History of Halford House 2

[00:00:00] I'm going to read a few more verses in deuteronomy. [00:00:04] And then when we've sung a hymn, I shall go straight on from where we stopped last night. This reading is in deuteronomy. Eleven. And verse 18. From verse 18. [00:00:27] Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul. And ye shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children talking of them. When thou sittest in thy house and when thou walkest by the way and when thou liest down and when thou risest up and thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thy house and upon thy gates, that your days may be multiplied and the days of your children in the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers to give them as the days of the heavens above the earth. For if ye shall diligently keep all this commandment which I command you to do it, to love the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways and to cleave unto him, then will the Lord drive out all these nations from before you. And ye shall dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourselves. Every place whereon the sole of your foot shall tread shall be yours. From the wilderness and Lebanon from the river, the river Euphrates. Even unto the hinder sea shall be your border. There shall no man be able to stand before you. The Lord your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon as he hath spoken unto you. [00:01:52] Now, there were just one or two things that I ought to go back over very simply. It only take me 1 minute, really. One. Is this the carpet and curtains? Do you remember I mentioned the carpet and curtains of that place when we got into the old nightclub that was closed down? And I said we had a new carpet and new curtains. They were interlined, and they were very, very big curtains. Quite the biggest windows I've ever been involved with. And I said to you last night, of course, I thought, does the Lord waste such things like that? Well, the amazing thing was this, that suddenly, remember, I told you I was not so much for this house. I felt it really was such a derelict ruin, and there was such an air of mystery about the whole place. There's a lot to be done. I really wondered whether it was the Lord. But afterwards it suddenly occurred to me. That downstairs room. That downstairs room, could that be? And when finally, in the time of prayer, we felt it was right that we should offer. This was the place. When we came back and looked at the downstairs room, it seemed to be exactly. Do you know, when we moved that carpet went downstairs exactly into it. But even more remarkable, those of you who want a little proof of this, you can go downstairs now and see the big red curtains. Now, they are, of course, not the very old ones. They dropped to pieces some years ago. But the pelmet board is the same board that was in the other. And you will notice that there is about half an inch at either end and about an inch above it. Those curtains went into those two windows exactly as if they were fitted. That was one remarkable thing. And then I also mentioned to you, the surveyor told us there was no damp course in the. [00:03:52] The place here. And of course, when we offered our mind, we did say, of course, that. And this was our own surveyor. I mean, he, when he saw it, said there was no damp course. When we moved in, after we bought the house, one of the brothers was a botanist, said that we should move the earth away from the walls. He thought it was causing some of the dry rot. And so we dug away all the earth right round this whole length of the wall. And to our amazement, we found a damp course. [00:04:19] What had happened was, it was the old fashioned damp course, with all the little holes in, you know, about that. And in the war, everyone had been told they must not let a chink of light through. And they'd been told to plug up all these holes with putty or with rag or whatever, and they had heaped earth up right over the whole thing, so that no one ever knew that there, in fact, there was a damp course there. Well, those are two things. Let's go on now. [00:04:49] On with this story. Let's tell you about the matter of insurance. Some of you will remember the great hoo ha we had over insurance. One or two of the business people amongst us were most bothered that we weren't insured, and also very good people outside of the company, who were believers, who had by then become more sympathetic when they came. They used to say to me, especially one gentleman, he used to say, lance, promise me your get insured. You cannot have a place like this with these valuable things without being insured. You must insure. And then someone said to me on one occasion, what happens if Bill Richards has a serious accident? Maybe he's nice, but what about his wife? Don't you think that his family will sue you? And then I began to worry. And you remember, we brought it all up in prayer. Should we be insured, not because we don't trust in the Lord, but for the sake of the world and the testimony. And you remember how we took the whole thing to the Lord and we got that amazing reply from the Lord that there's some trust in chariots and some trust in horses, but we will trust in the Lord our God. And therefore, we felt, not that we're against insurance, but we felt that in this particular property, because there was something special about it, which I will talk about more tomorrow. God was saying, you're not to insure it. [00:06:07] And I remember one of those business people going on at me about it and saying, it's on your head. It's on your head. [00:06:16] If anything happens in that house to any of those things, be it on your head. [00:06:22] And I quailed inside. And as we all do when we know what the Lord wants. But then, when someone is so dogmatic and categoric, we wonder, am I right? Am I right? But we comforted ourselves. I remember Margaret and I were having a cup of tea downstairs in the days when we were so sweet and small and when things were so like a country vicarage. [00:06:43] The telephone didn't ring all day, and suddenly there was the most fearful thump, and the whole house