| 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 £100 each. They got these from a local dealer, and Mr. Grantham says with feeling, "they made 27% profit on them in those days". The old rullies used to cost £25, and they had those made in Cottingham. With the modernisation of oil-lamps and solid tyres they began do less carrying and more removals being able to go further from Cottingham than before. Later in 1927 they replaced the oil-lamps with electric lighting, and so were able to go even further afield for business. Gradually, as firms for which they had previously carried obtained their own transport and as the gentry faded, the carrying gave way totally to removals. There was no one needing twenty bottles of wine carrying from Hull for delivery, and the market gardens no longer needed to employ a carrier to take lettuce etc., to market.
From 1927 the firm continued to modernise its vehicles, and Mr Grantham worked in Cottingham Carriers under his father. Then war broke out again, and the two Granthams found themselves very busy with removals from bomb-damaged houses in Hull. They removed from many bombed areas, taking furniture to safer relatives or to new houses from houses without roofs or some walls. They also did a lot of bed moving as people in Hull came out to Cottingham to sleep throughout the war, going back into the city to work. They also gave lifts to the workers in the mornings on their way into Hull. They moved many beds and mattresses to the King Street School Rooms, where evacuees slept. They also went to other cities, like Leeds and Sheffield to evacuate people from bombed areas. The Corporations paid for that Mr Grantham remembers. He remembers too in the days of carrying that Christmas was a busy time for his family. The front room in South Street would be stacked with parcels brought from Hull for friends and relatives in Cottingham, from there people would go and collect their Christmas presents. Mr Grantham's father worked in the business until he was 82 years old, and died after two years illness in 1962, and then Dick took over the firm. He married Mrs Grantham, who comes from the Stabeler family, an old Cottingham family like the Granthams in 1955 after the death of his mother. They had known each other all their lives, and started courting beause of the business. Mrs Grantham used to work in a fruit shop in Hull, and Grantham's used to deliver the stock!
Mr Grantham is a Congregationalist, and his wife a Wesleyan, terms which they use, not U.R.C. or even Methodist, and they married in Zion Church in Hallgate in 1955.
Mr Grantham is a mine of information about Cottingham, and loves to tell stories about its past.. He remembers the last man to have horses and carriage in the village was Colonel Goddard, and he looks back to the pre-second world war days with nostalgia, thinking that people were more sociable then, more ready to help one another. The war he sees as having changed much, people started to want to get rich then he says, a thing which he never has, nor will do. "You brought nothing into this world," says Mrs Grantham dryly, "and you're surely not going to take anything out." Work for Mr Grantham is like a hobby, not something to profit from, "Well I don't want to rob anybody" he says. He enjoys meeting people, as he has done all his life, alive and dead, for they used to move corpses in days gone by! He says that he remembers his father doing a "flit" for £1, and his sense of cost comes from that period and remains there. His sense of honest dealing comes from a long experience of what it used to cost, and he will not get away from that. He makes enough to live on, he says, and profit margins never enter his head. "I wouldn't want to rob folk", he says, and also that he is happy thinking that he doesn't "do anybody down".
Mr Grantham looks back on the days when they used to collect all the Sunday School children on the rullies and take them off to Waudby Green for an outing, when the best sports for miles were in the grounds of one of the gentry's houses. He would no more price himself into our world than fly a kite now. Mr Grantham is a good man, and he and his wife are happy people. [1]
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1910 - 1990 (~ 80 years)
d. 6 Sep 1962 (Age 86 years)