~ Chapter Twenty-Three ~
From Store Boy to Fireman

In 1920, at the age of only thirteen, Charlie left school to begin working for Dowlings, a firm of wholesale grocers and wine importers in Margate, where he would graduate from store boy to store man over the next ten years.  Ever an industrious young man, he also worked part-time elsewhere in order to earn additional money to help support his parents’ extended family.

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            Aside from his work, Charlie had two passions at that time.  He kept a large aviary in which he bred pigeons to race with the birds of other pigeon fanciers around the UK.  His pigeons were even raced from Belgium.  His other passion was the TA, the Territorial Army, in which he served in The Buffs, the same regiment that George and Steve had rushed to join when war broke out in 1914.  This is a photograph of Charlie during his TA service in 1927.  It was taken at a camp which The Buffs shared with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.  Charlie is wearing the uniform of the Scottish regiment because he and a Highlander agreed to swap uniforms for the day.
            In 1928, twenty-one year-old Charlie married Mildred Sylvia Griggs, who was also twenty-one and better known as Sue.  The couple took rented accommodation in a flat at 12 Fitzroy Avenue in Margate.  In January 1930, Sue gave birth to twin sons, who were given the forenames of Kenneth (Ken) Charles and Leonard (Len) William.

            We are indebted to Ken for allowing us to reproduce below extracts from his own richly detailed account of the life of his father.  Ken takes up the story after the birth of the twins:
The tenancy of the flat at 12 Fitzroy Avenue did not allow young children to be resident there.  Charlie found another house to rent, a two up and two down semi-detached house with an outside toilet but no bathroom, at No. 6 Randolph Square, Cliftonville, Margate.  Despite the fact that he did not own it, he was always making home improvements.  He completely tiled the walls and the floor of the kitchen – no mean task in those days before tiling adhesive was ever heard of – and he undertook many other home improvement tasks in the house.
            Realising that he would need more money to support his new family, Charlie resigned from Dowlings in 1930 and began two new jobs.  The first was as a milkman by day for Weston Brothers' Dairies in Northdown Road in Cliftonville, which paid far better than Dowlings.  The second job was as a part-time fireman by night with the Margate Borough Fire Brigade.  This photograph of him in his fireman’s uniform was taken in 1932.

            Ken tells us more about Charlie’s two jobs:
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Part-time firemen were casual workers and they were paid a sum of money for each call-out to attend a fire, plus another hourly payment for the number of hours after the first two hours of the incident.  There were frequent fire incidents in the town and surrounding area.  Charlie was a very good fireman, noted for his courage and for taking personal risks.  He was commended many times for bravery.

             At Weston Brothers’ Dairies, he delivered milk and other dairy goods from a wooden handcart.  The handcart he pushed was rather like a small three wheeled horse cart, with one small wheel at the front and two larger wheels at the rear.  The wheels were wooden with metal rims, similar to a pony trap's wheels, and on it there were a number of huge metal milk churns.  He had to start work at 6 a.m. each day. 

             Pushing the fully laden handcart was very hard work and he had to visit all the houses in each street on his round, and run up and down the steps to the area below street level.  Outside of the rear door in the area would be a covered jug, or in the larger boarding houses/hotels, metal milk churns.  He then had to ladle out (measure) the milk into the container and deliver dairy products according to a note which had been left for him by the cook. 

             Although Charlie really had two small forms of income, financially things were still quite tight.  Margate was, and still is, a seaside town where visitors stay on holiday during the summer months, and during this time the earnings of local people could be very high, but in the winter months there was no work to be had at all.  Charlie needed an all year round occupation because he was also committed to helping to supplement the income of his parents.  In one sense, in spite of the low pay, he was lucky that he had a job as a milk delivery man at a dairy because it was regular work and he was able to buy milk, cheese, eggs and butter at a much reduced price.
            In the late 1930's, Charlie moved his family to 10 Walpole Road in Margate, a semi-detached house with four bedrooms, an inside toilet and a small family bathroom.  Sue took in lodgers during the summer months to supplement the family's income.  The adjoining semi was rented by Charlie’s elder half-sister, Nell, and her husband, George Fox, who was also a fireman.  Ken describes his family’s time at Walpole Road:
Nell was always getting into debt because she could not resist buying new dresses and shoes.  As a result, occasionally the bailiffs from the County Court would call to seize their goods.  They called at the front door, and Nell and George would hand over all their property of any value over the wall at the back of the house and Charlie and Sue would hide it in their house until the bailiffs had left.

             During the summer Sue always had the same people from London, a Mr and Mrs Greenberg, staying at the house.  They were members of staff of the Queen's Highcliffe Hotel at Cliftonville.  With their small son, they stayed with the family for the whole summer season and returned to their home in London in the winter.  The income from the lodgers was sorely missed during the winter months.