shook. [00:06:52] And I said, margaret, what was that? Oh, she said, they've thrown something down from the roof. Now, they were working on the chimneys above this, outside this door, you know, the chimneys that go right high up. They were doing something with the chimneys right up the top, their bill and so on. He'd got scaffolding up there, and she thought he'd throw him down. But as she said it, there was a piercing scream from next door. It was Eunice. Those of you remember Eunice, piercing scream. And we both jumped up and ran right around the house. And as we did so, Blanche and Eunice came out the other side. They. Blanche had heard that thing and said to Eunice, look out at the window. And Eunice looked out the window and saw Bill spread eagled on the concrete. He had fallen from the chimney onto the concrete, and his weight had shaken the whole of this house. [00:07:38] Of course, as we both converged, we all expected him to be dead, at least at Blanche did, because she knew what happened. We didn't till we saw him there. And as we stood, he was getting up, and I said, no, no, bill, don't. I was like, I heard about people getting up and dropping dead. You know, I thought, it's nervous reaction. Nervous reaction. I said, you must. You mustn't move. You see, he said, I'm all right. I'm all right. And slowly I said, but you must have a doctor, Bill. No, no, no, I don't want any. But I said, bill, where did you fall from? The chimneys? He said. So I said, but, bill, you must. You'll have to go home. No, I don't want to go. Yes, I said, you must go home. We insist you go home. So he went home. But do you know he was at work the next morning? [00:08:19] This is the truth. He was at work the next morning at 08:00 without a bruise or a scratch. [00:08:27] Only the angels could have done that. And on another occasion, talking about insurance, I came up this far escape here, and at the top of the door there, in that door there, leaning, was what we used to call in those days a teddy boy. He had a cigarette hanging out. His mouth. Looked a bit white. And I knew him. He worked down in that shop on the corner. And I said, hello? And he said, hello. I said, is Bill. Yeah. He said, he's inside there. He said, here. He said, do you believe in miracles? I said, well, I do. [00:08:55] He said, well, I've just seen. When I heard someone from inside. Yeah, so do I. It was Bill. I looked in the door, and in the center here were about 100 to 200 wheelback chairs. Now, they were all together. They didn't belong to us. They belonged to somebody else. And we were storing them. And they were all one on top of the other, do you understand? With the legs all up. And right in the middle of this great jam pack of chairs was one that hadn't got one on top. And there in the middle was Bill sitting, smoking. And I thought, what a funny fellow he is. He's walked over all those chairs to sit in the middle instead of pulling one out and sitting on the side. And then this fellow said to me, he said, you know, he said, I came up. Now, there was no. There was no ceiling here. And he said, I came up, and there was only the rafters. And he said, I called up to the dormer. There's a dormer window up there. He said. I said, bill. And Bill said, yes. He said, so and so, I want to speak with you. And he said, yes. He said, I'm coming. And he said, his legs came through. [00:09:51] It was either there or here. I don't know which of these two. It was probably here, because he was sitting about there. And then he forgot too late, that he pulled the ladder up through the dormer to get onto the apex of the roof. And so this fellow said, I saw his legs trying to find the ladder, but he said it was too late, he said, and then he fell. And then he said it happened. He said he didn't fall. He said he floated. [00:10:14] And he said he landed in that chair. He said, the only chair's been sitting there ever since and built a chair. I came down like a feather. [00:10:27] It was amazing. Some of the things. When we had the decision to go on with this upstairs room, we had 450 pounds in hand to go on with this. We always seemed to be dealing in 450, and we had 450 pounds in hand, and we all felt we should go on with this upstairs room. Now, at that time, we were comfortably filling the downstairs room, but pleasant way. God had kept us really reasonably small all through those years because he was doing a work in us. And then we felt we must go ahead. And at the same time, we made the decision to go ahead. Misses Haller came round and she always did the same thing. She used to come round, she was a deer soul. She used to come out to the study window and she would go on the window and I would open the window, and she said, I've got bad news for you. And then I said to her, what is it, misses Haller? She said, that roof next door, something's got to be done about the water's pouring in on all our precious antiques. [00:11:24] And I used to say to misses Haller, what can we do? We only get one pound 50 from you a week for the whole house. I mean, what can we do? You see? And so I thought, well, the only righteous thing to do is to get Bill in to have a look. Bill went in and looked at the roof next door and he said, well, it'll cost 450 pounds, because he said, every tile there is a handmade tile and it's got to be replaced exactly as it is. So I said, okay, well, then let's. And then I thought, oh, that's our 450 pounds. I went back to the company. I said, what are we to do? Now, there was a little bit of discussion on this one because some of them, with the business minds getting to work said, why should we give up the 450 pounds we've got for this? They only pay 30 bob a week, 150 a week. It's quite wrong. Let them water go in. One man said. One brother said to me, let it go in, otherwise you're going to have them there forever. She was 20 years younger than him. He said, when, when he's gone, she'll be there for another 20 years. You'll never get in there. And I said, oh, I don't think. I think we should trust the Lord. No. He said, you've got your head in the air. You can't do that. But we prayed about it and we became convinced that the right thing to do