Ninety-two years ago Vic Grimwood was born off the Old Kent Road, in Darwin Street, where he spent a childhood with his brother and sister and parents, writes Michael Holland…
Mum stayed home to bring up the family while dad worked on an uncle’s paper pitch. When Vic was old enough he started a paper round with them and that was the start of his money-earning days.
‘I used to get seven shillings a week for that,’ Vic remembers vividly. His education came from Paragon School in the days when you stayed in one place. ‘I went when I was three,’ he says, ‘and stayed there until I left at 15.’ Vic didn’t like school – He wanted to get out to work.
Games played in the buildings with friends were Tin Can Copper and Jimmy Jimmy Knacker, a SE London favourite that involved jumping on one boy until he collapsed to the floor. But in between having fun there was a few quid to be earnt. ‘We used to get wood from the ruins, chop it into firewood and sell it for sixpence a bowl.’
Those were the days when everyone had open fires and shops sold firewood. Vic’s gang would be cheaper than the local tradesman and they had a system: ‘One bloke used to chop it up and we’d take it round the flats to sell to the women’.
Family holidays was hop-picking in Kent. It was a way to earn extra money and it was great for kids to get out in the country.
When war came Vic got evacuated to Sussex and stayed there for two years. There was a short return home when the skies became less dangerous but when the Luftwaffe again began their bombing campaign, Vic went to Staffordshire and stayed with a mining family. ‘They were very good to me,’ he recalls. ‘I was only there a year but they cried when I came home!’
Vic remembers the Doodlebugs and rockets: ‘We used to go up on our roof to watch them,’ he says with all the excitement of a boy off to a firework display.’ ‘We used to watch our Spitfires try to intercept the Doodlebugs by tipping up the flying bomb’s wing with theirs.’
The main attraction was watching where they landed so Vic could go and collect any scrap from the bomb site and shrapnel from the missiles, and sell it.
At the war’s end the Grimwoods holidayed in various caravan sites in the South-East. After leaving school and the firewood business behind, Vic’s first job was with an electrician rewiring a house in Manor Place but that ended when the electrician ‘went off to be a copper in The Borough!’ Vic was not happy about that.
A succession of jobs in construction followed until, at 16, an uncle got him in the docks. ‘They gave me a barrow and a broom and told me clean the warehouses.’ He paused. ‘That was one pound, nineteen shillings a week.’
In the pubs on his manor – The Bricklayers Arms, The Hand & Marigold, The Horseshoe and The George, that he and his mates would use, he said: ‘We’d have a pound whip – and it lasted all night!’
One day Vic went off to Korea to do his National Service where he was placed with the Commonwealth Division and given the responsibility of loading and unloading boats with a team of Koreans who had escaped the North. ‘These refugees had nothing,’ he says, while showing me a photo album from his time there. ‘They slept where they could.’
Vic trained them up to be good dockers, which meant everything they stole had to go through him. Hard work and little pay had taught Vic a lesson in life.
On his return, Vic went back to Cotton Wharf and became a proper docker, which he did for 28 year. ‘We were all thieves,’ he claims. ‘We’d nick anything to earn a pound note… I remember a nice earner we had once’. He licked his Rizla, lit his roll-up and proceeded to tell the tale…
A story followed of a huge amount of copper that would have been difficult to walk out the gate with: While they were unloading the barge it was on they hid some under the floorboards so that when the checker came round it appeared empty. The lighterman whose barge it was then took it over to Bow where the gang of scoundrels could safely take the contraband away to a scrap dealer. There were other stories of bars of silver going missing, mercury, and ‘gammon and bacon off the Danish boats’.
With money in his pocket Vic would enjoy Talent Nights in some of the local pubs or ‘go up the pictures’. One night he and a mate met two girls in a pub in Blackfriars Road. That lucky meeting led to Vic marrying Betty Searle and his mate wed the other girl.
Betty was an excellent roller skater and was in the American Hell Cats roller derby team who participated at Harringay Arena in the 1950s. They even invited her back to the States but Betty declined their offer.
Vic and Betty would dance the night away at the Assembly Hall in Neptune Street but while Vic never took up roller-skating, Betty changed from C of E to Catholic to keep Vic’s religious aunts happy and get married in a Catholic Church.
They spent much of their married life in Dover Flats, in the Old Kent Road, where they had children Victor and Christine: ‘I was earning a few bob from the docks in various ways, so our holidays were now in Spain, Italy, South of France, Corsica, Cyprus…’
In the 70s the London docks and wharves were closing down. One day Vic saw an advert for messengers, applied and passed the interview. ‘It was the best thing I ever done,’ he declares. ‘In the docks you never knew if you had work from one day to the next. At this job I had plenty of work. I went from messenger, to post room, to the print room and I loved it. I was still working when I was 70-odd!’
When the children grew up, Vic and Betty moved to Rotherhithe in one of the new builds that replaced the old docks and wharves. It has a beautiful view of the Thames where Vic had spent a lot of his working life.
In recent years Vic lost both his children and his beloved Betty. His mobility is not as good as it was but his mind is as lively as ever. He is as happy as he can be and is satisfied with a steady supply of roll-ups, old films and horse racing on the telly, and life on the busy river creating a constantly changing view outside.
