staffordshirebred

I wonder whether Orgreave House feels uncertain…. and a little wistful…. about its identity?  After all, if it wasn’t for its gracious neighbour, the Queen Anne mansion of Orgreave Hall, it would be the largest and most imposing dwelling in our hamlet.

And its architectural personality is full of contradictions.

It turns its Sunday face to the south. Bay windows bulge from its two principal reception rooms, scanning a large, sweeping lawn, that is adorned by a majestic cedar tree. The formal entrance drive – protected by a surprisingly substantial cattle grid – curves its way through mature rhododendrons, that welcome visitors with large gaudy blooms in the springtime.

But if you should make the muddy trudge to the rear –  tradesman’s –  entrance, where a gate leads into a generous courtyard bordered with outbuildings, the house squints at you as you pass the utilitarian windows of its north facing service rooms. On this side, the building abuts immediately onto the now blind ended track, that long ago and for many centuries gave access past the site of the Hall to Alrewas and beyond. No longer troubled by the passages of cart, pack horse and pedlar, instead it endures its proximity to what is a rutted shunting area for Hall Farm’s big, busy, blundering, pea-green tractors.

And the north-eastern corner of the house terminates most oddly in a single, foursquare crenellated tower.

The Orgreave House of two hundred and fifty years ago I imagine as a neat and almost symmetrical Georgian building, that still secretly forms the south-western core of the present house. Much later “improvements”, including the tower, the parapets atop the porch and bays, and the asymmetrical extension to the east, suggest inspiration drawn dilutely from the Gothic Revival style.

Annotated map of the Orgreave and Alrewas estate, from circa 1760, the original of which is kept at Stafford record office. Since then, a tennis court (shaded blue) has been laid against the site of a now extinct cottage, its grounds subsumed into Orgreave House’s extended gardens. Indicated in red, a bulky extension has created an East Wing, and the space between the building and the lane has been filled in, partly by the tower.

A map held at Stafford Record Office helps to put this house into context in mid 18th century “Orgrave” – as the cartographer spelled it – probably during a survey conducted in connection with the purchase of the Alrewas and Orgreave Estates by Admiral Lord Anson from the Turton family.

At the end of the 19th century, alterations to the house, and development of the outbuildings to provide copious stabling were undertaken by Mr. Henry Edward Audley Charles, with assistance from Walsall architects H. E. Lavender.  The Lichfield Mercury of 29th November 1901 speaks of veterinarian Mr Charles’ “equine veterinary hospital” at Orgreave House, although he had been at pains to publicise, via his own advertisement in the newspaper that year, that his “shoeing forge” had been transferred from here to Frog Lane, Lichfield.

OS 1881 – Prior to the extension of Orgreave House. http://www.oldmapsonline.org

OS 1901 – Following the extension of Orgreave House. http://www.oldmapsonline.org

Mr. Henry Edward Audley Charles was a scion of the affluent Charles Family of Pelsall Hall, but his family had deep roots in Orgreave: His grandmother, Catherine, who married Thomas Charles at All Saints Church, Kings Bromley on Christmas eve in 1816, had been born in Orgreave.  Her father, Henry Smith, is described – in his will of 1817 – as a Yeoman, in possession of the copyhold and freehold of various local tracts of land.

Catherine and Thomas’s second son, Abraham Charles, took up some of his matrilineal inheritance at Orgreave, where he settled with his wife, Hephzibah.  Their son, Henry Edward Audley Charles was born at Orgreave in January 1871, but, sadly, the beautifully named Hepzibah died only weeks later.

Happier times, perhaps, are captured by the enumerator of the 1901 census as he visited Orgreave House. Now 30, Henry, the successful veterinarian, and his wife Kate, live here with their eight year old daughter Muriel and her three younger brothers, Edmond, John, and Hugh.   A governess and nurse are on hand to take care of the children, whilst a groom and two maids attend to other domestic duties.  Intriguingly, the whole family shortly up-sticks and emigrate to Canada, where Minister of the Interior, Clifford Sifton, was pursuing  a vigorous policy of inviting suitable new citizens to his country.  Farmers were preferred, but opportunities must have been manifold for an expert equestrian vet, in that horse powered age.

Orgreave House is thus available to let.  What sort of tenant would be soothed by the familiar toy-fort tones of its nether reaches, and appreciate the ample accommodation available for their grooms and horses? Who better than senior army officers, from the local Whittington Barracks?

“ORGREAVE HOUSE, Near LICHFIELD: Telegrams – Alrewas. Railway Stations – ALREWAS – 1 1/2 miles. CROXALL – 3 miles. LICHFIELD (T.V.) – 5 miles

Wintertons auctioneers held a sale of some of the effects that are no longer required by Captain Occleston and his wife in the spring of 1909, as they prepared for their posting abroad.  The keys to Orgreave House were duly handed over to Brigadier General George Frederick Gorringe, C.M.G., D.S.O, appointed in April 1909 as Commander of the whole 18th Infantry Brigade at Whittington. What with the Sports Club, the officers’ Golf Club, the Barracks’ own Beagle Pack and the meets of the South Staffs or the Meynell Hunt who drew the coverts within easy reach of Orgreave, the Brigadier General was unable to make it to  the Grand National in 1911.  A piece of ephemera that has fluttered its way to me on the etherial breeze from eBay lets me peep at him making his courteous apologies to “May” from his desk at Orgreave:

Orgreave House, Near Lichfield

 21 March 1911

 My dear May

I am so very sorry but I shall not be able to accompany you to the National – I saw Herbert Hamilton & he is going from Stafford with Sir Bruce….but Thompson is going and Percival from here & possibly others who you know. So I do hope you will come here all the same, or my slump of luck will be indeed be heavy so au revoir on Thursday.

 Yours as ever

G.Gorringe

At the races in 1911. http://castaroundlesmodes.tumblr.com/post/63273035681/mode-aux-courses-1911-1914

The old charmer. Did May manage to rendez-vous with the party at Orgreave that Thursday, I wonder, and travel with Percival to Aintree? Did she arrive unchaperoned, with her huge hats and her furbelowed skirts to what was an almost exclusively masculine menage at Orgreave House?  Just a week or so later, on Sunday April 2nd, 1911, in Gorringe’s distinctive, confident handwriting, he makes a list of his household for that decade’s census, noting that the house boasts a plentiful 20 rooms. The Brigadier General, his brother, Leonard, and the horses, are being cared for by a staff of eight young men – a butler, footman, orderly, kitchen boy, gardener, and three grooms.  The gardener’s new wife, Sarah Powell, Gorringe’s cook, is the only woman in the place.  Contrast this manly crew with the staff controlled by the butler in the employ of William Edward Harrison at nearby Orgreave Hall – it is its mirror opposite. There, Mr.Bird finds himself in charge eight female staff – cook, lady’s maid, and a small flutteration of young maids and children’s nurses – this a much more typical profile, as female domestic staff are both more numerous and considerably cheaper than their male counterparts in 1911.

From the Imperial War Museum collection. General George Frederick Gorringe, C.M.G., D.S.O. 1871-1945

George Gorringe was a bachelor in his forties during his appointment at Whittington between 1909 and 1911.  Over 20 years in the regular army had seen him actively – and effectively – involved in a remarkable six military campaigns.  During the Mahdist War in the 1890s in Sudan, he brushed shoulders with both Winston Churchill, and the more famous Lance Corporal Jack Jones.  When Corporal Jones’ mentor, Lord Kitchener, had secured the reconquest of the Sudan at the Battle of Omdurman, and overseen the first steps in rebuilding Khartoum ( a process in which Gorringe was said to be closely involved), Gorringe left Sudan for South Africa with Kitchener, as his temporary Aide-de-camp.  During the Boer War, Gorringe cemented his reputation as an effective soldier, although his heirs have judged him harshly for his role in the execution of justice against civilians who he deemed to have been assisting the Afrikaner enemy.  How strange life must have been for him, marooned here in Staffordshire, in temperate weather, with no apparent threat to his life, an active social life to conduct, and the prospect of semi-retirement in “staff” roles for the rest of his career.

