Nigel Simms (23 Sep 1929 - 25 Dec 2019)

Ernest Nigel Brett Simms was born on 23rd September 1929 in Kent Street, Grimsby, the youngest of eight children. At some time during his childhood he moved to Grant Street in the East Marsh, in what was (and still is) one of the poorest districts in the country. He always used to say that everyone could leave their doors wide open all day and nothing would get stolen, but that was probably because no-one had anything worth stealing. Nevertheless he seems to have had a happy childhood. One of the highlights was going to the cinema with his friends, and on Saturday mornings in particular he would enjoy the cartoons and Laurel and Hardy, a love that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He was probably not the cinema’s ideal patron, because one of his favourite occupations was going up into the circle and dropping peanuts onto the heads of people in the stalls below.
Nigel’s mum was a cook, and during the War she was the cook for the American base stationed in Grimsby. This meant that wartime food rationing largely passed my dad by: the Americans always seemed to have unlimited supplies of the best of everything, and a lot of this found its way onto the Simms family table. Nigel left school at the age of fourteen. He hadn’t been the most successful of pupils, but he had been outstanding at maths: so much so, that during maths lessons he was sent out to water the garden, because he already knew everything they were teaching. He got his first job in a bakery, and had to get up very early in the morning to bake the bread. Throughout his life he was a hopeless cook, but he could bake bread, and he always liked to get up early in the morning. He also had an unofficial second job as a bookie’s runner, for which his maths skills came in very handy. He would run between bookies and their clients, taking bets in one direction and winnings (if there were any) in the other, dodging the local policeman along the way.
At the age of eighteen Nigel was called up for National Service, and spent most of it stationed in Austria. It was his only real experience of a foreign country, and his abiding memory of the locals was of a never-ending coffee pot that they would share with him. He was very athletic, and was a member of his division’s running team. He was trained as a silver service waiter in the officers’ mess, and this began a lifelong interest in formal etiquette. This was useful to me when I went to Cambridge, which was a very formal place in those days: thanks to my dad, I was able to give the correct form of reply to an invitation to afternoon sherry.
After the war Nigel went out in search of a permanent job. There was a shortage of labour, so jobs were easy to find: you just went down to the docks and asked for one, which is what my dad did. He was given a job as a plate layer (railway labourer) on the docks railways, working for the newly-nationalised British Transport Docks Board, which in the 1980s was denationalised as Associated British Ports. Over the years Nigel steadily worked up the ranks, from plate layer to sub-ganger to ganger to sub-inspector, and finally to inspector. At each stage he positively refused promotion at first, and had to be pushed into accepting it. He didn’t like responsibility, and he didn’t like supervising other people, although actually he was very good at it, and management could tell, which is why they kept inviting him to apply.
As a young man Nigel had a lot of personal vanity. He would always go out in an immaculately pressed suit with a starched handkerchief in the breast pocket, and he wouldn’t sit down on the bus for fear of creasing his trousers. (The effect was spoilt once, though, when he fell into the boating lake at Cleethorpes.) He was a member of the Amateur Weightlifting Association, and the muscles in his arms were so big he was nicknamed “Popeye” at work. Nigel was also a member of a local darts club till the mid-1960s, which he attended every Wednesday night, and won various prizes (a biscuit barrel is the one I remember).
In those days the place to go was the Gaiety Dance Hall in Welholme Road, Grimsby. The women would go early in the evening, and the men would turn up for the last half hour after the pubs shut at ten o’clock. It was there that my dad met my mum, Olive. Once they had become sufficiently friendly, Olive invited Nigel round to tea at her parents’ house. He turned up late, and was sent away with a flea in his ear. Despite this setback, Nigel persevered in his courtship, and on New Year’s Day 1955 Olive and Nigel were married, at St Michael’s Church, Littlecoats, Grimsby. New Year’s Eve was Nigel’s favourite time of the year, and he had spent it drinking Bell’s whisky with his friends, so he was a little worse for wear. It was when he was signing the register that Olive discovered he had a third forename, Brett.
Nigel was one of the few people to get on well with my mum’s father. His name was Lawrence, but my dad called him Horace. They shared an interest in horse racing, and once took an ill-fated trip to the Grand National meeting – it poured with rain all day. Every Saturday they would study form in the Daily Mirror and pick winners (losers, actually). My dad would walk round to the bookie’s in his slippers to put the bets on. Many years later my dad’s favourite bet was a Lucky Heinz 57 accumulator. He always told me he’d give me half if he won it, but it never was “Lucky”: of the £3.64 stake, typically he’d get the 64p back and £3.00 would go to the bookmaker.
