George William Eustace Henry Carver was my father.
He always signed his name G.H. Carver, but everyone called him Bill. Unless my mother was admonishing him for something and then she called him William.
Baptism entry in the Oxted Parish Church register for W.G.E.H Carver, Bill Carver, living in School Lane, his father was a milkman at this point in time. (National Archives via Ancestry.com)
Bill was born on 22nd May 1912 in the village of Oxted, Surrey. It was a village but is now probably a small town. His parents were Clarence Carver and Ada Spillett. Clarence, my grandfather, was born in Lodsworth, on the Sussex – Surrey border. He came from an agricultural background and arrived in Oxted to become a Groom on a local estate. Ada was the daughter of Henry Spillett and his first wife, Ada Willis. The latter had moved from Bognor Regis where Henry had been struggling with his business running a pub and wheel wright trade on the same premises.
The earliest image of Bill Carver, a baby in his mother’s arms with Clarence Carver, his father, standing behind the chair. (From the author’s collection).
Ada and Clarence settled into a cottage on School Lane in Oxted after they married and shortly after Bill was born, Clarence signed up with the Queens Regiment and spent much of the First World War in India.
Bill had two younger brothers, John, and Kenneth. The two younger brothers lived mainly in the Oxted area, specifically Limpsfield for most of their lives, whereas Bill was more of a nomad living in more places than I could ever have imagined, totalling over twenty locations of which I only ever lived in five during my life at home.
Bill Carver with his mother and two brothers. Bill is on the left, John on the right and Kenneth is on his mother’s lap. This photo was taken in 1917. (Photo from the author’s collection.)
Bill had a village upbringing. After the First World War, his father became a Labourer for a while before joining the new London Transport company and was a Bus Inspector for most of his career. When Bill left school, he earned his income by cleaning buses. I am uncertain where the bus depot would have been, but I am guessing closer to Limpsfield.
Bill’s social life included dances at the barracks in Caterham and this is where he met my mother, Grace Wilcox.
Grace was the daughter of Grace Walker and William Wilcox, and she was born in Acton. Her parents were in the Dairy trade. For some reason Grace’s parents decided to move to Surrey and after working in the Surrey Hills they eventually arrived in Caterham and lived in Roffe’s Lane running a dairy there. Grace, my mother, wanted to stay in London and she lived in lodgings where she completed her studies at a technical college and became a Clerk. Homesickness struck and she left London to rejoin her parents and sisters.
At the Caterham dances, Bill met Grace, they fell in love and ran away to get married. It was never made clear to me by my parents why they had to run away. My only assumption is that one or both sets of their parents would have been disapproving.
They were married at Reigate Registry Office in July 1932. They asked a couple of strangers on the street to be their witnesses.
Bill in 1932, the year he married Grace. He was 20 years old.
From this point Bill and Grace Carver’s hectic life began. During the following twenty-five years, they had a family of seven children, four of whom are still alive. They also pursued a working life that would by modern day standards seem exhausting.
From memory their occupations were:
- Door to door fruit and vegetable sellers
- Tizer salesman, driving a lorry.
- United Dairies milkman with a horse and cart
- Manager of a dairy in Soho, London
- Manager of a Threshers Wine Store in South Croydon
- Served in the Army on searchlights in Essex.
- Manager of a Dairy in the Brighton Road, Redhill
- Owners of the Black and White Café in Brighton Road, Redhill
- Licensed Turf Accountant (Book Maker) Redhill – working from home
- Hotelier and Publican, Bexhill on Sea
- Publican, Stratford Broadway, East London.
- Licensed Book Maker, Betting Shop, Brighton Road, Redhill
Bill had bought a van and he and Grace travelled to a London Vegetable Market each morning and bought one variety of fruit or vegetable, drove to Redhill, and went door to door selling the produce until it was sold out.
Moving to Edmonton where the Wilcox’s had moved to run a Dairy, Bill and Grace had to find work and Bill joined the Tizer company as a long-distance salesman and driver.
From my mother’s notes I discovered that Bill had an accident while driving the Tizer lorry and lost his nerve to continue. This led them to go into the Dairy business and Bill became a milkman with a horse and cart in Edmonton. Bill then applied to become a dairy manager in Soho, London.
Bill did not enjoy life in Soho because of the accommodation they had in Green’s Yard. Apparently it was infested with bed bugs that made Bill ill. They found a new job with Thresher’s Wine Shop in Croydon that had a cottage attached to the shop. Bill was then conscripted and became part of a company responsible for searchlights in Essex. For a year or two my mother joined him there and remembers living in a small cottage near Maldon, and this is where one of my sisters was born.
Bill, a soldier in the Royal Artillery, in 1940, aged 28. (Photo from author’s collection).
After leaving the Army in 1941, Bill managed a Dairy in Redhill before buying the Black and White Café in Brighton Road, Redhill. During the café years, Bill was asked on occasions for the use of his telephone by some of his travelling customers who had credit accounts with London Bookmakers. He noticed that they did not always win. Bill decided that he could make an additional living out of taking his customers bets – illegally.
Until Betting shops were licensed in 1961, the only off course betting on horse and dog racing was via a credit account with a licensed Turf Accountant. The only way to have a bet off course was by telephone. Bill operated his mini bookies at the back of the café. After the war, with a growing family and the need for a larger house to live in, Bill moved his family to 59, Ladbroke Road in Redhill. He then applied to the Reigate Borough Council for a Bookmakers licence. In their wisdom, the Council only ever allowed two licences for the whole town. Bill was successful in getting the vacant remaining one. The other was held by a firm called Inkpens.
