Edited image of train travelling evacuees from history.co.uk

Whatever aspect of recent social history you research it is, by the nature of things, always just in time for something, and just, tantalisingly, too late for something else. Where have you so recently vanished to, Audrey Blackford, lifelong spinster and resident of Margate, except for the two memorable years of your life spent near the village of Shenstone in Staffordshire? What have you to say about your experiences there?  Who was “Dorothy?”

It is timely that Staffordshire County Council have created their “Children on the move,” project – a book and set of educational resources to preserve the memories of those involved in war-time evacuations of young people to Staffordshire. To have any direct memories of the time at all, you now need to be well into your seventies. Colton, Hints, Burton, and Rugeley are mentioned.  Shenstone, which received two separate waves of young guests, does not yet feature.

The villagers of Shenstone were, like most of their countrymen, primed and ready for the fight against Nazi Germany in the late summer of 1939.

My Aunt Mary was a vigorous and vivacious young woman of 26, just a couple of years into her married life, and living in the Owlett’s Lodge at the end of the drive leading to the farm still occupied by her husband’s parents, before it was requisitioned to do its part for its country. Plans to evacuate children from the Midlands’ industrial heartlands, which were sure to be the enemy’s target, to the surrounding rural Shires, were very promptly put into action as war was declared on September 1^st. “A train load of children from Birmingham arrived at the village station.” Aunt Mary wrote.  “Those housewives closest were able to pick their children.  I was last on the list of volunteers, and there remained three boys to be housed.  I could not refuse to have them.” They had hardly arrived back at the young Mr. and Mrs. Cooper’s nice little single-storey cottage when it was clear that the arrangement was not to the visitors’ satisfaction.

“They arrived in the dark, in a mood.  Not one wanted to be in the country.  They wanted to be back among the houses.  They did not like being away from familiar things and said they wanted to go home.  Next morning they all, including those in various homes in the village [of Shenstone] wanted home.  They all went, leaving us all wondering why did we have children from less than 18 miles away?  Those in charge of arranging such things should have realised we lived too close to Birmingham.”

One can only imagine the defiant, boot scuffing, sullen exodus back to Shenstone station down the blackberry jewelled late summer lanes, away from the unsatisfactory, rustic hospitality.

Next time, the authorities would not make the mistake of evacuating civilians such a short distance away from their homes, but for now, it hardly seemed necessary to persevere with the operation.  Christmas 1939 came and went, and new evacuees all over the country made their way back home.  Winter faded into spring and still no dramatic action seemed to be occurring in Western Europe during what came to be referred to as the “Phoney War.”

It was in May 1940 that anxiety levels rose again.  The British population listened with horror to wireless broadcasts that described how Hitler’s forces were advancing towards them across the continent.  By May 26^th, Calais had fallen to Germany, and invasion seemed possible if not likely.

A hazy image of Keepers Cottage from Owletts in the 1940s

Grandad Horton cultivating vegetables at Keepers Cottage in the late 1940s, once more confident that his family would benefit from the fruits of his labours.

Across the fields from the Owletts Farm, at Keepers Cottage, on Footherly Lane, Mary Cooper’s youngest brother, Ted Horton, (my dad) was helping their father plant that spring’s chitted seed potatoes. That little vignette seemed to sum up the family’s deep connection to their little acre that was so outrageously under threat and was seared into my father’s memory.  The older man had sighed, and wondered, philosophically, whether the family would still be there on their well-worked smallholding later that year, to benefit from the crop.

On the East Kent Coast, now facing occupied territory only 22 miles across the channel, the danger from enemy action was more immediate and obvious. John Betjeman saw the vulnerability of the quintessential English seaside resort of Margate as a poignant symbol of all that was in danger of being lost. As he wrote in his poem “Margate 1940:”

 “Now dark is the terrace, a storm-battered stretch;

And I think, as the fairy-lit sights I recall,

It is those we are fighting for, foremost of all.
”

Along with about 80 other contemporaries at Trinity Junior School in Margate, young Audrey Thelma Bessie Blackford made the journey north, and about as far inland as you could get, to the rural villages around Lichfield in Staffordshire on June 2^nd 1940. It was thought such a significant influx of people that the local newspaper, Lichfield Mercury began a special “News from Margate” column to keep the evacuees in touch with events in their home town.  The billet officer’s record, part of a small bundle stored at the Lichfield Record Office details Audrey’s placement with the Cooper family, Owletts Lodge, Shenstone, too far from her home at number 7, Crescent Road, Margate, for her to return on a whim should the accommodation not prove to her liking. Luckily, the arrangement was a happy one, and Audrey stayed in friendly communication with her host family for seven decades after she returned home to Margate.  A worrying silence has only recently fallen.

As Audrey and her little brother Alan parted from their anxious mother in Margate, the little town prepared to receive a great many arrivals. Of the third of a million troops evacuated from Dunkirk and its beaches that very week, over 46,000  reached land with relief at Margate jetty.  They were given tea and consoling conversation in the Winter Gardens, only a very short stroll around the bay from Crescent Road.  These despondent hoards must have been an alarming and depressing sight for the Blackford family.

View of Owletts Hall Farm in the 1940s, down the tree lined drive to the Lodge on Lynn Lane. How did my dad take this photo?

Aunt Mary’s 27^th birthday had fallen on Saturday June 1^st 1940, but it is unlikely that the routine of a busy farmer’s wife had been interrupted for any celebrations.  Neither was Sunday 2^nd a day of rest, as she tripped down Lynn Lane onto the station platform once more, willing and ready to receive her young guests, but no doubt apprehensive about who might be billeted upon her this time. Initial indications were good:

“The next arrivals at the village station were from a different world, chatty, friendly and prepared. My allocation: two nice girls about 12 and a half years. They quickly established their priorities… Audrey the door side of the bed. “

It soon became clear that the two girls had differing  attitudes to life in the one spare bedroom the Coopers had in the little Lodge.

“Audrey was very interested in everything, quickly settled into country life. Dorothy at first appeared to be shy.”

Whilst boys might be more useful when there were heavy chores to be undertaken, it was generally accepted that girls were favoured as likely to be less intrusive and more biddable guests in the home.  Sadly, this was not the case with Dorothy:

“….she wanted everything done for her and hung about, showing not the slightest interest in her surroundings. Dorothy was a problem; she preferred to walk the mile into the village to stay with her other friends. After a few weeks her mother came over from Margate and was none too pleased when I could not put her up and she had to find someone with a spare room in the village. She returned to our cottage and said she was taking her daughter to live in the village.”

Tiresomely, it looked like the dissatisfaction was spreading:

 ”Next day I had a telegram from Audrey’s Mum saying she was coming up to see her children. Audrey had a brother someone else had taken  - he was 7. Mrs. Blackford was a plump dark haired motherly kind of woman, about 5 ’6″ tall. [Back at the station] Mother and daughter greeted each other, and a smiling Audrey introduced us:

‘ Mum this is Mrs. C. ‘

We looked at each other and shook hands. The serious look disappeared; she began to smile, as we began the mile long walk to our cottage, a pleasant little house.

Mrs. Blackford sat down and was soon drinking a cup of tea. Her reason for the unexpected visit had been provided by Dorothy’s mother by telegram ” Mrs. Cooper is not the woman we thought she was. “… ” No. Her daughter did not fit in. Audrey will tell you that.”

Husband and I spent 3 most uncomfortable nights on a makeshift bed in the scullery giving up our bed to Mrs. Blackford, who stayed on to have her son transferred to live with his sister… aware that her daughter did have a very good billet indeed…. plenty of eggs and well away from the bombers targets. She went back to Margate knowing her children were safe and cared for.”

As far as was possible, yes.  But Shenstone was not immune to the effects of war:

“One night “our” searchlight [In the Owlett's Orchard] caught a bomber on its way to Birmingham, followed him across the sky knowing that guns were trained on the bombers. Unfortunately another German bomber came up behind, dropped the bomb near the searchlight, putting them out.  We heard the bomb falling. It makes a peculiar sound, which gets louder until stopped by contact with the earth. A second’s silence then an almighty bang and blast which shook the cottage. Plaster began to fall but we could not put a light on to see the damage. There was a funny moment when Audrey said  ” The buggers have followed us here !!!!”. Next morning in the full light of day nothing was quite as bad as expected, we had just lost internal plaster. The big barn down at the farm was twisted, many of the corrugated sheets hung from the frame. The bomb had dropped about 300 yards from farm and searchlight creating a deep hole. It had landed on a very thick cable which carried the power to the searchlight. That was back in service by the time night came.

The bomber was stopped before it reached its target, the pilot bailed out.

The camp Naafi was partly wrecked and the soldiers took care of bottles of beer, sweets cigarettes etc. that managed to escape! One young soldier a new recruit from Erdington lost an arm and was invalided out of the army almost before he began.”

