Danny Baker – The Sausage Sandwich Tour– Epsom Playhouse – 12 April 2023. A review by Epsom and Ewell Times.

Once television’s go to cheeky chappie Cockney, Danny Baker demonstrates how much more there is to his life and career than that lazy characterisation: West End record shop assistant at 14, partying with Elton John and Rod Stewart by 17, co-founder of Sniffin’ Glue underground punk magazine at 19, New Musical Express journalist, TV presenter, radio host, script writer to Jonathan Ross, Chris Evans, Peter Kay, Ricky Gervais et al all by 40, and now at 66 add to that list raconteur touring the country and playing to sell-out audiences with his stand-up show.

Stand-up? More like stand still, Danny for Pete’s sake! Baker notches up his 10,000 steps comfortably in the first half as he walks to and fro across the stage in his fezz and brandishing a wand. After four hours we are exhausted, one can only imagine how Baker is feeling. Leaving the Playhouse at 11.20 p.m. after kicking off at 7.30 p.m. you can see that our host is giving the late Ken Dodd a run for his money in giving his audiences value for money.

The wonderful undercurrent of Danny’s life is the sheer unpredictability of it. John Lennon once famously said ‘Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans’, well in Danny’s case life is what happened to him when he was busy making no plans whatsoever. Driven only by the advice from his Dad never to sign on because ‘then, they’ve got you’,  Danny meandered into one fabulous job after another. Of course, if he wasn’t innately talented and possessing a natural connection with audiences of all kinds he would have fallen at the first hurdle. Baker also has bucketloads of gumption.

Danny hurtles through his life until his knee deep in the names he has dropped. But, why not? He has worked with and knows nearly everyone from Q4 20^th century popular culture. But his feet remain firmly planted in Deptford soil as he refused to play the celeb game. Despite it all he remains one of us, not one of them. He’s our imposter in their world. He’s a fighter, shaking off cancellation and cancer along the way. He’s funny. He doesn’t do emoting. He has no messages for us. If there is an opposite to virtue signalling this show is it. He has no lofty pronouncements on his “art”. Instead, he tells us his nice home is “the house that Daz built”, referencing his cringy TV ads from the 1990s. Danny Baker is an unvarnished old school cockney and there are few left. Go and see him while you can.

Follow the example of a 50 year reunion for Ewell County Secondary School reported here. Epsom and Ewell Times can help your school reunion by putting the word out in these pages.

Former pupils of Ewell County Secondary School gathered at The Station pub in Stoneleigh on Saturday to reminisce and celebrate fifty years or more since they left and entered the working world.

The poster for the event borrowed from the Rolling Stones back catalogue to stress: “This Could Be The Last Time” and over a hundred schoolmates took heed and presented themselves for register. The reunion was aimed at those pupils that left the old schools then situated in Ruxley Lane and Danetree Road between 1971 and 1976. Organised by Ray and Bob Baxter, Tony Jones, Dave Reynolds, Martin Knight, Kevan McIlroy and Kevin Merchant the event was a huge success with only minimal corporal punishment and detentions administered. Friendships that were interrupted by leaving school and moving away in some cases were resumed after fifty years. Bob Baxter commented: “It was wonderful to lean our walking sticks against the wall, kick our zimmer frames away and boogie to T. Rex, Slade and The Rubettes again.” By popular demand another reunion is being planned for 2025.

Following Epsom and Ewell Times story on George Pelham, who survived the Titanic disaster and another ship sinking, local writer and historian Martin Knight tells us the story of another Titanic double-sinking survivor, buried in our Borough:

Few will be aware of Ewell’s connection to the most famous maritime disaster of all time in which 1,514 people perished on RMS Titanic. Mary Kezia Humphries was born in Liverpool in 1870. In 1912 she was living in Nottingham with her husband David Roberts, who was the proprietor of the West Bridgford Motor Company. Mary joined the historic ship as a stewardess in 1st class and was rescued in lifeboat 11 as the boat was swallowed by the North Atlantic Ocean after colliding with an iceberg on the night of 15 April 1912.

