The Walsall hurricane of 1895
January 23, 2017 § Leave a comment
With all the talk of global warming and adverse weather it seems meteorology has only been “invented” in the last 40 years, bit like sex was invented in the 1960s! But in 1895 the weather hit Walsall hard in the form of a hurricane.
The report from which the information has been taken was first published in the Walsall Advertiser on Saturday 30th March 1895.
The General Hospital in 1935 badly damaged in the hurricane 40 years earlier. Although the hospital had been extended by this time the wards with the long windows on the left was where the chimney came through the roof. The chimney stood behind the thin building with the pointed roof adjoining the new extension.
Walsall Races – c.1754-1876
May 28, 2014 § Leave a comment
Best part of ten years since the book A Complete Record of Walsall Races was published people still insist on stating that the Races began in 1777, they did not, they began at least twenty-two years earlier. Whilst researching for the book I was “introduced” by the staff of Walsall Local History Centre to a grand gentleman by the name of Henry Somerfield. Mr. Somerfield, who is sadly no longer with us, left a remarkable legacy, amongst the many things he did, in 1926 he extracted and transcribed all of the articles appertaining to Walsall from the Birmingham newspaper, Aris’s Gazette. He carefully transcribed his findings into notebooks of varying shapes and sizes and these are now kept at the WLHC at Essex Street for perusal by anyone interested to take a look.
Walsall Life 