My mom and dad fooling in the Dutch barn at Owletts, just after the war, captured by Aunt Mary. Happy days after its traumatic night when the bomb dropped.

Maryvale Court, Glebe Street, Caldmore.

Nipping through the bleeping, security protected doors of Maryvale Court, in Glebe Street, Caldmore, I regularly hurry past this inscribed foundation stone, always eager to see my Aunty Kathleen, who resides within, to reassure myself about the state of her health, and, of course, ask her some more about The Old Days.

The man who not only laid, but blessed this stone, Bishop Joseph Francis Cleary,  is just one of the very numerous Irish, Catholic immigrants who have walked this steep Staffordshire street in the last two hundred years. Kathleen and I share several of them as ancestors.  Our family included Egans and Noons, from the West of Ireland, who migrated in the hope of fleeing from poverty, and were not by any means as illustrious as Joseph Francis Cleary.  Trained at Oscott, he served as a parish priest in Wolverhampton. In 1965, the Catholic Herald described a splendid ceremony at St Chad’s Catholic Cathedral in Birmingham at his ordination as bishop, witnessed by his proud mother, who had made the long journey from their native Dublin for the occasion.  No episcopal seat being vacant which Joseph might occupy, he was made an auxiliary Bishop of Birmingham, and consecrated Bishop of Cresima – a titular bishopric of an area in modern Tunisia, with a congregation of negligible number, and deemed by the Catholic church to be “in the regions of the infidels.”  - more so than Birmingham, at any rate.

The marriage certificate of Elsie May Day and Edward Sheldon, joined in what was to be 39 years of devoted matrimony by Canon Yeo.

The ground to build this sheltered housing complex, with elderly members of the Catholic community of Walsall in mind, was secured by Canon Peter Taylor during the 1970s.  The mysterious, sizeable, solid,  man-made mound of soil rising up towards the east of the empty site did not deter him in the slightest from his choice. After all, it is a convenient short stroll from the beautiful Romanesque edifice which is St Mary’s the Mount Catholic Church and its presbytery. Many of the future residents of Maryvale would have attended services there throughout their lives.  Some might well have been educated at the school which used to stand on the steep slope to its rear.  My grandparents had moved to Bentley from the Sheldon family home in Queen Street when their children began to arrive and so for my mother, her sisters, and brother, devotion and education took place in the neighbouring Catholic parish of St Patrick’s. However their parents, my staunchly Catholic grandfather, Edward Sheldon, and his biddable and sweet natured bride, Elsie May Day, had been married within the sumptuous azure and gold  interior of St Mary’s on the 23rd of March 1924. As a boy in the 1900′s my grandfather had attended school at St Mary’s with his friend John Carless, V.C., whose delightful niece lives opposite my Aunty at Maryvale.

St Mary the Mount Roman Catholic Church, Walsall. April 2013.

This pleasing building is one of the earliest post-Reformation Roman Catholic churches in the country: designed by Joseph Ireland, it was completed in 1827, which is, notably, 2 years before the Catholic Emancipation Act which removed civil restrictions on Roman Catholics in Britain, including those against purchasing land. Perhaps its early arrival was a result of keen demand in the area: in addition to the English Catholics who had stubbornly persisted in practicing their outlawed faith covertly, there began, in the 19th century, the influx of Irish migrants, who brought their religious practices with them. Perceptibly “foreign”, sometimes shabbily dressed, they were drawn in number to the church services whose Latin words were exactly those they had learnt by heart from infancy, as much from homesickness as faith. Even in recent years, my Aunty tells me, that the concerned Irish Mammy of a fugitive son would contact, by numerous, falteringly penned letters, the Catholic churches in the area she suspected he was working.  It was inevitable that however delinquent, he would be drawn into them at some point to hear the comfortingly familiar liturgy.

“Spite Hill” as it is still known to local people. April 2013.

What, then, became of the longstanding, large lump of earth and stones on the Church’s newly acquired building plot on the corner of Glebe Street and Caldmore Road? The architects seem to have worked the building around it, and it is incorporated into the communal garden at the heart of Maryvale Court.

A seat in the sunny conservatory affords a good view of the mound, and it is topped, like a bun with a pious cherry, by a statue of the Virgin Mary.  Is it in my imagination, or might Our Lady have a Mona Lisa hint of a satisfied smile playing about her prayerful lips?

The history of an area, even when its old buildings are gone, can often be traced by reference to the enduring names of its streets.  ”Mount Street,” running parallel with “Glebe Street” might seem self explanatory as this end of Caldmore is indeed on an elevated bit of terrain.  But why is the church called “St Mary the Mount” – perhaps because The Mount was situated alongside what is now Wednesbury Road but north of Glebe Street, and was a large house, used for many years as a boarding school run by the ladies of the Richmond family, and which the Walsall Hospital Committee – galvanised by Sister Dora, purchased in 1867 to serve as Walsall’s first proper hospital.

Beautiful, kind, Sister Edith and her team, now care for Maryvale Court on the former site of Walsall Vicarage. Their order of nuns was founded by Bishop Godfrey Okoye in 1969 in Nigeria, in response to the need to help a population ravaged by the Nigeria-Biafra war. They must sometimes feel a long way from home in Walsall, apart from the worldwide connection of their faith.

The “Glebe” of Glebe Street indicates that lands hereabouts were allocated to the Anglican parish priest of St Matthews to provide his income.   “Vicarage Place,” and “Vicarage Walk”, slicing between Maryvale and St Mary’s, reveal exactly what used to stand at the Caldmore Road end of Glebe Street.  In fact, the 1901 Ordnance Survey map reveals that the portion of Caldmore Road north of Glebe Street was then called “Vicarage Road.” Scrutinising the ground plan, it is possible to make out that when enjoying a comfortable seat in Maryvale’s conservatory you might be sitting in the very spot where the Vicar’s bow-windowed parlour jutted into his ferny garden.

It seems that even prior to taking up his appointment in the 1830′s, and having to move in his family and servants, cheek by jowl with the Papists of the district, the Reverend George Fisk was known as a “firebrand” preacher, whose enlivening sermons, drawing huge congregations,  often contained lengthy anti-Roman diatribes.  His clashes with Father Francis Martyn, the first priest at St Mary’s were even played out in the local press. In the Staffordshire Advertiser of 16th June 1838, Father Martyn accuses the Reverend Fisk of describing a Catholic Chapel as enchanted ground, under the spell of Satan, whilst Reverend Fisk suggests that Father Martyn has attempted to earn respect amongst unsuspecting and generous Protestants….by your urbanity and courtesy. A fearful thought, indeed, that seductive continental wiles might tempt the denizens of the town from their joyless low church paths. What would Dr. Fisk make, I wonder, of the smiling, darkly handsome new occupants of the presbytery in 2013, Father Salvatore, and his Italian brethren?

How then could George Fisk bear to view the procession of the faithful to Father Martyn’s masses, in plain sight of his window?  And what could he do about it but build an extraordinarily large garden rockery in the Vicarage grounds, to provide him with a more pleasing panorama?

So when, on September 8th, 1982, the Right Reverend Joseph Cleary laid the foundation stone to Maryvale Court, “Spite Hill” was as yet unobscured by the new building. Those in the know at the ceremony undoubtedly allowed themselves a victorious chuckle at the expense of the Reverend Fisk, and vowed to preserve, for posterity, the little mount of The Mount, “Spite Hill”

POST SCRIPT.

Without the inscription, what casual observer would remember anything of the events of September 8th 1982?  Well I would, because it was my 21st birthday, which I celebrated at le restaurant “L’Auchel”, above a bicycle shop in Walsall Wood Road,  Aldridge.

Between the two World Wars, the soundscape of the roads in most small provincial towns, such as Walsall Wood, in South Staffordshire, altered radically and irrevocably as vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine were introduced, and animals – of all sorts – everyday traffic, or beasts driven to market or slaughter – were seen less frequently in the street.

