Veness, Dicker, & Hicks Family Photos

See the photos folder for the full list of photos. (Note: the names get truncated in the list; to see the full name, hover the mouse over the filename, and the full name gets displayed in the status line at the bottom of your browser).

Below are a few selected photos, with notes... so these are 'family snapshots' in both senses of the word. Click on the thumbnail image to see a full size photo.

	John Hicks, my great-great-grandfather, was a seaman, coastguard, and inventor. While he was a coastguard, in 1872, he built a 'model' lifeboat, with several claimed improvements over the existing Hastings RNLI boat. Unfortunately, the enterprise backrupted him three years later, after several competive trials between the two boats, the Institute remaining unconvinced of its benefits. He also patented a rope-and-pulley fire escape, and a horseshoe-form life-raft very similar to versions still in use during the second world war (though whether it re-made his fortune I have not discovered).
	Jim Veness, my great-grandfather, spent most of his life as one of the Hastings fishermen, retiring to be a coal merchant when he was 55, in 1921.
	Arthur Dicker, also my great-grandfather, with 'Watch' - probably taken in the first decade of the century. Born in 1875, he was a printer when he married Eva, and a 'journeyman house painter' when my grandfather Charles was born in 1906.
	Eva Gibb became Eva Dicker when she married Arthur in 1896. This photograph was taken probably not much later. According to Charles Dicker, Eva was an orphan adopted by John Gibb, but I've not yet managed to trace any record of her birth or adoption.
	Charles Dicker is my grandfather. He abandoned Hastings for the Norfolk countryside, where he was building inspector for the council, but returned to Hastings in retirement, and eventually remarried - aged 93.

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