Thomas William Drewery — Bill, always — was born on 16 February 1911 at Sandholme, near Gilberdyke in the East Riding: the second child and eldest son of Thomas Batty Drewery, a railway platelayer, and his wife Harriet Ann Harrison. Home was a Hull & Barnsley Railway house on the edge of a wood, with a huge garden; school was Gilberdyke, until at twelve he went to work on the neighbouring farms. At fourteen he left home for a building site at Holme upon Spalding Moor, and after nine years of that came to the work that would hold the rest of his life: the Capper Pass smelting works at Melton.
The 1939 Register catches him there at twenty-eight — a maintenance engineer in the tin and lead smelting works, lodging at 50 Melton Fields, North Ferriby, in a street where nearly every man was a smelter's softener, refiner or furnace-hand. It was while boarding there, with Lily Williamson, that he met Ida Crabb; they married at St John's, Newington, on 22 October 1940, with the war already a year old. The war cost the family dearly: Bill's brother Arthur, a gunner taken prisoner in the fall of France, died in captivity in 1944.
Bill and Ida made their life at 162 Boothferry Road, Hessle — a terraced house whose garden Bill extended into the unused land behind, called the Willows, growing vegetables immaculately and rearing chickens. Two children were born at Hessle: Janet in 1942 — through whom, half a century later, this whole history would come to be written — and Geoffrey in 1947. Bill worked at Capper Pass until he retired at sixty-five; his pleasures were dominoes, Hull City, and Yorkshire cricket at the Circle ground on Anlaby Road — his daughter would trace her own lifelong love of football and cricket to the matches they watched together. In retirement he learnt Old Time dancing, and went dancing with Ida to the halls nearby. In her last months they moved to a flat near Hessle Square; Ida died in December 1989, and Bill lived on there quietly for almost two years, until his death in hospital on 4 October 1991, aged eighty.
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-02