Chapter I: Early Days

I was born on April 15th. 1923 at 31, Yardley Street, Stambermill.

Whereas I can accept with reservations that example of relativity which says that a butterfly landing on a flower in Japan can trigger and earthquake in Patagonia, I find it difficult to give credit to the "astrology" which would brand me as an 'Arian' because of the positions of stars and planets on the day of my birth, and that my life's destiny is thereby influenced to a significant degree. This is made the more unlikely by the fact that birth is, to the one being born, merely a shift from one environment to another and the point where the trouble starts.

If "astrology" does have any minimal impact on life, then surely it is at the act of conception, when the life of an individual starts, that its effect is more likely to be significant. On this basis March 25th. should be a much more significant festival than December 25th. and I am a "Leo".

My birth date would indicate that I was conceived whilst my parents were on holiday the previous summer. As in those years they always went to Aberystwyth, where Mr. & Mrs. Carter had a boarding house in Bath Street. At Carters' they were joined by various relatives of my father and their friends, including 'Aunt Lou', my father's youngest aunt. who had married Charles Adey, the owner of a 'cook shop' which sold cooked meats in Coventry. There was some family connection with the Carters but it was never revealed to me. Nevertheless some Welsh connection is also indicated by my maternal Grandfather's name being Hughes, and his mother being of the Pritchard clan. I thus assume that I started life in Wales and may therefore be eligible to play Rugby for Wales !

The thought of one's parents having a night of summer passion on August Bank Holiday is very difficult for any of us to take in. This applies, however, to each generation in turn.

I was born at Stambermill which, before the industrial revolution, was a village on the eastern outskirts of Stourbridge, then at the northern extremity of Worcestershire. The village was on the banks of the River Stour. Whereas the word "stour" in Scots denotes any sort of dirt or dust, the name is thought, in England, to have meant 'strong' or 'powerful'.

The Stour which drained from the north of the Clent hills took a wide sweep round Halesowen and Cradley, Lye and Stambermill, passed StourBRIDGE where it was crossed by the road from Stourbridge to Dudley and Wolverhampton. After this it took another broad sweep to more rural parts before proceeding via Kinver and Kidderminster to Stourport where it discharged into the Severn. For a good deal of its length it defined the boundary between Worcestershire and Staffordshire.

Before the second world war, the Stour had become an industrial drain. Every factory between Halesowen and Wordsley discharged effluent into it, so that as it passed Stourbridge it had acquired a khaki colour and was biologically dead. I believe that it has since been cleaned up.

Yardley Street, where I was born, led down to Yardley's spade and shovel works which was on the banks of the river. Another hundred yards to the north and I would have been a native of Staffordshire and of the parish of Amblecote whence my maternal Grandmother, Sarah Knott, was believed to have originated.

In 1923, Stambermill had been partially absorbed into the conurbation which stretched from Birmingham to the Wollaston Ridge and which, up to and including Stambermill, was known as the 'Black Country' because of the effects on it of industrialisation. West of the Stambermill viaduct was Stourbridge, a market town which regarded itself as outside the Black Country. There was some justification for this as the town was on the west side of the geological fault which distinguished the clay soil of the Black Country from the Old Red Sandstone of Stourbridge and much of North Worcestershire. This geology accounted for the world-renowned "Stourbridge Refractory" firebricks and for the coal and iron ore which dictated the industrial development.

The land to the west of Stambermill was less intensively industrialised than was the Black Country. Stourbridge had its industries: small engineering works and foundries, and notably 'Stourbridge Glass' of fine quality, but this was made just outside the town boundaries. Apart from some ribbon development as far as Stourton, rural England stretched west, almost unbroken, from the Wollaston Ridge to the Welsh border.

In spite of all the surrounding industry, Stambermill in my early years was still sufficiently rural to have some green fields and farms. Yardley Street, where I was born, was about a mile upstream from the 'Stourbridge', and led to Yardley's works on the river bank, which works may have been responsible for a part of the khaki colouring of the river.

THE HUGHES FAMILY.

At Stambermill, my maternal grandparents, William and Sarah Hughes (neé Knott) brought up a family of five daughters, Lily, Ruth, Margaret (Peggy) - my mother - Ethel and Vera Gladys, the last named being the only one with two Christian names. There had been another daughter, Jane (Jenny) who had died as a teenager.

