Gardens, pubs and rock n’ roll in

North Staffordshire historian MERVYN EDWARDS fondly recalls his disparate, if infrequent, visits to Biddulph – known as the garden town of Staffordshire

AS a non-motorist living in Wolstanton, I find that I can go for years without visiting some North Staffordshire towns – Biddulph being one of them.

However, it’s the quality of visits that counts, rather than the frequency, and the disparate business I have had in the Staffordshire Moorlands town has created vivid personal memories.

As a football-crazy teenager, I found myself suffering from what we used to call a ‘clicking cartilage’ in my right knee. It was very painful at times and it was clear to me that an operation would be required sooner or later.

This came in 1977, by which time I had become aware that a superior footballer to my good self – Stoke City’s flame-haired winger Terry Conroy – had had all four cartilages removed from his knees.

A bed was found for me in

Biddulph Grange Orthopaedic Hospital where Nurse O’neill painted my leg, pre-op, with an iodine antiseptic that looked like horse manure.

My recovery from the cartilage operation was helped on account of the two older fellows in adjacent beds who regularly passed the time by singing rock and roll songs such as Teenager in Love and That’ll Be The Day – thus igniting my interest in that musical genre.

Whilst in hospital, I kept my mind occupied by drawing cartoons on sheets of paper. Mr Cooper, the physiotherapist’s assistant, appeared at my bedside to check on my progress, and noticed that I had sketched an old woman on my pad, and asked who it was.

“You, if you like,” I cheekily replied, to which he responded, “You’re not out of hospital yet.” I was discharged after five days at Biddulph.

Some readers may recall the excellent television offering of 1992 entitled The World in a Garden: The Restoration of Biddulph Grange Garden.

It was presented by Roy Lancaster for Channel Four, and painted a detailed picture of how the Batemans’ former ornamental grounds had become largely forgotten, decayed with time and horrendously vandalised.

I watched this programme with great interest, learning how gardeners and volunteers were beginning to resurrect the garden and how the decorative tiles covering many eye-catching features were being restored.

And so I returned to Biddulph in July, 1993, to examine the progress of

Biddulph Grange Garden, and whereas restoration had not reached parts of it – such as the old bowling green and quoit ground – the tourist attraction was developing pleasingly with its rhododendron ground, monkey puzzle trees and ornamental features all taking the eye. No wonder Biddulph calls itself the garden town of Staffordshire.

I knew Biddulph through its social clubs. As a crown green bowler for Wolstanton WMC in the 1970s and 1980s, I regularly played club and institute matches against Biddulph Labour Club – then boasting the talents of such as Gerald Walker, Gordon Allen, Johnny Sumner, Bill Foy, David Lunn, Alan Hopkins, Ron Wickstead and the aptly-named Tommy Biddulph.

The club, by the way, was demolished in 2010 to make way for a new Sainsbury’s supermarket.

I also played at Biddulph Conservative Club – though not on a bowling green. Suitably inspired by the rock and rollers in my hospital ward in 1977, I became one half of a rock and roll/country duo called Two For The Road between 1986 and

1989, playing pubs and clubs.

Our agent booked us at Biddulph Conservative Club in 1989 and yes, we played Teenager in Love and That’ll Be The Day, immediately securing a re-booking.

I had suffered slight anxieties about playing a Conservative club, but the audience there were marvellous and even laughed at my jokes about Margaret Thatcher.

Biddulph Carnival was very popular at the time I worked at nearby Chatterley Whitfield Mining Museum, and we were more than happy to support it.

For the May, 1989 event, we joined the two-and-a-half mile cavalcade through Biddulph town centre, ending at a field near the Top o’ the Trent pub. Our shire horse, Ben, pulled the Whitfield dray, which was one of many imaginatively-decorated vehicles in a parade that was watched by several hundred rubberneckers.

I walked alongside our dray attired as a Victorian gentleman in a swallow-tailed coat and black topper.

I was similarly involved in the 1992 Biddulph Carnival when the 40-float procession featured cowboys, majorettes, actors dressed as lords and ladies, and the Chatterley Whitfield vintage mines rescue vehicle, driven by museum director Jim Hutchinson. Our ostlers, Arthur Lovatt and Thelma Dean, were on hand to chaperone retired pit pony Medie.

Medie the pit pony, ostler Thelma Dean, and Mervyn Edwards at Biddulph Carnival in 1992. Inset top right, the town’s Conservative club, and inset below right, St Lawrence Church.

I didn’t start visiting Biddulph pubs until early 1990, when I called at the Crown and Cushion, the Swan and the Royal Oak. It was not difficult to find pub walls adorned with photographs of the Victoria Colliery in Biddulph, which had only closed eight years earlier.

I began to take greater interest in Biddulph pubs through my involvement with the Potteries Pub Preservation Group, and I still have press cuttings relating to the controversy surrounding the Talbot pub in Grange Road in 1997.

In July of that year, more than a thousand people staged a vigil around the Talbot, hoping to persuade pub owner Bass Taverns from transforming their beloved local into a Vintage Inns theme pub.

Bass Taverns wished to create space for more dining tables at the expense of the areas that had been traditionally used for darts, crib and dominoes.

By way of a compromise, a designated drinking area was allowed in the plans as a sop to the protestors – whose passions were further enflamed by the pub’s brand new pictorial sign, featuring a cartoon mutt.

One of the protestors, Kate

Thacker, who was also a town council administrator, told “The sign used to be a rather nice Talbot hound. Now it looks like some kind of Huckleberry Hound cartoon dog and everybody around here hates it.”

The pub owners responded that the sign was of a style exclusive to them, using ‘colourful, visual humour.’ Thus did corporate branding triumph over community fervour.

I have met members of Biddulph Male Voice Choir in the past, including Gwenda Jones, its legendary conductor, and Australiaborn Bob Pill, a former chairman and secretary.

I interviewed him for

in 2003 and found that he had plentiful memories.

Recollecting an overseas concert tour in Norway in 1976, he revealed: “We stayed in a state youth hostel and catered for ourselves. On one occasion we had settled down for the night, three or four of us to a room.

“Three of our chaps, after a drink or two, put their false teeth into the