But in the earlier part of the period, human voices could be heard over the rhythmical striking of horses’ hooves on a rutted surface of pulverised stone or cobbles.   The metal-rimmed wheels of horse-drawn vehicles sang along the streets, augmented by the whirr and ring-ring of bicycles.  Steam engines were occasionally seen. The effect at a busy junction could be noisy.  Around 1920, where several thoroughfares met at “the Vigo” it certainly was.  My Aunt Mary remembered measures being taken to dampen down the clatter during her brother’s illness, and what a contrast the quiet time was to the usual cacophony:  Little George was suffering from

……double pneumonia. I had to watch him one evening, [I] remember his eyes turned up under his eyelids, only a tiny bit of blue showing. For days there had been thick straw across the road and everybody coming to the house speaking in whispers. Somebody said ” He’s going to die ” Everywhere was so quiet – more frightening to me than the words I heard. As you know, he didn’t die……

But Walsall Wood streets were not too busy for playing children to be able to inhabit them.  Even when draught horses were commonplace, there were certain circumstances in which they were a spectacle for young Mary Horton and her playmates:

I saw a hearse pulled by horses wearing purple ear covers and I think purple ribbons on the harness. The hearse was followed by the mourner in a purple veil and a purple scarf round one shoulder and across her body and tied, with some of it hanging. She cried so loudly us children felt like bawling too. Behind her came the people dressed in black, the ladies wearing black veils. After they’d passed out of view, I remember we sat down in the gutter covering our bare feet with the warm dry dirt… must have been a hot day……

Not all the children of Walsall Wood were allowed to lark unsupervised in the dusty gutter with their friends, and not all draught animals were horses: “When I was three or four,” my Aunt Mary began an anecdote in her hand-written memoirs, ( meaning that this memorable incident took place towards the end of the first World War):

From “goatcarts.tumblir.com”

I remember a lucky small child coming down our road in a small dogcart, pulled by a goat, their nanny holding the reins, walking behind

The streets that surrounded the family home at the top of Aldridge Road circumscribed Mary’s early experiences. Even the short journey on foot to and from school could be eventful:

I remember I had to come home at dinner time to have mostly bread and jam, or what I particularly liked: condensed milk on bread. Going back to school one day I saw a man whipping his two mules supposed to be pulling a long cart. I shouted at him ” Mister – don’t hit them horses…”. He stopped, cracked the whip in front of me, spat on the horses leg and shouted ” Bugger off ta school or I’ll cut yow across th’arse wi it !- Goo on ” I went – running as fast as my little legs could take me

The local sweet-shop was a cornucopia of delicious confectionary, but frightening sights lurked upstairs:

 Across the road from school was Suranne’s little sweet shop. All sorts of mouth-watering sweets were in small boxes with price tickets on. Liquorish Laces were 3 for 1d., birds nest with 3 eggs a penny, gob stoppers a halfpenny, sherbet suckers a halfpenny with a liquorish “straw” in the corner of the sucker bag 1d. “Sucky” fish 3 for a halfpenny, sucky pigs and mice 1d. Chocolate bars a halfpenny, penny or three ha’pence according to size.

One day when Suranne’s mother was ill (Suranne was mother’s cousin) my mother said I was to go in after school…. remember being taken upstairs into a room with curtains half closed. There were lots of people standing about – and a large bed in the middle of the room – in it lay the oldest, wrinkliest, most frightening old woman I had ever seen. Always before I had just heard her voice…” Suranne !.. Suranne!..” ” Coming Mother….” Suranne answered, but still attending to our wants, until once again the voice came ” Suranne!!!!”

She lay there propped up on the pillows. I peered at her through the slats on the bottom of the bed. Her eyes saw me – fastened onto me – ” Suranne, is that Mary?” I was so terrified I ran down the stairs and out into the road and ran all the way home.

By now, quite an elderly person herself – though she never really seemed it – Aunt Mary wrote, apologetically “Thinking of it now, the poor old thing must have been near to death.”

Mary left Walsall Wood school on her 14^th birthday, in 1927, and so we can date the following, most exotic  of her childhood animal encounters quite accurately:

Soon after I left school – in the November – Brownhills Wake was on, and there was a menagerie. Four chained elephants stood in a row, one put its trunk out so I gave it a sweet, then another, and another, til I only had two left. I walked away, but the elephant had other ideas, she wrapped her trunk around my waist and I couldn’t feel the floor I yelled”Mister !… Look what it’s doing !!!”… “Don’t be frightened.. give her your sweet bag ” I did. …and she put me down. Her name was Margaret and she often caught people like that ………

The tours of Bostock and Wombwell’s menagerie had been interrupted by the Great War, but the Tamworth Herald records its appearance back in the Midlands in 1925, and in 1930, and so I am tempted to assume that alarmingly sweet toothed and playful “Margaret” was one of the stars of their entertainments.

The appearance of a travelling menagerie, a fair, a circus, contests of athleticism, sparrow shooting and pigeon racing and the relaxation of licencing laws are all documented in the local press as events to look forward to at “Wakes Week,” although the Lichfield Mercury, with disparaging tone, refers to all this as “the usual paraphenalia” being assembled near the Hussey Arms. Consultation of the local press in the first decades of the 20^th century also confirms the traditional occasion of the Brownhills “Wakes”, (a gathering or fair) in November – unusual amongst the survivals or revivals of these ancient festivals in the North of England, and suggests that it pre-dates the mass holidays which have co-incided with annual closures in mining and manufacturing communities since the Industrial Revolution. As Brownhills only came into existance as a significant centre of population in the 19^th century, the Wakes must have evolved in one of its older neighbours – Ogley Hay, perhaps, or Pelsall.

Brian Stringer, “The Clayhanger Kid” remembers the pit ponies coming up for a week or two in August during the miners’ holidays, consistent with many mining areas.  Margaret Brice, in her “Short History of Walsall Wood,” records the pleasingly alliterative Walsall Wood Wakes Week as the last week in October/first week in November, but relates that this particular custom ended in 1913, the year Aunt Mary was born.

In her black riding habit and veiled top hat, Mrs. Geraldine Thomas, the last private tenant of Orgreave Hall, was often seen, well into the ninth decade of her life, determinedly venturing forth, riding side-saddle, between the shady lime tree avenues and across the level, green parkland surrounding her home. Captain Thomas had died 20 years previously, leaving her alone in the mansion, apart from the encroaching presence of sub-tenants in the periphery of the estate.

In the new, egalitarian Britain of the 1960′s, Mrs Thomas was uneasily aware that she was a living anachronism. She declined to exchange money for the horse fodder supplied to her by her farmer neighbours, and in exercising this small droit de seigneur she was making a small gesture of remembrance towards the world into which she was born, in which the duties of her tribe, to be warriors, pioneers, and leaders of men, were supported by small armies of household servants.

According to Lucy Lethbridge’s recent book “Servants: A downstairs view of 20th century Britain,” Lord Curzon, only a generation senior to Mrs Thomas, entirely accustomed as he was to having his every need accommodated by his staff, was once so baffled by the problem of how to open a window without a servant at hand that he ended up smashing it with a log. Civilised life might break down altogether without the capable hand of the paid domestic assistant.

One of the long abiding inhabitants of Orgreave remembers himself scuffing through a six inch deep layer of leaves on the floors of the fine seventeenth century house towards an audience with Mrs Thomas in the drawing room in Orgreave Hall. Whether she allowed this foliacious carpeting to accrue through her lack of facility with a broom, or out of resignation to changing times, we do not know.

In common with Lord Curzon, Mrs Thomas had strong connections with the British Imperial presence in the Indian Subcontinent. She had married in 1907, Captain Edward Hector Le Marchant Thomas, whose family’s interests in the Galleheria Coffee plantation in Ceylon, where he was born in 1867, provided them with a healthy income. His maternal grandfather, Tom Skinner, had been responsible for the construction of the Columbo – Kandy highway early in the 19th century, and had explored, and mapped, previously uncharted areas of the island. Geraldine’s own father, Colonel George Pilkington Blake, had served in the Suffolk Imperial Yeomanry during the Indian Mutiny of 1856-7. Her elder sister Adeline married Hardinge Hay Cameron, of interest not just because of his family’s own involvement in India and Ceylon, but because his mother was the famous pioneering Victorian photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. In widowhood, Adeline came to live with her sister and brother in law at Orgreave.

London children celebrate the Silver Jubilee of 1935.
From a book in my own collection.

The Lichfield Mercury of Friday 17th May 1935 pictures them in happy times, and performing roles in which I imagine them to be comfortable, leading local celebrations of the Silver Jubilee of King George and Queen Mary. Captain Thomas opened the event, hoisting the Union Jack after a few “well chosen words.” Mrs Cameron, (Adeline), presented prize money to the children who were victorious in their sports contests, and Mrs Thomas presented Jubilee cups and saucers. Each lucky child “also received oranges and sweets.”

When Adeline died in 1947,  ”Burton Woman Leaves £3,009″ screamed the Derby Daily Telegraph. It must have seemed a useful sum.

“Sloane Gardens House”
from “Where shall she live?”: Housing the New Working Woman in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’, in Living, Leisure and Law: Eight Building Types in England 1800-1941, ed. Geoff Brandwood.

Rising 40 and 31 years old respectively when they married, both Edward and Geraldine had already lived remarkable lives. The 1901 census finds Geraldine living in an upmarket ladies’ hostel in London. “Sloane Gardens House” was built on behalf of the Ladies’ Associated Dwellings Company and had been opened in 1888 at 52, Lower Sloane Street.  Its purpose was the accommodation of ladies who might, whilst retaining their good name, choose to pursue a career – an idea still only newly acceptable to many.  These salubrious surroundings with their library, music room, and dining room were effectively  Geraldine’s student digs.  Far from working in commerce, Geraldine was studying fine art, particularly sculpture.

