| Notes |
- An article in the Parish Magazine states:
Walter Hall Grantham may not be a name which everyone recognises immediately but many people will know "Dick" Grantham, the removal man who lives in South Street, opposite the end of Oakdene. Mr. Grantham and his family have been carriers and removers in Cottingham for many years, and people will know Dick Grantham as the remover who does the job well, and at an exceptionally low price. He came to be called "Dick" after being baptised Walter Hall because his father's name was Walter, as those who remember the days of horse drawn rullies will know from the sign "W. W. Grantham", which the family's vehicles bore for years, and to avoid confusion his family called the younger Walter "Dick". The name stuck and most people think that is his real name. Dick Grantham was born in 1910, in the house in which he and his wife now live, into a family of four children.- he has two sisters, and had an elder brother. He has never moved from the house, nor done any other job other than removals and carrying. His two sisters live away from Cottingham and his elder brother was tragically killed in a road accident in Hull Road by a motor cycle. The accident affected his mother deeply, and Mr Grantham remembers that she was never the same after it. This happened while they were on the job, but it didn't end the business.
Dick Grantham went to school in Hallgate in 1915 in the middle of the first world war, where he stayed until he was 14 years old. However, he didn't have a clean attendance record as he relates with a chuckle, because he used to have odd days off to help in the family business with his father and, brother. His father had horses and rullies (flat four-wheeled dray lorries) in those days and the business was mainly carrying rather than removals, the population being less mobile than later when people began to move far more. They carried goods for the "gentry" as he calls them, who lived in the big houses of Cottingham, and also under the name "Cottingham Carriers" ran something analogous to a postal service from Hull to Cottingham. They used to pick up parcels in Hull and bring them to Cottingham either for people to collect from the house in South Street or to be taken out by another firm of carriers in Cottingham. They also used to bring washing to Cottingham from the big houses in Hull, as Cottingham then housed many washer-women. This laundry came from the big houses in the Newland Park area, and was collected on Mondays in large baskets to be returned after Cottingham labour had done its bit to it on Saturdays. Mr Grantham remembers one woman in Finkle Street who took in four large baskets per week to wash in those days.
When he was 14 years old Dick Grantham went into the family business full time, and has remained in it ever since. That was still in the days of the horsedrawn rullies. When he was 17 years old in 1927 he remembers the firm getting its first motor-rullies, which had oil-lamps and solid tyres , they generally had two at a time of these new vehicles, the cost of each being [1]
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1910 - 1990 (~ 80 years)
d. 6 Sep 1962 (Age 86 years)