Olive and Nigel spent two years living in Sherwood Road Grimsby. They didn’t like it, so they sold up and moved in with Olive’s parents in Bradley Road till they could find somewhere else. Fortunately a bungalow came up for sale across the road, which they bought, and where they were to live for some twenty-five years. They wanted to have children immediately, but medical science didn’t understand human fertility to the extent it does today, and you just had to take pot luck as to if and when a child came along, so it was 1961 before I was born. I was originally going to be called Paul, but a woman in Sherwood Road had a child called Paul whom she would shout very loudly – Pooorrrl! – and this put them off, so I was given another single-syllable name, so it couldn’t be shortened.
Nigel worked long hours, so my very first memories of my dad were of a slightly strange man whom I’d meet each day before going to bed. It was only when I started school that he really came into his own as a dad. What really stands out for me was Saturday mornings, when as a treat I’d be allowed to take my mum’s place in my parents’ bed while my mum made my dad’s favourite bacon, eggs and tomato (with white bread to mop up the tinned tomato juice). I would bring with me my soft toys, and he would give them personalities and make up stories about them as he went along. I would laugh so hard I would almost fall out of the bed.
In the summer time I would help my dad cut the front and back lawns to the bungalow. Nigel was very proud of the front lawn, and it was always given the best possible treatment to keep it looking immaculate. He also put in a lot of work – way beyond the call of duty – keeping my mum’s parents’ garden nice, which involved cutting a lot of hedges and bushes by hand, among other things. Highlights of the year for me were when he took me to Cleethorpes, or the fair, or to the Grimsby Hospitals Carnival in People’s Park. We also went on our bikes a lot to various recreation grounds, especially the Boulevard off Boulevard Avenue and Corporation Road, and we used to play football a lot on what we called Bradley Pitches (officially Bradley Recreation Ground), or go on the swings in Bradley Woods. At harvest time there always used to be a massive pile of left-over straw in a ditch at the far end of the playing fields, and I used to love it when he’d throw me in it over and over again till he was exhausted. We used to have a lot of snow in winter in those days, and my dad would drag me around the playing fields on a sledge till we were absolutely frozen.
When I was eight I was having difficulty learning how to swim, so my dad took me to Grimsby Dolphins Swimming Club, which met at Grimsby Swimming Pool (on Scartho Road) every Tuesday evening, and they taught me. He was pressed into service as an instructor there himself, where he remained for some ten years. Although he always refused to take a formal qualification, he was a natural with the kids, and was highly valued by both the Club and the parents.
Occasionally my dad would take me into his work. This was always very exciting. At a very young age I got to operate a real crane, and a real JCB, and drive a real dump truck (there wasn’t much sense of Health and Safety in those days). My dad would walk the track checking it, and I would follow him. One day I kept finding coins along the sleepers. I was very lucky – they must have fallen off a train or something. Of course, I later found that my dad had been secretly dropping them for me to find. Whenever my dad came to a signal box he would call in and have a cup of tea out of a tin mug with the signalman, so I got to change the points when a train was coming (again, a Health and Safety nightmare by today’s standards, but they were only slow-moving goods trains).
Once Nigel became Inspector he had no-one to check up on him, so he could take a few liberties with his time. A favourite hobby was collecting and dealing in small antiques and bric-a-brac. By this time he was working at Immingham Dock on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and at Grimsby Docks on Tuesdays. Every Tuesday he would sneak out to Jackson, Green and Preston’s auction, where he would compete with the local junk shop owners in bidding for house clearance boxes and the like. He would then sort through them and sell the best items for a profit on the Docks, and put the rest back in the auction. He also enjoyed scavenging on the tip just outside Immingham Dock for choice items, and (slightly more respectably) going to car boot sales.
Once he became Inspector Nigel was no longer required to do manual work, but he still carried on with the heavy lifting as before, and no-one could persuade him to stop. He would never, ever, stand by and watch while other people did the hard work.
My dad enjoyed playing games in the evening. If I was home, we would play chess, otherwise he would play Scrabble with my mum. Nigel’s favourite Scrabble word was ‘nit’. He would take half an hour sometimes thinking about his turn, and then eventually put ‘nit’ exactly where the next player was intending to get all their letters out.
