The second edition of Walsall Lives Calendar followed in 2003 in the same format as the first one. One of the pictures on the front cover is a particular favourite of mine, the one in the top left showing Birmingham Street in the 1920s. Growing up in Sandwell Street this area of Walsall was well-known to me from an early age as it was my mother and grandmother’s route to and from “the town”. As a small boy the well-worn steps that can be seen in always fascinated me, “how old must this street be to have steps that have worn away that much” was the question I asked myself. The buildings on the left side had long gone when I was a boy, I think they may have been demolished in the 1930s when Gorton’s Yard and all of the area around St. Matthews was cleared but the buildings on the right remained until around the early 1960s. Past the building on the right side, where the trees protrude, were a couple of 1930s semis and one of them housed a name well-known to Walsall folk, that of Scoltock. The name around Walsall was synonymous with chimney sweeping from the mid-nineteenth century and quite possibly earlier. Neighbours of the Scoltocks were the Tonks family, my mother told me that Jack Tonks was a foreman over the seals department (I think) at the Walsall Lithographic…..she should know, apparently he was her boss when she worked there before WW2. Across the bottom of the cover was a picture of Wednesbury Road, Pleck, in 1912 taken from near the junction with Hilary Street.Read More »