I was a child of my time. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, was brought up on NHS orange juice and free school milk, went to a state primary school, passed the 11+ exam, went to university to study French, was briefly caught up in the Paris riots and general strike of 1968, did research at Cambridge, and ended up as a Professor of French in Birmingham. Somewhere along the way I lost my Black Country accent, but I know all the familiar Black Country words and phrases. If you meet me, you can hardly fail to notice that I have “a voice like a glede under a door”…
What I'm going to say will be about my family and in two parts. I've called it a Voyage round my Father, with apologies to the late John Mortimer whose famous autobiography was called precisely that. The first part is about religion. My father's family, the Woods of New Street, Oldbury, will be my starting point, but I hope it can lead on to matters of more general interest. I'd like to start quite a long way from the Black Country, in Alveley, Shropshire, which lies just south of Bridgnorth.
Alveley is now a village of mostly modern housing,
but it still has a picturesque old centre around the medieval parish church of St Mary the Virgin.
In the 1830s, where my story begins, Alveley was a very hard place to be if you were poor. The major employer was the local stone quarry, which supplied materials for the rebuilding of Worcester Cathedral in the 1850s. (The various coal mines in the area, at Highley and Alveley, opened later in the 19th century.) My great grandfather William Wood, who was born in Alveley in 1832, was the son a stone cutter working in Alveley quarry, his father was also named William Wood.
My great grandfather William Wood is seen here in middle age in the only photograph I have of him, taken probably in the 1880s in Highgate, Birmingham. (His ill-fitting clothes were probably lent to him for the occasion and he has no shirt.)
If I could open a brief digression here… I often muse on the practicalities of how you would travel the distance of somewhere between 15 and 25 miles, depending on which route you took, from Alveley to Oldbury. Would you follow the canals here on foot from Stourbridge or Wolverley, for example? I’ve heard amazing stories of just how far people in the 19th century could - and would - walk in a day. For example one man who was a horse dealer would regularly walk a horse (not ride it) from his stables in Dudley to Bewdley to deliver it to a customer, and then return to Dudley on foot, all in a single day. My grandfather and his brother used to think nothing in the early 1900s of walking from Oldbury to Clent village and back in a day to visit a sister. Of course the main point was that it cost you nothing at all, apart from shoe leather. Which I'll come back to shortly...
Where William Wood becomes pretty untypical is in religion. Some time between 1841 and 1851 he settled in Oldbury, at 39, New Street, where the Magistrates Court is now, with his older sister Elizabeth, who had married a cordwainer, that is a boot and shoe maker, named William Lawley from Wolverley, just outside Kidderminster. William Lawley taught my great grandfather William Wood the craft of the cordwainer, which made him independent and meant that he didn't have to ruin his lungs labouring in a chemical factory or working down a mine like so many others. In Alveley the Woods had been strongly Methodist. This is where I now have to rely on what was passed down to me as oral history by my late father and uncles. My great grandfather William Wood was, they told me, a devout Methodist and also a lay preacher. That last bit may - or may not - have been an exaggeration, since on his marriage certificate he couldn’t sign his name and simply put a cross. That certainly suggests he was illiterate like the majority of the working population before the Elementary Education Act of 1870. I suppose William might have been able to read but not write (a Methodist preacher would presumably need to be able to read aloud from the Bible sooner or later), but that seems unlikely, since reading and writing tend to go together, as we all know.
Anyway, during the 1860s there seems to have been some kind of wobble in William Wood's spiritual life. In May 1863 he married a girl from Smethwick, Mary Ann Blott, who had given birth in Greets Green, West Bromwich to a son named William Wood two months before. Their marriage took place at Christ Church, West Bromwich, which has since been demolished.
they were (I quote my uncles) “a rather military family, of Oldbury stock, with possibly Irish origins, who had prints of battles on the walls”. Now the Peters were Roman Catholics. They argued a lot with my great grandfather William about religion, and eventually William Wood became a Catholic. In the 1860s such a move was not without its consequences.