was to put their roof or give them their roof and lose our 450 pounds, which we did. And the very next day, there was a letter from Glasgow, and in it was a check for five. [00:12:45] They said, we don't know quite what you're doing, but we understand you're into doing some work we're building here as a gift. Now, the interesting thing is we had made a big decision that every gift that came from material things, we would take tithe of it, we would take 10% of it. So 500 pounds was 450 plus the tithe. And we felt it was a marvelous confirmation of God upon this matter of taking a 10th of all that God gives to us. [00:13:20] We, of course, then began on this room, and, my word, we had some incredible miracles connected with this room. You see that landing out there? We used to have squashes or camel gatherings or whatever you call them in Christmas, and we used to be jam packed in that library. And then we would have anything up to 40 people sitting on those stairs. They used to. You remember it, those of you with those jam packed, I mean, standing, sitting, sitting almost on top of one another. Anyone who couldn't get in was all down there. It was a terrible shock to us when we started up here and we came to take down to find that the whole of that landing was on nothing, that both sets of rafters had literally rotted away, and that the whole thing was literally resting on nothing. That reminds me of an earlier story when we come. When they did this roof here, when Bill did it, and he came down, said, you better come up and look at this. And when I came up, there were these old gentlemen standing here looking as if they were watching. They'd seen a vision of God, and all of them were up. And when I looked, they had it all undone. And the huge beam upon which the both roofs came had gone to powder. [00:14:37] Now, that whole two roofs had stayed together right through the war. [00:14:42] All the shaking and everything else and all our bumping and singing and everything else, it had all gone right through. It was amazing. One other story about this room and that is that wall there. They told us, the building inspectors, that the whole of that wall had to come down, right down to the ground. Six foot taken out of the ground, huge foundations put in, and a 13 inch wall built right up to the top. And we knew this was a major operation. And when the men came to do it, they were tough men. I'd always wondered why pubs were called bricklayers arms till I met these bricklayers. My word, they were like buccaneers, like pirates. They were very funny men. Misses Huller went outside, I remember, and she was so upset about one of her poppies. Now these poppies came flowered one a day, and these men, to humor her, lifted a giant cement mixer over a poppy. [00:15:38] You saw this whole cement mixer being lifted over one poppy and put down on the other side. They scared the living daylights of the old ladies next door on the Darby and Joan Club. The old girls used to look up and then tap the window and say, don't be careful. Won't you be careful? And then we watched these men market down to how horror we saw them when they were demolishing the wall, taking great lumps rock and going, one, two, and then, whoo. It went over and came down on the hat. And you saw all the tables jump up. And Margaret and I used to go out visiting. More people got visited in that week or two. We thought, we can't face the people next door if they keep on doing these things. We couldn't stop them. But, you know, Bill came to me and said, listen, lance, he said, I don't care about myself. He said, you can owe me anything you want to. He said, you never have. But he said, you can owe me any. But he said, these men will tear me to pieces if their wages are not here on Friday. I said, I knew them, so I thought, yes, he's dead right. [00:16:37] They will. There was one man, particularly, who didn't like Bill at all and was raring for a fight. And so we really got bothered. Ivy was looking after the kitchen. Margaret was away at that time, I remember. And there came this marvellous occasion because we couldn't have a study. We used to sit in here and look out into the garden. The whole place was right down to the ground. The marvelous thing is, we prayed that God would give us a good summer. And it did not rain in Richmond from April of that year till the end of September. From the day the wall was demolished to the day those bow windows went back in, it never rained. We used to watch storms cloudburst right up in Richmond park, going right around us. But never a drop in answer to prayer came on this. We had to water the whole thing by hose, or at least misses Halliday. The interesting thing was that finally this day I was sitting in the library and there were some letters there, and I opened one. And then I really thought I'd lost my sight. And I kept on looking at it because it was a cheque which seemed to me for a thousand pounds. Now, we've never had such a gift before. And I kept on looking at it and I thought, there must be a hundred. And then I said, ivy? And she said, yes. So I said, here, come here a minute, quickly. And she came belting up the stairs, and I said, look. I said, look at that. I said, tell me, I said, am I seeing double? Does it say a hundred or a thousand? She. A thousand. [00:17:57] Well, I said, look at this letter. And there was a letter from a bank manager from a place down in the south of England, and it simply said, a client of ours wishes to make this gift of money to you anonymously for connection with building work. [00:18:14] So I said to aviat, I've never had a gift like that. I said, I really feel weak round the knees. Let's have a cup of tea. Yes, she said. And she belted downstairs, put on the kettle, and then I heard a piercing shriek from downstairs. And I went and I thought, it's a mouse. She's seen a mouse. But ivy was coming up the stairs with a tea caddy. Open her head, she said, look. And there in the tea were pound notes. [00:18:38] So we went everywhere through the whole house. [00:18:42] We thought, this is the day when everything happens. It was a very funny day, but, you know, it was amazing how God