Edmund Trebus

Edmund Zygfryd Trebus: born Ostrowo, Poland 11 November 1918; married (five children); died London 29 September 2002.

Edmund Trebus won the hearts of millions when his determination to maintain a rubbish-strewn life style was broadcast in the BBC series A Life of Grime in 1999. His ding-dong encounters with the Haringey Environmental Health Officer, Mike Cording, made for captivating television. When presented with yet another legal notice authorising Haringey's clearance of his garden, Trebus retorted in typically robust fashion, "Stick it up your chuffer!"

It was an appropriate term of abuse from the son of a stationmaster. Edmund Trebus was born on Armistice Day 1918 in a railway village near Gdansk on the Polish Baltic coast. His father drowned when Edmund was three years old, falling through the ice of a frozen lake. He stayed with his mother and extended family until the latter stages of the Second World War, surviving bruising encounters with the Nazis in his occupied homeland. On one occasion he was struck across the face by a soldier's rifle butt for refusing to heed German instructions not to speak in Polish.

Trebus often invoked his contributions to the war in his rows with Cording. "I fought for this country and my human rights!" Having been conscripted into the German army in 1944, he defected to the Allies the following spring before joining an anti-tank regiment of the Polish Free Forces in Italy.

But it was the remarkable way in which he lived in post-war Britain that brought him to national attention. In 1964, he acquired a five-bedroom Victorian villa at Crouch End in north London. Into this property, he moved his Polish wife and five children. But soon they had to make room for his bizarre collection. He began hoarding curiosities from his trawls through junk shops – rocking horses, vacuum cleaners, bicycles.

Then he started dragging home the flotsam and jetsam of local skips and tips – window frames, motorbikes, scaffolding poles, tree-trunks, For Sale signs (complete with posts), fridge-freezers, even a mortuary table. His garden became a minor industrial complex with huge constructions towering 30 feet above the modest boundary fence. The interior of his house was also filled, first with collectables such as Elvis records, cameras and watches, later with bags of rotting vegetables piled from floor to ceiling in every room. Neighbours recalled how his wife stubbornly camped her deckchair in the few remaining square feet of the garden. When she finally departed, Trebus filled that space too.

The hygiene problems caused so many complaints that Haringey Council was eventually forced to take action. For three years, Cording chose diplomacy to persuade Trebus to redress the problem. But in 1998 Haringey began a compulsory clearance of the garden. The operation, filmed by the BBC, took six weeks: 515 cubic yards were cleared in five trucks and 11 skips at a total cost of £30,000.

When the contractors left, Trebus simply carried on hoarding. He was now living in his kitchen in a space the size of a single bed without electricity, gas or running water. The garden filled again. This time, there were fewer weighty structures, more portable stuff: vegetation, old clothes and bags of excreta draped on the branches of his trees like the residue of a spring tide. When Cording returned to clear the garden again (£10,000), he noted the house itself was beginning to crumble.

There followed a remarkable demonstration of Trebus's enduring ability to appear as a victim, yet to be in complete control of his destiny. A group of builders and private developers emerged, keen to fund the repairs in exchange for a share of the considerable value of a fully refurbished property. Trebus agreed to the essential repairs but cannily refused to sign any further commitment. When the repairs were complete (and Haringey's Building Control department were off his back), Trebus sent the men in suits packing and several thousand pounds worse off. In a BBC film in 2001, Trebus grinned to the camera, lit his musical lighter, smiled at the crows in the trees and muttered into his fulsome beard: "Did I do anything wrong?"

Last winter, the notorious fighting spirit finally began to fade. Before Christmas, he was found in a state of severe confusion and hypothermia. He was taken to Trentfield residential care home, a facility run by his old enemy, Haringey Council. They cleaned him up, shaved off his beard, gave him a new wardrobe and regular meals. Once more his story was recorded by BBC cameras for a forthcoming series of A Life of Grime, in which he is seen to have visibly prospered.

But, when Mike Cording turned up at Trentfield to give notice of a third garden clearance, Trebus's response was unusually subdued. His rebellious career was coming to an end.

Julian Mercer