William Wood's business as a boot and shoemaker suffered considerably from his conversion to Roman Catholicism. We can glimpse the family in the 1881 census, ten of them living at 46, Albert Street, Oldbury (known locally as Back Lane), an area of grimy courtyards and poor back-to-back housing. William was known as “Little Billy Wood” because he was short in stature, his children were not tall either. If you look at the wonderful 1940s Oldbury home movie Town Sparrows which Dr Terry Daniels has recently put on the Oldbury local history website, you'll see what Albert Street looked like before demolition. William Wood's conversion to Roman Catholicism occurred in the period 1864-1866, it seems, and his daughter Sarah Anne was given conditional baptism by the first parish priest of the new St Francis Xavier's Catholic church,
We're talking about a very different age from now. From the Reformation in the 16th century until the late 18th century there had been many restrictions imposed on Roman Catholics in England. Under the Act of Uniformity, the Test Acts and the Penal Laws they had been required to renounce the authority of the Pope and to deny the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation in the Mass. But since the 1790s Catholics had been allowed access for the first time to the legal profession, to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and to the lower ranks of the army. They were not entirely alone in receiving such treatment, of course, Non-conformists had also suffered from legal restrictions. The process of Catholic emancipation was completed by the 1829 Catholic Relief Act, to some extent as a result of campaigning in Catholic Ireland by Daniel O'Connell. This Act lifted the remaining restrictions on Roman Catholics in England, although of course it's one thing to be legal, and quite another to be approved of. There was a large influx of Irish Catholic immigrants in the first half of the 19th century, to work in the factories and to build the new railways, and Roman Catholic churches appeared everywhere in response to this. There was an upsurge of anti-Catholic feeling among some well known writers, among them Charles Dickens who famously called Roman Catholicism “that curse upon the world” in his Pictures from Italy of 1846. This hostility intensified when the Catholic bishops and their dioceses were instated, or reinstated, in 1850. The situation was not greatly helped by the activities of the Fenians (Irish nationalists) who caused popular revulsion when in 1867 they blew up a prison wall at Clerkenwell Gaol to free some of their comrades, killing twelve people and injuring 120.
The Rev. Henry McKean says in his book Picturesque Oldbury (1900): “The Catholics of Oldbury are for the most part of the poorer labouring class, yet they have reason to be proud of their beautiful little Church and the School in connection with it” (p. 52) I remember both buildings vividly. Like every denomination, Catholicism had its own strong sub-culture, centred on the Latin Mass. It was a demanding faith and was reinforced by church schools. In the case of St Francis Xavier, the elementary or primary school was below the church, St Francis's church being on the first floor, at the top of a spiral stone staircase and large
To return to William Wood, my great grandfather: he bequeathed Roman Catholicism to his children who all attended church. Likewise their children were Catholics, some of the boys serving on the altar at Mass. Within the Catholic fold there was often a sense of being a beleaguered group deep in hostile territory. My grandfather and his family were fiercely patriotic about England, and I know from my father that they would have been affronted to be thought of as fifth-columnists or immigrant followers of an alien creed. There was a final stage in the Wood family's journey from Methodism to Roman Catholicism - the ultimate one. William Wood of Alveley's grandson, John Wood, born at 12, Queen Street, Oldbury in 1903, behind the Wesleyan church with which perhaps William Wood had been associated, became a Roman Catholic missionary priest in the 1920s. I remember my Uncle John as a larger-than-life, almost Dickensian character, big and tall, he died when I was 16. He was naturally conservative in every sense of that word, he was vehemently anti-Communist and I'm told he delivered sermons of starkly terrifying power. At the Catholic seminary near Brighton, where his parents scrimped and saved to send him, he received an education far beyond what would otherwise have been available to somebody from his very poor background in Oldbury. He learned Latin and French and could play the organ with brio, always fortissimo. At 15, after what the French would call une jeunesse pieuse, a pious youth, Uncle John Wood joined the Catholic organization The Knights of the Blessed Sacrament which still exists, and which was intended to strengthen young men's faith in Holy Communion. He began in the priesthood with the élite White Fathers – the SAS, as it were, of the Catholic missions - but didn't continue with them, perhaps not having quite reached the educational standard they required. At some point he was in Lyon, in France, and I can vouch for the fact that he could indeed speak French, we exchanged a few words in it to test each other out… as you do.... He moved on to the Society of African Missions and went to North Africa, perhaps Tangier, where sometimes priests were obliged to work in a quarry. (He grew a large black beard, which he shaved off on his return home.) John contracted a serious tropical disease while in Africa and lost all his fingernails, but was nursed back to health by his mother back home at 2, New Street, Oldbury.
This is where the Rev. John Wood entered my life in the form of blue airmail letters received during the 1950s and 1960s from New Mexico, typed in a characteristic mix of capitals and small letters, and from places with exotic Spanish names like Albuquerque, Tulerosa, Aguas Calientes and El Paso (indeed about the same time as Marty Robbins’ hit song of the same name, El Paso, 1959). At one point Uncle John was even at Roswell, New Mexico, of UFO fame. For me he was very much what the French call mon oncle d’Amérique, “my uncle in America”, that is the successful relative everybody dreams of having, who seems to be enjoying a richer and fuller life on the other side of the Atlantic. On his return visits to Oldbury, Father John Wood was welcomed and revered by his family both for who he was and for the enormous sacrifice of a normal life that he'd made for the Faith. I can see him now playing the piano with his habitual gusto. He sometimes found the many demands of his vocation very hard, as I'm sure a lot of priests and ministers do. When Uncle John died in England in 1964, I attended his requiem at the old St Francis Xavier's and I remember how the undertakers struggled to get his large coffin up that steep spiral stone staircase and down again. He is buried with his parents at Rood End cemetery. Requiescat in pace.
© Dennis Wood 2011
