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It was an absolute pleasure, along with Catherine Tresham, BCM’s ElderLink Manager, to visit this engaging couple in their home. With his gentle Irish lilt Eric recounted, ‘It all started with liners – the first one I made was the Titanic. My grandad was a riveter on the Titanic in Belfast. The pay was fairly good – £2 a week. He put together the hull with white hot rivets – one and three quarter million rivets in total. So I made a 7 foot model of the Titanic out of wood.

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‘I left home at 14 years old. At school I couldn’t understand half the questions in the exams, never mind answer them, and my father had to pay a lot of money for the school. So I told him, there’s no use going on like this, pouring money down the drain, and I left Galway for Dublin.

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‘I was three years in the Harding working boys’ home. We had to give them two thirds of everything we were paid. It was like being in the army. The prefect was a right terror. If you didn’t make your bed properly you weren’t let in for breakfast and then you had to do a day’s work with nothing in your stomach. In 1957 I went to Canada, but I couldn’t stand the heat – it was over 90 degrees – so I saved money to come back on a Cunard liner, the Sylvania.’

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I asked Eric how he ended up in Birmingham. ‘You had to come to Birmingham to find me,’ Sylvia said. They met on a blind date at the Sheldon picture house where they watched ‘My Fair Lady’. They have now been married for 60 years.

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‘I lost my way, leaving home. When I met Sylvia and had kids, things improved,’ said Eric. ‘But there have been ups and downs. When the kids were young I had a nervous breakdown and was in a bad state.’

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The woodwork hobby has really helped Eric, which is why Sylvia tolerates rooms piled high with wooden crosses, fish, nativity scenes and 7 foot ships! Eric recycles any pieces of wood he can find or is given and fashions them into items to be sold to raise money for charity. He once raised £700 from what he made out of an old church pew.

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Eric cannot stand up for any length of time now, but he is still busy in his workshop set up at the end of the kitchen. ‘I wanted to give something to the Lord, and that was a way of doing it,’ he said. ‘What kept me going was my faith in God, otherwise I don’t know what would have happened. It’s been hard, but the Lord is in our lives, and that’s what made the difference.’

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Hannah Noble, Publicity & Fundraising Officer

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