Winston Churchill desperately sought out the conflict in Sudan of the late ’90s as the only live theatre of war in which he could test his mettle as soldier and as writer.  His first publication “The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan” was the fruit of that.  By the time the Great War was really underway in 1915, no British – or Colonial -man had to look far for the opportunity to fight.  In Canada, Henry Edward Audley Charles joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps. An experienced officer like Gorringe was, of course, a most valuable asset to the army.  With his endurance both of unfavourable  climates and the difficulty of waging war where insect infested water was both too deep for tanks and too shallow for boats, he was given a command in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq).  Himself a 21st century soldier with experience of fighting in Iraq, Paul Knight mentions Gorringe in his book “The British Army in Mesopotamia, 1914-1918.”

…….if ever a determined General was needed to force through a victory on the Euphrates, it was Gorringe.  Russell Brandon, writing in 1969 considered him to be: “…..the ideal man for a relentless slog.  A big man, highly coloured, deeply tanned, officious and utterly without tact.  He reminded those less insensitive than himself of an enormous he-goat, and allowed nothing – not Turks, counter-attacks, casualties, swamps, Marsh Arabs, or deeply entrenched redoubts to stop him.”

He doesn’t sound like a fellow that May would have recognised.

I paused  – for the purpose of taking this photograph – from heaving my wooden spoon around the luscious, peaty amalgam of this season’s rather late Christmas Cake. This huge and precious old Mason and Cash mixing bowl had only just come into my possession as a Christmas gift from my aunt, Irene, and I couldn’t wait to try it out.

 There was here only one scant week of advent remaining for the piercing and dripping of strong brown drink to ‘feed’ the uniquely stiff and fragrant mixture, glistening both tawny and ruby with the fruits of exotic tree and vine. The recipe that has evolved into “Christmas Cake” was, historically, prepared for consumption on Twelfth Night, January 5th, rather than Christmas Day. Our cake, now iced, beribboned, and adorned with some bristly little fake conifers and a small herd of plastic deer, should be fit for consumption by then.

This big bowl won’t fit into any of my cupboards but it is a pleasure to have it readily to hand to knead my bread dough in its roomy interior.  The open angle of the cross-section, the grippable raised lip, and the weighty stability of the whole, are some of its practical and distinctive attributes.  It just makes the job easy. No wonder the design has endured to long.

It dwarfs the useful No.24 bowl that has already been passed on to me by my mother, but which was amply proportioned for whipping up a Victoria Sponge or a few rock cakes for childhood teas to spread before our single-offspring family. No, this giant is a No.6 – almost the biggest size of the iconic “Cane” bowls (from the distinctive colour) that begun to be made by Mason Cash and Co near Swadlincote in 1901, and have not changed in appearance since, despite the company having now been taken over.  Production in Derbyshire has now ceased, having moved to somewhere much further east. The size designations refer to the number of bowls that would fit into a firing in the original Church Gresley kiln – the smaller the number, the larger the bowl.

After what must be many decades of service, it has travelled with me back across the Midlands towards its place of manufacture. It comes to me with a treasured family provenance, having been handed down to Irene from her mother-in-law. What a sweet blend can be made when the miscellany of family has a new ingredient added.

In the 1950’s, Irene – my mother’s practical, capable, and lovely younger sister – left her job as manageress of Dorothy Perkins’ Worcester shop to marry into a clan that for several generations had earned their Worcestershire living as farmers and blacksmiths, in and around Pershore, Powick, and Upton upon Severn.

Here, on his wedding photograph, Trevor’s huge hands tell of the Grizzells’ genetic aptitude for wrestling their livestock into profit, or for making dancingly effortless the heaving arc of a hefty hammer onto a ringing anvil. I loved to hear the family adage that, on their wedding day, Trevor could easily encircle his bride’s waist with his two hands. This was testament to the siren slenderness of the waist, too.  I remember, in my ‘teens, the treat of being allowed to try on this lovely dress.  I sashayed coquettishly down the old oak staircase in the pink washed, timber framed farmhouse convincingly enough – but with one unseen hand holding together the two sides of the zip, that refused to meet around me.

The compass of the voice and personality matched the hands.  At 13 or 14 years old he’d greet me on family visits with a “Boiy Croist!” (his Worcestershire accent redolent of Ambridge) in mock horror at some offensive aspect of what I had believed to be a supremely stylish sartorial ensemble.

He and Irene had three sons. It was fair of him, I now realise, not to discriminate either in favour or against this little girl’s well-honed sense of dignity. Before I grew too tall, I was scooped up and held, squealing, upside down by the ankles in those enormous hands,  like his reared-for-Christmas poultry – with my feathers well and truly ruffled. My name is Sue; How do you do, he bawled at me, excruciatingly, a hundred times over, when, just after my 8th birthday, Johnny Cash’s song “A Boy named Sue” rocketed up the singles charts, a gift to Uncle Trevor’s gentle campaign of torture.  What doesn’t kill you makes you strong.

Despite my ordeals, our visits were hours of delight to me. Hours of dogs, and lambs, and my cousin Nigel’s pony.  There was fruit picking in the orchard, walking the stock, and fishing expeditions (my father so chucklingly delighted on the single afternoon that my keep-net writhed with more weight of little Severn River gudgeon than my cousins’ did). And then there was the tucking in, a companionable eight of us round the kitchen table, swinging my legs happily on my chair, enjoying the feeling of belonging to the cohered group. Across the stiffly creased white linen tablecloth I observed the particular affection between my mother and her sister, and the quiet rivalry between the brothers-in-law.

A tender plant, grown under glass, needs “hardening off” gradually before it is planted out permanently into the uncertain climate outdoors.  It was in this spirit that my parents later allowed me away from my protected home environment for more protracted visits to Cowhills Farm, the “tied” house on the large acreage that Uncle Trevor brilliantly managed for his employers. Now, intrigued and fascinated by farming to a greater extent than any of his sons seemed to be, I felt privileged to accompany him to market at Worcester, Ledbury or Gloucester, where he knew everyone and everyone knew him, a fine stockman also brimming with bonhomie.  He seemed proud when my career aspirations began to coalesce into a strong desire to become an auctioneer myself.

I also see my over made-up teenaged self lolling at that farmhouse kitchen table, near the warming Rayburn: sighing, pouting, and pondering about my future.  Briskly and willingly, my aunt wielded her batterie de cuisine around the obstruction – including what was to be, 30 odd years later, my prized mixing bowl. The bowl in which Uncle Trevor’s childhood cakes had in their turn been mixed. Perhaps even those of his mother, Emily, in the forge at Powick.

No longer just an observer of the alchemy, a licker of the spoon, now I have to make my own cake.

The site of the Old Tollgate Cottage, near Orgreave. Razed to the ground, now, as much as was 25, Cromwell Street in Gloucester or 5, College Close in Soham. An inspection of a few square feet of the field in which it once stood soon yield some russet chunks of locally-fired brick, pieces of the Rosemary roofing tiles so typical of the area, and some broken pieces of crock once part of jars and kitchenware. Note the stand of trees to the rear right of the picture which are also visible in the press photograph of the cottage contemporary to the murder.

