A Grain of Sand explored

The real life story of a Robinson Crusoe from Dewsbury, Yorkshire

Courtesy of imageBROKER/Alamy

Brendon Grimshaw lived on an island in the Seychelles called Moyenne, which he bought for £8,000 in 1962. He lived there from 1972 until his death in July 2012.

I wanted to read his book, A Grain of Sand, but it must be out of print and now sort after because the two copies I could find were hundreds of dollars. Instead my research focused on the documentary shot in 2009 of the same title.

Who was Brendon Grimshaw?

Born in 1925, the only unusual aspect of his childhood I could find was he flew in a bi-plane in Southport when he was 8 years old, presumably on his summer holidays. Less unusual was leaving school without any qualifications at 15. He explained in the documentary that he didn’t like Maths and Science at all, but did enjoy writing. His shrewd mother, who discovered that the headmaster’s son at Grimshaw’s school was working at the local newspaper as a journalist, managed to get him an interview with the editor.

Grimshaw didn’t regard himself as a rebel, but must have been a single-minded soul, because he always felt that he did what he wanted to do. He persuaded the editor of the Batley News to take him on and…