My grandfather, Ernest Pegley, died in 1965, more than six years before I was born.

What I know of him comes in fragments –  a few photographs, family stories passed down through my mum June. Ernie was jovial, apparently. He liked a cigarette. He was a regular at the local pub.

What nobody ever mentioned – not once, in all the years of family storytelling – was that he once chased a gang of thieves through the streets of south London and made the front page of a London newspaper doing it.