Our trip to Wolverhampton in The View from the Terrace

I started this entry a week ago. I didn’t finish it, left it as a draft, and then Prosebox went down! These things come to try us, as my mother used to say.

We got back from our trip to Wolverhampton a week yesterday. It was a lovely break. I didn’t actually get any further with my family history research but it was wonderful to visit the places that my ancestors lived. It was also a nostalgic trip as I used to visit the city a lot as a child to see my aunt.

Both of my parents were born and grew up in Wolverhampton. My parents and Dad’s parents moved to Shrewsbury after being made redundant in the early 1930s. Mum’s parents were from Wednesbury, only a few miles away. Mum’s Dad, Granddad Arthur played the violin and, as a young man, wanted to turn professional but felt he wouldn’t earn enough money that way to marry and have a family. Grandma Annie, who had trained as a milliner, started her own business in order that her husband could take a wage cut and follow his dream. They moved to Wolverhampton where he taught violin and then got a job at The Electric Cinema playing to the early movies. Later he joined the orchestra at the Grand Theatre and eventually became musical director there. By that time Grandma had her own millinery and habadashery shop and that was where my mother and her sister grew up.

Grandma did amazingly well. As well as helping to support the family, both of her daughters were educated privately at the Convent High School. By the time she was middle aged she had also invested in property and owned several rows of terraced houses. My mother told me how she had to collect the rents as a child. My aunt became a primary school teacher and my mother joined her mum in the shop. She worked there until she got engaged to my father and left the town.

I never knew either of my maternal grandparents because they died before I was born but we visited my aunt regularly. Mum and I used to go on the train. There were 2 stations in Wolverhampton in those days, Low Level and High Level. We always went into Low Level and had to walk along what I remembered as a tunnel and up a lot of steps to come out in front of High Level. The hotel we stayed at was right next to the old Low Level station which was closed in the 1960s but is still there and is now a wedding venue. I couldn’t believe our room looked out to the walkway Mum and I used to go up. On our first morning there we walked up to the city. I remembered a lot of steps, maybe 70 or so! but there were in fact only 3 flights of about 10. I guess memory exaggerates!

As soon as we were in the city itself the first thing I saw was The Grand Theatre. The last time I went there was when I was 11 and Auntie took us to see Peter Pan with Margaret Lockwood and her daughter Julia, who, at that time was a just few years older than me. After the show Auntie went to the stage door to get Margaret Lockwood’s autograph. She talked her way in and when she came back she also had Julia’s for me. Auntie was like that, very forthright and tended to get her own way but in a nice way, everyone loved her. When the theatre went through a bad patch in the 50s she used to buy rows of seats and talk all of her friends into going to help keep it open.

We collected our tickets for the following evening and then went on into the city. High above the centre of the city stands St Peter’s Church.

I had never been in there and wanted to have a look inside. Almost all of my fathers ancestors were married there. It was very impressive and we spent quite a while looking around and learning about the history. I was delighted to find some lovely birthday cards in the shop and bought several while Hubby bought a book on gypsies in the 1950s that took his fancy.

Then I went off to find The Old Still pub where my great grandmother worked in the 1860s. In those days it was called The Old Saracen’s Head and she was the cook. One of the servants was a Joseph Harris who was the brother of the man she eventually married. Perhaps that is how they met.

We had thought of having lunch at The Old Still but it was full of working men watching sport on a big screen TV so we decided to look elsewhere and eventually had a nice lunch in Marks and Spencer’s cafe.

After lunch we went to the Wolverhampton Archives to do some research. The archives is in what used to be a big house owned by the Molineux family. At one time there was a row of houses at the side of it and one of those was the home of my great great grandparents. Unfortuately these houses were knocked own in order to build the new ring road.
This is the building now

And I found this 1930s picture showing the houses at the side. My great grandmother was born in one of these.

I had planned to spend the afternoon doing some family history research. It was an interesting afternoon but I didn’t find out anything I didn’t already know. I was hoping there might be records there that were not yet online but I couldn’t find any. I think I may have got as far in that line of the family as I am going to get. I had also hoped to look through newspapers for any mention of my ancestors but found they were not indexed so one had to pick a likely date and then look through the whole paper. I did try but couldn’t get the hang of the microfilche viewer.

I had hoped to find out a little more about my paternal grandfather. Granddad Frederick was a mechanic and worked in the motor industry for the Sunbeam Motor Company. As well as producing cars they designed racing cars and Grandad was on the racing car team. I know he went to a lot of places including France and the USA with the team. Mum used to tell me about one particular car, the Silver Bullet, that he worked on in the late 1920s and she mentioned the names of some of the racing drivers he worked with. I had rather hoped there might be work records for the company, but sadly not. We did spend an hour looking through books about the racing cars but not one of the pictures had Granddad in them. I already have one photo of him with the team which I found in a book we bought at The Black Country Living Museum a few years ago and would love to have found more. I found this copy of the photo on the internet. Granddad is fifth from the left on the front row.

After a couple of hours I was getting tired and we decided to walk back to our hotel. It was starting to get dark and the trees around the church were lit with little lights. It all looked very pretty. We had plans for the next day to visit a local museum where they were doing an antique valuing day. I had brought with me a family heirloom I wanted to take. I think I am going to write about that later as there is quite a complicated story to go with it.