A palace of delights for Christmas 1901 were illuminated in the windows of the nearby Peter Jones department store, and her Michaelmas term drew to an end.  Meanwhile, her future husband’s Boer War medal, with a creditable five clasps, denoting his service among the Ceylon Mounted Rifles in the battles of  Dreifontein, Johannesburg, Diamond Hill, Wittebergen, and Cape Colony, was being collected by his brother Jocelyn, also a decorated veteran of the conflict. Edward had been invalided to England the previous year.  A third brother, Arthur, had perished, one of over 22,000 British casualties.  The Thomas brothers, not youths but men in their 30s, had travelled from one distant corner of The Empire to another for the sake of duty and adventure, and their father did not forget that one of them never returned home.

How did “Ted” Thomas become acquainted with Miss Geraldine Blake?  Perhaps a clue lies in the following.  A fine statue, representing a trooper of the Ceylon Mounted Infantry giving the signal “enemy is in sight” was commissioned by Mr Thomas senior in memory of his son and his fallen comrades. It was unveiled in Ceylon by H.R.H. The Duke of Connaught on March 18th 1907, some six weeks after the marriage of Lieutenant Thomas to the designer of the memorial.

Geraldine Blake Thomas with the statue she designed.
Image and information courtesy of Dr Jean Ferran.

There were several months of speculation before a new Poet Laureate was appointed in 1972, following the death of the incumbent, Cecil Day-Lewis.  With unemployment reaching a record one million, and the S.A.L.T. agreement finally being signed by the Russian and US presidents, I imagine that the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, thought he had more to worry about that summer than whose name he would be submitting to the Queen as Day-Lewis’s successor.

A short piece about Albert Sperrin, “Royal” Poet, appeared in the Lichfield and Tamworth Magazine in September 1972.

According to the Lichfield and Tamworth Magazine, at his home at 95, Gaia Lane, Lichfield, a hopeful candidate for the newly vacant position was relying on the advocacy of no less a figure than Earl Mountbatten of Burma to promote his cause. The eventful life of the minor Royal, Admiral of the Fleet and last Viceroy of India had recently inspired a lengthy verse narrative to be penned in this neat, turn-of-the-century, semi-detached cottage near Stowe Pool by productive wordsmith Albert Edward Sperrin, who lived there with his wife, Jessie.

Self styled “Poet for Royal Occassions,” Albert Sperrin, had received over 50 letters of acknowledgement from the Queen Mother, Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and Princess Margaret, among others, according to the September 1972 edition of the local magazine. Even the black sheep of the Royal Family, the Duke of Windsor, had been the subject of one of Sperrin’s poetic tributes following his demise that May, for which his widow, the former Mrs. Wallis Simpson, was said to be grateful. Public events of all kinds had been marked by Mr Sperrin’s enthusiastic lyrical endeavours since the 1930s. Meanwhile, he had kept body and soul together by virtue of his day-job as Superintendent of Hospital Gardens, first in his native county of Oxfordshire, later in Birmingham and also his adopted city of Lichfield. He was proud to relate that like Doctor Samuel Johnson, Lichfield’s other famous man of letters, the young Albert had attended Pembroke College, Oxford. In parallel with Johnson, he, too, had been obliged to leave without attaining a degree because of a shortfall in the family finances.

My dad had an eclectic portfolio of customers for his domestic building skills in and around Lichfield, and Mr. Sperrin looks likely to have been one of them. Why else do I have in my possession a copy of his snappily titled opus ” To Sir Francis Chichester, Britain’s lone around the World Yachtsman and Flier. In Appreciation May 1967″, annotated with a warm and personal dedication to me by the poet? Ted Horton formed easy, chatty, friendships with most of the people he worked for, and during tea-break conversations in his brown bib and braces, checked shirt, and narrow, woollen tie, there were inevitable references to me. Me, his daughter and only child, who at the age of six, already showed tedious signs of being “wordy”, and so would have genuinely appreciated the personalised draft of “To Sir Francis Chichester…et cetera.”

We now know that, in the event, the honour of Laureate was conferred upon Sir John Betjeman on the 10th of October 1972, and that the aspirant speculation of the Lichfield and Tamworth Magazine was futile. But there are more ways than one for a poet to acquire posthumous fame. It came to light after Albert Sperrin’s death on Valentine’s Day in 1987 that he had bequeathed to Lichfield City Council a portrait of himself in oils. Years later, details of the portrait, by artist “J. Buchanan” made it to the list which the Public Catalogue Foundation compiled of publicly owned art. In collaboration with the BBC, the database is now available online, so that by making a Google search of albert+sperrin+poet you are rewarded within seconds by the view of a round, bespectacled face, and, additionally, the opportunity to read the verse which Sperrin composed to mark the Mexico Olympic Games in 1968.

Albert Sperrin (1903–1987) by J. Buchanan.
Date painted: 1979
Oil on canvas, 53 x 42.5 cm

Mrs. Jo Wilson, the curator of the Samuel Johnson Museum in Lichfield was kind enough to retrieve Albert’s picture from the archive for my perusal. She commented that the relaxed, informal pose of the sitter intimated that the artist, J.Buchanan and his subject were personal friends. The composition of the picture, with Mr Sperrin sitting comfortably in his armchair with a patterned sofa partially visible in an awkward position to the rear suggests to me that we are privileged to be looking at the interior of 95, Gaia Lane.

The portrait seems to have gone on public exhibition in Lichfield in 1987, accompanied by some of his letters and manuscripts.  A short biography written to accompany it reinforces the impression of a good hearted, traditional British eccentric, a “generous man always ready to write a poem for a good cause.” His subject matter ranged from Royal events to the Bradford Football Ground fire, and the artistry of Torville and Dean. His is described as an “idiosyncratic’ style,  which charmed and delighted local people – which I am sure is a fair description.  Touchingly patriotic, Albert Sperrin’s work is part of a long tradition of versifying about events of national importance, which goes back to a time before mass media or widespread literacy when reading rhyming accounts out loud was a useful way of communicating news.

Faults in meter and stress, and some instances of oddly archaic language are easily overlooked when Sperrin’s writing has such brio. Haven’t the devoted fans of William Topaz McGonagall, guilty of far more brutal shoe-horning of words into lines remained faithful and evangelistic over 100 years after his death?  ( He died 6 months before Sperrin was born – although it is said that Sperrin met Rudyard Kipling in his youth, who encouraged him in his writing)

Like Sperrin, McGonagall sought Royal patronage for his efforts. He dubbed himself “The Queen’s Poet,” and walked 60 miles to Balmoral in a violent storm to present a performance of his work to her.  He did not meet with success either, and received no accolade from his monarch.

But how bad a Poet Laureate might Albert Sperrin have made?  Sir John Betjeman, the successful candidate, did not enjoy the job, and, according to a press report of the time received news of his appointment with luke-warm enthusiasm:

Sir John Betjeman will write only when moved, and otherwise “remain a silent thrush.” said the Guardian on the 11th October 1972. It went on:

He asked yesterday, on holiday at a cottage in North Cornwall: “Isn’t that a beautiful remark? I just made it up. Poetry is poetry, whether you are Poet Laureate or not. It has to be felt. I don’t think I shall write about public occasions unless I can feel them, it is better not to write than to write badly.”

Our local bard would have displayed no such reluctance, I feel sure.

To Sir Francis Chichester, Britain’s lone around the World Yatchtsman and Flier – by A.E.Sperrin

Let guns boom out, let flags fly at ship’s mast,

Sir Francis Chichester is safely home,

Let planes dip in salute as they fly past

Over his yacht; no more is he alone;

This man who journeyed round the world on sea,

Marking his name in Britain’s history.

This flying ace, this ocean pioneer

Britain’s loved crusader named Chichester,

Undaunted by mishaps, unmoved by fear,

A man of courage, an adventurer;

Flying to Australia o’er land and sea,

Alone, but for his Gipsy Moth for company.

Around the world he flew, always alone

The sea and land below, the sky above

The cockpit of his aeroplane his throne

The Gipsy Moth he flew in, his air-love;

Flying from New Zealand o’er the Tasman sea,

Reaching Australia, and making history.

Airman, now turned sailor, fearless, bold and brave

With Gipsy Moth the Fourth as his steed.

Sailing upon the ocean, his untiring slave,

Willing at his command to give more speed:

White sails at her mast-head, billowing in the breeze,

Gliding her along o’er the windswept seas.

Alone around the world he rode the seas,

Through dreary days and nights for weeks on end.

Into the unknown, lashed by the wild sea breeze,

Enduring loneliness without a friend

The sun and stars above his visual guide,

The yacht he rode with his love and pride.

Stately she rode her Captain standing by

Crossing the Atlantic Ocean on her way.

Speeding along, her main-sail flying high

Nearer her destinations day by day.

Alone, the Captain and his sea-worthy friend

Riding the storm-tossed waves unto journey’s end

Together, yacht and man rounding the Horn

Tossed upon mighty waves, then lost beneath the spray.

