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More
than a hundred residents and ex-residents of Redditch have contributed
to this history.
Old Redditch Voices tells how, in the 1100s, Redditch began outside the
gates of Bordesley Abbey, near the ‘Red Ditch’. The town moved
up the hill and became famous for its needles, springs and fish-hooks.
There are those who remember long hours at work, infrequent holidays,
epidemics which closed schools, horses straining to pull heavy carts up
hills, a sewage system in the shape of a night soil cart and above all,
grinding poverty. Roy Clews, the well-known novelist, was abandoned at
birth and spent his childhood escaping from the violence of his adoptive
parents. Frank Cardy has described how, at the age of fifteen, a government
scheme took him from his home in Wales and sent him to work in Redditch.
However, not all memories are so bleak. Terry Halford’s grandad pushed
a donkey up the steps of The Bell in Britten Street and ‘got him
drunk’. A large spaniel lay on the pavement in Alcester Street, waiting
for passersby to give him a penny so that he could take it in his mouth
to the grocers and buy a fairy cake.
During the Second World War a bomb dropped on Glover Street and, according
to Norman Neasom, ‘Six were killed, twelve were seriously injured
and eight houses were demolished’.
The final chapters deal with the upheaval of the Redditch Development
Corporation, which aimed to increase the population from 32,000 to 70,000.
These memories are sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes comic, often purely
informative and occasionally controversial, but always entertaining. |