Sarah and William Hughes

'Uncle' Joe Knott

William Hughes was employed as a turner by Yardley's, but must have been a man of parts and of some enterprise since he owned a row of six houses on the main road at its junction with Bagley Street. The family occupied the largest and most westerly house where grandfather, or "Pop" as he was known, ran a 'cobbler's' shop where boots and shoes were sold to the 'workers' and where repairs were carried out. This was soon expanded into a clothing business. Stocks were limited, but almost anything could be obtained from the Birmingham wholesale warehouses such as Lunts' in Old Square and Wilkinson & Riddell ('Wilkins') in Cherry Street. Clients would come into the shop, describe what they wanted, and periodically a member of the family would go to 'Brum' by bus and bring back a limited choice 'on appro'. The warehouses never nominally sold small items such as socks, underwear, ties, handkerchiefs and scarves in quantities of less than a dozen at a time. They were, however, quite happy to sell a 'quarter dozen' to small shop-keepers. This accounts for the family's apparent ability to make any one article of clothing last three times as long as did other people.

The 'Boot and Shoe' trade really was in that order in those days - even women wore boots. Boots for the 'workers' were hung up on either side of the shop door by the string which tied them together in pairs. A favourite joke at the time was about the chap who asked for a pair with a long string as it was easier to walk home. These boots were mostly made of thick, hard leather with hob-nailed soles. They came even in sizes to 'fit' small children, it being thought at the time that ankle boots of stiff leather 'strengthened the ankles'. They probably had the opposite effect. To own a pair of boots with hobnails that would 'strike fire' on the granite cobbles of the street was a privilege indeed, especially if they went with a pair of trousers that would 'whistle' as corduroy was wont to do.

As our social class was regarded, at least by us, as being slightly superior, we regarded this sort of thing as one of the many which were considered rather vulgar. Thankfully we 'kept our feet dry' in something more delicate and comfortable.

Keeping one's feet dry was the essential to life which came only second to 'keeping your bowels open'. If you got your feet wet, then you were extremely susceptible to practically every known malady. So indoctrinated were we in this theory that it was some years before I discovered that paddling in the sea was unlikely to cause my untimely demise. I still have a letter written to me by my mother as late as 1939, when I was in camp on Anglesey when, with all the world on the brink of war, I, at age 16, was exhorted to 'make sure you don't get your feet wet!'

The original 'parlour' of the grandparents' house at Stambermill formed the shop, so the problem of the social disgrace in not having a parlour had to be solved. This was done by making interior alterations whereby the parlour of the house next door was incorporated - with access through the shop. Presumably this was done at a time when next door was temporarily unoccupied.

Later on, the Stambermill Sub-Post Office, which until then had been in a shop opposite the 'Hart in Hand', was incorporated into the business. This resulted not only in a mail box being built into the front garden wall, but also eventually a red telephone box was erected in the miniscule garden, thereby taking up about a third of its area.

Aunt Ethel took over the Post Office side of the business once she had reached years of discretion and remained in this prominent position in the village for forty years.

Ethel Hughes

 I have copy of the certificate which the Post Office gave her on her retirement:

The post enabled her to be the confidant and close observer of everyone in the village and thereby to acquire a vast fund of funny stories with which she entertained her nephews and nieces until her death at 97. She was the last of her generation, a person of great humour, and being childless doted on her nephews and nieces.

Ethel Cartwright (neé Hughes)

When Aunt Ethel. married Joe Cartwright the newly-weds moved into what was left of the house next door. As Pop (William Hughes) by then had been widowed, this was quite a convenient arrangement, and Ethel eventually took over the running of the business.

Until Pop retired, the business was run by my grandmother, who died in her sixties, and such of her daughters as were available by age and ability.

After his retirement Pop still retained an interest in Yardley's to the extent of going 'down the works' occasionally and being allowed to make some intricate brass artefact as a present for one of his daughters.

William ('Pop') Hughes

It would seem that all the Hughes daughters received a good education. There are stories of their putting on Shakespearian plays in the attic bed room of their home, and even in her nineties, Ethel could recite Macbeth at great length. It is believed that two of them became 'tafloresses', one working for George Osborne & Sons at Stourbridge. My mother, Margaret, certainly had a secondary education at Stourbridge Girls' High School, and after being for some time a pupil teacher at Stambermill school, went on to become infants' teacher at Wribbenhall, Bewdley, prior to her marriage in 1919.

At some time in the 1890's the Hughes family had moved to Stambermill from Orchard Lane, Lye. My mother told of being a pupil for a time at Orchard Lane school, as was also my father, Benjamin Green. They may have been in the same class as infants, but at that time there was strict sexual segregation after the age of about seven, many schools having three entrances, for 'Boys', 'Girls', and 'Mixed Infants'.

On their removal to Stambermill, my mother and such of her sisters as had then arrived in this world, were transferred to Stambermill School where they came under the tutelage of the headmaster, one Evan Evans, whose name thereafter was mentioned with that odd mixture of reverence and ridicule reserved for dominies of that age whose philosophy was 'Education by Terrification'.