answered that prayer. Now, when God gave us the money, you would have thought, just like this property in Jerusalem, you praise the Lord, we've got the money, the battle's over. And then immediately, like a bomb, the brick crisis hit us. First of all, the building inspector came around and said, by the way, he said, I hope you're building this in old stocks. He said, I hope this wall is not going up in new. And of course, Bill then had a fit. Then he phoned up. I remember Bill sitting at the phone, phoning the whole of the south of England, right down to Bath to Exeter, to see if he could find any old stock. And finally they found here, I think it was somewhere in Putney, they found these old yellow stocks, and they got a whole lorry load here. While we had the Bible study downstairs, the bricks were being delivered outside that window. That whole wall was completed in the most amazing way. One of the most remarkable things, apart from the fact that there was no rain, we prayed. Bill said to us, listen, he said, you've got to pray. If you believe in prayer, you've got to ask that there be no rain, because he said, we're going to have the whole of these wall down, and although we'll have tarpaulins hanging from the roof right down to the ground, he said, if we have big storms or anything else, going to be mighty wet inside, and we really won't be able to work properly in getting it done. And we got on our knees and we asked the Lord to give us good weather. And from April of that year right through to the September of that year, we didn't have a drop of rain on this garden. We actually stood here, some of us, and watched the storms cloudburst up in the park and over Wimbledon and Kingston way, but not here. We never had a drop right there. And Bill used to say to you, waited. He said, when those windows go in, it'll come down like cats and dogs. And as the windows went in, it came down like cats and dogs. I've never forgotten that. I told you the story, of course, of the wall. I told you that and told you about the bricks. One of the most remarkable miracles about this room, I was personally involved in this, as within some of the others, was these rsJs. Now, don't ask me to tell you what RSJ stands for, but they are great steel beams that go from this pillar here to that pillar there. You are all sitting under two of these huge beams. They had to be specially made for this house. We ordered them a month or two before they were brought down by an enormous trailer. I shall never forget it because they could hardly get up Halford House Road, round the bend here. And finally, of course, they got them in by rolling them along the side and left them there. We had actually gotten the pictures of the house. One of the boys who since moved away as a probation officer somewhere or other in some part of the country, standing on one of those beams. Now, he looks quite small on it, although he was six foot three, I think, but he looks quite small standing on those beams now. Bill assured us there was no problem. He was going to take this roof away here and take it away there. The pillar here was built. The pillar there was built. The wall was now up, so all was ready for the yard sjs. It wouldn't just crumble, you know, as on when they went in. And he ordered, if I remember rightly, I think it was molems. Anyway, it was one of the biggest crane people in the country. He ordered an 80 foot jib crane to be. [00:22:43] To be here in Halford Road to swing these two rsjs over one by one, of course, and let them down on these pillars. [00:22:55] The police had been informed and were going to close the whole of Halford Road for a whole day whilst the work was done, just before the crane was due to be brought here. By the way, the reason why it had to be such a big crane was because it had to get over the big yew tree here and in some way had to lift the thing right up over the yew tree and over the hut and then swing it right over this roof and that roof and bring it down here. You understand? We still had two rooms here for it to negotiate. Bill, you should mention that we have this valley gutter. [00:23:38] No, it was never here. It was there. The valley gutter was over there. No, this was never a valley gutter, this one. But what did happen was that Bill got bothered by this. He kept on wondering and there was some kind of intuition he had as to whether really they were going to, at the last moment, let him down. So he phoned them up and they kept saying, yeah, it is all right, we do this all the time. No, there's nothing to worry. But finally, on the last time, he wrote, they said, look, we'll send a man down and he'll inspect the site. The man came, he looked at the tree, he looked at the two roofs, he looked at the Red Cross hut, and he said, there's no going. [00:24:19] He said, we could not possibly allow you to have the crane. He said, it would be far too big a risk. If one, as we swing it over one of those girders, were to get into a swing, it would crush that hut, which, of course, could have been an answer to prayer, but it would crush that hut completely. [00:24:40] So the fact was that suddenly molems, or whoever they were, langs, or whoever it was, drew out at the last moment. Now, it was the next day. Bill had already got the roof right back. There was tarpaulin over the top, just in case anything happened in the weather. And by the way, that wasn't the same time as the good weather of that summer. That was later. It was quite mixed weather at that time, and Bill was in a state. He didn't know what to do. And we said, well, we'll pray about it. And then after a while, he came back and he said, you know, I'm going to get it up. I'm going to get it the way the pyramids were built. He said, I'll get it up with block and tackle. So I said, but, billy, there was only one man on the job, you see, and he got this other man who came in on jobs, and then he was an engineer, but he'd mostly been in ships to deal with the pipes and plumbing. And Bill said, he'll help, I'm sure. Well, I shall never forget that day. We had these Douglas fir bees, you know, like trunks, going right out over there, over the little passageway