Category Archives: Uncategorized

My Aunt Mary and Uncle Alfred “retired” from farming at Owletts Hall Farm at Lynn, near Shenstone in the late 1960’s, to the beautiful Llyn Peninsula in North Wales.  Taking on a small hill farm, with an ancient stone farmhouse … Continue reading →

The post-war housing shortage was a bit of a Curate’s Egg for my mom and dad. It was easy then for any chap to find work in the building industry, and my dad, with a bricklaying apprenticeship under his belt, … Continue reading →

Advocates of HS2, a high-speed railway that is to link London Euston station to Birmingham and beyond, proclaim a short but persuasive list of arguments in its favour. The opponents to the new line have a less coherent argument.  Many … Continue reading →

It’s said  – unscientifically – that Greater London’s tapwater passes through 13 bodies before it is discharged into the mighty Thames.  This I could well believe, when I first tasted it, in September 1980 as I commenced wafting through my … Continue reading →

I find it endlessly interesting how the the female spawn of the British upper classes in bygone centuries were mindfully placed into matrimony at sexual maturity, their identity obscured by a customary (but not inevitable) change of name, only to supply … Continue reading →

The most significant topographical feature of the hamlet of Orgreave, in Staffordshire, is its own stretch of the River Trent.  This meanders capriciously within level banks, almost invisible until you are upon it, alerted to its presence only by the … Continue reading →

Sandwiched between an upbraiding of a less than helpful Lichfield shopkeeper and a review of The Hunt Pony Club Meet, readers of the Lichfield Mercury’s popular “Carousel” column “ – for women readers” could, in January 1967, amuse themselves with … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →