Flood Family

ON HIS hundredth birthday in January Alf Flood, Ti's oldest pensioner, settled himself on the piano stool in his Sheen, London, sitting room and played a gentle Chopin Mazurka, Of course, there were other celebrations to mark the great day: a telegram from the Queen and another from TI chairman Sir Brian Kellett, a cheque from the domestic appliance division and another, together with a birthday cake, from the Legal and General Assurance Company who administer the old pension scheme to which he belongs. And visits from relatives and neighbours.
But it was to the piano, which he first learned to play as a schoolboy from his music master, Bandy' Evans, that he turned for a special treat. Although his eyesight is nearly gone he remembers many of the pieces he used to play, especially his favourite Chopin, Grieg and Chaminade. He still has a sensitive, musical touch and masters the most complicated runs without hesitation.
Alf comes from a long line of tinsmiths and sheet metal workers. His grandfather was a tinsmith in Devon and both his father and two elder brothers followed the trade in London, working for George Glover, a company making gas meters just off the Kings Road in Chelsea. (He still cherishes an illuminated address his father received from his workmates more than a century ago for his work as secretary of the mutual loan fund). But Alf did better: he won scholarships from board school, first to United Westminster and then to Emmanual School at Wandsworth Common. In fact, he received a letter from the present headmaster to congratulate him on his hundredth birthday. 'Appalling handwriting', Alf commented.
Just before he was 15 he left school and Went to Pitmans to learn shorthand and typing and got his first job, at 8 shillings a week, in a City shipping firm which owned four 2,500-tonners. From there he joined the Civil Service - as a boy clerk in the Office of Works, where he had to hand-write letters drafted by senior clerks. He was there during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and was given a grandstand view from one of the big wooden stands built on Constitution Hill. 'Yes, I saw all the crowned heads of Europe ride by in their carriages', he recalls. 'There was "Little Willie", who became the Kaiser, and the Tsar of Russia and I don't know how many more'.
In 1902, thanks to his elder brother, he got the job of private clerk to Edward Richmond - Edward Walter Tiller Richmond, to give him his full name - founder of the Richmonds Gas Stove Company of Warrington, who had just taken over George Glover. There, sitting on a high stool in front of a desk with a flap which opened, he wrote in copperplate in great big ledgers which cost £5 each even at that time. That job lasted only ten months, for at the end of that time Mr Richmond, who was only 39, had an accident while on a cycle tour of the West Country and after lingering a fortnight in a pub, died. So he joined the clerks at George Glover and became head clerk, a job which he held until he retired in 1947.
As the only man left in the office he escaped call-up in the first world war and witnessed instead the first invasion of offices by women. 'They were very nice girls who had had some office training at school and they fitted in very easily', he says. 'They kept ledgers and day books and could write decently in those days - more than they do now'.
The second world war nearly brought tragedy. In 1944 Alf and his wife were at home in the house they had lived in since it was built in 1910 when a bomb fell. They dived under the table and felt the whole house come down around them.
One of his great interests has been photography. He began with a quarter-plate camera, paid for out of his savings, and his scrapbooks bear witness to the very high standards of composition and light and shade he achieved. A camera went with him on all his holidays and some of his country scenes and atmospheric shots in such places as Algiers were published in Country Life.

Descendants of Thomas Flood