beside the house here, and then two or three more Douglas fir poles all bound together with a block and pulley, and down came the thing and under the girders, and Bill inched it up. Literally. It went up an inch at a time. [00:26:09] And that engineer man, I shall never forget. Bill said he'd rather have done it alone, because this man was terrified. I've never seen a man really so terrified in my life. He was pouring perspiration down him on a reasonably cool day. Now, Margaret and I were involved in this because Bill said, the only way we can get these beams up, he said, is if we have people. He said, normally, he said, when we do it this old fashioned way, there's got to be someone on either end of the beam steadying it so it doesn't swing up and down. And he said, now, the way to do it is if I put a coil around the beam. And don't forget, these beams were about, you know, that deep. At least they were enormous beams, these ones up here. [00:26:56] He said, you've got to tie it round your waist and hold it here, see? Well, dear old Margaret, she tied it round her waist and held it there. She was this end, or. I can't remember, she was this end or that end. But anyway, I was the other end with it tied around my. And slowly it went up as we let it out, you see, round that thing we had, up it went, and then the phone rang, and I didn't think for a moment. I thought, hold the phone. The phone. And I dropped the rope and ran in, and I saw Margaret going up. [00:27:32] I never forget Bill saying, no, get back. [00:27:38] Oh, dear. Do you know that when those RSJs went in, Bill had said to us at tea time, listening, he said, the one thing I'm affected of is this, once those RSJs go in, if they're out, I can't do anything, I can't lift them. We've got nothing. Whereas with the crane, you can fiddle around with it and get it right. He said, it's going to be a miracle. He said, if they just go. Do you know that when those two girders went in. They were absolutely perfect. [00:28:07] It was an amazing thing. And it meant that, of course, when that was done, we not only saved a lot of money because to hire that wretched old crane and close the whole road for the day was costing money. But, I mean, we saved all that. But the actual work was done perfectly and it didn't take any longer. The only thing we didn't lose was the Red Cross hut that was still with us, I ought to say here, that Halford house, we discovered was an ancient monument. Grade two. Now, grade one, of course, is Stonehenge, St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and so on. We never could understand why this house was grade two and why they were so. [00:28:54] They felt it was so precious. I remember once the old gentleman who was the head of the ancient monuments came to us here. As soon as I looked at him. Well, he was an ancient monument himself, but he was a walking encyclopedia of everything to do with buildings in the whole south of the country. And I said to him, I can't remember his name now, but I said, after we gave him a cup of tea, but why is this house so precious? I said, when we bought this house and we looked at it, I said, I've lived here all my life. I've never heard of anyone famous living in Halford House. I mean, we know other houses in the area where famous people have lived and where belong to connected with famous historical incidents and so on, but not Halford House. Why should it be so precious? You see, when we first came in, we thought we were going to get great big modern picture glass windows in both over there. We were going to have no problem at all. It was all going to be nice and modern and light and sunny. And of course, the first thing the people said at the local council was, you can't do that. [00:29:59] It's an ancient monument. And we began to. And he said, well, you'll have to talk to the ancient monument people. So we got the ancient monument man in, and when he came in and I said to him, well, listen, I don't understand. [00:30:09] I mean, why can't we just do simple things like we want to do? And he said, well, he said, this is a very, very precious manor house. [00:30:18] He said, you see, there are very few Queen Anne manor houses left. There are a number of georgian. But he said, this particular house is not only beautifully kept outside, but inside. All the original fireplaces, all the original furnishing furniture of the house is still there. And he said, that's why we want to preserve it as it was now, we were very upset at the time and we thought, oh, dear, dear, dear. It was no good fighting it. We thought, well, God led us to this house, therefore, God knows. But now we see it as an undisguised blessing, because we found out afterwards that the town council had wanted to bring a big road connecting up with Richmond Bridge right across here, right down Ormond Road widening, all taking away all the houses there, and then right across here. They were going to leave Halford House proper, but this and the Red Cross hut were going to disappear, and then this road was to go on and connect up with the Chertsey Road. But the reason why they could not do it was that all the other houses down there weren't ancient monuments, but Halford House had already been declared an ancient monument. Now, of course, the others are too, but that's. They had to put aside that plan. And then again, another very interesting thing. When we went and asked the town council about this place, you know, we had to get permission to be a gathering place, a public meeting place and so on. You have to have permission because it was a change of use, as they called it, from residential to public. [00:32:00] And when I went into the town and country planning and all the rest of it and talked with them, the man said to me, well, he said, you know, he said, what are you? And I said, we're all young people, we're christian young people, and we just want to use it as a meeting place for young people. Oh, he said, you can certainly have it. He said, that council, he said, they'll do anything, he said, for you. He said, you see that place they have kept for years as a youth centre, they wanted it as a community youth center. But