Glenys and Bernard Pennycuick building the house at 61 Ventnor Street in Scarborough c1963

The below story was entered with this photograph into the 2018 History and Heritage Awards:

I got into a bit of a scrape at school with another bloke who was a junior lightweight boxing champion. He did me well and truly! He said to me afterwards, "I believe you're helping your father build a house...My brother is a roof tiler." So twice a week I'd go with him to whichever suburb it was to bump the tiles up, so I knew how to bump them up on the house in Corbett street.'' Bernie Pennycuick

Bernie is referring to the first house built on Corbett street (number 6), in Scarborough. His parents, Eric and Ella, paid 100 pounds for two adjacent blocks of land in 1951. They cleared the land themselves. Young Bernie and his father, a motor-mechanic, then built the majority of the house by hand with some help from the neighbourhood.

At sixteen, Bernie became a member of the Scarborough Surf Lifesaving Club where he served as a lifeguard for years, until other interests arose. It was around this time he met his wife, Glenys, a master seamstress. Bernie inherited his parents thrift, but not his father's trade. Swapping his motor-mechanic apprenticeship for plastering, he was able to save enough to pay his parents market value for the second block, which he later sold to buy a plot on Ventnor street. Glenys and Bernie cleared the land themselves every weekend. They secured a loan to pay the builder. Bernie later did all the plasterwork and tiling. He continued as a plasterer until retirement. The house eventually became the archetype of the era, covered in extensions for a fast-growing family of six. The Corbett street house came down November 2017. And the empty nest on Ventnor St sold in February, 2018 to a new family with their own designs for a life in Scarborough.