Steam age memories – a life in railways
RAMON WILLIAMS tells ANDY COPE about his time with the Great Western Railway in Stourbridge – PART ONE
THE number of people left that remember steam on the Stourbridge line is rapidly dwindling, as are the number of people who remember the extensive freight and parcels operation the railway was responsible for before serious rationalisation of services began.
I have known several railwaymen from Stourbridge over the years but recently, through lockdown, was fortunate to be introduced to fellow SLUG (Stourbridge Line User Group) member Ramon Williams, now a Kidderminster resident but originally from a hamlet near Barnstaple in North Devon.
He was named after Ramon Navaro the early film star. As a baby, his parents told him, he was a passenger on the last train on the long-lost narrow gauge Lynton and Barnstaple Railway. He moved to Stourbridge when he was 12 so that his father could take up employment with Batemans, the well-established Stourbridge timber merchant and sawmill owner. What follows is a record of the email conversations I have had with Ramon over the course of the last twelve months or so.
Because several separate emails were involved, I have attempted to re-shape them into a continuous prose without, hopefully, removing any of the content. Over to Ramon ...
I was born in Devon in a small hamlet from which the nearest town was Barnstaple. This entailed cycling five miles each day to the village school, which was situated on the edge of Exmoor, where everyone between five and twelve years of age were all put in one class during the war.
If the weather was fine, we went out on the local lanes looking for rose hips, which sustained many people as ‘Rose Hip Syrup,’ a food supplement to the wartime rations – but when it was raining we made camouflage nets for the Army.
So, as you can see, my education was not great. I was told, however, that as a babe in arms I was taken on the last narrow gauge Lynton and Barnstaple train in 1935, my first involvement with trains!
In 1945, my parents, Mother at 41 and Dad at 40, cycled from North Devon so that Dad could be considered for a sawyer’s job at Batemans at the top of Prospect Hill in Stourbridge, which in those days included a house with the job.
Having cycled to Stourbridge, they then had to cycle back to the outskirts of Barnstaple. Dad got the job and therefore we moved to Union Street in Stourbridge at the end of 1945.
I went to school at the Grange. I was bullied a lot, especially because of my accent – for example, a gang took my dinner money off me every week during the first couple of months which meant I had no lunch.
The result of all these difficulties was that I left at 14 in July 1947.
However, to try and catch up on my education I went to night school above Stourbridge Library, taking Typing, Shorthand, Maths and English. After two weeks the Shorthand teacher, whose other job was as a council rent collector, tore my book up!
However, I passed out on the other exams! Later, when my wife Ann and I got married, we lived for a time in Pargeter Street and then moved to a terraced house in Union Street.
So, in July 1947 I started work as what was then called a “slipper boy”, helping to look after the GWR barge horses, which were stabled in a cave below Gasometer Lane, Stourbridge, behind what is now Fieldings Auctioneers.
The gent who looked after them was a Bernard Caitlin who had worked with the horses so long, he actually smelt of them! In those days, the only telephone was a small telephone exchange in the goods office. When a message was received about incoming goods by boat someone would run over and say, “the barge coming from (say) Richard Thomas and Baldwins of Swindon (Staffs) requires another horse.”
So we would saddle one up, I would get on top, and amble across Lower High Street (I would not like to do that now!), ride to Stewponey, and when the barge came along, harness my horse to the barge horse and make our way back towards Stourbridge.
As we got towards the Bonded Warehouse the bargee would shout to “move them along a bit quicker” and then throw the towing rope off and glide under the roadway into the basin as there was no towpath under the road.
After a while of doing this type of work, I managed to get into the office as a messenger. Downstairs at the end in a small office was the Goods Agent, Mr Bullas (who lived at Stourton) who often took charge, but really it was the Chief Clerk Mr Keene who ran the yard.
Staff outside included two shunters, the Yard Foreman Norman Niblett and a weighbridge lad. There was also a man who drove the Ruston Bucyrus crane in the yard, while the GWR also had a flatbed lorry to deliver local goods.
At the opposite end was the office of Thomas Bantock whose company had a lot of Scammell threewheeled lorries which did most deliveries further afield. When a train came down the incline into the Town goods yard, the yard foreman, Norman, would go up the offside of the train, and take the labels off the trucks – as an example, some might say from Cannock Chase to H.S. Pitt & Leesons. He would enter them in a book and take the labels into a clerk who would make out an invoice, which I would immediately take to their office, just up on the right in Lower High Street, as none of these coal merchants had telephones around 1948.
There were at that time six coal merchants serving the people of Stourbridge. The level crossing at the bottom of Lower High Street has long been a distant memory but I remember it well as I was the one that helped the yard foreman open the gates. As I remember the track went by the side of Lunt’s coal merchants, past Stourbridge rolling mills towards Bradley’s (now the Lion Surgery).
I remember they had a tractor with a buffer on, which was the same height as the wagon buffers. I also remember that D & F Fellows had a siding into their premises and that they had a horse for shunting purposes.
The large factory off Lower High Street was Turner’s Skin Factory, and in front of that was D & F Fellows,
who at that time were making tiled fireplaces, which most people had. They were also coal merchants.
While I was at the Town as a messenger, I used to cycle to the Lye Goods with invoices every day, with documentation pertaining to their area. The Goods office there was very small so, up against the buffer stop near the office, there was a GWR coach. This was fitted out as an office, mostly used by lady clerks.
While at Town Goods, I had to go to Snow Hill for a clerical exam, which I failed, so was passed on to the motive power department which included the footplate grades. At first, we were “Caller Uppers”, cycling around Stourbridge knocking on footplate men’s doors to get them up for work. The Health and Safety of today would have a fit, with young lads of 15 cycling around the Stourbridge area during the dead of night. One of the “Caller Uppers” had a nasty accident on Grange Hill near the Junction station. This lad who was on the call up with me and a few others, came to the top of the hill where he saw what he thought were two lads walking up the hill with bikes.
So, he decided to frighten them by cycling between them. Cars had a small light on each mudguard then and what he thought was his two mates coming up the hill turned out to be a car! We understood he was in a bad way after the accident and sadly never saw him again.
Bernard had worked with the horses for so long that he actually smelt of them
This article was first published by the Stourbridge Line User Group which is a group dedicated to improving the standard of public transport along the Stourbridge rail line, as well as producing occasional retrospective articles such as this. Membership cost £5 per year (£3 if online) and details may be found on their website stourbridge lineusergroup info