Nigel also always enjoyed his music. He had a good singing voice, and as a young man was encouraged to become a professional pub-and-club singer, but he was too nervous to get up on stage in front of an audience. But he would always wander around the house singing loudly, and invariably getting the words wrong. He especially liked what he called “the ballad singers” (Perry Como, Dean Martin, Al Martino), country and western back in the days when it was “and western” (Johnny Cash, Slim Whitman, Jim Reeves, Charlie Rich), and some of the original 1950s rock ‘n’ rollers (Elvis), especially if they had a country tinge (Jerry Lee Lewis). History seems to have forgotten that in the 1960s a large proportion of the population didn’t like the Beatles, and my dad was one of them: two of his favourites, Frank Ifield and Engelbert Humperdinck, kept them off the No. 1 spot.
Nigel was always a very sociable person. While living at Bradley Road he would lean over the front gate and talk to passers-by. If it was summer, he would sunbathe on the old railway bench they had in the front garden, wearing nothing but a bright orange pair of swimming trunks and a straw hat. One day a man came up to him for a chat, and they spent some time talking. Eventually my dad said, “Would you like a can of beer?”. The man said, “Oh no, I don’t drink - I’m a Jehovah’s Witness”.
When I was a teenager my parents came into a bit of money, and they decided to use it to move house. They spent ten years looking for a suitable place, and eventually moved after I’d left Cambridge! They lived in a very nice bungalow on Grimsby Road, Immingham, for about eight years.
During this time, after denationalisation, the railways on Grimsby and Immingham Docks were wound down, and eventually Associated British Ports called in a firm of civil engineering contractors to take most of them out. It was Nigel’s job to liaise with the manager of the contractors, a man named Godfrey, who was a charming southern Irish rogue – one of the many men you used to see around the docks with massive wodges of cash in their wallets. He and my dad hit it off instantly, and did an audit of the stock together. Without going into too much detail, my dad was able to enjoy a comfortable retirement as a result of their exploits.
Of course, Nigel’s dealings with the contractors meant that he was engineering his own redundancy, which he was happy to accept at the age of sixty-two. He and Olive retired, initially unhappily to Holton-le-Clay. During their time at Holton-le-Clay, Olive became seriously ill with a heart condition, and had to spend several weeks in hospital, first at Hull and then at Cottingham. My dad stayed with her all the time, and underwent great hardship to do so, sleeping in a range of makeshift accommodation, including at one point the Salvation Army hostel.
In 1996 or thereabouts my parents moved to Utterby, where they remained till my dad’s death. They were very happy in Utterby. A bench at the front of the drive took the place of the gate at Bradley Road, and Nigel would sit on it to talk to passers-by. A favourite was The Major: they shared an interest in Bell’s whisky, and would sometimes walk round to The Major’s bungalow for a drink. My dad was still very much into keeping fit, and one of his favourite occupations was to go for a walk around Utterby and beyond, talking to people as he went, which he did almost every day.
My dad always took a keen interest in how I got on at school and university, and later in my job. He was far more proud than I deserved of my achievements, and is the only person I know to have read all of my books. But there was no fooling him, and he could always see right through me: he always knew when I’d been lazy. When my dad met my future wife Tracy for the first time, after she’d gone home, he said to me, “By, you’ve landed on your feet, haven’t you?”. And he was absolutely delighted when our son Miles came along. It was always a source of sadness that by that time my dad was too old to do with him all the things he’d done with me when I was a child.
In their later years my parents enjoyed going for lunchtime meals out. Nigel’s two favourite meals were ham, egg and chips, and steak and kidney pie. He was a connoisseur of steak and kidney pie: whenever he got one he would subject it to a detailed analysis, then compare it to every other steak and kidney pie he’d ever eaten. He also enjoyed going over to Southport to see Tracy, Miles and I, and going to the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Prince of Wales Hotel, which served all the old-fashioned favourites.
In 2016 Nigel’s hip gave way, severely restricting his mobility, and this was a great blow to someone who’d been so active all of his life. Another blow came in April 2019, when he had a serious fall that confined him to the house. From his time living at Immingham onwards he’d say every year “I won’t see the year out”, and this time it finally came true. He died in Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital, Grimsby, on Christmas Day 2019. If he’d lasted another week, he’d have been married sixty-five years.
There won’t be many people at the funeral, because Nigel outlived everyone: all of his brothers and sisters, all of his workmates, and (with the exception of George and Linda, to whom he was enormously grateful for all that they’ve done to help him) all of his Utterby friends. For someone to be born in 1929 in the circumstances he was, and to live to ninety, was a great achievement, and not one that my dad ever expected. When he died my mum and I were both with him, and the official cause of death was “the frailty of old age”. He would have been pleased to go the way he did: he had a good death, just as he’d had a good life.
“Who’d have thought it, eh?”