It is interesting to note that someone with so Welsh a name as 'Evan Evans' should, in that district, be teaching the 'Hughes' family, a name originating in North Wales. The immigration of labour from Wales into the industrial Midlands two or three generations previously may account for this, as for a degree of 'hiraeth' with which my family at least has always had for Wales.

THE GREENS.

My father was Benjamin (Ben) Green (b.1891), who had been brought up as the second son and one of the six children of William (b.1859) and Elizabeth Green (nee Woodhouse), my paternal grandparents, who lived all their lives in Lye, which until the 1930's was a separate Urban District and afterwards incorporated into the enlarged borough of Stourbridge. William's father, Benjamin, my great-grandfather, was a collier at Oldnall. Colliery and was married to an Elizabeth Holloway and the father of a fairly large family of which William was the second or third son.

William and Elizabeth Green

It was alleged by some of my great-aunts who at one time made periodic visits, that the Greens had moved into the Midlands from the green hills of Herefordshire. This is quite possible of course, for the same reason as the Hughes family may have ultimate origins in Wales. It may also account for my having the same strange feeling of affinity with Herefordshire as I have with Wales.

Alan Green

The eldest of William and Elizabeth Green's family, Alan, was a cub reporter with a local newspaper the 'County Express' before becoming a reporter on the 'Grimsby Telegraph'. From there he went on to study for the Congregational Ministry at Paton College, Nottingham and became a Congregationalist Minister, serving at Crawley, and Tooting before becoming Moderator of the London Province of that Church. Latterly he lived at Covingto Way, Norbury, on the edge of Streatham Common. Alan married Eleanor, (Aunt Dolly) who came from Trottiscliffe (pron: Trosley) near Gravesend in Kent, and who could tell of being driven in her father's pony and trap to Gravesend to do the weekly shopping. Aunt "Dolly's" real Christian name I only discovered when I saw it on the brass plate of her coffin! A pity! I would have liked an 'Aunt Eleanor'!

During the war, when I was working in London for a time, I visited them occasionally and appreciated being treated by Aunt Dolly as a sensible adult, rather than with the patronism of which my own parents seemed unable to rid themselves. Alan and Dolly had one son, Tony, who also became a Congregationalist Minister, first as assistant at Mill Hill, London, where he married Joan, and then inter al at Cleckheaton before retiring to Newscastle-under-Lyme.

The second child of my grandparents was Aunt Doris who married a man with the unlikely name of Marlborough (Marl) Rutter who was a First Class Driver with the Great Western Railway and therefore revered by me as a small boy. They lived in Bowling Green Road, Stourbridge. 'Uncle Marl' drove the 'King' Class locomotives of that railway and on one memorable occasion drove the train which took my father and me from Birmingham to Paddington. It was a proud moment to be hailed by the driver on our arrival!

Doris and 'Marl' had two children, 'Young Marl' about whom I know little except that he was at one time a leading light of the Stourbridge Bowling Club, and Daisy (Howard), who lived at Wollaston and died, I believe in the 1980's. In those days, and perhaps still, if you worked for the railway you could get a free pass for yourself and your family with which to travel to a holiday destination - but only on that railway for which you worked.

It was noted that the Rutter family usually went to St. Ives, which was as far as you could get on the G.W.R. thus maximising their advantage. We, not being eligible for the privilege but thus being free from the restriction, were able to go to such exotic places as Bridlington and Morecambe. In those days 'one-upmanship' played a great part in family relationships!

Margaret, Ben and John Green
at Bridlington in 1936

Ben, my father, was the third child and second son. His younger siblings were Aunt May, who married Harold Kendrick and lived at Wynall Lane, Wollescote, and with whose children, Edna and Raymond I have been in touch in recent years. Edna, who married Tom Beech, unfortunately died in 1998. Harold was a fireman but beyond that I know nothing of his history.

Then came Aunt Elsie and Uncle Bill, but in which order I am unsure.

Elsie married Fred Harper who was a craftsman glass-blower who worked at Amblecote for 'Stourbridge Glass'. They lived in Collis Street, Amblecote and had several children, with one of whom, Donald, I am in touch.

Uncle Bill (William) I cannot recall having ever met. During my early years he worked for a sweet manufacturing firm in Maidstone, but afterwards joined the Post Office and moved to Newcastle-on-Tyne. He married Elsie (?) and they had two daughters, Aurea and Pam, about whom I know nothing. Attempts to make contact have not been successful.

My father, Benjamin, known to all as 'Ben Green', was born and brought up in Lye, going to Orchard Lane school. On leaving school he served an apprenticeship as a clerk in his father's office, before becoming a clerk in the employ of the Gas Department of Stourbridge Corporation. He later became manager of the Sales Showrooms in New Road, Stourbridge.