I inhabit – for the time being – a small rural hamlet strung just off the A513, and equidistant between two enduringly olde worlde villages, a few miles north of Lichfield in Staffordshire.  It’s the sort of quiet place that Torment and Violence would choose to pass by, heading for the hustle and bustle elsewhere, along with the generations of mules, ponies, cycles, and latterly, motor traffic, that have travelled along what is the old turnpiked road linking Rugeley to Tamworth. But this cannot be true! As any half-interested TV viewer of one of Miss Marple’s  investigations into torrid crime must be aware, turbulent human passions and and acts of brutality occur everywhere men live, and their drama is most sharply defined in the most tranquil of natural environments, such as the flattish, innocuous-looking holly-and-hawthorn bordered fields, slow streams and and little copses that are features of this stretch of the Trent Valley.

The Old Tollgate Cottage, twixt Alrewas and Kings Bromley. From a contemporary press photograph.

One dull October week in 1937, the roadway near Orgreave, between Alrewas and Kings Bromley was periodically thronged, according to the local press, by “morbid sightseers and motorists.” who were stopping by to contemplate the Old Tollgate Cottage, the recent scene of the tragic death of Alice Maude Morris at the hand of her husband Leslie. The lattice windows of the brick-built single storey dwelling in its “small but pretty” garden had been boarded up. Behind them, in the darkness, the table remained partly set for a meal, although there was smashed crockery on the tiled floor, and a large, sticky pool of drying blood near the hearth. It was towards lunchtime on Tuesday 19th October when Albert Dunn, the manager of the Singer sewing machine shop in Tamworth Street Lichfield, was cycling towards Alrewas. As he passed the Tollgate Cottage he was alarmed to have his attention attracted by two distressed little girls,  screaming and waving their arms at him.  Leslie Morris, their father, was emerging from the side door of the cottage as Mr Dunn entered to see what the matter was, and he found the body of a woman on the floor of the living room, profusely bleeding from several severe head wounds.  A bloodied flat iron lay on the floor nearby. Leslie Morris came back in to the cottage behind Mr Dunn, and knelt down beside his dead wife in a heart rending state of confusion and remorse for what he had done.  Mr Dunn heard him murmuring “Oh my dear, my dear! What is the matter, my dear?” , his face bending tenderly towards her poor broken head.  Within the luxuriant tresses of hair that crowned Alice Maude’s somewhat ordinary-looking face, there nestled an envelope.

Joan Frances Morris, and Pearl Morris, from a contemporary press photograph. They must be old ladies now. I hope that the tragic events of their childhood did not blight their entire life.

Then as now, the Tipper family occupied Lupin Farm, Orgreave, the nearest other habitation to the relatively isolated Tollgate Cottage, and the resourceful Mr Dunn crossed the quiet road to the farm hand in hand with the unfortunate children, 12 year old Joan and 8 year old Pearl, to place them temporarily into Mrs Tipper’s care, before turning his attention to summoning the police to deal with the situation, including the capture of Mr Morris, who was now making his way slowly and distractedly on foot towards Kings Bromley. A Rugeley miner, also cycling along this stretch was soon on hand to help in this endeavour. Who were this Morris family, the neighbours asked each other? They were not natives of Orgreave. William Cliffe, a farm worker who had been living alone as  the tenant of the Tollhouse Cottage, had engaged a lady housekeeper to look after him, they had been led to assume, when Mrs Morris had moved in the week before, bringing her daughters with her from her native Cheshire, via the “workers’ train” that was then able to halt at Alrewas Railway Station. If darker gossip about the exact nature of their relationship had been aired over a pint in the Royal Oak in Bromley or one of the several hostelries that served the small population of Alrewas and the more numerous travellers passing through, then it would later prove to be well founded. Murder “at Orgreave”. That was how the incident was headlined in the Lichfield Mercury that Friday.  It was their job to make a sensation of their news stories.  Their readership would have made the mental connection, even without the reminder that the editor included in the reporting, with the nationally notorious murders carried out by Tommy Bond in a cottage in Orgreave some 40 years previously, within living memory of many local people. In fact, the Tollgate Cottage was positioned a little beyond the Alrewas/Bromley parish boundary formed by the winding Bourne Brook that crosses under the road between the two “Lupin” Farms, and was more correctly described in other newspapers as having an address of Kings Bromley. During her brief sojourns in Staffordshire, was Alice told that the narrow stream near her friend’s cottage was called the Bourne Brook?  If so, she would have remembered, because Bourne had been her maiden name.

Alice Maude Morris, nee Bourne, from a contemporary press photograph.

At barely 18 years old, Miss Alice Maude Bourne had married Leslie Morris in her home town of Congleton on 1922. Their son, Leslie, a “honeymoon baby” had quickly arrived, followed by daughters Joan and Pearl. Mr. Morris was a mechanic, and Alice, too, had a job.  Their happy, boring, domestic life was to be fatally disrupted by a chance encounter in Congleton with a man called William Cliffe. Alice’s heart raced. She and William had known each other well as young teenagers. This,  neither of them saw fit to disclose to the hapless Leslie as the three began to socialise together, soon leading on to Cliffe lodging with the Morris family when he found himself without a place to live. Leslie Morris grew uncomfortable about this menage a trois, despite protestations of innocence from his wife, and Cliffe found himself a bungalow and smallholding nearby, and moved out.  A couple of minor fracas occurring during this period were later described at Morris’s murder trial.  Mrs Morris’s bicycle had been spied, propped up against Cliffe’s bungalow door on more than one occasion.  Still she denied to her husband that she had been unfaithful to him. Cliffe moved from Cheshire to take a job in Kings Bromley in 1936.  He and Mrs Morris continued to correspond, clandestinely, with him addressing the letters to her place of work.  With a suitable alibi in place, Alice even made a couple of brief visits to the Tollgate Cottage.  It looked like she had now moved out permanently in October 1937 to be with “Her own darling Bill”  yet, when her husband arrived at the cottage to beg her to come home with him,  she didn’t know what to decide. Perhaps she would go back home with him, she thought, when he had turned up on the Saturday before the murder, but in the end she did not. Astonishingly, she and Cliffe continued to convince Leslie Morris that their relationship was that of housekeeper and employer. On Tuesday, neglecting his job, and leaving their eldest child Leslie with his grandparents, Leslie Morris was back, and with Cliffe absent from the cottage, it seemed that he had this time succeeded in his objective, and that the whole family would return to Cheshire, able to put the episode behind them. After all, Cliffe looked as if he had been trying to distance himself from the ardent Mrs Morris by moving away from Congleton.  Cliffe’s character and demeanour later made a poor impression on the court when he was called to give evidence at Morris’s trial.  Was Alice disillusioned with her lover, now that she had moved into his humble Staffordshire cottage, facing a life deprived of the reasonable income her marital household had enjoyed? That fateful Tuesday lunchtime Mr Morris, satisfied that his marriage might be restored, was waiting for his wife to retrieve her stockings and coat from the bedroom of Tollgate Cottage, when he noticed a familiar piece of furniture.  There was the very chest of drawers that Cliffe had hauled with him to the Morris family home when he was their guest, and brought on to the Tollgate Cottage. Morris paused, then opened the drawer in which he remembered Cliffe had stored his correspondence.  He pulled out a couple of letters. In his own faithless wife’s hand he read:

” Love, I am not ‘as you say’, I only wish I were.  It would give me something to remember.  There is time yet.”

