INTERVIEW
Keith sees
world
the
in a grain of sand…
He’s literally spent six decades of his life on the beach, becoming a familiar
face to generations of holidaymakers and locals in Lake, Sandown – and at
the age of 70, there’s still nowhere else that Keith Jacobs would rather be.
Jackie McCarrick caught up with him after he’d folded up the deckchairs
and shut down the tea hut on another day by the shore.
W
hilst many of his cousins and
schoolmates were straining at
the leash in the 1950s, eager
to flee the Isle of Wight and make their
fortunes on the mainland, the young
Keith Jacobs had other plans – and they
involved staying right where he was.
In fact Keith reckons he discovered his
path in life at the tender age of 10, which
was when he began helping out at his
family’s traditional beach hire business in
Lake, after school and at weekends. He
quickly settled into the fresh air routine of
physical work and chatting to people, and
spent more and more of his free time at
Hinks & Sons until he was ready to leave
Fairway Secondary Modern School at the
age of 15.
“I did think of going into the Navy or
all the usual kind of jobs” he says, “but
I was so happy doing what I was doing,
that I decided I could do a lot worse than
sticking with it”.
The traditional seaside business, with
its beach huts, deckchair hire, boat hire
and tea hut, was established in 1920 by
a Great Uncle, Walter Hinks, and Keith
came into it via his Aunt Ena, who had
married into the Hinks family.
Aunt Ena and Keith’s mother Lillian
were the stalwarts of the tea hut, whilst
he helped his uncles Bert and Ted,
fetching and carrying the huge stacks
of stripey deckchairs they would hire
Keith in 1959www.visitilife.com
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