he said, just last year, you probably read it. And I did remember it. All the tow paths were found to be in a terrible state of disrepair, and millions of pounds had to be found in order to do all the tow paths of this whole area of the Thames. And they decided that the youth centre that they had been keeping this place for unofficially had to be forgotten. Now, a number of factories and small sort of light industries and also firms had tried to get this house to use as a kind of warehouse. But every time they'd refused, because in the back of the council's mind was this youth centre, they had just decided, let it go for good when we walked in and they said, you are a godsend. We've got our youth centre, you can have it. [00:33:26] So really, in many ways, we felt that all this was quite remarkable. Of course, this explains why we've always had to take such care about this house. You see, we haven't just been able to, to do the sort of simple, ordinary things that you could do with any house, a normal house, change things around and so on. This time the windows have to be passed, the different commissions have to come in to see and be involved, and all the rest of it, generally speaking, at least on the outside of the house and to a certain extent on the inside. [00:34:05] Another point I ought to mention just here in the story is the freehold. When we bought this house, it was leasehold, and it went through, I cannot remember. Now someone will have to look it up in the documents, how long our lease went on. We came in on the latter part of the lease, if I remember, and it certainly was one of these 99 year leases, but we all thought perhaps the Lord would be back by then. We're not bothered about leasehold rents, okay? We thought we paid a little tiny nominal sum in ground rent and didn't bother. But then suddenly, out of the blue, the St. Olive and St. Saviour's grammar School foundation, who owned the whole of this whole part of Richmond Hill, wrote to us and said, would we like to have the freehold? And there being a charity, and we being a registered charity as well, they weren't permitted to make a lot of money out of us, and they offered the freehold for 1450 pounds. Now, that ground, this whole ground, the freehold of it, was in fact including the Red Cross hut. [00:35:18] And that's where, because there was a fiddle that went on in the whole, it was suddenly carved up. And the Red Cross were offered their part, although we had paid their ground rent for many years. [00:35:32] This was because in the higher ups in the grammar school foundation were a number of top Red Cross officials. They were wives of people in the foundation. And so although we fought it for a while, it was nothing we could do. In fact, at the very last moment, there was a special committee meeting. It sounds rather like the house in Jerusalem. At the last moment there was a special committee meeting of the foundation, because they thought that this house was too precious to let go. They were prepared to let all the other freeholds be sold, but not this. And some members of the committee fought very much to retain the freehold of this property. But finally they gave it to us. We went to prayer and God gave us the 1450 pounds gradually, in a number of small amounts and so on, and we finally paid for it and the house became ours completely. But that explains the problem of the Red Cross hut. It was built originally on our ground. It was first World War army hut which was allowed there by the kind permission of Joseph Mayors, who was the owner of this house of mayors steamers, mayors taxes, mayors coaches. Those of you are Richmond people will remember mayors. And even to do with the football, Fulham mayors were the big people in this area and he allowed them to have that on the understanding that after the first World War it should be demolished and the ground returned to its former use. Of course, it never did. It went on and on and on and on right through the second World War, right till now. And it has been, as you know, superficially renewed. Now the miracles cover really every aspect. It's not only money and not only, as I spoke of some furnishings last night, but literally everything. I remember one day in our earlier days when I was here on a Friday alone, working, and I was sitting in the study and I went across to do something and suddenly I realized we had no flowers. And I remember thinking, I didn't pray. I just thought to myself, well, well, well, that's the first time in our history as a company. We've never, never had any flowers for the weekend and we have not a penny to get them. My sister used to do the decorations. You. Some of you will remember that. And I thought, well, that's it. We've got a penny in the treasury. I knew that. We've got no flowers. I went back to the study, I went on working and there was a ring at the door. And I went over and there was a mammoth black lemon seam. Now, I don't know much about cars. I don't know what kind of car, except it was. You could have had a table tennis table in the back of it. It was enormous. And then standing in front of the door was a chauffeur, beautifully dressed with an enormous bunch of flowers. And he said, these are for you, sir. And I said, oh, no, no, you've got it wrong. You want Professor Hullabrawn next door. And he said, aren't you christian fellowship? And I said, yes. Well, he said, then they're for you, sir. And he put them in my hands and I said, oh, thank you very much, and shut the door. And oh, it's one of the regrets of my life. [00:39:03] We don't know where they came from. They were anonymous. I said, where do they come from? He said, oh, and that's not for you to know. It's anonymous. And to this day I want. Oh, he said, from the north. That's right. From the north. That's all he said, from the north. And that to this day, I have wished I knew. Did he drive all the way down from the north with that bunch of flowers? I mean, it was an extraordinary. He just went off. I'd never seen the car or the chauffeur since. Some people thought that I would think that it was Lady Ogle's car and chauffeur, but it was neither. It was quite remarkable. And