She might have been pregnant with Cliffe’s child. His self deception was completely shattered, and as he struggled vicously with his wife to retrieve a second letter which she would not let him read, his fury empowered him to inflict what the Coroner later described as the “extensive injuries” with the flat iron, which killed her. Judge and jury were satisfied that the shock of this sudden revelation was enough to temporarily deprive Morris of his sanity, and mitigate the crime to manslaughter instead of murder, and Morris was sentenced to five years hard labour for his misdemeanour. Today, as in 1937, the Tippers are still farming at Lupin, and the Hills at Orgreave.  Like the Morrises and William Cliffe the latter are originally from our neighbouring county of Cheshire.  In the 1930’s, the youngest of the Hill family were able to safely make their way along the the road to school in Kings Bromley in a pony and trap, and much of the other traffic comprised cyclists – pedalling not for recreation, but out of necessity. Near the site where the Old Tollgate Cottage stood, the road has changed course.  A sharp bend that someone must have deemed dangerous, but which actually had the effect of slowing most traffic down, has been ironed out, and its old surface is used to stockpile highway surfacing.  Of the cottage itself, no trace remains above ground level, bar scattered fragments of rubble and the broken detritus of domestic life. The Bourne Brook still goes babbling through, intersecting the road and dividing the parishes, insouciant.

Adapted from 1920’s Ordnance Survey via OldMapsOnline

Received, sincere and helpful advice during her “confinement”, by my mother in 1961. That she has preserved it thus some indication that the time holds happy memories for her?

This funny baby did not appear as pink and cherubic as the illustrations on the cover of the instruction manual that it came with. But a few hours had now passed since my birth. The angry bruising around my face had begun to subside, along with the memories of any previous lifetimes.  The nurses at Bloxwich Maternity Home deemed I was finally fit to be presented to the other end of my mother.

A matching pair of right hands – but separated in age by 31 years, 9 months and 24 days.

“Oh, she looks just like her father, the poor little thing!” it is claimed that she expostulated, when presented with what she had to make do with forever –  her only offspring.

Then she noticed the miracle of my little hand, the index and the ring finger curved inwards, and the little finger discernibly bent at the top joint: an exact miniature replica of her own.

My hand, my good fortune.  From this alliance  you could prognosticate a happy carry-on without reference to the auspicious, graphically pleasing,  upsidy- downy year in which I arrived – 1961 – or to the  lines on my palm.  Any fool could see this was the best of starts in life that, having fallen to Earth, it was this particular woman who grasped my matching mitt – and held it tightly through my infant vulnerability, only to lovingly unfurl her fingers and let go when I was ready to stand steadily. Now I take her hand and steady her through our precious remaining years – we are going to move in together.

Her sisters –  my aunties –  don’t share our twisted digits.  Kathleen’s long fingers and smooth spoon-shaped nails are nothing like ours.  Irene’s  – once daintily manicured and ladylike  when she was a glamorous young manageress at Dorothy Perkins – have been coarsened by a subsequent half a century as a hands-on farmer’s wife.

This image is a refugee from an eBay sale.

The fingers on their own mother’s left hand were a troubling sight to me as a child: my Granny Sheldon’s left hand was crippled, and with the nails horribly deformed into tiny cubes of dark horn.

They must have been nimble enough, once. As an industrious young teenager  – in 1911 – 14 year old Elsie May Day, of Paddock Lane, Walsall, was a “sorter in a brass foundry”.  Between then and her marriage and the birth of her first child in 1927, she had a period of employment at the Grove Laundry in Walsall that proved costly to her wellbeing.

In those days, gentlemen’s shirts sported detachable collars that could be laundered separately and stiffened with starch. Between its two fearsomely large rollers, a special machine at the busy Grove Steam Laundry was, several times daily, fed with industrial quantities of starched collars. One dark morning my grandmother inadvertently added her fingers to the load.

The pain must have been excruciating.  The incident was never described in detail to the family in later years……..only “it was thought that I would lose my hand.”

Barr Beacon, late 20’s. My grandmother, Elsie May Sheldon, nee Day, and beloved first-born, my “aunt” Winifred, who wouldn’t, thanks to meningitis, make 16.

Here, see the state of the sorry left hand.  Sometimes, my mother remembers, the wearing of the wedding ring was sacrificial,  gave some gyp.

This is a celebration, a rare day out. They had travelled from Walsall to Barr Beacon, remarkable simply for being an elevated vantage point in an area of scarce and modest eminences. It had been opened in 1918 with pomp as a public park following the death of the last of the Scott family, after some centuries as the crowning glory of their estate,  centred around Great Barr Hall.

It was 10 years since Elsie’s husband had, unforgettably, seen his pals shot to bits before his eyes on the Somme, and at Passchendaele. Later, at the very summit of the Beacon, would stand a memorial to the Midland’s fallen. She sits with little Winifred, the beloved  first baby, born 1927, and died from meningitis in the midst of the Second World War.

Me, Granny Sheldon, and the much abused dolly “Sarah” . 11, Friezland Road, Bentley, Walsall, c. 1967. The sideboard contains a cache of humbugs, in a jar, only for “good girls.”

We got on famously.  I was the only grand-daughter. (Irene bred boys).

Just once, we took her with us for our annual holiday at my father’s sister’s farm in North Wales.  We shared a room.   Her corsets were a fascinating clatter of stays in salmon pink fabric, draped over the chair at the end of our bed. I remember the reluctance with which she returned from the sea air to her house in Walsall.  “This hole,” she said, venomously – such an uncharacteristically frank admission that life was an ordeal – and it cut me to the quick, because as much as I loved holidays, I loved my home.

My parents finished building the house at 155 Bosty Lane, Aldridge by the summer of 1957. They had, by this time, been married for almost nine years.  These had been nine years of a childless, double-income life in rented rooms comprising half of a nice house on Broadway in Walsall.  These had been nine years of delightfully carefree week-ends in the country: cycling trips, picnics, or fishing expeditions. They had enjoyed a little money in their pockets and no domestic responsibilities.

Now a mortgage had been taken out by the new property-owners in order to purchase the plot of land and the materials for their home (a risibly small sum by 21st century standards), and they decided to begin this new phase of their life with a celebratory fortnight’s holiday in Berrynarbor, North Devon.

Simon, our English Setter.

“English Setter Puppies For Sale,” read the chalked sign outside the Poltimore Arms at Yarde Down on Exmoor, as they passed the old pub in their V8 Pilot, and suddenly, unaccountably,  they felt more than ready to down a thirst quenching tankard of Shandy.

How could they refuse the landlord’s daughter’s invitation only to peek into the outbuildings out at the back, and admire the litter of pups squirming in the straw, just about ready to leave their beautiful mother, Lucinda for lives in their new homes?

Inevitably, when they returned to Aldridge, the patter of four furry feet now sounded on the newly laid red quarry tiles in the little kitchen on Bosty Lane, and a soft, silky muzzle nudged Mom’s hand as she finished painting the window frames, (black and white) and stitched up the bark-cloth cushion covers. Dear Simon became my dad’s shooting companion, and as gentle and obedient as you could wish a dog to be – apart from the afternoon he leapt on an unsuspecting lady visitor, whose “visiting hat” was adorned with a cockade of pheasant feathers.

This house was furnished with marvellous things, from the perspective of my grandparents on both sides of the family.  There was hot and cold running water from the taps, and to store food in, a refrigerator. ( the 1950’s Frigidaire was still in service there when I got married in 1992: ” My word, it’s like the bonnet of a Buick!”  said my husband when for the first time he saw the convexly curvaceous  fridge door, with its slender, vertical, chromed handle).

Luxury of luxuries, there was a television, sitting on its spindly “atomic age” legs in the living room. And, considered a necessity because of my Dad’s building business, a telephone was soon installed.

Even twelve years after VE day, post war shortages were blamed for the practice of installing a “Party Line” connection  – to the ponderously heavy, black Bakelite telephone receiver  supplied to my parents.  My parents at 155 shared the line with the Aldridge family at number 143 – perhaps the only other household in Bosty Lane to have a ‘phone in the 50’s.  Mr Aldridge of Aldridge, worked as a manager for Rock and Downes builders on the Walsall Road.  Clearly, the dangers of not being able to receive out of hours cement or scaffolding queries were taken very seriously by the General Post Office at the time.

