A 1909 newspaper account of the sinking of Lina, (Tuesday’s post), informed readers that the skipper, Mortimer CHAPMAN, was “a few years ago, a famous footballer”. Here he is about 1891 when he played for Filey Red Stars. Several Filey amateurs did go on to professional Football League clubs and perhaps Mortimer was one of them.

His granddaughter, Jane GARTON, spoke about him when interviewed for the Heritage Lottery funded project Exploring Filey’s Past about twelve years ago.

My grandfather was a real Filey character. His nickname was ‘Old Shaggy’…He used to sit in the Memorial Gardens but he always had an old sou’ wester on and never took it off. He never took it off when he went to bed and he was buried in it. But he used to talk to people [and] they all used to talk to him…Old Shaggy, how he got his name, it was something to do with a dog and he used to say to this dog, “shake it shaggy” and then my granddad got the name Shaggy.

He was photographed on the Coble Landing in the late 1940s with eight other fishermen and a couple of children. Can you pick him out?

Morton, the sixth child of Thomas CHAPMAN and Mary JENKINSON, was baptized on the first of March 1815 but he died in January the following year. He was followed on the 29^th  December 1816 by the first of five Mortimer CHAPMANs recorded in Filey Genealogy & Connections. The Chapman pedigree on FG&C doesn’t go back beyond Thomas and Mary so I don’t know if there were earlier Mortimers in the line. (The name seems to have Norman origins and is linked to a couple of places, one in France and the other in the Holy Land. Choose between its resulting meanings – ‘still water’ or dead sea’.)

Only Mortimer born 1844 is on FamilySearch Tree at the moment. He is Shaggy’s uncle. I’ll connect them on FST as soon as I can.