then I went back to work. I put them in a bucket of water and went on working. And there was another ring on the door, I think was about 02:00 I went to the door, and there was a big green inter flora van there. And a man said, for you, sir. Christian fellowship from Liverpool. [00:39:55] And we didn't know anybody in Liverpool, but I took these flowers and I said, who are they from in Liverpool? He said, anonymous, sir. So I signed the thing and he drove off. And we had so many flowers that weekend, we didn't know what to do with them. [00:40:10] It seemed to me so funny that there was the one weekend we had no flowers. So many flowers arrived upon us. And then I remember another quite different kind of story. We had a dear couple from Denmark, Anna Mittelson and Sophia Johansson, staying with us here, and they were real servants of the Lord. Sophia spent quite as much of her life in China, and they. They were Trojans, great prayer warriors. And they were here staying for a few days, and they were sitting in the garden on hard little wooden chairs. And I said to Margaret, oh, what a shame. It seems so terrible to have guests staying with us and sit them on those uncomfortable chairs. If only we had some comfortable chair, like one of those swing chairs wouldn't be lovely. We had one of those garden swing chairs. And Margaret said, oh, they're terribly expensive. But she said, of course, we could ask the Lord. And I said, well, do you think really that the Lord would give a luxury like that? And Margaret said, well, you can ask him. And I remember that c t studd once said, why ask the Lord for an egg if you can ask him for an elephant? [00:41:20] And so I thought to myself, should we ask the Lord for a swing chair? But I had a. [00:41:25] So we didn't do anything at that time. But that evening, before cleaning, we had our little time of prayer, and there was a particular brother there who didn't believe in any kind of luxuries at all, of any kind, especially when it came to the Lord's people. And I felt terribly inhibited. I mentioned this, and I felt his steely sort of look go right through me. And then we went to prayer, and no one prayed about the swing chair. So I thought, well, I'm going to. And so I said, lord, I said, and this is exactly what I said. Oh, heaven's got such humour, Lord. I said, if you see it as a necessity, give us a swing chair. Now, the brother didn't snort. He was quite nice about it. But I said, you know, lord, we don't. We don't want it for ourselves. We would like it for these guests we have come and stay with us. And I said, amen. And I think everybody else said, amen. And nothing. Nothing happened. One month went by, two months went by, three months went by. And of course, I was quite sure that the law didn't supply swing cheers, since he saw them as coming into the category of luxury and not necessity. And I'm quite sure that the other brother felt that and probably others as well. We forgot it altogether. It's very strange, the timing of the Lord. When the summer was over, at the end of September, a lady phoned me up and said, lance, I've got an awful shot for you. She lives somewhere down the south of England. And she said, I'm going to sell my home. And I really was surprised. She said, the Lord has told me to sell my home. Now, I've got some beds here. You know, my home. They're beautiful beds, and I want you to have the first choice. And there are some other things here that might be good as well. Well, yes. I said, I want. Would love to. Well, she. Could you come down on Wednesday? Yes. I said, that would be very nice. Well, she said, well, then we'll make the arrangements and you can have a look over and see. Well, I went to the station, was met at the station, driven up to this lovely home which overlooked Ashdown forest. And when she said, we'll have a cup of coffee first, it was a beautiful day. We went out on this terrace. And as we went out, she said, look, she said, there are two swing chairs. Which one do you want? [00:43:36] So I looked at these two swing chairs and all I could think was. I could hardly say which one, because I kept on thinking, Lord, how strange of you. Waited three months and now you give us a swing chair. Now, in actual fact, we were given far more remarkable things that day. All kinds of beds for next door, all kinds of useful things. And I never forgotten the beautiful William and Mary Cabinet, which, as we went through a room, she pointed to and said, of course you would like that. And I said in a very blasey manner, thinking it was a little reproduction piece, oh yes, that will be useful. And went on, I've always thought, ever since she must have thought, my goodness me, he really is terribly blazing because this was one of the most valuable, which is the most valuable piece of furniture in the whole house. I knew it was valuable because when it came here, Bill rushed into me and said here, he said, do you want to sell that? [00:44:32] So then I knew immediately, I thought to myself, aha. Then the city of the city valuer for the city of Leeds was here. He was the father of one of the brothers. And as he came up the stairs, he was just looking round like this, you know, and it was stored on the landing, which was the other side in those days. He went, he said, my word, my word, he was a short man. He ran up to the. And he began to stroke it. And he was a quite unemotional man. He'd be stroked. And he said my word, he said, a William and Mary cabinet in mint condition, a genuine piece. He said, even the glasses original. I'll give you 400 pounds, he said, if you want it in cash. So I swallowed hard and I thought it was of a half. So that's why Bill was interested in it. A bit later. Mister Ellis, some of you knew the antique man he was in having a cup of tea with us, with Taffy. Both of them are dead now. And as he was going out, Taffy got into the car. Mister Ellis came back, he was jewish. He came back to me and he took his hat off. He said, mister Lambert, if you want to sell that cabinet, I'll give you 1000 pounds in cash. And then he got into the car. Well, I'm only telling you this because I just said, oh yes, that'll be