             The house at Walpole Road was on a steep hill and there was a row of 19 concrete steps which led down to the small garden at the rear which Charlie tended with care.  The family had moved to this address because it was only a very short distance from the fire station.  In fact, there was a locked door in the wall about 50 metres from the front door of the house, and when there was a fire call-out, the door was automatically unlocked.  Inside there was a shiny metal pole, down which the fireman would slide to get to the fire engines garaged below.

             Things were usually great during the summer months, the weather was good and by beachcombing the two boys were able to find coins and other items which the visiting holiday makers had left behind.  This was considered to be fair game.  However, it was known by the locals that when the visitors left their deckchairs to go into the sea some other youngsters would cover items such as a camera or other articles with a newspaper and then cover the whole thing with sand.  Invariably the visitors on their return to their chairs would either overlook the items or presume that they had already been stolen.  By keeping watch, the youngsters could see when the visitors had left the beach and they would then recover the items and either take them home or take them to the police station and hand them in against a receipt.  If not claimed, they would collect the items three months later.

             Sometimes during the winter there was not enough money for meat or other protein food and so the family tried to catch fish in pools on the rocky seashore after the tide had gone out.  On some rare occasions the family had to eat limpets or other shellfish, but in one instance the boys caught a large live dogfish which had become trapped in a pool and the family celebrated that evening by having a fish supper.

             In those days, inexpensive take-away foods consisted of faggots, roast onions and peas pudding, cold chitterlings (boiled pigs intestines), Bath chap (the rolled and smoked cheek of a pig), cheap shellfish such as mussels, whelks, cockles and believe it or not as a really special treat, local oysters, plus of course the traditional fish and chips.  When Charlie was able to afford it, the family thought it was a real treat to occasionally have one of those take-away meals for supper.  At most other times, the family's evening meal consisted mainly of a bowl with an Oxo beef stock cube dissolved in hot full cream milk with chunks of bread in it.

             Although the supper meals they ate would nowadays be thought of as rather poor fare and potentially a cardiac health nightmare, the family thoroughly enjoyed them and did not seem to suffer.  In the main the family was fit and healthy although there may have been some small amount of vitamin deficiency.  The boys did not suffer from rickets as some of the neighbours' children did.  The ailment, rickets, seems to be caused by a vitamin deficiency which causes the legs of children to become bowed.

             One day Charlie came home with one of those big white five pound notes, more than twice his weekly wage.  He said he had been approached by a newspaper reporter from the Daily Sketch to pose for a photograph pushing his milk cart and wearing a pair of roller skates.  The next day, it must have been a poor news day, there was his photograph on the front page of the Daily Sketch and the story said that he was the fastest milkman in Margate because he did his milk round wearing roller skates.  It was total nonsense, of course, but it seems to have sold newspapers.

             Charlie rented an allotment at Dane Park, about one and a half miles from the family home, and to fertilize it he decided to use seaweed.  When broken down, seaweed is a good fertilizer, because it contains nitrogen and iodine and, more importantly, it is free.  He built a large wooden barrow which was supported on two cycle wheels, and his boys were tasked to go to the beach and load it up with wet seaweed and take it to the allotment. It was really hard work for two 7 - 8 year olds to take these loads well over three miles.  His father-in-law, John Griggs, a widower, had retired by this time.  He sometimes slept in a shed on the allotment during the afternoons, but he helped Charlie to manage the allotment at other times.  When they were in season, the allotment soil always seemed to produce a good crop of vegetables.

             One hot summer evening in around 1937, Charlie’s twin boys were playing with kites near to the large permanent funfair park at Margate known as “Dreamland”.  To add to the fun, they tied some rolls of toy pistol caps to the tail of the kite and set fire to them so that they would pop as the kite ascended and the length of the pistol cap roll burned.  They believed the kite would fall to the ground, but what they had not reckoned with was that the kite too might catch fire and plunge to earth.  Unfortunately this did happen and one of the burning kites fell into the dried scrub at the base of the wooden struts of the scenic railway, setting the whole on fire.  The fire destroyed quite a large area of the funfair park and there was a lengthy investigation carried out by the police regarding this so called deliberate act of “arson”.

             Charlie was called out to this fire and he was told by the police that two boys had been seen to run away, but he did not connect it with his own youngsters.  It wasn't until they were both in the services that they dared to confess to him that they were responsible for this non-deliberate accidental fire.
            As soon as the war with Nazi Germany was declared in September 1939, Charlie volunteered for the Army, but was turned down.  As a result of a problem with his feet – a condition known as “hammer toes”, in which his small toes overlapped the others – he was graded as unfit for active service.  Undeterred, he promptly enlisted as a full-time member of the regular Margate Borough Fire Brigade, thus embarking on a career in fire safety that would last the best part of forty years.