, he had joined the Territorial Army (The 9th County of London Battalion, London Regiment, Queen Victoria's Rifles), and was therefore first in line for the call-up when World War I was declared. He was made a captain almost immediately, perhaps because of his experience with the Territorials. By the end of the war, he had become the right-hand-man to a British Army chaplain. He was wounded at the Battle of The Somme (July-November 1916) and was evacuated from the battlefield along a river by raft in an attempt to stop the piece of shrapnel which had lodged between his shoulder blades from doing further internal damage.
After convalescence in England he was posted to the North-West Frontier in India where he worked alongside the Royal Gurkha Rifles. He had a reputation for sleeping soundly. His Gurkha colleagues once managed to remove him and all his possessions from his tent while he was sleeping without waking him up.
Walter continued to serve as an officer in India after the Great War and may have developed an attachment to the daughter of his commanding officer while he was there. In later life, he was heard to say that he would have liked to marry her. On 15th August 1922, he wrote to his brother Kelman from Jandola, South Waziristan, in what is now Pakistan. To his greetings on Kelman's forthcoming 36th birthday, Jack added, ‘…none too cheery at present. None of us knows what is going to happen to us How is Amy? a kiss to the kiddy.’ (The ‘kiddy’ must have been Dorothy Topping, Kelman's daughter).
He remarks that the presence of Pathan tribesmen outside his military camp at Jandola posed a threat. ‘Jandola is built, or rather "pitched", on a hill At the beginning of the Afghan War Jandola Fort was surrounded by hundreds of the blighters.’ Nevertheless, and despite feeling ‘none too cheery’, he seems to have been relatively happy there: ‘It is even better than India.’ The letter, which was in the possession of Peter Topping, also reveals that Jack had previously been in Barrackpore in West Bengal.
At some point after this, Jack was ‘axed’ or made redundant. According to Peter Topping he considered careers in a tobacco company and the Church of England. Kelman, though a chain smoker, told him that he thought selling tobacco was immoral; which left one choice.
Sometime in 1924, Walter must have returned to college as a student at the London College of Divinity, Highbury, training for the Anglican Priesthood, presumably for two years until his marriage in 1926. LCD was a college founded specifically for men who had had previous experience in commerce or other employment. It later became St John’s College, Nottingham.
Sometime in the early 1920s, Walter found himself standing in a queue outside a bakery in Highgate, London, behind Winifred Wood, then in her twenties, whom he had not seen for a decade or more. She was working as a governess in the area. He reintroduced himself by running his finger down her spine and their friendship subsequently blossomed. The couple married in the summer of 1926. Walter was living at 74 Englefield Road, Islington at the time.
Walter did not have a great deal of money with which to fund his studies and his daughter, Joyce Palmer, believed that he and Winifred borrowed heavily against the value of a house which she had either bought or inherited in Harlow. What is more certain is that the house was later sold to pay debts which had accumulated during this period. In the late 1930s he drove a ‘clapped out Austin 7’ in which Peter Topping remembered being given rides during childhood visits to Granny Bentley, Walter's mother, in Crowborough, Sussex.
In about 1929, when Joyce was 2, the couple moved from St Jude's, Mildmay Park, where Walter had served his first curacy, to Old Harlow in Essex, where a second curacy began at St John's Church. Two years later, Walter was appointed as the parish priest of St Saviour's Church, Stratford, in the East End of London. Joyce remembers that she was not allowed to go to school until she was 7 because the area was ‘too rough’. Walter was assisted in the parish by one curate, one Church Army captain and two Church Army sisters. The Church Army captain was murdered by a publican who became violent and threw him down a staircase after he had spoken against the evils of drink.
In about 1936, Walter moved to St Andrew's Church, Westcliff-on-Sea, near Southend. Shortly after the start of the Second World War, in 1940, his two daughters, Joyce, now 13, and Jean, 9, were evacuated to Chapel-en-le-Frith, where they stayed until 1944. They had no contact with their parents throughout that time as Walter and Winifred could not afford the train fare to Derbyshire. Walter appears in the 1939 England and Wales Register for Southend-on-Sea, Essex, at 81 Fairmead Avenue, Westcliff-on-Sea, as ‘Topping, Walter D, 51, Vicar, Holy Orders’.
Towards the end of the war, ‘between the doodlebugs and the V2s’ as Joyce put it, the family moved to Magdalen Laver & High Laver in rural Essex, where Walter became the vicar of St Mary Magdalen. He remained there until the early 1960s when, obliged to work until the age of 80 before being able to claim his pension, he moved to his last parish at Great & Little Saling near Braintree. He retired in 1968.
On retirement, Walter and Winnie went to live with their eldest daughter and her family in the rectory at Weston-under-Penyard in Herefordshire. The house was set in four and a half acres and had 16 bedrooms, so there was plenty of room. They stayed there for two years and then, in about 1970, moved into a self-contained flat in a converted early-19th century villa called Mabledon, on Quarry Hill, Tonbridge in Kent. The house had formerly belonged to the Deacon family who were London bankers and had also been the home of Decimus Burton, one of the most significant builders of Georgian London, responsible for large areas of Bloomsbury, as well as St. Johns Wood and Clapham Common and, in collaboration with John Nash, the development of Regents Park. His commisions in Tunbridge Wells and the surrounding area were extensive and included Burrswood at Groombridge and St Peters Church at Southborough.
It was whilst living at Mabledon that Walter had a stroke. He died in hospital in the summer of 1972.
External Links
London College of Divinity, Highbury
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1888 - 1972 (83 years)
Education