Was ever there a braver yachtsman born?

Or yet a yacht which gave such staunch display?

High on a sea-borne mountain, then tossed below,

Into the boiling ocean, backwards, to and fro.

Salute this hero over the country wide!

Salute this gallant yachtsman on this day!

Citizens of Britain, look on him with pride,

As Plymouth celebrations get underway.

Receive, Sir Francis, the hear-thanks of our Nation

And the statuette of Plymouth’s presentation.

The scene is set with regal pageantry,

As Sir Francis kneels before our reigning Queen.

This day of June, -repeating history

When another Francis stole the historic scene,

Using the trusted sword of Sir Francis Drake,

These epic words Her Majesty bespake;

“Arise, Sir Francis, receive the honour due,

The accolade of Knighthood I bestowe on you.”

Footherly Lane, near Stonnall. August 1950, and November 2012.

Over the years since my Uncle Bill’s death in 1982, I have regularly taken a less then necessary detour along Footherly Lane, and permitted myself intermittent wincing glances at Keepers Cottage.  Over the course of half a century, it was home to three generations of my family. Peering through the windows after it had been empty for eight or ten years, we could hardly believe that the tiny rooms could have accommodated the extended Horton family for Sunday Teas, and death-bed vigils, but they did, and with its extraordinary,  time-capsule characteristics –  the unspoilt rural setting, the well water, the paraffin lights, and the earth closet – the place assumed a mythological status in our imaginations, and still haunts me in dreams.

My inner eye has compiled a little flip-through book of images over the intervening, uninhabited, years of the little dwelling, its boundary wall, and its outbuildings, as they have sunk gradually, incrementally, to their rendered red brick knees onto the soft, loamy soil.  Windows are now bricked up and blind, and chimney pots long toppled. The field which comprised the small holding is overgrown. However, the wood and the stream by which it is bounded look much the same, and the precise curve of the lane down to the bridge over Footherly Brook is unchanged from the sunny August day in 1950 when my Dad took a snap of his niece, Josephine Anne, her refined, well dressed dolly, and Bob the dog.

It must come as some shock if you have the misfortune to suddenly revisit, after a long interval, a beloved building, now decayed, which you remember in its prime. Surveying the scene must be like viewing one of those ambiguous optical illusions; drawings which simultaneously depict, say, either and both a rabbit or a duck. Or Rubin’s vase whose outline is composed by the silhouettes of two faces in profile….images of which either one or the other can be seen at one time, so that the brain flips back and forth between the different perceptions. Or, is it always possible to be aware of the sharply defined picture, drawn from memory, superimposed upon the deficient and unreal dreariness of present facts?

Augmented reality technology will one day – soon – be able to mimic the natural phenomenon of seeing the landscape of your past as you plant your feet on today’s unforgiving ground. I discount the obvious application of  ”A.T.” glasses or contact lenses feeding sat nav data seamlessly into your field of vision.   My thoughts rush to the possibility of enhancing my view of the 21st century streetscape of an historic city such as Lichfield by generating transparent images of now indiscernible thoroughfares  - or of buildings long demolished. And of populating them with shadowy animations of the denizens of the city going about their business as they would have looked 50, 100, or 1000 years ago? Wouldn’t that be winning way of engaging with history?

For now, I must be content with my own internally perceived web of visual recollections. Perhaps you experience them too? Walk up the comfortable incline of Greenhill from Lichfield’s commercial centre, turn left, and walk on between the townhouses, a happy melding of old and new, which have been christened “Greenhill Mews.” At the end, are you ever still arrested by the sight of the undulating roofline of the “new” Tesco superstore, which opened in 2009, having seen, in your mind’s eye, the “older” store, a mere 10 years its senior? There was no windowless booth of a “Costa Coffee” in the earlier, squarer, edifice. To the left of the main doors was a spacious and convenient café. In there, my parents and I raised celebratory hot beverages after a property auction sale in the – also now long gone – Lichfield Civic Hall. Winterton and Sons’ gavel had fallen in my favour, and our future marital home, our very own Keepers Cottage, had been “knocked down” to me.

Part of “Greenhill Mews.”

And speaking of auction sales, can you, like me, picture an even older incarnation of this elevated acre of Lichfield, recalled in the name of the street called “Smithfield Rise”, on the north-west side of the Tesco store? Until the site off Church Street was cleared to make way for the supermarket in 1988, Winterton and Sons, auctioneers, operated, as their family had done for over a century, the busy Lichfield “Smithfield”, or livestock market, there. The Victoria County History of Stafford tells us that:

in 1883 Thomas Winterton began building a covered market in Church Street. There was a street market for horses once a month by 1879, and it was evidently still held in 1889. By then the smithfields were selling cheese, poultry, bacon, and potatoes, to the detriment of the general Friday market. An annual wool sale was started at the Greenhill smithfield in 1884 with some 4,000 fleeces advertised, and by 1892 some 32,000 were pitched there. In 1927 the Church Street smithfield dealt in cattle, sheep, pigs, wool, and potatoes on alternate Mondays and in horses on the first Friday of the month. A livestock market was held there every Monday from 1935.

The old walls, which have been incorporated so congruently into the dwellings which form Greenhill Mews, I knew in the 1970s as part of the buildings which housed the stock on Monday market days. Thrillingly, every fourth or fifth Thursday, the ridged and gullied concrete was scrubbed and sluiced even more vigorously than usual, and,  in the stalls, ponderous examples of Victorian furniture jostled for space with pictures,  sets of books tied with string, baskets of china, and the mysterious and most desirable boxes of “miscellaneous items”, which were sure to contain a priceless treasure in their dusty nether reaches.

Attending the sales held much excitement for me.  Michael Winterton, attractive, charismatic, acerbically witty, was wheeled, by minions, on his platform around the lots.  He winked at the girls, and humiliated, with cutting remarks, whoever had amateurishly waved or gestured within his field of vision and yet had not intended to make a bid.  How pleasurably my heart pounded when I first secured a lot by bidding for it myself, handed over my pocket money to the clerk, and took home my prize. The risk!  The drama! The smell and glory of being freely able to handle and inspect the time worn chattels of another man’s household!

Auction-going then was a minority sport.  ”Flog it!” was decades from being aired on TV screens.  Even “Going for a Song,” the only, po-faced, antique TV programme of the day, had yet to be superseded by “Antiques Roadshow”.  Items which would effortlessly slip into the  Art and Antiques category of EBay today were as yet not even “Collectables” –  mostly just someone else’s junk, but endlessly fascinating to me!  ”That’s a dealer,” my dad might say to me, indicating with his eyes, but without moving his head, some eccentric looking person who might have been Colonel Mustard or Miss Scarlett. I was a rapt observer of this arcane world, in which I felt I belonged.  The porters, in their matt brown cotton coats lifted their eyes and greeted my dad by name: “Worro, Ted.” “Worro.” “Worro.”

My father bought these rather gloomy, continental looking seascapes at the Wychnor Hall sale in 1976, having been outbid on some Stevengraphs which he fancied better.

If the contents of a larger house were to be auctioned, the auctioneers would decamp to the site.  Mohammed would go to the Mountain. An enormous marquee was erected on the lawn of Wychnor Hall, in that long hot summer of 1976, where the copious contents of the building were sold off during two days, following the death the previous year of its gentleman owner of 30 years, William Harrison, the scion of industrialists, inheritor of their wealth, but father of daughters only.

The River Trent babbled refreshingly at the foot of the gardens, but it was humid in the marquee.  It seems audacious of us now, but Mom, Dad and I snook into the cooler interior of the Hall, and found it to be deserted.  Having started the job, we finished it, and the memory has never left me of climbing ever narrower stairs to the top floor, where we peeped into an abandoned nursery containing a shabby rocking horse with a mangy mane draped in spiders’ webs.

The document, signed by Mr Harrison’s heirs, conferring the right of tenure on his gamekeeper, Mr Johnson, and his wife, in 1976.

When his boss died, William Harrison’s Gamekeeper, Harold Johnson, was forced into an early retirement.  His service, rearing wild game, preserving the hedgerows and copses of their habitat, and organising shooting days for Mr Harrison and his aristocratic guests, had begun not long after the days when the Harrisons were tenants of Orgreave Hall, on the south bank of the river, and it was in Orgreave that he had remained living in his tied cottage. In accordance with Mr Harrison’s wishes, a legal document was raised in April 1976 to confer on the Johnsons the right to reside in the Keepers Cottage for just as long as they wished.  In fact, that was to be until 1991, with Harold dead, and Ivy ready to move into sheltered accommodation, precipitating that sale at the Civic Hall at which I was the successful bidder.

The Serjeantson Fountain, Greenhill, Lichfield.

What is there to remember the Greenhill Smithfield by now?  Well, the Serjeantson Fountain, built by public subscription as a memorial to the Reverend James Jordan Serjeantson, 19th century rector of St Michael’s Church has been restored and repositioned in Greenhill. It sports capacious stone troughs for the refreshment of the livestock which would be arriving in Lichfield from the surrounding countryside each Monday for the auction sales.

