For accuracy it was a weather forecast worthy of the great Michael Fish, not exactly playing at the top of his game in 1987, just before that Storm: "Earlier on today apparently a lady rang the BBC and said she'd heard that there was a hurricane on the way. Well don't worry if you're watching, there isn't." I suppose the tattered remains of what had once been an umbrella scudding across Oldbury town square past the cenotaph would have been warning enough for most people not to proceed with this outing...Never mind. Oldbury. Home town. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..."
I first began to focus on things in Tower Road, Rounds Green, at the outermost edge of the borough of Oldbury, in the late 1940s. It was a very long way from now, a world of decaying air raid shelters, bronchitis and Take It From Here on the radio. Back in the Dark Ages, before satnav, Twitter and Implementation Plans, my heroic Mum used to take me in my pushchair from Tower Road, halfway up the Rowley hills, to the very bottom of Oldbury where my Gran lived, and then all the way back. Let's make the journey again, this time with the benefit of air conditioning.
Tower Road, Bury Hill Estate
We cross the Wolverhampton New Road, drop steeply down Florence Road and past Rounds Green school. The road into Oldbury is the same, but the scenery has been changed pretty radically. The mighty Accles & Pollock tube works with its many mills and departments that once employed hundreds around here has vanished from sight. All that's left are its curiously appealing Art Deco offices next to the canal, with their cheerfully curved walls. There's a double dose of Sic transit here, since, despite the large letters on the building proclaiming Black Country House, for the Black Country Partnership appears to have moved on and a To Let sign has gone up...
Former Paddock offices, Accles & Pollock
Entrance to Accles offices, Art Deco
Accles offices from canal bridge
All rather poignant. Not only my Dad but I too worked there, in my case only in my summer holidays. It was all paternalistic capitalism, you may say, but everything was laid on for workers, àla Cadbury, every club imaginable and the fabulous Birchley sports and social club with bar and dance hall, tennis courts, bowling green and vast playing fields. I played there while my parents danced, I tagged along to contests of the Angling Club, I went with my Dad to Mr Tranter's Classical Music Club! No trace at all of that now, except in the collective memory of the middle-aged. It wasn't all sunshine, of course. My boss in those offices - no names, no pack drill - who was a very kind and helpful man, would sometimes suddenly snap as the result of somebody's perceived failings, burst out his lair roaring with rage at his underlings, do a lap of the desks still bellowing, and then disappear again with a wall-shaking slam of the door. But I suppose we've all been there...
Across the canal were Accles' staff canteen and further still the Tabernacle School, the bus station and Mr Jones the barbers'. Now we have Sainsbury's Savacentre beneath an oriental dome and a bristling mess of roads which no pedestrian in his right mind would want to tackle. Somewhere under all that lie the 1950s and my childhood. Mr Jones was a devout believer whose premises overlooked serried rows of bus shelters where Sainsbury's car park now stands. On every visit I would listen to him preaching to his customers against the theory of evolution with the same conviction that Richard Dawkins now employs to promote it. If I might digress: did Mr Jones perform the arcane tonsorial procedure known as "singeing" back then, I wonder? As any fule kno, when it's cut, hair leaks from its tips, so it's important to seal it by passing a burning taper over it... This always used to cost more, naturally. It was a delicious assault on juvenile senses deadened by prolonged theological argument, but instantly revived by intense warmth passing across the scalp and the unique smell of hair ash.
Sainsbury's Savacentre, Oldbury
Also existing only at archeological levels somewhere around here are the once fine (New) Talbot Hotel and the old railway bridge across Halesowen Street - you can triangulate for these vanished landmarks now only in relation to the unchanging cenotaph. At least the old Library building is still there, as a Citizens' Advice Bureau. And the Library itself is - where else? - in the old Police Station... The shops of Freeth Street have been replaced by a stately pleasure-dome which Sandwell Council decreed for itself, "with walls and towers girdled round /And gardens bright with sinuous rills." It could be a lot worse, I have to admit, even as the gale howls across the Sandwell Civic Fountain and the horizontal rain soaks into my shirt. Look down the desolate and empty Freeth Street where once stood the Palace cinema: the picture house closed in 1961, but it was famous for its boisterous children's matinees with Tarzan in 38 weekly episodes, ice cream and a lot of audience participation. I loved it.
