The lock-up in Robin Hood's Bay

There used to be a prison here, you know. Back in my grandad’s day. My mum didn’t like him telling me the stories about when he was a policeman, but I thought they were really exciting.
I used to follow him out into the garden in the evenings when mum wasn’t looking. The best times were when he built a bonfire. We stood next to each other and threw sticks on the fire, our fronts roasting and our backs freezing. Wrapped up in jumpers and scarves and smoke, he told me stories about when he moved to Bay from Whitby. He was only 20. It was really hard to imagine my grandad ever being that young.
 
They were building a railway between Whitby and Scarborough, and there weren’t enough men locally, so the railway company called in gangs of labourers. According to grandad, these were hard-drinking and rough-living men. I asked him what that meant and he wouldn’t tell me, and I knew if I asked my mum she would be cross with grandad, so I just imagined men with bottles of beer and dirty clothes.
 
Grandad said that there were fights between the railway men – he called them navvies – and the local farmers and fishermen. He said these resulted in broken heads and helpless drunken legs, and that made me giggle.
 
Every time there was one of these fights, grandad had to get them the five miles to Whitby in a horse and cart because there was no lock up in Bay, and obviously the local men didn’t want to help when it was a Bay man who was in trouble. He was thrilled when they told him that they were going to build somewhere with living quarters, an office, two cells and an exercise yard. It cost £1500, and he said that was more money than he expected to see in a lifetime.
 
He moved from his room in a boarding house in Upper Bay into the new police house and lockup in 1886 with his new wife, my lovely grandma. It was so much easier for him not to have to take the prisoners over to Whitby, especially as my grandma was now expecting my uncle Cyril.
 
I asked him why he was laughing as he told me the story, and he said that in the time he was there, only two people ever stayed overnight. He got serious then – one night there was an awful battle between the labourers and the locals, and someone died. He said that it frightened the railway company so much that they speeded up the railway work, and then the labourers moved on to the Whitby-Middlesborough line. He chuckled and said that it was another copper’s problem then.
 
Mum came out and found us laughing. She gave my grandad such a look and bustled me inside. She scrubbed the smuts off my face and hands with a scratchy wet facecloth and sent me to bed, where I dreamed of fights and men with dirty hands and my grandad with a young face and lots of dark hair.