At the Tesco end of Greenhill Mews is “The Formation of Poetry,” by Lichfield born sculptor Peter Walker, which was unveiled in September 2010.  It is a dramatic tribute to the life and work of Samuel Johnson, in the form of an animated dictionary from which choice pages are cascading away. The title of the work refers to Johnson’s method of using poetical quotations to establish the meaning of words. These include “Sleep,” ; “Walk”; “Moon,” “Cloud,” and “Rose”, with supporting quotations from verse.  ”Worro,” does not appear in the famous dictionary, although it is a word which must surely have been heard in the Lichfield of Johnson’s  youth. I have a hunch that it, like its upper class relative, “What Ho!”, can be traced back to the earliest of English poetical sources……..

Hwæt! We Gardena    in gear-dagum,
þeodcyninga,     þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas     ellen fremedon.

When I see an old wall, I look at the pattern of the bricks to determine the bond. When I name the bonds, as at many other times, I think about my father.

When I was a little girl in the 1960s, my father, a self employed builder, worked very long hours. If I was lucky, he arrived home on weeknights before I went to bed, and I was allowed to perch on his knee and share a few mouthfuls of his dinner, which Mother would have kept warm between two plates on top of a saucepan of simmering water on the gas hob. The crusty shore at the edge of the plate gave it a distinctive, delicious savour which endures in my memory.

Mom was, and is, a “good, plain, cook”, and our evening meal was wholesome but unvarying: vegetables, which were often home grown, and meat, the plated-up arrangement topped by Bisto gravy.  Chops, mince, liver, braising steak,  or a smallish roasting joint were purchased twice weekly from Mr Cope’s shop on Aldridge High Street. With gloved hands – sheepskin in winter, cotton in summer, leather in-between – Mother pushed me on the mile and a bit journey to “the village” and back again in my tinny-metal, sky-blue push chair on fine days, or bundled me onto a bone-shaking “Harper’s” ‘bus in foul weather.

By the 1970s, the componenets of our evening meal would have been lifted out of the ponderous sarcophagus of a chest freezer which stood in the ex-coalplace just outside the kitchen door. (The hated – by Mother – Parkray having been superseded by the clean convenience of gas central heating.)

Seasonal gluts of produce harvested from our own garden and from the field at Keepers Cottage could be thriftily preserved in that freezer, and it was less than irrelevant that Walter and Geoff Yates of Yieldfields, Bloxwich, were amongst my Dad’s customers at that time.  He worked on their slaughter hall as well as the family’s houses.  I remember Mrs Yates’ huge warm kitchen one cold Sunday morning, and my diminutive self being pleasantly overwhelmed by two huge and enthusiastic, gritty mouthed Bassett Hounds. It was to be in another, far away abattoir, a quarter of a century later that I met my future husband…..but that’s another (romantic) story.

Childhood Sundays with my dad were delightful. At Redhouse Junior School,  Monday morning’s “News” in my blue exercise book sang of my carefree and  interesting week ends.  In this 1968-9 “volume”. punctuation is dodgy, and some of the spelling is a damning reminder of the misguided fad that was I.T.A.  - The “Initial Teaching Alphabet.”

4th May 1969: “On Sunday before we went to my Grandad’s we had to call at a place were my dad was working it was in a Private road called Birch Grove it was coverd in birch trees it was very hot and I felt like taking All! my clothes off! the houses were very posh and as we drove along I could read the names on the gates. soon we got there and my dad showed the people the stone and then we came home.”

There were visits to be made on Sundays, and my dad was happy to have me to himself, by his side, as he helped his customers to choose stone for their fireplaces, delivered estimates for jobs, or dropped a gentle hint about payment over tea and biscuits. The day always started well, too: When Mom vacated her side of the bed in the morning, I might slip between the sheets beside my bulky, cosy dad and read to him a couple of chapters from the Enid Blyton canon. Or we might be up first, and while Mother sipped tea, propped against a wynceyette pillow, bleary eyed, I would cheer my dad on as he wielded the sizzling frying pan, concocting the sort of “Full English” which Mom frowned on then, but was later forbidden entirely after my dad’s heart attack in 1972.

Taking a keen interest in concrete.

My curiosity, and my father’s eagerness to instruct were in harmony with each other as we set off on our Sunday rounds in the 1966 Ford Thames van, our family’s only vehicle.

At some customer’s quaint, unspoilt rural cottage (a speciality), or at a boxy modern house, or the grander home of decayed minor gentry in Four Oaks or Little Aston, the building job would be explained to me.

 Rafter, purlin, truss, noggin, and facia; header, stretcher, weather-struck, raked:  The vocabulary of carpentry and bricklaying was at my command from an early age. We called in on my dad’s Pop and brother Bill at Keepers Cottage, and where Footherly Woods met the bottom of their field was a magical Sabbath playground for us.

May 11th 1969: “The Dams. On Sunday, we went to Grandads we were a bit late because my dad had to deliver some horse manure to Mr and Mrs Sadlers. I thought that Mr Sadler was mad when he said the wife’s in the garden it was more like a park. At last when we got down the wood it was nearly twenty -five-to-two. Straet away we went down to the little brook that runs into the river my dad made a dam and I made a dam then all of a sudden my dad moved his dam away and my dam was drowned. I built my dam up again soon the front was made of stones and backed with mud and leaves then Suki walked up and nearley got stuck. Soon it was quarter-past-two so we had to go home I hope my dam is still there.”

 Streams could be dammed, flowers named and gathered, trees climbed, and wildlife excitedly identified, and, as I reached my teens, shot at.  I trembled, and missed my target because of my great reluctance to kill.  During my  ”training”, I wielded only my lighterweight .410 shotgun, with its beautiful walnut stock, which had been made to measure for my Uncle Bill by Thomas Wild’s gunsmith in Birmingham before the war.  My dad had painstakingly beat out an old silver sixpence, engraved an elegant copperplate “S” on it, and set it into the stock of the gun for me. With skilful stitches, a relative’s stiff ginger leather “Sam Browne” belt from the First World War was cannibalised into a cartridge belt for .410 sized cartridges.  What a painstaking, loving gift! I was paralysed by guilt on either hand: I abhorred the thought of being less competent than any lad would  be at shooting or fishing, and frightened of garnering less accolades than I might from my beloved parent, but I passionately resisted the idea of inflicting pain on a beautiful bird or animal.

But what was part of my father’s identity I absorbed as part of my own. My father told me that as soon as he had been strong enough to hold a gun, he had been accustomed to stand under the holly bush at the bottom of the field at Keepers Cottage, watching for pigeons – (or pheasants put down by the Footherly Estate) – coming in to roost in the conifers in the corner of the wood. Not far into his teens, he began building work with Pop and Bill.  Uncle Bill was a foreman for J.R. Deakin in Lichfield until around 1980, and my dad worked there too, before the war.  There was a proper apprenticeship completed, and then Adolf intervened.  Service with the 1st Battallion of the Welsh Guards saw my father busy in the armourer’s workshop, pursuing his interest in firearms for King and Country, against the backdrop of conflict in early post-colonial Palestine, until, in 1947, gun yielded once more to trowel and mortarboard.

A family tragedy saw guns put aside for most of the 1960s.  They were innocent years. How fine it was, when constructing sand castles on a summer beach, but also in the snowy winter garden, to have a father, so skilled in laying bricks, with Sunday hours to give to you!

A snowman and and igloo from snowfall in Bosty Lane, Aldridge, 44 winters ago.

A youthful Big Ted takes care to wrap up warm when venturing outdoors in February 1969.

23rd February 1968: ” THE IGLOO! On Sunday my dad said he would help me build an igloo first we had to go to Ikins because my dad had left his wellingtons there when we came back we spent a good two hours on it first of all we made a big wall of snow and when we had done that we started on the bricks we used buckets and we made little castles like at the sea-side then my dad picked them up and put them on top we did this untill diner time then after dinner I called for Geraldine and she helped soon it was fineshed with a big tunell.”

In his threadbare (!) old age, Big Ted is now content to observe the wintry weather from the window. January 2013.

When the rose was more famous than the shop – an American plantsman’s catalogue of 1920 from my own collection.

There are fashions in rose cultivation, just as there are in habits, costume, and coiffure.

A nameless, ancient, pale shell pink rose used to ramble at will all over the old brick barn where my dad’s family lived at Keepers Cottage, Footherly. It had been planted in some distant season without reference to the preferred palette and naturalistic planting schemes popularised by Gertrude Jekyll at the turn of the 20th century, even though it typified them.

“iceberg,” “Blue Moon,” “Peace,” I could recite the names of all my mother’s roses. At the front of 155, Bosty Lane, Aldridge, in the 1960s.