At 3.30 a.m. on the morning of Friday September 8th, 1961, my father woke to hear that telephone emitting its characteristic, rhythmic, shrill, mechanical ring.  Some momentous, and long anticipated news was bursting to come through.  From Bloxwich Maternity home, a midwife was calling him with news of my birth.

“Husbands only,” we read, “may visit every evening 7-45 to 8-30 p.m., without a visiting card.” – which perhaps accounts for the perfect state of preservation of the visiting cards in my possession.

We were soon released from the six-bedded maternity ward at Bloxwich that had once been one of the generously proportioned bedrooms of a wealthy Victoria family’s Italian style villa.  The building is still discernible behind a high hedge, and is part of the present day Bloxwich Hospital.

Mother and I spent the following – then requisite – several days of complete rest both happily be-pillowed between the dark polished oak headboard and footboard of my parents’ bed at Bosty Lane.  Aunty Rene kindly double-bussed it from Stonnall to make light of the housework, and a community midwife attended to us.  Mrs Gombridge was that right-thinking professional who seems to have esteemed dogs at least as highly as she did babies.  Two large mongrels accompanied her on her rounds, panting and wagging their tails in her little car as she made her calls on new mothers, and her dark uniform was liberally coated with their hair. She put paid to any misgivings my mother had about big dogs and new babies and briskly insisted that Simon should be introduced to his new human immediately. His kind brown eyes watched protectively over me for the next several years.  With angelic patience, he suffered my little arms to probe deep into his soft liver-and-pink mouth to retrieve an important piece of Lego that he might have purloined from my play.

Deepmore Avenue, Bentley, near Walsall – nineteen thirty something….

My maternal grandparents.

He is out of bed well before the five children rise and put their reluctant toes onto the cold lino before dressing for school. His faithful little wife – in her morning pinafore – the wrap around variety –  fries bacon for his breakfast sandwich. It sizzles in a pan on the gas hob, or, sometimes, on the living room fire, livened from its night-time blanket of slack, if they hadn’t had a penny for the meter.

She has wrapped his lunchtime snap in yesterday’s Daily Herald, and his white enamelled billy with its lid and wire handle is clean and ready for a brew when he gets where he’s going – there will be no shortage of freshly drawn water.

The kids don’t wear a uniform for St Pat’s – that’s for the sort who are not only able enough but also affluent enough to go on to the Grammar School.

But if you saw him and his oppos climbing into the lorry to take them from Walsall to Lichfield, you might well think that their employer had prescribed their uniform clothing:

Dressed up to the nines on a club outing…HOw tall he is! There’s a swagger stick under his arm. The young officers he encountered during the first war are duly ridiculed…

To a man, the same flat cap, moleskin trousers, collarless shirt, waistcoat, and, perhaps, a donkey jacket.

However thoroughly you might scour the vintage clothing shop now, in the 21^st century, you would struggle to find original examples of a working man’s clothing from the inter war period. Let alone his boots. My mom cleaned her dad’s working boots on Saturdays until they shone like glass, and matched his weekend drinking outfit. Payment: 2d. What more proof do you need that he only owned one pair?

Those boots, those boots – worn out, not recycled or passed onto someone more needy. Where was there someone more needy? Only someone who had no boots at all.

He was worn out too, too young. I was barely two years old when he died, still in his 60’s. Careering past him, delirious with delight at the newly mastered facility with my little limbs, nearly knocking him over.

“I’ll gi’it yo!” – he said , smiling, mock-exasperated, my mother remembers. To me, a shadowy figure, a memory thoroughly overlaid by other people’s reminiscences of him.

He was unsteady on his tired legs, one of which would have to be amputated before that premature death. Those legs that were months up to their knees in mud, in the Great War. Couldn’t have done them much good. But it was the same for all of them.

So, let’s board the work lorry for Lichfield, bleary eyed: “Worro, Ted,” they grunt, as he heaves his long, lean frame up on the back with his bundle.

“Worro,” he replies. “How bist?”

My maternal grandfather, Edward Sheldon, (left) at the South Staffs Water’s Trent Valley Pumping Station, Lichfield. 1930’s

Up to Trent Valley, Lichfield – where a junction in the railway network existed because the South Staffordshire railway (Dudley to Burton) developed, mid-19th century, alongside the London to Manchester line.

Perhaps only the foreman has the privilege of arriving by rail to the site, along with the bulky components of the job.

Adjacent to the premises of the Lichfield Brewery, a water pumping station was established just before the turn of the 20^th century. The men, including my grandad, Edward Sheldon, are working for South Staffs Water. Something momentous is going on now, in the 30’s with some large-bore piping. Why else would someone have taken the trouble to photograph the job?  Why else would the images have been kept carefully throughout the lifetime of one of these workers, and, miraculously, preserved in a bedroom drawer through the half a century since he died?

Trent Valley Pumping Station – Its architecture still unmistakeable after 8 decades or so.

Home at last – but not before a few pints in “The Cottage” on Wolverhampton Road.   Singing the songs of his Irish forebears, he comes in, at last, to his hot meal, and the patient Love-of-his-life.  If there’s a little steak, there will be a fresh egg plucked from its safe home in the sugar bowl and fried as a jaunty topping.

What a long mournful face!  My mother has inherited it – I am always asking her “What’s up?”

“Inside, I’m smiling!” she reassures me.

So was he – “Goo on gi’us yower apron,” he said to the missus – and pinched her sun-hat while he was at it, and gurned ludicrously for the camera!

Ken, my husband, dug up this livery button in the vegetable garden of our cottage the other day.

He might be a bit mutton, but he’s still a hawk-eye for a bit of garden archeology, and swooped on what looked like a very dirty coin indeed, until we swilled the gobbets of soil off the back to reveal the shank of a button. After some more soaking and rubbing, the relief casting of a simple crest emerged, with what look like the smallest traces of gilding in its crevices. I have not yet identified the achievement from which this emblem comes.

Horace Roome, a liveried footman at Shugborough Hall, an establishment still grand and wealthy enough to support him in the 1920s when this photograph was taken. Horace Roome worked for the 4th Earl of Lichfield, whose g.g.g.grandparents left Orgreave for Shugborough in 1773. Image: http://www.staffspasttrack.org.uk/

Once upon a time, this button fastened, or merely decorated, a garment worn by a male servant. A garment forming a part of a sort of archaic uniform, known as livery, that identified the servant’s employer. A grant of heraldic arms made to the employer’s family would be echoed in the colour and special adornments of the clothes distributed to these servants. The word livery comes from the Norman French livree, to hand over.

What person may have mislaid this button, this little badge of servitude, as he once traversed the ground  where now is our well-manured ‘tater patch?

To my untutored eye, the back-stamp “Extra superfine – Best quality” doesn’t suggest a date for it as far distant in the past as the 18th century, when Orgreave enjoyed its most intimate aristocratic connections – (that is if we don’t count members of the Jordanian Royal family who make the occasional appearance today). George Adams Anson, his wife Mary, and their children – the eldest of whom would become the first Viscount Anson “Of Shugborough and Orgrave” [sic], left their home at Orgreave Hall  in 1773 to take over their inheritance at Shugborough.

Nor does it look very “1810s”, when the rather fey, devout, Mr and Mrs John Gisborne were amongst the first of the Anson dynasty’s many tenants at the vacated Orgreave Hall.  Not only was the family short of money with which to support staff (It was his inability to purchase the exquisite wooded surroundings of their home at Hollybush near Newborough to save them from enclosure that drove him to Orgreave) – but they were closely connected with the anti-slavery movement, and one wonders whether they would have found it pleasing to enjoy the luxury of being fawned upon by uniformed lackeys. At John’s childhood home, Yoxall Lodge, his brother Thomas Gisborne famously hosted William Wilberforce as he worked on his abolition bill.

