University of Sussex

My dad, Charles John Budd Desborough, was a bricklayer and you can see him in the foreground here with his cap on.  He was a great builder, fast and accurate, and had a good eye for a straight wall.  He was very proud of the fact that he was involved in the building of many prominent buildings in the Brighton area.  He once came home when I was very young, in the 1950s, covered in cuts and bruises - he had fallen from the top of the Dudley Hotel in Hove.  He had stepped on to an unsecured scaffold board and fallen through the hole.  He later told me that he had the presence of mind to just grab at the horizontal scaffold poles as he fell, this saved his life.  He was off work but they didn't have such a thing as compensation in those days - you just got better and went back to work.