The gas works and the Prince of Wales
ROY LANGFORD takes us back once more to his childhood memories of a lost part of Dudley
I wonder how many fellow Bugle readers can recognise this gloomy street scene, on the right, taken around 1960 in the depths of the Flood Street slum clearance scheme?
Wall
My guess is not many, so I’ll give you a clue. To the right in the photo is the towering wall that enclosed the mighty Dudley Gas Works, and that forlorn street was Spring Gardens. And if the photo had been more clear past that rise in the ground, you would have seen to the top of Red Hill, which bordered Prospect Row.
To the near left, behind that high wall in past times, during the Second World War years, I remember there was once a small holding which all we kids from around that area were in awe of, but never allowed to enter.
All we little rascals could do was to clamber up the wall and peep over to see a rare sight for our neighbourhood – an apple orchard, complete with chickens, ducks and a pig sty complete with family of pigs. It was quite an eye-opener for us youngsters,
as the only time we had seen a real pig was when it was hanging in the butcher’s shop window. I might add that there was plenty of chicken wire fencing at hand to keep those flighty ducks and fowl safe behind that wall.
Garden
This small holding, more of a large garden really, was the property of Mr Arthur Neath, who lived at number 5 Spring Gardens. How do I know this? Well take another look at that photo and just past the gas lamp, to the left, was John Street, which at this point in time, the early 1960s, had almost been laid bare by the bulldozers under the heartbreaking (for some) Slum
Clearance Scheme. But this didn’t hide the fact that from early 1942 to mid-1943, I lived there, with my doting grandparents, Susan and Harry Woodall, at number 15, John Street. They moved away from the old, pongysmelling gas works to number 49 Oakeywell Street, in 1943.
Junction
If you now go back to the bottom of John Street, at the junction with Spring Gardens, you will see a woeful-looking halfdemolished building that looks like it’s split into two parts, which believe it or not was of some special interest, because it dated back to around 1870. At that time it was a public house named the Prince of Wales, and listed many years later as number 6, Spring Gardens.
The second nostalgic photo shows, in great detail, the above ground level intricate structure of the gas works, but cast your eyes almost to the top left of the photo and you will see a street, sloping down towards the works. The picture may be of poor quality but it’s like a nugget of gold to me, because it shows John Street and that large building with four windows facing the gas works – the former Prince of
Wales in all its glory, before the slum clearance came into force.
Landlady
Other interesting (I hope) brief facts I’ve gathered about the old pub building are, that the first licensee, from 1870 to 1872, was a feisty landlady named Mrs Sarah Bowler. The next one I’ve managed
to unearth, almost fifty years later in my 1911 Dudley Herald Year Directory, is Henry James Edwards; while in my Blocksidge’s Dudley Almanack of 1933 is listed
Samuel Wilkes.
But as it happens I know the pub actually closed down in 1934, which, if Mr Wilkes was still in charge, made him the last landlord of the
Prince of Wales. Thomas Rogers and his
So what happened to family were listed there – the pub after that? Well at number 6, Spring Gardens soon after it closed it as it was then known. became a lodging house, They may well have and when I went to live stayed there until they with my gran in John had Dudley Council’s Street in 1942/43, it was Compulsory Notice to shared by two families; the Quit, which would have Rogers and the Kendall been at some point in the families. Checking mid-fifties. through Blocksidge’s Alamanacks I hope readers with connections for 1949 and to that area find 1951, it seems that only this all of interest.