I was a young child when my mother lovingly stocked our front garden at 155, Bosty Lane, Aldridge with all the latest varieties of “Hybrid Teas”. We really appreciated their virtues: the exquisite form of the bloom, with the classic pointed bud, whose shape endures as the petals around it unfold, and the startlingly intense colours of the latest introductions: “Uncle Walter”, (1963) , a vivid red; “Grandpa Dickson”, (1966), sunny yellow – and “Blue Moon”(1964)- in reality a blueish violet, but even now the nearest approximation of the elusive blue rose.  “Ena Harkness” invited a diminutive Susan to lean in to its ruby flowers to inhale a powerful fragrance, undaunted by the earwigs lurking at the base of the petals.

Hybrid Tea roses are sparse of foliage, and whole beds of them present as a dismal cluster of bare, upright sticks in the winter months, because they sulk if underplanted. These shortcomings mean that are now out of favour with gardening cognoscenti.  All roses, from the wild dog-rose to the florist’s confection give me too much pleasure to criticise them for their faults, unlike Vita Sackville West, who really had it in for a rose called “Dorothy Perkins“. This endearingly bright Barbie-pink rose, a generous bloomer,  she described as an “old enemy”, in her column for “The Observer,” and as  ”… a blaze of color; a long, angry, startling streak … I blink on seeing it; and having blinked, I weep.” Oh dear!

The “real” Dorothy Perkins was the grand-daughter of American rose-grower Charles H. Perkins, who named his creation after her back in 1901, fostering a trend for naming roses after people.  The vigorous plant immediately began to win prizes, and become so famous and popular that the H. P. Newman Stores changed their name to “Dorothy Perkins” in 1919.

Nearly 100 years later, the name “Dorothy Perkins” is still emblazoned on shopfronts the length and breadth of Britain. I reckon I would have been about 16 or 17, in the 1970s when I first sloped in to make a purchase of a pretty blouse or some lacy tights in the Dotty P. shop in Park Street, Walsall, but a member of my family had crossed that threshold some 25 years before at a similar age, with much more purposeful a step, let alone far superior deportment and grooming.

My Aunt, Irene Thackeray, nee Sheldon. Born Walsall, 1932.

My mother’s next youngest sister, Irene, was a tall, slender, personable girl in a cheap print frock when, she recalls, she was making herself useful by running errands for a near neighbour by the name of Mrs Alice Brown.  Mrs Brown was the manageress of the Walsall branch of Dorothy Perkins, and, despite Irene’s tender years, persuaded her to be recruited into the sales force as a trainee manageress. At first, she was obliged to sport the dreaded greeny-beige button- through uniform of the sales girls – “it was horrible, like a prison dress,” Irene says vehemently.  Soon, in deference to her training she was allowed to wear her own outfit of an impeccably tailored dark suit, and stylish peep-toed court shoes.  She relished the fact that her income enabled her to choose her clothes  for the first time in her life.

The staff of the Walsall branch of Dorothy Perkins in the early 1950s. A young Irene Sheldon, second row, left, has one hand on the shoulder of Mrs. Rathbone, the cleaner. Mrs. Brown, manageress, is at the front.

If dainty, now obsolete items of trousseau such as bed-jackets and girdles had been your desire in 1950′s Park Street, you would have been greeted, Madam, at the door of the Dorothy Perkins store by a young lady at once uncannily similar to my mother, but, in Mother’s own words, sweeter and more ladylike. In the role of “First Hand”, the elegant Miss Sheldon would then have shown you to the department you required, be it hosiery, corsetry, blouses, nightwear, or the comprehensive range of knitting yarns which Dorothy Perkins purveyed at the time. Miss Butler, Miss Brazier (whose husband never allowed her to wear make up) or Miss Cooper with their proficient knowledge of the stock behind their own glass counter, would courteously have served you, and neatly hand written the record of your purchase – each ticket being countersigned by the manageress.  A dedicated cashier would have completed the financial transaction. Mrs Rathbone, the cleaner, was an integral member of the team, and appears prominently on group photographs of the staff.  I remember Mrs Rathbone in later life as she lived next door to my grandmother in Bentley.  She was the matriarch of a large family, which, I was uneasily aware, struggled against ill health and poverty.

The Dorothy Perkins girls of Walsall on an outing in the early 50′s at an unrecalled location. Trainee manageress Irene Sheldon is centre back, Mrs Rathbone is centre front.

When a relief manager was required at West Bromwich, the company had an opportunity to assess Irene’s ability to run a shop.  Acquitting herself well, and not quite nineteen years old, she was offered the position of manageress of the Worcester branch.  Reassured that The Church was able to find a respectable Catholic family for her to board with, my grandfather gave his permission for her to go.

Mr Farmer, a member of the family which owned the company, made regular visits to the larger stores, including Worcester.  He was also present (and it looks like it is a terrible chore for him)  at a conference attended by Dorothy Perkins manageresses and area supervisors from far and wide. Worcester seemed cosmopolitan to Irene after Walsall, but arriving by train in London she feared to leave her hotel at all, in case she got lost in the streets of the capital.  A coach arrived at the hotel in the morning to transport the delegates to the impressive Ashridge conference centre in Hertfordshire.

Irene Sheldon, right, manager of Worcester branch, attended a conference for managers in the Dorothy Perkins organisation at Ashridge in Hertfordshire. Mr Farmer is the thorn amongst the roses. Mrs Brown, the manager at Walsall branch is front left, and area manager Miss Marriot is front right,

The Worcester branch of Dorothy Perkins, managed by Irene Sheldon, photographed for the company magazine.

Irene thrived at Worcester. Her salary of £30 per month enabled a single girl to live well and to save for the future.  She became great friends with all the girls who worked for her, including Miss O’Connell, Miss Thatcher, and Worcester branch’s cleaning lady Mrs Turbeville.  This lovely shot of the staff in their shop was taken for the Dorothy Perkins company magazine. The young photographer who took the picture returned to the shop several times, for what he insisted were vital retakes. He had, Irene remembers with amusement, “The biggest ears you ever did see.” Eventually, he plucked up courage to ask Irene to go out with him.  But an evening at the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre, and afternoon tea with his parents in their Worcester flat were insufficient to impress. On New Year’s Eve 1954, Irene was to meet her future husband, at the exclusive staff ball held at the Powick Asylum. As midnight chimed, a net of balloons was released from the splendid ceiling of the Victorian ballroom. Irene watched a girl sip from a glass of port as she sternly warned a defiantly grinning young farmer in a sparkling white dress shirt to desist from popping the balloons with his lighted cigarette.  Despite the big sticky red stain he had earned for the front of his shirt, Irene accepted a lift home on the back of Trevor Thackeray’s motorbike……………….

Then this happened..but Irene’s career at Dorothy Perkns continued, and Miss Marriot suggested further promotion…

…..but then this started happening as well.

Respecting the season,  car parking charges have been waived during the 25th and 26th of December, which I find an incongruous gesture. Mother seems quite gleeful, as if this were a Christmas gift, or that we were getting away with something we oughtn’t to. Despite the iron grey skies, and our anxious sympathy for the patient we have come to spend time with, these visits are definitely not the darker interludes of the 2012 holidays. There is sporadic cheerful chatter between the two of us and it is my delight to be free of a hostess’s teeth-gritting obligation to make meaningless small talk with people you are forbidden from disliking. My mother’s youngest sister, although confined to bed, tetchy and in pain, has got some colour back in her cheeks, and we are optimistic about her chances of recovery.  The car park is large and level, and although we are looking through leafless trees onto industrial premises, their careful planting amongst grass and shrubbery gives the impression that the environment around the building has been considered important.  I do hope the suitably empowered realise the uplifting potential of preserving the Guardians’ Building.

We have been in and out of here too frequently in the last few years, and remember the mud and pot-holes we used to struggle to park up in: an extra flake of irritation in 2007 –  tiny, beside the gigantic gouge of loss we were experiencing.

The new Manor Hospital. Does the architecture of the new hospital make a faint nod towards the style of the Guardian’s Building?

Now, the redeveloped hospital is bright and impressive, with lofty halls, light-filled corridors and a reassuring emphasis on cleanliness. We used to associate our local nursing heroine, Sister Dora, with the old General Hospital, but now she is commemorated here at “The Manor.” There is a prominent board bearing information about her life and significant contribution to nursing, and a plaster cast model of her strong, noble features, identical to the bronze statue by FJ Williamson on The Bridge, which has been familiar to me for the whole of my life.

“The Spirit of Sister Dora”

Just inside the entrance, The “Spirit of Sister Dora” is a 2010 work by Steve Yeates, which, very appealingly, has been created from glass from the windows in the old infirmary.  There is something very fitting and moving about the sculptor metaphorically capturing the troubled stares of the sick paupers of long ago through those old panes, from their sick beds to the busy world outside, and incorporating them into this lovely work of art.

