Walsall Life

In 2002 I began to produce a calendar titled Walsall Lives – Remembering The Old Town utilising my collection of old images, memorabilia and ephemera. Between 2002 and 2013 eight calendars were produced but not consecutively as some years I simply ran out of new material. The calendar was always well received and I rarely had any left come the end of December, that was probably thanks to Dr. Carl Chinn! For the first three years he invited me onto his now sadly, defunct radio show to talk about the contents of each calendar, with Carl’s enthusiasm and my ability to talk for England in the right company, we had a great time. Thanks for that Carl!

In recent posts on my blog I have included a couple of old calendar pages which have seemed popular so I thought I would post them for people who hadn’t seen them first time round. Several of the pictures have already been used in various posts on the blog already but now you will see them in their original calendar format. Although the post is mainly illustrative I hope you will find the old images, ephemera and memorabilia interesting.

The first three editions of the calendar were produced in A4 portrait format until 2005 when I changed it to A4 landscape as this gave a larger area to display the pictures and a completely separate page for the dates along with a description on the contents of the page. When hung on a wall the calendar now covered twice the area in this new format, making it A3.

The cover for the first calendar consisted of four images, in the top left was my great-grandmother, Emma Moseley followed by my favourite picture of a Black Country workin’ mon, a worker from the annealing shop at Eyland & Sons Ltd., in Lower Rushall Street. The picture below that is of a chara’ trip from the same company in the 1920s and the final picture shows the Parker family standing on the doorstep of their home in St. Paul’s Close.

Shown below are the two pages that describes the content of each month’s page throughout the calendar. By clicking on the images they will enlarge sufficiently to be able to read the text easily. Following these two pages are each months page displayed in pairs.

Note the spectators perched precariously on the edge of The George Hotel roof.

When the calendar was printed I had no idea which company it was that took centre stage for December, other than it was in Walsall. In early 2002 a lady who had bought the calendar contacted me to tell me the lady just off centre and looking directly at the camera was her late sister-in-law and the company was William Bate Limited of Hospital Street, so thank you Mrs Roseblade.
© John Griffiths 2014

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