Grandad was the last ferryman (From Echo)

Grandad was the last ferryman

10:40pm Friday 23rd October 2009 in

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THELMA Pastfield, like the majority of people, remembers her grandad as a warm presence in the background of her childhood.

So far, so normal. Arthur Charles Hymas, though, was no ordinary figure, but a man who occupied a pivotal notch in local history.

He was the last representative of a breed of men who had done the same job for more than 900 years.

Dick, as Arthur preferred to be called, earned his living as the Hullbridge ferryman. When he retired, the ancient job title became extinct.

There may be a few men left in Britain who can list their occupation as ferry operator, but none who can claim to operate their ferry by pure human muscle power.

This, though, was the sole means of forward motion at Dick Hymas’s disposal. He had no motor, either inboard or outboard, just arms and oars.

The ferry Dick powered was a 12ft rowing boat, designed to hold 11 people.

The fare between the two banks of the River Crouch was four old pennies per person per crossing, about 0.5p in modern terms.

For 30 years, Dick made a steady living out of this role, ferrying schoolchildren to and from school, shoppers from the north bank villages heading for Southend, people visiting their relatives and a mass of other folk who found the River Crouch standing between them and what they needed to do.

The nearest road crossing lay almost three miles upstream at Battlesbridge, so, as Thelma says: “He never seemed to be short of customers.”

Dick was a countryman to his marrow. Before he took over the ferry, he worked as a thatcher.

When business was quieter, he would do a spot of fishing. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff that was in the river in those days, particularly when the flatfish came up with the tide,” says Thelma, of London Road, Rayleigh.

There were also whelks, mussels and winkles to be had out of the river. Early morning would see Dick out shrimping.

“He brought the shrimps back to grandma. She’d cook them and then sell them outside the Anchor,” Thelma recalls.

Like many countrymen, Dick kept a gun close at hand and was always on the lookout for a chance to bag a rabbit on the riverbank.

“He was a crack shot,” Thelma says. “He learnt a lot in the First World War.” Dick’s table was also augmented by a steady diet of waterfowl. Thelma points out: “There are lots of swans in the river nowadays. They wouldn’t have lasted in the old days. They’d have been shot.”

Naturally, the job of ferryman required great physical strength. “He could lift a hundredweight,” says Thelma.

One one occasion, Dick engaged in a bet he could row a 19-stone policeman across the river – and won. But however strong the ferryman, the river would always be stronger.

“He respected the river. He knew its currents and its danger points,” says Thelma. “We weren’t allowed to swim there as children.”

Others were less wary. Dick was often required to act as an unofficial lifeguard.

A cutting in Thelma’s scrapbook from the Southend Pictorial records the occasion when Dick saved seven lives in the course of a single day.

Occasionally, in summer, the river would relax its power, and shrink to little more than a trickle at low tide. At such times, the ferry would also change its nature, and Dick would substitute his boat for a horse and trap.

Dick married a local girl, Ada Binder. The Binders were also closely associated with the river and it was they who built Dick’s two ferryboats. Thelma was born at Dick and Ada’s home in Pooles Lane.

Now 80, she retains strong memories of the house with its long garden to the rear, and the stable where the ferryhorse lived. It was where Dick had been born, and he died there 90 years later.

“He was still very active, still working in the garden. Then one day he stayed in bed. He was ready to go and two weeks later he was gone,” Thelma says. “Right up to the end, he was always full of fun and full of life.”

As for the Hullbridge ferry, that went out before Dick. When he retired, around 1954, another man, known as Jock, briefly took over the ferry.

Legend says Jock was once an understudy for Johnny Weissmuller, star of the Tarzan films. True or not, the ferry appears to have been more demanding than Hollywood jungles. Jock gave up after a short spell, and the Hullbridge ferry, dating back to time immemorial, became a riverbank memory.