Monday 14 August 2023
Today would have been my father’s 100th birthday. In part to celebrate his life, in part out of curiosity about his early adult years, this coming autumn I will publish a collection of his Letters to Long Lane from the 1940s.
In 1943, Arthur joined the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and trained in various places around England, mainly in Bury, Lancashire, and Aborfield, near Reading, in Berkshire. In early 1945 he was posted to India and spent most of the following two years there. He returned to England on the Empire Windrush, in June 1947, shortly before the independence of India.
Arthur Lewis Wells (1923-2019) was born in Erith, Kent to Stan & Peg, fairly modest, upwardly mobile sort of people, living on the edge of the sprawling metropolis of London. Arthur was named after my grandad’s only brother, killed in the First War in 1915 at the age of 19. In the early 1930s, the family moved to a newly-built semi at 6 Long Lane, Bexley Heath, Kent, England, which is the address on the letters home, whence the title of the book.
Letters to Long Lane is the correspondence I found in an embossed leather pouch in which my grandparents had carefully kept Arthur’s letters. There are letters from other people, too, including Mrs Jessie Macnaughton-Smith, whose son Michael, a school friend of Arthur’s, joined the RAF as a navigator and died in 1944, at the age of 20, shot down over Belgium.
The book will be about 300 pages (75,000 words) long and gives insights into the life of a twenty-something year old in the 1940s. Arthur trained as an engineer, but his passion was singing and he devoted much time and energy to rehearsing and performing opera, his first performances were broadcast on All India Radio. In Delhi, he met Giovanni Lupato, a young Italian POW and tenor, who was to become a lifelong friend. After demobilisation in September 1947, Arthur travelled to Venice to stay with Giovanni and train with his relative, the operatic tenor, Luigi Lupato.
Arthur was a devout Roman Catholic and was wondering whether he had a vocation as a priest, yet was also in a relationship with Kay Povey, a childhood sweetheart.
Through these letters home, we follow the development of a young man from a modest background in south-east London, who left school at 16 to avoid evacuation and started work as an apprentice at the Gas Light & Coke Company in Beckton, while also studying for an engineering degree at Woolwich Polytechnic. He ended his military career, having worked as Deputy Assistant Director of Mechanical Engineering (DADME) for the Chief Administrative Officer War Department, New Delhi, with the rank of Major.
Letters to Long Lane, to be published in Autumn 2023.
Michael Wells's Blog 