Mrs Laura de Poitiers on the steps of St Gabriel’s Rest Home, Cormont Road, where she was the Assistant Matron. The home was run by the London County Council. The building has now been converted to residential use and is known as St Gabriel’s Manor. The de Poitiers family lived in Brussels at the time of the German invasion of Belgium and fled to London in 1940, as Laura de Poitiers’ son Edward 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\/4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mrs Laura de Poitiers on the steps of St Gabriel’s Rest Home, Cormont Road, where she was the Assistant Matron. The home was run by the London County Council. The building has now been converted to residential use and is known as St Gabriel’s Manor. The de Poitiers family lived in Brussels at the time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22677,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,28,39,285,20,30,6,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1926-1950","category-brixton-north","category-health","category-home_front_project_2005","category-housing","category-people","category-photograph","category-welfare-and-social-institutions"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n