On Ashen Grove, Wimbledon Park sits a terraced house with a simple homemade white box hanging above the doorstep with the door number written out in black lettering. The box is nothing special or eye catching and the house sits anonymously between some of the more modernised, “kerb appeal” properties of Wimbledon Park.
However, it was here behind that original door number sign fashioned by his father, that Raymond Briggs, the writer and illustrator began his life. A life that has brought The Snowman, Father Christmas and Fungus the Bogeyman to the public imagination and introduced us, in his novel, which was also made into an animated film in 2016, to his parents Ethel and Ernest and his Wimbledon Park roots.
Young Raymond attended Wimbledon Park Primary School, the local 14th Wimbledon scouts group (which still meets today), Rutlish (at the time a grammar school - something his mother was hugely proud of) and later Wimbledon College of Art (despite his father’s protests that he should aspire to have a more profitable career).
It’s hard to imagine now, that in an area where properties regularly sell for nearly a million pound, that Ethel, a lady’s maid and Ernest, a milkman, could take a foot on the property ladder but in 1930, at the not insignificant price of 875 pounds, they found themselves on Ashen Grove. His 1999 novel Ethel and Ernest, a eulogy in comic-book form to his parents, documents in pictures the local landmarks of his childhood such as the golf club (where he was arrested aged 12 for stealing billiard cues), Wimbledon Park with it’s lake and café (now a community police building) and the home which nurtured this local boy through the ravages of World War 2 until his late teens.
Soon after art school at the age of 23, Raymond Briggs left Wimbledon Park and began his writing career settling in Sussex where he still lives now. He never returned to live in his childhood neighbourhood but he still drew inspiration from his early years in the area, with the roof of his home on Ashen Grove featuring in Father Christmas and the main characters in his book Where the Wind Blows based upon his parents.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2005, Raymond Brigg’s talked about the “moving” experience of returning to Wimbledon Park and visiting his old home. While Ethel and Ernest is Raymond Briggs’s heartfelt tribute to his loving parents, it is also a valuable historical insight into the changing social history of a neighbourhood over the last century.
By Alex Buchanan, Wilson’s School
