Just a little trip today into Grimsby and on into Cleethorpes to look at the town halls.

Both these buildings have been familiar to me all my life so there was not much of the public rooms to surprise me, however Grimsby had set out an interesting exhibition from the town archives of documents about the fishing industry and travellers to and from Grimsby in the Council Chamber. The permanent Time Trap exhibition of the town's history in the former gaol in the town hall was also open free so we had a look at that too. I won't say that I personally learned much new, but it is well set out and well worth a visit.

Back in the town hall proper we visited the mayor's parlour and Joe was very much impressed by how similar the carved furniture in there was to that which we have at home, and we both wonder whether it was made by my great-grandfather. He was a master cabinet maker who came to Grimsby as a refugee from Belgium during the Great War and worked for a Grimsby firm of furniture makers for the duration. Afterwards he returned to his own business and with my grandad set up a regular trade in furniture between Antwerp and Grimsby, so there is plenty of his furniture about and if it was (so I have been told) good enough for royalty, it was certainly good enough for Grimsby Borough Council.
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Cleethorpes Town Hall is even more familiiar to me than that at Grimsby; my father was mayor in 1960-61 when I was 5, and I was therefore a fairly frequent visitor to the Mayor's Parlour there. I also attended the annual League of Pity Christmas parties there where we played games, had a fancy dress competition and a party tea, and received badges for collecting money for the charity over the year in large papiermache blue eggs. One year I won a prize in the Fancy Dress as a witch, and in another Helen and I were Peter Pan and Wendy. In 1960 the Borough Mayor was (as was customary) the judge so I (being barred from the competition for obvious reasons) was allowed to assist in the judging.
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Joe had never before visited the town hall so I was able to show and tell him quite a bit of its connections with the family back to his great-great-grandfather who was on the old Urban District Council before Cleethorpes became a Borough (one of only three charters granted in the brief reign of Edward VIII). I was also able to give him a brief (and frequently less than flattering) run down on a good many of the former mayors - he now knows the pompous twits from the good eggs. Looking at the list, we discovered that of all the mayors of the old Borough (pre 1970s local government re-organisation) my father is one of only two still living, and the only one still active in local government.

In the evening we went to the village barbecue. Once again most people chose to remain indoors at the village hall which I find strange on a pleasantly warm evening. We fitted our visit in comfortably between the England v Israel football match (3-0 good result) and the Last Night of the Proms, but either or both of these had reduced the expected numbers attending although the hall was reasonably full.