BOOTS FOR DICKENS

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 199, 24 August 1939, Page 19

BOOTS FOR DICKENS

SHOEMAKER'S CLAIM.

ONE OF TRIPLETS IS 100. BROTHERS IN AUSTRALIA. (Special.—By Air Mail.) LONDON, August 5. On his 100 th birthday, Charles Mavhew, who lives near Mount Pleasant Post Office, London, sent greetings this week, to his brothers Frederick and John in Australia, who are the same age. At least they are very nearly the same ago. Said Charles: "I am really a day older than they are, because I was born just before midnight, and they were born just after midnight. "We write to each other now and again. We always say the same thing: 'I am in fine fettle. How are you?' I intend to go on living as long as I can. My father lived to be 103 and my mother 104." And there seems to be n,o reason why Mr. Mayhew should not go on living. Re reads without glasses, has no trace of deafness, and walks without a stick. Every Sunday morning he goes to St. Paul's Cathedral, where lie first sang as a boy of seven in the choir in 1840, He last sang in the choir there in 19121 ''I well remember when 1 was a chorister at St. Clement Dane's singing in an augmented choir at the Cathedral on November 18, 1852, on the occasion of the Duke of Wellington's funeral." Mr. Mayhew was a boot and shoe maker. He had a shop near the Old Bailey, and used to make boots for Charles Dickens. '"There was a man for you," he said. "I never knew such a man. He could liven up a dead tree. 1 used to make him two pairs of boots a year. He took size seven and a half."