Tom Woodhouse

 
Left:
Teamsmen  Tom 'Rummy' Woodhouse and Jakey Matthews, posing with a team outside Ivy Hall in Purdey Street, Salthouse, c. 1916.
Tom's grandson Jasper, aged 84, remembers:  "The man on the right is Jakey Matthews, he’s the one that jumped over the churchyard wall to get married! He was working in the field next to the church and he told his mate, ‘I’m just going - I’ll be about half an hour.’ And he jumped over the wall, went in the church, got married and come back to work."

Brian Holman as a boy on
the duckpond then known as 'Springholes'

Tom's  grandson Brian Holman related a little story about his grandfather when Tom was teamsman at the Hall farm in the early 1900s:

"They used to be out early mornings with the horses, and they'd sit on the corner of the field having a drink. The boss come up on his big horse and they were talking about big houses. my grandfather said 'I reckon I was born in a bigger house than you.' 'What do you mean boy,' he say. 'Where were you born then?' ' In the workhouse.'
And the boss turned his horse and went off and never said a word . . ."

The 1953 flood ravaged the cottages all along the coast road and round the village green. 

Tom, by then a widower, was rescued and taken to Weybourne Camp, on Muckleborough hill - as were many Salthouse people.

He died just a week after, from pneumonia and the shock of the worst flood of that century.

 

 Tom as an old man in the front  garden of Victoria Cottage before the 1953 flood.

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