William. Green, his father, prior to his early death in 1917, had been Rating Officer for the Lye Urban District Council. William must have been a remarkable man. The son of a collier - and not even the eldest son managed to drag himself out of the 'labouring class' of the time and eventually became the Rating Officer for the Urban District Council. He became a person of some standing in the Lye community, being a leading light in the St. John Ambulance Brigade, Secretary and Deacon of the thriving Congregational Church, and was local organiser of celebrations at the time of the coronation of King Edward VII. Record has it that 'The Green family lived 'in a large house next to the Congregational Manse'. This house was up a lane which led off the High Street alongside the hall which became the 'Vic' cinema.

Unfortunately, both William and Elizabeth died within weeks of each other in 1917, so I never met them. This tragedy occurred whilst my father was in the Army. When he eventually obtained compassionate leave he arrived back in Lye to find that the family home had been disposed of and that he had no home to go to. This was the cause of an 'atmosphere' between my father and some of his family, especially as he was the only one to have been called to the colours.

Ben Green in R.A.M.C. uniform

Ben had, with his father, been prominent in the St. John Ambulance Brigade, so his army service was with the Royal Army Medical Corps. (R.A.M.C.) After a time in France whence he was invalided out and sent to Craiglockart Hospital in Edinburgh. This was, I believe, the first military hospital to have a psychiatric unit for the treatment of 'shell-shock'. After a spell on the staff of Hollymoor Hospital at Rubery near Birmingham, Ben was drafted to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force under Gen. Allenby travelling through the length of Italy and embarking at Taranto for Alexandria. He spent some time in Egypt before moving up through Palestine to Aleppo in Syria.

Ben had, we believe, hoped to follow his brother Alan into the Congregational Ministry, but his ambitions had been frustrated by the war. He had left school at fourteen, but was remarkably well read and educated - probably thanks to the 'Adult School' movement. His book-cases were full of classics and theological works, some of which I still have.

His frustration was to some extent, but not entirely, worked out by his becoming a prominent and well respected layman and Lay Preacher in the Non-Conformist scene in Worcestershire, and a Lay Preacher. We infer that this frustration also accounted for his becoming a pacifist between the wars. However, with the rise of Hitler, the atrocities associated therewith, and the threat later posed to this country, he realised, I think that his pacifism could not remain absolute and my own subsequent military training was not opposed.

Following his de-mobilisation in 1919 Ben married Margaret Hughes, on Christmas Day 1919. As children they had been at Orchard Lane school together in Lye, but the 'Greens' had another interest in Stambermill which may have accounted for their continued acquaintance.

Margaret Green (neé Hughes)

Amongst William Green's interests was the encouragement of 'Adult Schools' designed to improve the education of 'the workers' He was responsible for one such at Lye. A few yards from the Hughes establishment at Stambermill was a redundant chapel which had once belonged to some small religious body, but which had fallen into disuse. By some means, William Green managed to raise funds to purchase this chapel. It was then used for Congregational worship and as a location for another 'Adult School'.

The Chapel Keeper or caretaker of this building was a certain 'ode 'ooman Gauden'. The term 'ode 'ooman' was then used, almost as a term of affection, for any widow over the age of fifty. Mrs Gauden had, like so many of her vintage, lost most of her teeth in her youth, but unlike those who could afford a 'full set', had been left with a single front tooth which thereby acquired a certain prominence.

Much later, I think during the second world war, my family were invited to the Stambermill Chapel, probably to help celebrate the golden jubilee of its resuscitation by Grandfather Green. There, with a cup of tea in one hand and one of Mrs. Pardoe's rock cakes in the other, my younger brother Paul, then in his mid-teens and therefore most vulnerable, was accosted without warning by Mrs. Gauden and her tooth in the solemn words, "Ah knowed yo'er gran'faether!" That is the one time that I have known my brother to be left speechless.

The correct reply would, of course, been "Oh Ah!" on that rising cadence which indicated a mild interest but we had then lived in Stourbridge itself for some years and had gone up-market.

(The term 'Oh Ah' as used in the area, was not , as in the West Country, just another way of saying 'yes'. With slight variations in cadence it could mean 'yes', but also 'Really!', 'How interesting 'Extr'ordinary!' or 'Go on - pull th'other'un!' )

I did not appear on the scene until over three years after my parents' marriage, probably because their first abode was temporarily with my mother's elder sister Ruth and her husband Sam White at Ham Farm which lay between Wollescote and Pedmore.

They did, eventually manage to rent the house in Yardley Street in which I was born, and which at its last inspection by me sometime in the 1980's was modernised and in good order.

Yardley Street in the 1980's