Alfred Crabb was born on 31 March 1883 in Hull — the sixth of Isaac and Rachel's seven children, and the third born since the train from the fens set them down at the end of the line. He grew up off Hessle Road, in the streets of the fishing community, and went to Somerset Street School, where — as his daughter Ida recorded — his teachers wanted him to stay on, 'as he was a bright lad, but his family were poor and he had to leave school to get work.' What followed was, in her words, a jack of all trades: telegraph boy, then to sea as a trawler hand; at seventeen the census caught him as a ship chandler, provisioning the trawlers instead of crewing them. When he married at St John the Baptist, Newington, on 26 November 1905 — Jane Thomas, the fisherman's daughter who lived at the same address in Havelock Street — the register still called him a seaman, and his father, the old Salvationist, a railwayman. The love poem he wrote Jane before the wedding is kept in the family papers still.
Then came the horses. By 1911 he was a coal hawker on his own account at 43 Massey Street — hauling it and crying it round the streets — a house bought, the family remembered, for its archway to let the horses and carts through — and by the Great War the business had settled at 57 Edinburgh Street, with the yard at the railway's Hessle Road coal siding. Ida's memories of that house are the family's brightest: stables for three horses across the back, wagons — rullies — in the yard, the horses fed on a mash of black treacle and linseed whose smell she could summon fifty years on, one horse that walked into the kitchen for its apple and would not leave, children queuing for a penny ride to the park in the trap, and Jane weighing out coal on the scales through every lunch hour. The 1911 census form carries a quieter memory: Alfred first wrote three children born, one dead at birth — and the enumerator struck it through, because the census counted only the live-born. Harry, Alfred, Ida, Joseph and Hilda grew up over the business.
The war years put the coal merchant in the paper twice. In 1941 the police court fined him £10 14s. 6d. for failing to send in the new weekly coal returns — he told the magistrate he had thought the scheme voluntary, 'so busy trying to keep his business going for the return of his sons from H.M. Forces that he took no action'. In May 1942 the business he had built became Alf. Crabb & Sons Ltd — nominal capital £700, directors Alfred and his son Harry — and that December the new company was fined £1 for carrying coal in Hull's customary ten-stone sacks across the East Riding boundary, where a 1902 by-law nobody remembered prescribed lighter ones; the magistrates allowed it was 'purely a technical offence', and the defending solicitor observed that Alfred Crabb, and his father before him, had been in the business all his life. In 1946 Alfred and Jane left Edinburgh Street to Joseph's family and moved to 5 Etty Grove, off Gordon Street, where the aunts, uncles and cousins gathered every Boxing Day — his granddaughter Janet's earliest Christmas memories — and where in 1955 they kept their golden wedding. Alfred died on 17 January 1960, aged seventy-six. The probate calendar records the working man's estate — £2,127 15s. 7d., proved by Harry, coal merchant, and the firm's accountant — and the Hull Daily Mail of 19 January carries his children's farewells, Ida's among them: 'Dearer to me than words can tell, was the father I've lost and loved so well.'
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-03