Orgreave Hall was downgraded to a working farmhouse rather than a gentleman’s residence in the mid Victorian era – and presumably no footmen or fancy coaches were kept.  Unhappy, “melancholic” farmer Samuel Winter made such a gory mess, much raked over delightedly by the local and national press, when he committed suicide by cutting his own throat in a stable at the rear of the Kings Head in Lichfield in 1847. He was succeeded by Thomas Shipton in the 1850s.  No, I’m looking for a grander household in Orgreave, and a more recent one….. members of whose smartly turned out retinue may have strayed onto what is now our little patch.

This button was not lost, I can be fairly certain, from the clothing of one of the gamekeepers whose home this cottage had been for most of the last century: Harold Johnson, and George Blake and Harry Goring before him, invariably wore a costume of tweed jacket and plus fours when working – even when ministering to the titled “guns” who shot the gentle terrain of the Wychnor Estate – extending to the farms on this, the Orgreave side of the Trent, as the guests of Colonel, and, later, his son, Mr. Harrison.

As the new owners of Keeper’s Cottage, Orgreave in the Spring of 1991, we inherited a  croft at the back that had only recently been cleared of the pens that Mr Johnson, the last gamekeeper, had used to raise game birds. He was a skilled gamekeeper of the old school, and had employed the “Euston” method (pioneered on the Duke of Grafton’s estate near the village of Euston in Suffolk) to multiply the numbers of wild, native, grey partridge on his patch.

We found dummy partridge eggs – as well as china hens’ eggs in the croft.

Experience had taught him where to find the partridge nests in spring, from which the eggs would be removed, and replaced with dummy ceramic versions. Examples of these little china eggs were amongst the first intriguing bits of garden treasure we ever dug up.

The partridge eggs would be brought back here to incubate in complete safety under broody fowl, to be returned to their real parents as the chicks began to chip the shells. This was the yearly routine where we now wander and hoe amongst vegetable and fruit beds, apple trees and pond. We laid the lawns and quintessentially “cottagey” flower beds at the front where vegetables used to be grown….and no one would know that now.  We have contrived the reality around the imagined picture.

It was over a decade after the First World War when Harold and Ivy Johnson, as newlyweds, had taken up residence here at Keepers Cottage, and the era of liveried “indoor” manservants  – footmen and coachman – had all but passed.

“Harmsworth’s Household Encylopedia” of the inter-war period reminds the householder that he was obliged to purchase an annual 15 shilling licence for each manservant he kept.  This was a piece of legislation instituted in 1870 that remained in force until 1937, making its own petty contribution to the almost terminal decline of male domestic service between those years.

A surviving exception was the new role of chauffeur, whose overcoat, Harmsworth’s instructs, might usefully match the upholstery of the car, and who might dress in a livery redolent of the coachmen of old, whose heirs, in some senses, they were. A certain Mr. James Ashford carried out chauffeuring duties for the Harrisons in 1911, when they were renting Orgreave Hall from the Earl of Lichfield, prior to their purchase of Wychnor Hall, over the river from Orgreave, from Basil Levett.  Billeted in his flat behind the coach house at Wychnor, it was Bert Bloomfield who then drove the Colonel to and from his appointments. It might have been the last thread holding a crested button to one of their coats that frayed untimely to let that button drop. Perhaps there were exchanges  of information between chauffeur and gamekeeper as he tended the pens out there – just where I am looking now from my office window?

The Harrisons kept a butler – not a liveried post –  at Orgreave in 1911 (he had come with them from their previous house at Aldershawe)  – along with eight female servants.

The household of the Burnaby Atkins family – tenants in 1901, had a similar profile. There were 6 maids, a nurse for the children, and 21 year old George Skett – yes, a footman. They were well to do. The daughters of the house, Millicent, Violet, Judith, Cecily and Emily flit fragrantly through the “society” pages of the press in Edwardian Staffordshire.

The coal dust was yet to be brushed off the lucre with which the Harrisons financed their lifestyle.  The source of his family’s wealth came from operating the South Staffordshire coal mines where two of my own great grandfathers once toiled.  Settling down for three generations on this country estate, 10 miles from the grimy industry that paid for it, and then the industry’s nationalisation in 1947 had a distancing effect, and William Harrison was able to concentrate on his passion for the wildlife on the land surrounding Wychnor – both the sporting pursuit of it, and the corresponding interest in protecting it.  With his friend Peter Scott – a very keen shooter turned conservationist – he made a plan to develop a wildfowl sanctuary in the waterlogged plain below Wychnor Hall. It didn’t come to fruition, but he made a positive contribution to conservation on the banks of this stretch of the Trent. In the period since William Harrison’s death in 1975, tenant farmers have continued to run shoots on the estate in pale imitation of him.  But hedgerows and trees, fiercely defended in the old days, are habitually grubbed up and liberally doused with herbicide in the name of efficiency, reducing cover for wild birds, and compromising the habitat of the food chain of which they are part. Pheasants are farmed like poultry before they are put down to be shot, and when I see partridge – as I do – they are more often than not red-legged “Frenchmen” – and not native greys.

And the resources of the Burnaby Atkins? You may read of Mr Burnaby Atkins’ generous benefactions which completely rebuilt the church at Halstead in Kent, where he had inherited an estate and a considerable sum of money from his childless, fairly distant, relative John Pelly Atkins, in 1872.  Who are we to say that the repositioning of the church moved the bustle of the parishioners and the noise of the bells conveniently further from Halstead Place? The conditions of John Pelly Atkins’ will stipulated that The former Mr Burnaby take his name.  Although Burnaby Atkins and his family might live 170 miles away in Orgreave, his deceased benefactor had preferred to think that there would be no intention on his part to distance himself from the source of the fortune – the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and the six-figure sum with which the British Government compensated his father, John Atkins, erstwhile Lord Mayor of London, for the loss of his enslaved black workforce, at a rate of about £20 a man, or woman.

Ogreave Hall and Keepers Cottage in the 1990s. vegetation and fencing has proliferated, and the two buildings are no longer simultaneously visible.

St Matthew’s, Walsall, a parish church with Norman origins. In April its Victorian tombstones are interleaved with Myosotis, or “Forget Me Not”

8, Church Street, Walsall:

Sunday 7th April 1861.

Name: Thos. Day

Age: 19

Occupation: Baker

Where born: Boston, Lincolnshire

Church Street, Walsall, its course and proportions enduring, but the dwellings and taverns that once crowded its margins – long gone.

My mother’s great grandfather, Thomas Watson Day, was not yet out of his teens. He had left behind all that was familiar to him:  the flat, fertile Fenlands, with low milky ribbons of mist afloat on the peaty fields that his father had farmed, and had made his way alone to lodge in the steep, teeming streets which fell away from the limestone escarpment on which Walsall’s Parish Church of St Matthews had first been sited at least seven hundred years before.

As the April light pushed optimistically through dirty air in this increasingly industrial town, and illuminated what gritty corners it was able to between the close met walls of the houses and courts, the census enumerator worked his way methodically along  Peal Street and up Church Hill.  Reaching the south west corner of the churchyard of St Matthew’s, he followed Church Street as it swept back down the incline to Peal Street, and collected – for later transcription into his ledger – the  individual schedules of the 1861 census that had been completed  – if their level of literacy allowed – by buckle filers, brass polishers, and chain makers. And there are bridle stitchers and saddle stitchers noted, too –  all typifying the many specialised skills needed to produce the leather and lorinery goods for which the town of Walsall was already, in the mid 19th century, internationally famous.