 Her husband and children experienced a torrid few days without knowing whether Mary had survived the tragedy or not and it was only after she was deposited by the Carpathian in New York that word finally reached home. However, the experience did not deter Mary from going back to sea, and in 1914 she was working again aboard the Rohilla when that ship went down in the North Sea. Mary told her family that the rescue from the Rohilla, a ship that was built in Belfast by Harland & Wolf like the Titanic, was a far more frightening ordeal than the one two years earlier. The sea was eerily calm when the Titanic sunk and if you were lucky enough to get into a lifeboat you were relatively safe but conditions were far more treacherous with the Rohilla. Eighty-five lives were lost. Mary is thought to be the only survivor of both disasters.

 At some point Mary and David opted for a quieter life and settled in Ewell. Mary died in 1932 and her husband David was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident just a year later. They are buried together along with their daughters Daisy Bell and Kezia Nora in St Mary’s Churchyard.

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Epsom’s Titanic Ties

Shortly after 11.pm on the night of 21 December 1869, Thomas O’ Brien, the stationmaster on Ewell West Railway Station prepared to turn the gas lights off as he awaited the last train of the night – the 10.40 pm from Waterloo. A single passenger alighted who Mr O’ Brien would later describe as wearing a ‘villainous expression of countenance’. He was so alarmed at the man’s appearance and odd manner he ordered him from his pristine new station.

The man, Thomas Huggett, had no intention of hanging around as he had murder in his heart and he set off, following the course of the River Hogsmill, to the gunpowder mills owned by Sharp & Company and that were situated by the river in the areas leading up to what is now Ewell Court Park. He knew the mills well as he had delivered and collected from there in the past. Breaking into an outhouse he stole 25lb of gunpowder and feeling in his pocket to ensure he also had his knife he headed back towards Ewell Village and the house in West Street where his former lover, Lizzie Richardson, was now living.

Huggett worked in a warehouse at Rotherhithe and had been living with Lizzie Richardson for six months after she had left her husband for him. They had never married and the relationship had quickly broken down and Lizzie had moved away from him to live with her sister Eliza and her husband George Spooner and was acting as housekeeper as Eliza had been ill for some months. Also living in the cottage, which stood close to the newly opened Ewell Boy’s School in West Street, was a man called William Smith, a porter with the railway company, and another lodger George Mason, as well as the Spooners’ two young children Ellen and Frederick. It was rumoured later in the many pubs of Ewell that Huggett believed that Lizzie and William Smith were romantically attached.

Hiding in the Spooner’s coal house he watched as the lights of the Hop Pole Inn opposite (now the site of John Gale Court) were turned down and waited quietly. At 3.40 am Lizzie rose from her bed to begin to prepare George Spooner’s breakfast as he was due to make a delivery to London early that morning. She went outside to fetch coal to top up the fire she had lit and was shocked to be faced with Huggett sitting on the coals with a bag between his legs. Screaming she ran back into the house followed by Huggett who was shouting that he would kill her and himself. He was also brandishing his knife and tipping gunpowder on to the floor. By this time George Spooner had jumped from his bed and ran down the stairs to restrain Huggett from following Lizzie Richardson who had taken refuge in her bedroom. A struggle ensued and Huggett managed to break free and throw the bag of powder on to the fire. The house exploded demolishing the adjoining wall of the cottage next door and Huggett was blown through it.

Huggett was dead either from the blast or a knife-wound to his heart which had been inflicted with his own weapon. It was possible that George Spooner may have wrestled it from him but he was in no fit state to tell as he had been carried across to the Hop Pole pub with horrendous burns. Witnesses said that his ‘outer skin had come off’. William Smith was also less seriously injured and he was taken to Guy’s Hospital.

The explosion would have rocked the village but would have been no great surprise as accidents emanating from the gunpowder mills were not uncommon. Only six years earlier Ewell resident James Baker had been blown to bits by one such ‘accident’. Messrs Sharp & Co. were moved by the Spooner tragedy to write to the Times not to express sympathy but to assure readers that their premises were not unmanned at nights. George Spooner, 38 years of age, lingered a few days but died from his injuries and a subsequent inquest recorded wilful murder by Thomas Huggett whose own inquest had concluded suicide.

When Thomas O’Brien, the stationmaster at Ewell West station, heard of the incident when he rose on the morning of 22 December he immediately said, “That man I saw last night did it.” He marched across the Gibraltar area to West Street to view the body which still lay in the half-standing house and confirmed that Huggett was indeed the man that had got off the train the previous night. He had to be steadied though when he realised that the lodger that had been taken to Guy’s Hospital (and would later recover from his injuries) was his new employee, porter, William Smith.

© Martin Knight, 2012