Bill and Grace in their evening dress and suit. This picture was taken in the back lounge of 59 Ladbroke Road in the ‘nouveau riche’ days of the bookmaking business. During the 1950’s Bill and Grace had occasional cocktail parties (drinks and canapes!) for the clients and associated friends.
Bill opened his office in the front room of the new house. He had a desk custom made in the bay window to accommodate several telephones and the paraphernalia for taking bets over the phone, and for settling the bets.
On course bookmakers always had a clerk who had a large format spreadsheet, or ‘book’ on which, once the bookmaker had called out the bet that he had taken, would write it into the appropriate column and keep a running total on each horse so that he could advise the bookmaker on whether to change the price on the horse, or not. The ‘book’ always had to balance so that any losses were minimised. An outsider horse winning with less money on it was always a ‘turnup for the book’.
Some of the betting equations were difficult to calculate quickly and so Bill had a Ready Reckoner from which he would be able to make his settling of bets easier. He was not alone. My mother was always there in the afternoon to assist him. Bill was reasonably well known in the town, and it was not long before he began to acquire a good number of clients. My brother Peter told me that he considered this period of Bill’s life as his arrival amongst the ‘nouveau riche’. It was in the first decade after the war and there was a vibrant atmosphere in the UK. The Festival of Britain in 1951 and the Coronation of 1953 all added to that. From 1948 to 1958 Bill ran Redhill Racing Service from, firstly, the front room of his house, and then not long after, he acquired the rent on a house come office at the bottom of Ladbroke Road, next to the Yorkshire Fish and Chip Shop.
Bill in 1951, aged 39. This photo was amongst a collection of family pictures, quite why it was taken Bognor, I have no idea, unless photographers in seaside towns were taken advantage of the Festival outside of London. (From the author’s collection)
During the summer, there was always evening racing and Bill would be in his office from mid-morning until 9pm at night. My mother often plated his evening meal up, put a lid on it and placed in a basket that hung from the handlebar of my scooter, I would roll down the road with it to his office for him.
Bill and Grace with their daughter, Janet. I think this photo may have been taken during the Coronation year of 1953. It was possibly taken on the steps leading down to the Mall. Janet would have been aged 11. (From the author’s collection)
In 1957, Bill and Grace announced that they wanted to take up a new profession. Apparently, they had always wanted to run a little hotel, or bed and breakfast, in a seaside town. They bought, as tenants, the York Hotel in Bexhill – on – Sea, in Sussex. Bexhill is a short journey along the coast from Hastings. It was made famous in one of Spike Milligan’s autobiographical books, he was stationed there in the army during the war.
The York Hotel was not small by any means and took a lot of hard work to maintain. Only I and my two younger brothers went with Bill and Grace. My eldest brother took over the running of the Bookmakers and this gave a roof to another brother and sister who were working locally near Redhill.
My recollection of Bexhill and the York Hotel was generally good. For the first time in my life I began to earn pocket money by helping Bill at weekends with getting crates of beer up to the bar on a moving platform that was hand cranked from the cellar. Running a pub was a novelty. I’m not sure that Bill had many hotel guests during the year. Probably because the hotel was a couple of miles back from the seafront.
After two years at the York Hotel, I think Bill and Grace realised that they might have been given false hope with regards the business by the brewery. They decided to sell up and in 1960 Bill took us all to London where he had bought the tenancy of the King Edward VII pub on Stratford Broadway. Stratford in East London was a wonderful East End suburb with traditional markets and market streets plus the famous Stratford East Theatre. The King Edward had started out at the end of the 19th Century as the King of Prussia. Once the First World War started, protestors threw bricks in the windows and so the name of the pub was changed. Amusingly, locals who used the public bar of the King Edward still called it the Prussia in 1960.
Two years later, I think Bill was exhausted. Running a pub is not a job, it’s a vocation, seven days a week. All day. There was obviously a family discussion that I would not have been aware of, and it was agreed that Bill would sell the pub and rejoin his eldest son to return to Redhill Racing Services. Bill bought a small semi-detached house in Linnell Road, Redhill. By this time, 1962, betting shops had been legalised. They bought their one and only shop, in Brighton Road. Although my brother later decided to leave the partnership, Bill with Grace’s help, ran the betting shop until about 1978 when they retired from the business.
Bill and Grace outside the Redhill Racing Services Betting Shop on Brighton Road in Redhill. This picture was taken in 1978, the year that they retired. (Photo from the author’s collection)
Bill and Grace sold their house in Linnell Road and moved to a mobile home in Lower Kingswood up beyond Reigate Hill. They were very happy there and although some of the family thought it was a bit isolated, it became their longest spell of home life in the whole of their marriage. One of my sisters realised that the longer they lived there the more difficult it would be to care for them in later life. She persuaded them to move to a sheltered flat in Eastbourne, close to where she and my other sister lived and to a brother in Brighton. They moved in 1996.
Later that year, Bill died of cancer of the tongue. I saw him for the last time two weeks before he died. He was frail and not at all happy with the state he was in. He had occasional respite care at a local hospice and MacMillan Nurses were being introduced. This was too late for him, and he died before they could come in to care for him.
Bill died at home which was a blessing of sorts. It was a lonely climb up a hill for Grace to visit him in the hospice when he was there.
I feel exhausted just reminding myself of his extraordinary life and the energy that he and Grace must have had to achieve everything they did.
Bill’s ashes remained on top of a dresser for the next ten years until Grace died in 2006. But that is another story.
Newspaper cutting from the Surry Mirror, 1996.