Some years ago a very kind lady who knew me as a child, Mrs Foy, formerly of Tower Road, Rounds Green, sent me a hand-written list of all the shops in Oldbury as she remembered them. I put it in a safe place, unfortunately, but I'm confident it will resurface among my papers one day soon. Oldbury's shops did indeed inspire great affection and loyalty. I remember them in the 1950s and 1960s and could recite some of them too like a litany: Guest's the greengrocers at both ends of the town (“Top” and “Bottom” Guests), Bates the butchers on the Bussell Bridge, Moyle & Adams, and there was even a posh fishing tackle shop, Redmayne & Todd just past the Perrott Arms. But my Wood family was also on the other side of the counter. My grandmother Margaret, who married cordwainer William Wood's son Tom, was the daughter of Elizabeth Plant, born in Langley Green in 1846.
Now I've no idea how it came about, but many of that Plant family were either fishmongers or later kept fish and chip shops, or did both, right across the south of the Black Country. Elizabeth's flamboyant younger brother, Warwick Plant, born in Langley Green in 1853, was later a greengrocer and fish dealer in Cradley Heath. (A fabulous name, by the way, and not an uncommon one in these parts, other “geographical” first names being Dudley and Richmond. My father knew a Warwick Edmonds 
Warwick Plant was known as “Stinking Herrings”, which was his streetseller's cry. He wore a coat with sovereigns sewn onto it.He was fiery by nature and very strict with his sons, who each had a horse and cart and had to go out hawking fish. Everything was kept very clean at his Cradley Heath shop, in Lomey Town, the tap was always running. At the same time he was a bit of a lad, being fond of gambling on the horses. Warwick's sister Sarah Ann Plant married Frank Westwood and, as some of you will recall, the Westwoods later had fish and chip shops in Blackheath and, I think, West Bromwich. Whenever my Dad went into the shop near the Rex cinema in Blackheath, near where Sainsbury's now is, he was always recognized and greeted warmly as cousin.
The fishmongering Plants were evidently a very tough lot indeed, and my paternal great grandmother Elizabeth Plant of Oldbury was no exception. You could argue that they had to be tough in those days or they would have soon gone under. I'm not sure how long I for one would have lasted under the Plants’ iron régime… They appear to have been born business people, and sometimes, shall we say, short on sentiment. Elizabeth Plant, my great grandmother, was married twice, both her husbands were of Irish origin, the first was a fish dealer, Charles Murphy, the second Dennis McCormick. And here Roman Catholicism makes a rather poignant re-entry into my story. Elizabeth Plant, usually known as “Grace” for some reason, remained a Protestant, but her children were brought up as Catholics by her second husband, Dennis McCormick. Dennis, who came originally from Queen's County, now County Laois, Ireland, died aged 37 of heart and lung disease brought on by shovelling chemicals at Chance and Hunt's.
According to what I was told, when he lay dying in 1882, Dennis asked that his daughter Margaret, aged three, continue to be brought up as a Catholic, and his request was honoured. His two words of advice to her were: “Abstain from meat on Friday and go to Mass on Sunday”.While I'm talking about Oldbury fishmongers and Catholicism I ought to mention at least in passing Jack Judge (1872-1938), without doubt the town's most famous fish dealer… but also the composer in 1912 of a song called It's A Long Way to Tipperary.
Jack Judge's parents were Irish Catholics, I believe they came from Carrow Beg, near Westport, in County Mayo, it was his grandparents who were from Tipperary, unless I'm wrong. Jack himself was born in Low Town, Oldbury, in 1872. He used to have a fish stall outside the Wrexham, that is the present-day Junction pub. My Uncle Denis used to call round to Jack's house in Low Town with a collecting box from St Francis Xavier's, occasionally Jack but more often his wife would come to the door. In 1974 Denis's older brother Tom told me: “Jack was a songwriter and a doggerel writer. He was completely bubbling over, a comedian. He would carry a tin drum and beat out his own songs which he'd spontaneously made up, songs about everybody. The songs would be published in his shop window.”To return to my grandmother, Margaret McCormick, later Wood, known as Maggie: she did precisely as her father had asked, she abstained from meat on Friday and went to Mass on Sunday, indeed she led the full Catholic life. Whenever a thunderstorm began and there was lightning, for example, she would make the sign of the cross and then carry on as normal. Maggie, her twice-widowed mother Elizabeth nee Plant and the family continued to boil lobsters and crabs in a shop at 13, New Street. Maggie was also a flower girl and obtained her flowers from Birmingham market. Her half-brother Jack Murphy had a wet fish stall on Oldbury market where Maggie helped him, standing all day long and in all weathers in her petticoats, selling live eels, crabs and wet fish. I was told that there was a scene worthy of Dickens at the end of Elizabeth nee Plant's life. As she lay dying in 1896, relatives were searching through her house for money. Elizabeth hid a small bag of gold sovereigns under the bedclothes between her legs and passed them secretly to her daughter, my grandmother Maggie.
Maggie made good use of what little money she had. She married my grandfather Tom Wood, William Wood of Alveley's son, and they continued in business as greengrocers at number 2, New Street. I say “they”, but Maggie was always the driving force, especially after poor Tom lost an eye in a riveting accident at Edwin Danks the boilermaker's. A “dolly”, that is a triangular piece of metal used to guide a hot rivet into place in a boiler, entered his left eye point first and (in his words to my Uncle Tom) “I felt my eye trickle down my face like a tomato” He had to wait for the tram to West Bromwich hospital where the eye was subsequently removed.
Thereafter he wore a glass eye, as you will see in photos of him. He received (I quote his son Tom ) “£15 and the sack” from Edwin Danks. He was never employed again and assisted his wife in the greengrocer's shop which they moved into between 1904 and 1908 and rented but never owned.