Sandwell Council House with Civic Fountain
Former Library building, Freeth Street, Oldbury
So why is the entrance from the town square to Birmingham Street, the main thoroughfare of Oldbury, so narrow? It must have been a problem for trams. The Old Talbot, situated in this bottleneck, has gone, but only in relatively recently times, it was coaching inn on the road to Shrewsbury and Holyhead. The other buildings up here seem mostly to have survived under different ownership, and for a short way they extend even along the once bustling Halesowen Street (where my Dad bought his seed potatoes from, I think, Hickman's), including the old Aplin's newsagents and the dentist's surgery (it was Mr Sharp then, I believe, a not inappropriate name for his calling.). The chemist's shop is still full of character, there is even an old alleyway halfway down the block, now leading nowhere. I have somewhere a complete list of all the shops of Birmingham Street which an old lady kindly gave me, such was the affection in which they were once held by locals. The Lloyds Bank building is now a Subway diner next to the Junction pub, Lloyds Bank now operates from the old Birmingham Municipal Bank building, once wood-panelled and with scratchy dip-in pens. And the Birmingham Municipal? It became a Trustee Savings Bank, now part of Lloyds TSB.
C. H. White Chemist, Birmingham Street, Oldbury
Former Lloyds Bank building and Junction pub, Oldbury
I don't remember any shoe shops in Oldbury, although I'm sure there must have been some. We generally bought shoes in West Bromwich. One of the special treats for any child was the shoe shop X-ray machine - yes, X-ray machine - rather like a radiator about three feet high. You put your feet through the bottom and looked down through the tube. You could wiggle your feet and watch your skeleton move eerily within the confines of your shoes. We're talking about some time in the 1950s, which, despite everything, was still an age of relative innocence about things atomic. (I see body X-rays may be introduced in airports, things seem to have come full circle...OK, we've reached that triangular block where the Junction pub stands, still in business I'm pleased to see. Excuse me while I jump up onto the low wall around the churchyard opposite the Junction and walk down to the far end, trying not to fall off... No, the wall's gone, I'm afraid, so I can't do that any more. It was already stripped of its metal railings as part of the War Effort. Now it's disappeared completely and the graveyard has become a kind of post-modern rockery.
The old Post Office building still lurks behind the triangle, at the entrance to Albert Street where my great grandfather was a shoemaker in the 1870s with a large family in a tiny back-to-back. I did the Christmas postal delivery a couple of times. I was given Rood End to do and lent a bicycle with no lights and (if I remember rightly) one pedal. A good trick if you can pull it off, riding one of those on a December night... The only tip I received was from one of my Dad's mates, a man not noted for digging deep in his pocket at the pub - and he hadn't even recognized me. Life's little ironies... Opposite the Post Office was Dr Shaw's surgery. Doctors were treated with such awe in those days, a home visit was a Royal occasion. Not without reason: a bottle of pink M and B, an early form of penicillin, later prescribed by Dr White saved my life when measles was rapidly turning into pneumonia.
Former Oldbury Post Office, Albert Street
Former doctor's surgery, Unity Place, Oldbury
Two important buildings once graced the Bustle Bridge where Birmingham Street crossed the Oldbury Branch Canal, which was cut in 1772 and filled in during the 1970s. One was the Savoy cinema, where a friend of mine claimed he could hear suspicious rustlings under the floorboards. The other was Bates the butchers, where there was manifestly nothing under the sawdust-covered floorboards except the oily glint of canal water. A flight of steps still leads down to where the canal used to be, and the outline of the bridge can be seen behind the former butcher's shop.
Site of former Bustle canal bridge
Steps down to canal, former Bustle Bridge
Bed of former Oldbury Branch Canal with former built-on Bustle Bridge, centre
On we go, down past Low Town, which, despite its tantalizingly vague name, is actually a street and where the sweet shop is now a taxi office. It was there I heard the phrase "Very much obliged" addressed to my mother every week by the old shopkeeper when she bought me some sweets: it took me years to work out what it meant. On we press, past the present-day car park where once stood W. K. Adams & Sons the drapers and Moyle & Adams the grocers (or was it Marsh & Baxter?), where the nice plump lady who sliced bacon on the Berkel always reminded me of Private Doberman in Phil Silvers' exhilaratingly outrageous Sergeant Bilko. And finally, past the empty shell of the Perrott Arms on the other side of the road, to No 2 New Street, which now lies somewhere under Oldbury Magistrates Court, and to my Grandma's greengrocery shop, still in my memory looking out over a Victorian courtyard, with a shared outside lavatory and an under-kitchen full of coal that was liable to flood when the water table and the Flash Brook were high. My uncles would then intrepidly set sail in a tin bath... But that, as they say, is another story.
© Dennis Wood 2009
Low Town, off Birmingham Street
Bricked-up Perrott Arms on Flash Road, seen from former New Street, Oldbury
To view in full size, all of above photos see pages 13 - 17
....see here
