Robert & Paddy Bateman

Robert and 'Paddy' Bateman moved into Grymsdyke

Hallmark 1976 Robert and 'Paddy Bateman and their children leave Grymsdyke, Lacey Green, for Canada. click Grymsdyke for the history of Grymsdyke

Hallmark August 1996. Letter to the Editor from Robert Bateman, 'Goldrush County' California :-

"It's early June, 102 degrees F, and I've just picked the first of my “Grymsdyke” beans. This evening while I was spraying them to encourage bean formation, there was a fledgling humming bird perched on one of the shoots. It’s a long way from Lacey Green, the conditions are quite different, but the Lacey Green beans were quite delicious, in fact incomparable because seeds for real runner beans are not available here.

The seeds have an interesting heritage. I first ate their fruit in 1948 when we moved from London to Grymsdyke, which had previously been the RAF Officers' Mess for Bomber Command. Eric Boreman and his father-in-law worked in the garden and grew among other things mountains of delicious beans. For a city boy used to rations, the months of summer when fruits and vegetables were plentiful, were heaven.

At that stage I developed an “academic” interest in gardening. 25 years later when Paddy and I lived in Grymsdyke I became an apprentice to a great gardener – Jack Adams, who bicycled down from his house opposite Hickman’s Stores to help me maintain the marvellous walled vegetable garden. He was a bean expert and taught me all the tricks.

When we left Lacey Green in 1976, we took some bean seeds and successfully grew beans in Toronto and then Tennessee before we moved here in 1990. They always did well but my supply was getting dangerously low. So, I was delighted when last year I met Rob Knight at a wedding – my brother’s daughter married his godson, a Lacey Green co-incidence - and he told me that he had lots of seeds from the Grymsdyke beans. I collected a bag full and am now set for life!