Roy Grainger, the Roundhouse baby who spoke his own language
JOHN SPARRY remembers his old friend Roy Grainger, and his family’s connections to some famous local landmarks
COLLARLESS ‘Oxford’ shirts and cloth caps, with bonnets and shawls for the ladies; many outer garments sliced at the back with velcro fastenings for what used to be described as ‘the fuller figure’.
These were some of the props that Ros Corns provided when she opned her photography studio at the Black Country Museum, dedicated to evoking the ‘good old days’ when there were 240 pennies, 480 ha’pennies and 960 farthings in one pound.
Among Ros’s early clients – somewhere around 1988 or ’89 – were Roy Grainger and his mum, Phoebe, together with his sister Lillian and her husband Raymond.
‘Changing the pots’, was, Roy Grainger told me, heavy work indeed. This was when he was employed at the firm of Plowden and Thompson, glass suppliers and manufacturers in Brettell Lane near Stourbridge. Long canes of layered glass, said Roy, were known as ‘red/ brown’, and these would eventually be supplied for the making of eyes for teddy bears.
Roy and I were both pupils at St Mary’s Infants and Junior School in High Street, Kingswinford. Staff there included Miss Alice
Woof and Miss Florrie Woodcock, Mr Martin, and headmaster of the Juniors, Mr Arthur Roberts, who lived on Wolverhampton Road in Wall Heath.
Roy always reckoned that if the kindly Mr Martin dozed off at his desk, the more artful of the lads fired paper pellets propelled by rubber bands at the poor gentleman’s open mouth. Certainly, another lady, who as a girl was taught piano by my mother Daisy, has reminded me that Mr Martin’s efforts on the school’s antique piano mainly consisted of the hymn ‘Forty Days and Forty Nights’; played with one finger!
Mrs Harry Jones (nee Elsie Richards) did not have far to travel to teach us, for she lived in a bungalow opposite St Mary’s School. I had great difficulty learning to read, but with her patience I began to get the idea. Maybe Roy missed out on that good lady’s devoted attention, for reading and writing had seemed to pass Roy by. In much later years, when Roy and I renewed our acquaintance, being fascinated by the origins of words, I have always been entertained by Roy’s handling of our language. I’m going a bit hard of hearing and that may been been the case with J.R. Grainger, Esq. Roy’s version of the walkway between the shops at the top of Wall Heath’s Enville Road was ‘the bocade’ and another of his sayings was ‘as a sakkle of fak’ – for ‘as a matter of fact’. I much prefer the creative Grainger examples. Altogether, Mr Leslie Grainger and his wife Phoebe brought eleven children into the world; two died at a very young age, so Roy was, in effect, elder brother to eight boys and girls.
Before her marriage to Leslie, Phoebe Cynthia Oldnall, her two sisters and three brothers, with father and mother Richard and Sarah Jane, lived for quite some years in the legendary Roundhouse at Gothersley, by the Staffs and Worcester Canal. An appreciation of this tower and adjoinging premises was reprinted in the 1985 Bugle Annual. Father, Richard Oldnall, worked as a tram driver. School for young Phoebe and her siblings meant a walk into Kinver.
On leaving school there was work as a maid at the Ashwood House private asylum in Swindon Road, Kingswinford. The asylum was then owned and run by Dr Pieterson and his wife. In Miss Oldnall’s time, one of the male attendants was possibly Dick Lees, with whom I briefly worked at Messrs Piddock’s clothing, drapery – and linoleum! – stores in Market Street, Kingswinford. Dick being manager and buyer there, and a highly regarded voluntary worker for the British Legion.
My old friend Roy Grainger worked as a coalman for Witton’s in Back Road, Kingswinford, before his years with the Brettell Lane glass suppliers. He often reminisced to me of his visits as a young lad to his Granny Cook’s (she had remarried), who lived near Brettell Lane in King William Street. Roy would recall the nicely old-fashioned atmosphere; kettles steaming on the hob of the iron grate, and maybe a pot of stew simmering too.
When I still drove an old Bedford van, Roy often accompanied me on some adventure when I was trying to earn a little from pieces of old furniture and suchlike (hard to believe, in the early 1960s wallclocks sold to the trade at one pound each).
It was at a property in Kinver, near the canal, by which his mum had spent much of her childhood, that Roy and I were asked to remove relics such as a heavy iron kitchener and a regency library table, in such awful nick that the eventual buyer said he’d have to sell it in the dark!
I’d guess ornithologists might have enjoyed helping to restore the dwelling from which that haul came, for there was a swallow’s nest in one room.
Roy’s father worked for some time at the Savoy Cinema in Stourbridge as commissionaire, however I know that the Grand picture house in Kingswinford was a favourite of Roy when the increasing family lived at Broad Street, and then Blaze Park in Wall Heath.
What with Hopalong Cassidy (and the bewhiskered George ‘Gabby’ Hayes) and Laurel and Hardy – and going fishing into the bargain – I’d say that Joseph Roy Grainger had ‘got the world on a string’!
I have always been entertained by Roy’s handling of English