The ancillary services of candlemakers, shopkeepers – and bakers, like Thomas – supported their activities. Some of the unmarried workforce – many in their teens or 20s – boarded in official or unofficial Lodging Houses. Thomas Watson Day rents space in number 8, Church Street, from Edward Jones, aged 24, a carter, and his 20 year old wife Emma.  Lucy Bigmore, a buckle stitcher, who is 21, also lodges there, as does Hannah Robinson, an 18 year old girl employed as a house servant. I can’t help thinking how the age and relationship profile of this household resembles the cast of “Friends,” and that there might have been moments of fun and laughter; of romance, and mutual support between the young people.   I picture them retiring for the night in small dark rooms, further subdivided in the name of decency and modesty with curtains that are strung across them.  There is just a wooden peg or two on which Thomas can hang clothing, and a shelf, perhaps, above his bed.

Unlike Thomas, most inhabitants of the area have been born in the immediate vicinity of Walsall, although a strong contingent of Irish labourers is apparent in the neighbourhood, foreshadowing the marriage alliances that Thomas’s son and grand-daughter will make in Walsall in the decades to come. There are Public Houses, too, and how tiny their stuffy drinking rooms must be.  It is difficult to imagine how so many buildings fitted together on the margins of these old streets. Now prettily fringed by trees instead of squint-eyed houses, the curving  course and narrow extent of Church Street is still apparent if you plod up it today.  At some points neighbours would have been able to reach from one attic window to another above its cobbles, like Kay and Gerda in “The Snow Queen.”

St Matthew’s church and environs from the 1901 Ordnance Survey map, following partial slum clearance, that would be completed only after the Second World War

Thomas Watson Day’s distinctive name would later be bequeathed to two generations of his descendants in Walsall.

The parish church of St Peter and St Paul, Algarkirk, Lincolnshire. “The little cathedral of the Fens.” The names of members of the Day family pepper its registers, and its gravestones.

Elizabeth Watson and George Day were married on the 25th February 1836 in the in the magnificent, cathedral-like church of St Peter and St Paul in Algarkirk, near Boston, Lincolnshire.  The 1840s saw them prospering on their farm on Algarkirk Fen, if the several farm servants they employed are anything to go by. They were beginning to raise a respectable home-grown workforce –  including their son Thomas Watson Day – when in 1849,  George died, and life changed for Elizabeth.  The 1851 census describes what must have been a miserable come-down.  She is a “Pauper, farmer’s widow”.  She and her fatherless brood of six  are crowded in with her elderly father in Swineshead, with him damningly categorised as “Pauper, former pig jobber” [pig dealer].  The family, with no means of support, were evidently not encouraged to remain in Algarkirk, as a burden on that parish, or indeed on the wider Day clan. The youngest child, Abraham, subsequently went to live with another of his mother’s Watson relatives.  As much Watson as Day, my great great grandfather made the choice to head for Staffordshire, but his motivation for choosing Walsall must remain a mystery.

The turn of the year in 1867 saw Thomas married to a Miss Mary Ann Round.  She had in common with her bridegroom the loss of her father whilst still an infant. But, in the employment-rich, skill hungry, mid 19th century Black Country, as it grew into the “Workshop of the World,” the loss of a male breadwinner was not necessarily as devastating as it was for poor Elizabeth Watson Day: Mary Ann Round’s family confers the welcome genetic inheritance of some sturdy Walsall wenches upon me. The head of her household as she grew up in Birchills Street was her grandmother Phoebe. Phoebe was a widow of 75 years of age, in 1861, and must have continued to retain formidable skill and vigour: she is still described “a Lockmaker.”

Hill Street, Walsall – or what’s left of it. Surely this is the original road surface. Why does it mean so much to me to tread where the segs on my ancestors’ boots once rang out on the cobbles?

On the eastern slope of Walsall’s Church Hill, Hill Street descends to Ablewell Street.  Marked out like the thoroughfares of a Roman habitation after a careful archaeological excavation, the former “residential” road is flanked by lawn and trees these days and provides a small garden-like oasis in central Walsall.

Here, the 1871 census captures a picture of Thomas Watson Day and Mary Ann in their 20s, him now a “furnaceman” My mother’s dear grandad – also “Thomas Watson Day”, and the second of their children, George, are already at Mary Ann’s knee, and they live in one of many a “court” – or “back-to-back” house on Hill Street.

Thomas is a “Walsall mon” now.

Gorton’s Yard, Church Hill, Walsall, c. 1900. Reproduced from “For want of due regulations: Public Health and Housing in Walsall, 1800-1914”.

My dad told me that when he was at work pegging out building plots for the new estates that were springing up north of Birmingham in the post-war years, he would marvel at how inconveniently small the allotted spaces for sitting room, dining room, and kitchen appeared to be on the barren site. As the level strings edged upwards, closely followed by courses of bricks, the rooms would proceed to settle themselves in his visual perception as of perfectly adequate proportions for happy families to conduct life in during the following decades.

And so, pondering this small area of open grass and trees at the junction of Green Lane and Old Birchills, my mother can’t quite believe that when she trod this ground during her childhood, there were scores of miniature dwellings converging just here around the yards behind Forge Street and Little Street, with nearly as many more facing them across the narrow cobbled thoroughfares, all in the shadow of the still-thriving foundries – but not, by that time, the furnaces –  for which “The” Birchills, just north-east of Walsall, was widely famous. My grandmother’s sisters both married into Birchills families, families of foundry workers, furnacemen, and boatmen.

Green Lane, the Wheway & Son Ltd Birchills Hame & Chain Works and environs, Birchills, 1946. Forge Street – where my great-aunt Maud lived at this time, can be seen running in a short diagonal near the centre top of the photograph.

From the 1902 Ordnance Survey Map, Forge Street and Little Street in Birchills. My great-aunt, Maud Ford, nee Day, lived in one of the middle group of houses on the east side of Forge Street. The building housing shared privies and brewhouse is in the communal yard.

In those days, Mother would be stepping from Forge Street into the tiny parlour of her Aunt Maud’s house, after a short walk from St Patrick’s in Blue Lane East, or from home in  Bentley.  Until its demolition in the 1950s, the little dwelling had no running water supply, and possessed only one other downstairs room in which Maud and her husband Billy – along with their two children – could bide their waking hours indoors, and yet the unused space, the sacrosanct parlour, had to be afforded: a defiant statement about the extent of the family’s accommodation.  That they had enough. That there was – of space, if nothing else – a surplus.

In the back room, the lino on the floor always showed a high  polish; spotless, my mother emphasises.  A white enamel bowl sat on a stool near the door.  It was filled, ready, with water drawn from a communal stand pipe in a tidy yard paved with durable blue bricks. The Ford family’s comforts were meagre, and the conditions of their life were unmercifully spartan, but not necessarily squalid, given the co-operation of a group of neighbouring housewives who shared clean and orderly habits.

A 1950s advertisement for the Walsall, Wednesbury and District Society for the Blind. Reproduced in “Memories of Walsall ” by Alton Douglas and Dennis Moore.

Billy Ford was blind.  An industrial accident some years earlier had robbed him permanently of his sight, but Mom remembers a cheerful Uncle Bill, smiling and immaculately dressed, cared for with kindness by his wife, their laundry willingly taken in by her sister Emma in nearby Dalkeith Street, to save the indignity of the shared “brewhouse”, and returned in a crisply ironed pile.

How did the family manage to support themselves? Maud regularly “walked” Billy to the premises of the society for the blind in Hatherton Road.  Perhaps some small income derived from his pastimes there. What a hard, hard life.

