The staff of Fenstanton Rest Home, Christchurch Road, Streatham on VE Day in 1945. The house was previously used for mentally-ill patients before it was taken over by the London County Council. Mrs Gaston de Poitiers, the Matron, is behind the central kneeing nurse with her nephew Edward between her and her sister Laura. The de Poitiers lived in Brussels at the time of the German invasion in 1940 and fled to London, as Edward de Poitiers recalls: “I was in Brussels, sitting quietly at home. We heard the announcement and immediately my mother and aunt, who were both English, said we’re going to have to get out of Belgium, because we’ll be interned for sure. The decision was made to leave and we came out of Belgium as the Germans came in behind us. We came through parts of Belgium that had been bombed and I remember horrible things like bodies hanging in trees….I was only nine and a half.”Digital image by kind permission of Edward de Poitiers. From the Lambeth Archives Home Front project 2005.Ref: SPd 4051\/2<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The staff of Fenstanton Rest Home, Christchurch Road, Streatham on VE Day in 1945. The house was previously used for mentally-ill patients before it was taken over by the London County Council. Mrs Gaston de Poitiers, the Matron, is behind the central kneeing nurse with her nephew Edward between her and her sister Laura. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22675,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,9,39,285,20,30,6,79,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1926-1950","category-buildings-architecture","category-health","category-home_front_project_2005","category-housing","category-people","category-photograph","category-streatham-hill","category-welfare-and-social-institutions"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n