very useful. [00:45:50] Because I thought it might be good for one of the young marrieds. [00:45:55] I thought it was. Well, I thought, you know, it, perhaps we won't go in Halford House, you know, thing. But anyway, that's just the thing that thrilled me was the swing chair. And all the way home I chuckled in the train tea and wait till I tell them. Wait till I tell them. We waited three months and now to why do we have to wait three minutes? Why does the Lord keep us waiting for these? The mystery of the Lord's sovereignty is extraordinary. It's amazing. Well, I got in of course the next morning and I told the folks that were here. And we all had a laugh and praised the Lord. And I said, oh, it's a lovely swing chair. And then I went out into the town and went down to Mister Ellis. Now, Mister Ellis at that time had a shop, most of you know, in Duke street, right on the end on the Richmond Green. He had a little bargain shop and then a very posh part. And underneath the bargain basement, well, there was a great pantechnic. And all this stuff was going out into the shop. And they were just pulling a lady out from under a double mattress that had fallen on her in the cellar. As I was talking with Mister Ellis at the top of the stairs, two men came in with a swing chair. Half in, half out. They said, oh, Mister Ellis, what are we going to do with this swing chair? And the police was jam packed. He pushed his hat back on his head and he turned around and he said, mister Lamb, do you want a swing chair? And I said, mister Ellis, are you giving it to me? No. He said, four pounds. Oh, I said, that's a gift. It was beautiful. I said, yes, yes, yes, we'll have that. Put it back on. He said, take it up to Albert house. Done. So then I thought to myself, two swing chairs, lord, I said to you, if you see it as a necessity, give us a swing chair. [00:47:29] But you haven't heard the funny thing. I came buzzing back here and we were all having lunch downstairs and laughing about this thing. Oh, isn't that wonderful? Isn't the Lord amazing what humor the Lord has? When the phone rang and I went to the phone and a terribly posh voice said, this is Harold. [00:47:46] Yes, I said, and the voice said, is the leader of christian fellowship a mister. Lt. Lambert? Yes, I said, speaking. Oh, she said, thank you. Is the address Christian Fellowship in Richmond? Halford House, Halford Road, Richmond, Surrey. Yes, I said, thank you very much. I'm sorry to bother you. Just wait. I said, what's all this? Oh, she said, don't you know? [00:48:09] We have a client who has a swing chair, but she's decided not to have it recovered. And when we asked what we were to do with her swing chair, she said, oh, but there was a work in Richmond, a mister. Lambert and Mister Lt. Lambert. Halford House in Richmond. She was sure they would be glad to have it. We had three swing chairs. We had to give one away. [00:48:34] At that time we had only a little bit of garden. We just hadn't got place for three swing chairs. But we laughed and laughed and laughed at the fatherhood of God that when we said to him, if you see it as a necessity, Lord, give us a swing chair. But he gave us three swing chairs and we had to give one away. [00:48:53] These kind of things made us really sort of amazed. I remember we had an extraordinary old gentleman. Some of you will remember him. I can't remember his name but I think David Potter will remember probably his name because I think it was David who first introduced him to us. He was a piano tuner, but he was one of the eccentrics of this area. He was a most lovable man, most solemn. But he would tell you exactly what he thought about any given piano. It didn't matter if it was the most cherished possession you had. He would tell you, this piano is rubbish. [00:49:32] And then he would proceed to tune it and charge for it. But he would tell you this, for instance, the little one in the library. He said, rubbish, rubbish. He said, I'd burn it if I had it. But he tuned it each time. He said, I'd go in for an upright. These little thingies said they're just to go in for people's fancies and frills. Now you see, one day he suddenly came to. He said, I don't understand why people think old pianos are good. He said, old pianos are like old cars. He said, they deteriorate every day. You have them. [00:50:09] I've never forgotten that. I can't remember his name. But anyway, he suddenly said one day came in great excitement, Mister Lambert, and said, I have been tuning a piano for some years in Nisleworth which he said, I feel would be best here in this place. [00:50:26] He said, now I have been asked by the gentleman if you would be interested in having it now. He said, I don't feel I can tell you. It was very old fashioned, candida. And he said, I feel I can't break any confidences but it belongs to one of the highest families in the country and so on. It is an old piano. But he said, on this occasion I can tell you that it would be very suitable for you and they only want 30 pounds. [00:50:52] So I said well, could we go and say yes? He gave me the address and off we went. Well, of course we saw this piano. This piano was made by Sir Edward Cassil's for Lady Edwina, Countess Mountbatten. When she married the Earl Mountbatten, it was a present. Of course, Lady Edwina was jewish. The castles were jewish. And this family, this family, this was a family piano. This man was the butler for Lady Edwina. And when Lady Edwina, Countess Mountbatten died suddenly in Singapore, I think it was. [00:51:34] She left this piano when the house was all carved up. This piano was left to the butler and he had it in his small little home in Isleworth. It literally took about two thirds of his front room. And he didn't really wanted it to go because his wife wanted it to go. But he sort of didn't really. But he said, you know, if I thought it was going into a good home, I'd be very happy. And that's how we got this incredible piece of furniture for 30 pounds. Now, those are just a few little examples, samples, really, of the kind of things God did. [00:52:20] We apologize to the listener. But the end of side two is missing from the master tape.