Grandpa Stead, the Brave
When you're 235 feet up a ship’s mast above a raging sea, hanging on to a lump of wood and being thrown from side to side by the heaving iron ship underneath you, I reckon you can call yourself brave.
My grandfather Charlie Stead (pronounced 'Sted') did that for a living. He was ship’s carpenter in the Royal Navy in the late 1800s. His ship was the HMS Comus, a three-masted barque, fully-armed, with coal-powered steam engine. She was commissioned for service, with 19-year-old Charlie on board, on October 23rd, 1879. He served on her for four years and for much of the time in the South China Sea.
And if some bit of rigging up one of the three masts got itself wrenched out of gear, he was the one who went up there to fix it.
I learned a little of the sort of man he was from my mother, the second of five girls in the family, whom I remember pestering for stories ‘about when you were a little girl’. One of these was about the mornings he would go into the girls’ room when they were small, load as many of them as he could manage on arms and shoulders and amid their shrieks of laughter and pretended terror go flying down the two flights of stairs with his feet seeming to slither over the edge of each stair, then into the morning room where he would dump them in a heap on to the big, plump sofa.
My own memory of him was a man in his middle fifties, a Plymouth Brother of the most exclusive strain, patrician, gentle, funny, quietly-suited, slightly portly, wearing a snow-white wing collar and tie and a Homburg, with a gold watch-chain and pince-nez.
I have those pince-nez now; one of our granddaughters used to like trying them on. I would tell her they did not fit her but she could not agree. On a top shelf in front of me I have his tattered, marbled-cover diary.
When he left the Royal Navy he was known all over Ramsgate both for the soundness of his work as a builder and decorator and for his charity of character.
In Ramsgate he would move the family from one house to another, re-fitting and decorating each one, inside and out, and then put it up for sale. The final house in Hollicondane Road he built himself and there the family grew up and lived until they were well into adulthood. Whenever I stayed with them as a 7 - 10 year-old he would take me to his workroom. It smelt of wood, paint and turps and whenever I smell those things now they remind me of his precise gilt lettering on half-finished black shop fascias leaning, drying, against the wall and smaller oak-grained panels for genteel Ramsgate front gates and on bows and sterns of ocean-going ships.
The signwriter in him could be seen in his handwriting; every letter, every quick note, was written in copperplate script. It was something that I admired. I wanted to write like that myself but I knew I never would. For as well as being a stammerer I was left-handed and no left-handed man on earth could possibly get anywhere near that beautiful right-sloping script.
One memory is of a visit he made to us. Someone suggested a trip over to the Ruislip Reservoir, a quiet place surrounded then by green pastures and reached in an hour or so on the 158 London Transport Bus. We went, and Grandpa, having selected the best of the skiffs from the little yard, helped us both on board and took charge of the oars. After pulling for some ten minutes, slowly and rhythmically, he began to recite the whole of the 23rd Psalm. I hear his voice now, quiet, as though he was thinking aloud, the words beautifully enunciated. The lake was silent; sheep grazed by the shore, and we listened.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff
they comfort me.
Within weeks of that visit he became ill and in the middle of the morning on October 26, 1936, the telegraph boy knocked on the Venetian-red front door of our new Bushey house. My mother opened it and took the little yellow envelope. The boy touched his cap and left. The telegram said, simply, ‘Father much worse. Chris.’ He died the next day, aged 76.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010