My grandmother, Elsie-May Day, at the age of 15, and already at work as a “Sorter, Iron Foundry Worker” according to the 1911 census, had found herself, on her own mother’s untimely death that year, a surrogate parent to her two surviving sisters: Emma, two years younger than her, and “ower poor little Maudie,” as she was forever to be called, just 8 years old.

My mother tells me that her dear little Aunt Maud received my swaddled infant self into enthusiastic arms when we were introduced, and twittered sweet nothings into my baby face with a child-like delight. Although I remember nothing of this meeting, I am very glad to know about it.

By the time that I was born in 1961, Forge Street had been demolished, and the family had been moved into a new council house in Leckie Road.  Maudie died, and Billy ended his days in a home for the blind.

Among this little copse where Forge Street stood, there don’t seem to have been any birches planted in memory of the landscape of the “Birch-Hills” before the coal working, the lime working, and the metal working began. A posy’s worth of bluebells brightens the grass.

These snuff-brown pieces of thick, stiff, dry, hide have the passing appearance of relics from a medieval fortress siege.  They are my dad’s “tab” (finger-guard) and “bracer” (arm-guard), from his practice of archery , which my parents had taken up some time early in the 1950’s.

They say that every man’s home is his castle. Our home, 155, Bosty Lane, Aldridge, being a three-bed-semi, had not moat nor drawbridge nor portcullis.  Within its modest curtilage, however, I was endowed with a liberating sense of complete security. And it had its own strong-room, its very own armoury.

This stronghold was the 7’6″ by 9’3″ Dark Room. Named thus not for any sinister connotation, but only because of the long, suspenseful evenings when felted blanket, as well as curtains, were fixed to the window of the smallest of the three bedrooms – the one that had been mine when a younger child –  and the alchemical creation of photographs from film took place. Along with the photographic paraphernalia, and the angling and fly-tying equipment, were housed here an eclectic arsenal of weaponry.  The his-and-hers longbows were propped in a corner – a 34lb draw, 5’2″ for my mother, and one 5’9″ in length with a more manful draw weight of 48lb for my father. An old African tribal spear brushed shoulders with a 19th century hand-gun, powder and shot flasks, and a real American Cavalry sword. The impressive unsheathing of this yard-long blade from its scabbard reliably drew gasps from the favoured guests to the house who were witness to this spectacle.  My mother would wince.  She hates the thought of any sort of killing, and fought hard – verbally – against my dad’s repeated attempts to have some of the more attractive items in his collection mounted on gruesome permanent show on the chimney breast in the sitting room. As a small child, I echoed her sentiments entirely. Sometimes, my father could be seen shaking one leg gently as he tried to leave the house with a shotgun in a bag, attempting to detach himself from my thin white arms which clasped his ankle,  and to ignore the desperate piping pleas of “Don’t shoot the birdies, Daddy!”

Licensing for shotguns was introduced in 1968.

There was a sea-change in attitudes in the 1960s.  The shotguns, once casual and anonymous in the room had to be licensed following the 1968 Firearms Act, and an amnesty was declared for other “interesting”  items, such as – say – a “liberated” German wartime pistol, the unexplained possession of which could now “trigger” an automatic prison sentence. In the unlikely event that my parents had wanted to bag wild game with their longbows, that archaic practice was outlawed in 1965.

Archery in the orchard at Owletts Hall Farm, Lynn, Shenstone.

No, to inveigle my mother into an interest in the sport, it had to be a light-hearted affair. They set up their targets in the orchard at my dad’s sister and brother-in-law’s farm near Shenstone, to try their aim with their Slazenger equipment.

Their arrows were skilfully fletched and re-fletched, each with their three “vanes” of feathers, at the little workshop, in Station Street, Walsall, of Mr Lingard, who had been a neighbour of my mother’s family,  in Deepmore Avenue, Bentley, where she had grown up in the 1930s.  During the war, his brother, George, had served in the Merchant Navy, and there had been the excitedly received boon of priceless, rare bananas for the four girls and little Patrick at number 32.

Without realising that they were later to spend a whole half- century living in Bosty Lane, Aldridge, Ted and Marie Horton also had use of a handy field in which to practice their toxophily, less than a mile away from their future home, beyond the fields of College Farm and across the canal – this waterway being the Daw End branch of the Wyrley and Essington, dug at the end of the 18th century to transport limestone from the workings that have been a particular feature of the immediate area for, reputedly, two millenia.

So here they are, my dad, my mom, and their friend, Ken, lined up balletically on a rise of ground opposite Calderfields.  At the rear of the picture, Aldridge Road runs from side to side. Facing the road are Longwood Cottages, then, in the 50’s, still a pair, today a single dwelling, that retains in its grounds remarkable, surviving evidence, in the form of a rounded couple of acres of puddle, that is a feature from a much earlier settlement: It was a moat, fed by a stream, that fortified a manor house of the 13th century.

The first Ordnance Survey map of the area dating from first part of the 19th century. Note the Lime Workings, “Bosty Lane”, “The Butts” (which may possibly have been named after a practice area for earlier archers); “Caudy Fields” with the way to the moat and therefore the early manor marked. The rise of ground opposite where the photograph was taken would seem a better site to build, but the moat area still receives a flow of water from a natural stream that rises nearby. “Caldewell”????

“Calewenhull Grange”,  “Caldewell” – or “Caudy Fields” (at the time of the first Ordnance Survey map) – we can be fairly sure that this was the local seat of the de Boweles family, and Sir Hugh is said to have

bilte and repairede a mansion at Caldewalle, and made a moot abowte the seyd mansion, and there dwellide the seyd William and his wyf manye yeeris.  And there deyde sire Hugh de Boweles.

The Rushall Psalter, with its original 14th century chain. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk

For this narrative, I am endebted to the anonymous 14th century author of the notes on the history of Rushall, which are bound with the other parchment pages that comprise the Rushall Psalter, a precious object now cared for by the University of Nottingham.

Hugh de Boweles had been in the service of  Henry III, who was a monarch troubled by having to commit much of the years and resources of his long reign (1207-72) to waging war against his own barons. Archery equipment not dissimilar from our bows was no doubt employed, but both would be a far cry from modern bows with mechanically assisted draws that demand much less strength in the arm of the exponent.

The third Henry Plantagenet was not, perhaps, a master from whom Hugh could expect much in the way of material rewards for his service.  But Hugh had another strategy for extending his influence in this corner of the Shire of  Stafford: His wife was Alice, the daughter and sole heir to William of Rushall, to which “castle” (as the 19th century Ordnance Survey still describes the modest hall,) the de Boweles family removed, leaving the building they had repaired a mile away at Caldewalle to disappear without a trace, except for its persistent moat.

When Hugh’s grandson, another William, perished of the Black Death in the 1340s, it was his daughter’s descendants who inherited the manor.  Once again lacking male heirs in the following century, the Harpur family took the lordship of Rushall.  By the same process, the Leigh, Mellish, and Buchanan families succeeded them, all of which names are commemorated in street names on the north west side of the present day Walsall conurbation.

Park Lime Pits, afternoon stroll, mid 1960’s. Our relatives from rural Worcestershire had to agree that Park Lime Pits, by any standard, was an attractive bit of countryside for us to be lucky enough to have on our doorstep.

The excavations of the productive Lime Workings that lay within the parkland of Rushall Hall have flooded and the scenes of industry where some of our family toiled decades ago have metamorphosed into a picturesque landscape of lakes and woodland – a haven for wildlife.  Apart from the distant view of the steamy excrescences from the cooling towers of Reedswood Power Station at Bentley (demolished 1987) – that, in any case, I romanticised in my in young imagination into the austere, windowless battlements of some castle, you might be way out in the country, wandering its winding paths, as we occasionally did.