As the wintery minutes ticked on until two o’clock, me and Mom gazed, in companionable silence, across Pleck Road, through the rain beaded windscreen of the silver Ford Fiesta, my late dad’s final car, which I inherited, I calculated, five and three-quarter years ago, the day he didn’t come back out of The Manor Hospital. Ghosts tend to rise at Christmas.

The site where my great-aunt Louisa’s house stood in the first half of the 20th century.

“My Aunt Lou used to live over there, just where that blue building ends,” my mother said, unexpectedly.  My mother’s memories stretch back to 1930′s Walsall, but supposing that my great-aunt, Cecilia Louisa Ruddell, nee Sheldon, had moved to the little house in Pleck Road early in her marriage to Uncle Ted?

View of the Guardians’ Building from the site of Louisa’s house. The Union workhouse buildings stood where grass and trees have been planted.

It would have been business as usual in the Union workhouse in those days, and how must it have felt to peep round the lace curtain in the tiny parlour to see a downcast queue shuffling in the cold immediately opposite, outside the Receiving Ward? Was it a sight so commonplace that it did not merit notice?  Did my great-aunt, with her industrious husband, and manageably sized family of three, view the inmates as feckless and lacking in pride?  Or did she clutch little John, Eileen, and Kathleen to her skirts, and remember with a shudder that she had been told that her own great grandparents had ended their days in the a Union workhouse?

The Sheldon family in the 18th and 19th centuries populated the area in and around Ocker Bank, the very heart of the Black Country.  My great grandfather and his Irish wife migrated slowly eastwards, first to Wednesbury, where my grandfather and his sister, great-aunt Lou, were born in the 1890′s, and by 1911 they were living at 196, Queen Street, Walsall.  This is a house my mother remembers well.  Steps up to the front door, parlour, living room and scullery.  Mom’s grandmother, born Maria Egan, spoke with a strong Irish brogue.  Her white hair was piled up on her head in a bun, and over her long black dress she wore a sparkling white pinafore.  She would stride from the back door, past the outside lavatory and shed, over a small thoroughfare to the garden, where she kept her chickens. Her fierce devotion  to the faith she was brought up in reverberates down the years.  There was no question that her son Edward, my grandfather, would have all his five children brought up as Romans Catholics.  His youngest daughter, my currently hospitalised aunty,  remained both unmarried and devout.  She has had a long career of unpaid service in the church, and “Fathers,” and “Sisters” may both be encountered at her bedside at visiting time.

A little way down the road from the Sheldons in 1911, census returns reveal 185, Queen Street to be the home of the Ruddell family, including great-aunt Louisa’s future husband.  His occupation, like that of my grandfather at the time, is described as “Caster’s helper.” Was the man Louisa married her brother’s foundry workmate, as well as her neighbour? Meanwhile, 18 year old Louisa works as a “Jappaner of Harness Furniture”, a typical Walsall occupation in the “Town of 100 Trades.”

My grandparents’ first child was born in the family home in Queen Street, but by the time my mother came along they had moved out into rooms in Countess Street.  In Deepmore Avenue, Bentley, their address lost its aristocratic connotations, but a spacious, new, council house was theirs, where three more children arrived.

At the bottom of Queen Street is the small cemetery, now overgrown, where Dorothy Pattison, “Sister Dora”, was laid to rest in some grandeur following her death on Christmas Eve 1878.

My maternal grandfather, Edward Sheldon, in about 1927, with his first child, Winifred. At the rear of the house in Queen Street, Walsall

And all that talk of shields and sword pommels adorned with cloisonne and filigree brought back memories of hedonistic, full grant, London University days.

It was during the spring of 1983 that I made a futile attempt to compensate for my dedicated and thoroughly reprehensible time-wasting during the preceding 27 months. The core of the course was English Literature, up to 1880. For my “special subject”, inspired by mesmerising fragments of Anglo Saxon poetry, I made the maverick choice of Anglo Saxon Archaeology. The course was conducted in Bloomsbury, necessitating a weekly, teatime, bicycle-train-bicycle dash from my campus in leafy Surrey.

I was an indolent and distracted student, but it was well worth the effort of the journey to listen to Vera Evison, who illustrated her lectures with grainy slide projections. These showed a still recognisable Miss Evison, all tweed skirts and brown brogues, offering up to the camera some small but significant bits of glass and metal from the depths of a sepia tinted trench in the 1920s and 30s.

I was entranced by the experience, deeply impressed by the outfits, and fascinated by archaeology, but had hardly taken in any facts.

Fortified by pork pie, and swilling Courage Directors’, I scoured past exam papers for hints and clues and cheats which might, hope beyond hope, assist me in my finals. The Anglo Saxon examination was to include a “picture round” detailed on a large, glossy, black and white, pull-out page.

Artifacts from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, excavated in 1939, predominate on the 1970s papers.

A few Saxon church towers, and the unprepossessingly rusty looking “Benty Grange Helmet”, found way back in the 19th century, appear repeatedly.

Each year a different one of the five decorated faces of the “Franks’ Casket” was given an outing. The inscriptions on that were also a handy resource for those setting tests in runic translation. The casket was made around the 8th century out of whale bone, but was cavalierly being used by a French household as a sewing box until shortly before Augustus Wollaston Franks bought most of its sorry remains in a Parisian antique shop in 1857. They were all old news, these finds, and not very numerous. But that was before what we like to call The Brownhills Hoard. Setting exam questions must be much more interesting these days.

You really can’t imagine how all that lustrous gold, thrust roughly into the ground near the Watling Street escaped notice for so long, especially now that we know that the hoard was scattered by ploughing activity. Once “detected” and dug up, though, it would have been impossible not to notice that you were holding precious things in your hands.

So, I think that huge credit should be given to a young girl who, in 1954 Lynn, in the “Big Field” of Owletts Hall Farm, noticed a smooth, dull, stone protruding from a post-hole which she had been digging to position a horse-jump, and instantly recognised it as an archaeological find. Lichfield Museum Services were less than interested, but the “Friary” schoolgirl was happy to exchange it for a fat Postal Order from Birmingham Museum. According to “Discovering Stonnall”, produced by the Lynn and Stonnall Conservation and Historical Society, my cousin Rosalind had discovered the only Neolithic axe that has so far come to light in the parish of Stonnall. This is a little disingenuous of them, since, when I paid Ros’s axe a visit recently at the Museum’s fantastic storage facility, it was nestling companionably in a drawer with some other Neolithic axes from very closely adjacent Shenstone. These were finds by Mr Charles Foden who, luckily for we interested parties, made a habit of following his ploughman to see what might turn up on the land of Shenstone Hall Farm. He made donations to Roman as well as prehistoric collections.

We pulled up at Birmingham Museums’ secret, extra building on a bright winter’s morning. We have been in a fair few warehouses over the years, foodstuffs, car parts, workaday and boring. This visit, however, was an unforgettable and surprisingly emotional experience, following Collections Manager, Phil Watson through the serried rows of archived exhibits, to the drawer which holds our axe. Ken and I made slow progress down the aisles, looking from from side to side and back again, in something approaching awe. A Dali-esque array of ships’ figureheads, perambulators, engines, stuffed birds and framed embroideries seemed to be bursting forth from the racking, but, within some arcane cataloguing system, all was in absolutely perfect order, and solicitously protected by fire suppression systems and parasite traps. Phil Watson allowed himself a wry smile at the looks on our faces – he says he is quite used to visitors to this establishment being quite overwhelmed by it.

Here is the object. An axe. A tool for felling trees. Ken has a fearsome collection of metal bladed axes at home – weapons used daily in the constant battle to feed our greedy Rayburn. He could only imagine this stone axe wielded day-long until it achieved the pulverisation of bark and wood. Not what you would describe as “cutting”. But without recourse to metal tools, this beautiful object would achieve exponentially more than bare hands. The stone is from Charnwood Forest, I learned. This tangible evidence now enables me to contemplate our ancestors – many, many generations ago in what is now called Staffordshire, trading stone along an ancient track, shaping and polishing stone with a high degree of skill, and clearing the deeply forested land to farm it for food.  I admired another object in the drawer: mossy-green, mottled, highly polished, right beside the Owletts Axe. Within such a small sample, it was startling to see that the location of its discovery was Orgreave, where we live. Its asymmetrical appearance is due to its sharp edge having been repolished following use. Phil Watson had showed us larger scale examples of these tools which would have been impractical in use, had not been worn, and could be surmised to be ceremonial objects, serving as status symbols, or even currency. He took us to a nearby cabinet, and removed a knapped flint tool over a hundred times older than than the others. This, I was allowed to hold. Ergonomic is the word. My hand folded around it, an exact fit. My thumb found a perfectly placed depression to assist me to grasp it.  Objects with the patina of 50 years handling can excite me.  To touch this 500,000 year old object was overwhelming.  There were tears!

The excellent Phil Watson, with a drawer full of Neolithic Axes found in Staffordshire