Edward (Ted) Grummitt
1910-1987

 A LITTLE BIOGRAPHY BY HIS SON ED

My father Edward, or Ted Grummitt, was born in West Street, Bourne, on 9th May 1910. His father was Tom Grummitt, a painter, carpenter and occasional coffin maker, who was as they said in those days, in business on his own account, and married to Jane (née Lane).

Ted, often known by the nickname Nibb, was the youngest of 11 children, as can be seen from the lovely portrait taken in 1913.The story goes that the photograph was first prize in a large family picture competition. The children were Helen, Tom, Fred, Georgina, Minnie, Jenny, Jessie and Connie (twins), Jack Redvers "Buller" and George Baden "White" (twins) and Edward, my Dad.

Dad suffered a terrible loss which scarred him for life when his mother Jane died a couple of years after the photo was taken. Tom Grummitt subsequently married a widow, Mrs Annie Buffham (née Flatters), who already had a son, Reg. Three more children, Eva, Ida and Geoff, were born later, meaning Tom was eventually father to 15 children and so you can imagine that in my youth, I had considerable problems identifying my father’s Bourne relatives.

In those days, children had to make their way in the world fairly swiftly. Dad told a story that his first job was acting as assistant to a chemist and horse doctor in Bourne. He held the horse while the doctor blew pills down the horse's throat through a cardboard tube.

My dad and my uncle White ganged up for the various fetes and processions taking place in Bourne; in one surviving photo (from 1938) he is dressed as a Bourne Abbey monk reading a very large book, probably not actually anything very religious.

In the 1920s, Bourne was pretty unchanged from the Victorian era and Ted probably felt he had to see a bit more of the world. After all, brother Tom had been on the dreadnought HMS Essex before the Great War of 1914-18 and brother White is believed to have signed up to the Royal Flying Corps at the age of 15. Ted seems to have somehow migrated to Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire and became a butler in a middle class household.

A little later he worked for the new Central Electricity Board, erecting the massive pylons which bestrode the countryside and formed the national grid. This job, as can be imagined, was freezing in the winter, boiling in the summer and extremely dangerous but Ted eventually left and went to work for a firm of nurserymen in Nottingham.

His father, Tom Grummitt, died in 1936, in harness, reported the Stamford Mercury, because he was sitting on his chair in the house in West Street and wearing his carpenter’s apron. Dad was obviously very upset, keeping the press cuttings for the rest of his life, but gained a measure of stability in 1941 by joining the Goodyear Tyre Company as one of their fitters at Barton Transport in Chilwell, Nottinghamshire, and it was here that he met my mother, then Hilda Ratcliffe.

Bartons were legendary for their eccentricities so Ted fitted in very well. He generally worked at their Chilwell headquarters but would sometimes go out on the road rescuing errant buses and coaches with the wrecking lorry and he can be seen in one of the photographs below with a later ex-Army AEC Matador wrecker. I believe on this occasion the crew were pulling out tree stumps to allow more bus parking. Naturally Dad’s employers, Goodyear, did not know abut these additional duties with their vehicle.

Ted and Hilda married just after the war in December 1945, and had to live with Hilda’s parents and an elderly uncle in a terraced house for seven years. I came along in 1947, which made things even cosier. Even after managing to rent a new council house in Bramcote in 1952, there were still problems. The house was damp and freezing so Ted got some coal from Bartons, shovelled it into a suitcase and took the bus home. Inevitably the case burst open when Dad left the bus and the contents were strewn all over the pavement.

Throughout this period, Ted, later joined by his family, would return to Bourne to see his various relatives. This was done until 1959 by taking the Midland and Great Northern train from Nottingham, later by train to Grantham and then a Lincolnshire bus, and eventually in my elderly Wolseley. Dad always looked out for brothers as soon as we arrived in Bourne, sometimes my uncle Fred, by this time bent with arthritis which he blamed on his time in the trenches, would appear on his bike with a quiet “All right, boy?” We would then go to see White, his wife Peggy and their children Philip, Peter and Penny, and later go round to Geoff and Jean’s round the corner. These trips became some of the most gleefully anticipated of my young life.

Heaving giant bus, and later earthmover tyres around inevitably took its toll on Ted’s back and in the late 1950s he moved to work in a local garage office where he remained until his retirement in the 1970s.

My uncle White died just before my wedding in 1978 and I think my Dad was totally bereft but we still occasionally made the trip out to Bourne. From 1952, Mum and Dad lived at Ewe Lamb Lane, Bramcote, Nottinghamshire, where he died in in 1987, aged 77, but Mum survived him until she was 95. He always had a soft spot for Bourne and used to say: "They drive me mad but I love them. You can always see an old boy on the corner surveying life as it goes by. The best thing I remember is cricket on the Abbey Lawn but it's not now like it was in my day!"

He was really great at telling tall tales and my sister Mary remembers the time when she was quite small returning to Bourne on the bus from Corby Glen or somewhere. It was chugging along at snail's pace and she asked Dad why it was so slow and he pointed out that Bourne buses were unlike any others as the driver used pedals to propel it rather than the engine. She believed this for years.

Dad was active nearly up to the end and enjoyed 12 years of retirement during which he and my Mum volunteered to help local elderly people. The fact that they were themselves elderly did not cross their minds. Their like will not be seen again.