This photograph is of William Stewart aged 19 when the photo was taken.Seated in a hand-propelled wheechair which he used from 1934 to 1967.
Memoirs of Andrew Stewart, son of William Stewart.
"My father, William Stewart, lived in Hartlepool from 1923 until 1964. He belonged to a fishing family from north-east Scotland, where my grandfather, Alexander Stewart, worked on the herring drifters, as did many other family members. My grandmother died in the 1918 flu epidemic, and for 5 years my father and his older brother John lived with different family members and in foster homes in Scotland.
By 1923, my grandfather’s sister Jessie had married Jack Coultas, and was living in Hartlepool. Jack was skipper of a trawler, HL 21 Ben Tarbert and he offered to take my grandfather onto the crew where he became “Third Hand” or bosun. So in 1923 my grandfather set up home in Hartlepool and arranged for his mother Jane Stewart, known in the family as “Grannie” to look after my father, then aged 7, and his brother aged 11, while their father was at sea – as he was from every Sunday night until the following Saturday night. After a period in lodgings, they lived in the Croft till 1929 before it was demolished, then moved to Everard Street. Grannie, known in the area as “the big Scotch woman”, could speak little “normal” English but used a very broad Scots dialect known as Doric, as did my grandfather and the two boys at home, and earned a living by carrying fish round the town and local villages in a creel on her back, to sell or barter.
After leaving school, John joined the Ben Tarbert as apprentice deckhand. In 1930 “Grannie” died, and my father – now 14 but looking a lot younger – spent the summer at sea on the Ben Tarbert with his father and brother as a “crew passenger”. This was common in those days, giving boys from fishing families a chance to find out whether they wished to become fishermen themselves. But my father contracted polio in 1931 at the age of 15, spent 14 months in hospital, and was never able to walk again. After leaving hospital he acted as housekeeper for his brother (who left to get married later in the 1930s) and father, until he started work at Remploy in 1950 by which time his own father had retired. In 1938 my father and grandfather moved to King Street – now the “Town Wall” end of Northgate – then in 1950 to Sharp Crescent in West View, where my grandfather died in 1953.
In 1934 my father acquired a hand-propelled pushchair which enabled him to get around independently. During the 1950s, he was allocated some of the first Ministry of Transport cars for disabled people (unattractively known as “invalid carriages”). Several of the photos of my father are of interest as much for his chairs and cars as for my father himself!
Also in 1934, my father joined the Hartlepool Corps of The Salvation Army, in Lumley Street, later called Hartlepool Citadel; distinct from West Hartlepool Corps, later called Hartlepool Temple. He joined the SA choir, known as the Songster Brigade; during WW2 when the younger men of the Corps were away in the forces, he learnt to play a brass instrument and joined the Band; from 1945 to 1950 or just after he was a member of a SA musical “Quartette” which presented programmes of Christian brass and vocal music throughout the North-East; and from 1950 onwards he helped set up and run a SA Sunday School for children in West View.
My parents married in November 1959, I was born in Cameron Hospital in December 1960, and we moved to London in 1964 so my mother could help care for her mother who had suffered a stroke."
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Hartlepool Sports & Leisure
Alexander Stewart 1940's
