Anthony: The adventure with Hull started in the 1960s with my father doing work with one of the largest trawler companies operating from Hull with deep sea fishing. J Marr was a private company run by two brothers and they were looking for means of developing their fish catching business. They could see troubles coming with British trawlers being excluded from Icelandic waters, and there was a period of the Icelandic cod wars which didn’t finish until the 1970s, and so father was employed to develop means of freezing fish at sea. The problem with the deep sea fisheries was that the time to travel from catching fish on Iceland and getting back to port and unloading and getting fish to market was about 10 days and cod kept on ice only for 14 days after which it started to go off flavour, so any fresh cod that one bought in those days tended to be at least ten days old if not more, unless it was caught more locally, so it was decided that the only solution was freezing at sea, and so I was involved in the development of this when I was at L Stern, and I went on one of those trawlers as guarantee engineer and I had a great time. I don’t know if you remember seeing my film of it? And so I was involved, Forbes Pearson was also involved but at that stage he was involved with the fish research station at Torry, and they were involved with regards to the viability of frozen fish, and were the fish good to eat frozen etc, so when Star was formed with Forbes and me, we were obviously interested in this, and so we did a lot of work with J Marr and sons, and other trawler companies, helping at that stage just with servicing their existing plant which they bought from Sterns, but later on we supplied them with fish freezing machinery etc. But anyway the reason I say all this is that I was regularly driving to Hull and Grimsby, and tended to make day visits. We’d have a meeting at 9 o clock and so I’d leave at 5 o clock in the morning in my car and would then drive back in the evening. Usually I was so weary – I’d have a meal in the Scotch Corner road, and have a good sleep and sometimes woke up within half an hour, and sometimes didn’t wake up until dawn. Never had an accident on that score. Was I in my Triumph Vitesse? No, my Austin Maxi. And anyway on one of those trips probably about 1975 we were already established in number 9 Royal Terrace, I stopped at an antique shop on the road out of Hull and saw this chest, and it looked a very attractive chest to have with a family of small boys …. With all its little drawers, very convenient, so without consultation with mum I just bought it, and it was delivered later by carrier.
It seemed so attractive and I thought it was a very good basement bit of furniture – not precious but with all those drawers very useful. It had come from the Hull Merchant Navy club where it was used in their sports department with members coming in because Hull was a very strong merchant navy. The port of Hull was very busy, a lot of trade with Europe. When people came in to change they would get a ticket with a number on the drawer and put their clothes in there and take out their gymshoes and singlets and so on for their sports, so clearly there were at least 30 members of the sports club, and that is really it. It’s not an old family piece or anything of that sort, but ideal for family life with drawers, but I don’t really remember it being used for family. Mum had some drawers, I had the end 4 drawers for gardening things, but the marble top was very useful for dropping things between bedrooms and bathrooms and gardens and upstairs and downstairs and so on.
And the mirror added a bit of light to the dark basement room because of the reflection. [Alison says in background that she thinks it would have been ‘de-luxe’, and Anthony says, no, rather utilitarian] A lot of it is pine inside, with mahogany facings.
I was not aware of marble in my life until marrying Alison. It was very smart to have a marble or stone slab on top of a dresser for baking. At Boghall we always had stainless steel because father working at Sterns he always had bits cut to precisely the right size for every bit of furniture, and so we had sheets of stainless steel.
The Royal Collection 