I remember the shop, it smelt of earth and potatoes. As well as fruit and vegetables, they had also sold rabbits at one time (I mean dead ones!) and had kept the rabbit skins in the underkitchen for sale later in Birmingham. While living on a very modest income from the shop, Tom and Maggie had at least ten children. Tom Wood was conservative in his political views, frequented the nearby Perrott Arms on Birmingham Street and suffered from chronic gout which at times virtually crippled his hands.Behind the greengrocer's shop there was a single living room with a piano and the book Czerny’s Piano Tutor open on it - a piano which several members of the family could play. I remember a central table, a window with a potted plant in it looking down onto the Victorian courtyard and a coal-fired cooking range with a Dutch oven. On the wall above the range was a blackened painting, behind which Maggie had kept a cane in her early married years to keep her children in order. It was still like that when I knew it in the early 1950s, very like the world of the film Hobson's Choice or indeed that demonstration living room-cum-kitchen at the Black Country Museum, the one with the peg rug. (Indeed there was a peg rug at 2, New Street.) The floors had been mostly bare boards. A winding staircase led up to the bedrooms which the children had shared, and where lighting had been by candle. Another staircase led down to the underkitchen where coal was stored and where there was a window behind the sink looking out onto a typical Victorian courtyard. A sloping entrance under an archway beside the shop led down from New Street into the courtyard where the communal lavatory was situated. In earlier years the lavatory had been regularly cleared by the night soil men.
The low-lying area of Oldbury where these courtyard houses were situated was subject to flooding, especially after the yard was concreted over, and quite often the underkitchen of 2, New Street was under water to the top of the sink. That was when the boys would sometimes set sail in a tin bath... The underkitchen was insanitary and couldn't be used as a proper kitchen, so it was used for the storage of coal, rabbit skins etc. There were mice, possibly rats, and the family kept a cat to control them.My Uncle Tom remembered the very first Zeppelin air raid on Oldbury, he said of the family: “We were terrified of those things in the sky, we had one candle, we gathered around saying the Rosary, praying to be spared”. Was it the same raid as the infamous 1916 Tipton raid, I wonder? After the Great War, and despite David Lloyd George's ringing promise to returning troops of a “land fit for heroes”, there was the distressing sight of disabled and amputee soldiers having to beg on the streets of Oldbury, something which used to upset my father when he was a boy.
To supplement the very modest income from the shop (there were rival greengrocers nearby, of course, not least “Top” and “Bottom” Guests), my grandmother Maggie made sweets called "Maggie Murphy's Humbugs" (Elizabeth Plant's first husband had been a Charles Murphy). In 2003 Ray Kenny wrote to me: “There was always a tray of sweets in the shop window, she made them in the basement kitchen, boiling sugar in a large pot on the big black range. The molten toffee was then tipped out onto a large round smooth steel cast-iron table. Her sons Tom and Frank would then divide it into two parts, one to remain as brown “troach” [herbal sweet], the other to have red colouring added and to be sold as a two-coloured sweet. Troaches were 4d a quarter pound”. All the children had to work for the shop, delivering groceries whatever the weather, selling bunches of wallflower plants from door to door, or raffle tickets to win a rabbit. My Dad said: “Despite Tom's drinking at the Perrott Arms, Maggie always had £100 in Lloyd's Bank”.
In the period 1900-1920 the sons Tom and Frank had to go up to High Town or to a field near Pinfold Street every morning to round up the often reluctant family pony called Pasha, which their father used for his grocery deliveries, and then bring it down to the shop. After work Tom would come back in, throw his billycock [bowler hat] on top of a cupboard, put his glass eye on the sideboard, and sit by the cooking range. 
In their early years Tom and Maggie went to the Birdcage Music Hall in Church Street to see Vesta Tilley and other performers. Later it became a cinema where my Dad used to watch Laurel and Hardy. In the 1940s the whole Wood family met on a Sunday lunchtime after Mass at the Perrott Arms, opposite the end of New Street.
The Perrott, of course, is now derelict pending demolition, and the area where New Street once stood is now occupied by Oldbury Magistrates Court. 
I seem to remember there was a coat-of-arms inside the bar with the Perrott family motto Amo ut invenio, “I love as I find.”I ought to add that my mother, Hilda Brown's parents, Harry and Alice Brown, also kept a shop. They sold fish and chips at 83, Station Road, Langley from the 1920s until the 1940s, just below the bridge where the former New Inns stands. They used only the best beef dripping which was delivered by bicycle in huge block from Oldbury town. Not very healthy, perhaps, but beef dripping makes the best chips, as you may have discovered at the Black Country Museum. Harry Brown was also an ambulanceman at Oldbury ambulance station in Low Town and saw some pretty terrible things during the Blitz.
Here he is on the right with, I presume, Oldbury's ambulance during the Second World War.
First from the left is his best friend Alf Brettell from Green Street, Oldbury, Alf later worked for W. H. Bright the furnishers in Cape Hill.Let me end with something which is at a galactic distance from all of this. (And you're entitled to ask what it has to do with the proverbial price of fish…) I'm telling it to you now as it was told to me. My mother used to play near the Browns’ shop, in a field between Albright and Wilson's and the Langley canal, opposite the Maltings.
One day, in about 1930, when she was about ten, she was playing cricket there with her friends when, across a clear blue sky she saw what she described as a beautiful many-pointed silver star which silently swept in a huge arc overhead across the sky from one horizon to the other. Everybody was looking somewhere else, and by the time she told them about it, it had gone. Until her dying day Mum used to tell me the same story, and it remains inexplicable. Well I did mention Roswell and UFOs in my last piece…© Dennis Wood 2011
