Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Our very own Roving Reporter Dennis revisits the Black Country to find out what's still there and what has changed.

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Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Postby Dennis » Sat Oct 24, 2009 9:16 pm

Black Country Ride No 2

Dudley. "Yes, I remember Dudley / The name because one afternoon / Of heat the express-train drew up there / Unwontedly. It was late June..." No, I don't think Dudley has quite the same ring as Edward Thomas's sublime "Adlestrop"... All the same I remember on a warm day in the early 1950s being hoisted onto my Dad's shoulders to see over the parapet of the railway bridge to where our visitors from Dawley were getting on a train at Dudley station. I've a sense, too, of the bridge being enveloped in steam and that unrecapturable smell of anthracite... This is running through my mind as I turn right at the bottom of Castle Hill on another warm day and into the seemingly limitless car park for Dudley Zoo. I can't help noticing parties of foot soldiers all dressed in a distinctive black uniform streaming past my car and out onto the bridge, men in leather jerkins, women in decorated tee-shirts and black jeans, all looking happy and relaxed... Loud music seems to be issuing from a large van with people perched on top of it. No doubt about it, I've arrived in the middle of a Heavy Metal convention, as the name Megadeth in large white Gothic script proclaims. Welcome to 2009.

I drive as far as you can - which is a long way - to find a parking place, out onto what was once the sidings and goods yard of the old railway station and (later) container port. No trace of any of it, just couples walking their children off into the distance along a green path. I trudge back to the impromptu concert area to buy a parking ticket and (what must be half a mile) back again to stick it on my car. Only attempt this in sensible shoes.

I eventually find my way in to the ticket office... There are several cunningly laid false trails, but the right one turns out to be hidden in the shrubbery next to the famous 1930s entrance by Lubetkin, the long one with the wiggly roof painted in what my father would call "back and kidney pills green". I pause to contemplate what's left of the two cinemas, neither of them picture houses any more, but still glaring at each other across Castle Hill, the Hippodrome on this side and the Art Deco Odeon on the other. I fall to remembering when I was nine and being briefly traumatized by a musical - not something that happens every day - which my Mum took me to see at the Odeon, It was the magnificently alien The King and I with the terrifying Yul Brynner and the charming English governess Deborah Kerr whose only defence seems to be to dress in a range of large lampshades. Great songs, though...

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Dudley Zoo (Tecton Entrance) ... For full view click here

Back to reality. My nose is assailed by sundry farmyard odours, where you buy your ticket you can also buy a range of comestibles to pamper the animals with. I'm invited to pay an additional something to keep the zoo going, which I'm happy to do. I head towards the yellow trique waiting to whisk me up painlessly to the thing I've really come here for, the Castle. Nope, it appears to have been rusting away quietly for some years. I'm directed towards the red Disneyland-style train. One of those days, clearly - it has a notice saying it's for birthday groups only. No alternative but to shed a few pounds and begin the ascent.

The path takes you up a brisk gradient to a long set of steps and through a side gate in what is obviously a medieval outer curtain wall. Suddenly everything goes quiet. In the meerkat enclosure a sentry sitting up on a rock spots me. A man points to it and says to his little son: "Look - Simples!" (that compare.com advert again - it's just so catchy). Ahead is the fiendishly complicated arrangement around the main entrance to the castle to keep besiegers out - and there have been a few of those. I'm not a medievalist at all, Roman's more my thing, but I remember clambering over this place in about 1964 with Mick Aston, who was very enthusiastic about mottes and baileys - still is, I think. The length and depth of the entrance tunnel are amazing. I'd forgotten just how much of this ruin is still here, rather more in fact than of some Black Country towns I could mention...

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Meerkat sentry....For full view, click ....here

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Main Gate of Castle

As you emerge into the courtyard, you see what the Keep actually looked like once. The tower, much battered by Cromwell, is complete and round when seen from the side and behind, like the Keep at, say, Arundel. It looks absolutely formidable. From the town you get no impression at all, it merely resembles a couple of rounded cheese graters, with some anachronistic cannon from the Crimea. The other buildings facing it across the yard are so complete that you're surprised they weren't repaired after the 1750 fire. There's an Information Centre buried somewhere inside them, it has some good things, but the video screen is about the size of an Amstrad monitor and is mumbling away to itself at a frequency my ears can't register.

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Main buildings of Castle, destroyed by fire in 1750

OK, can't put it off any longer: it's the North Face of the Keep. The staircase, your standard-issue medieval with a devilishly smart change of direction in the spiral halfway up (to do with sword arms and defence, no doubt), leads onto a railed walk with unobstructed views that are - well, just awesome. In the distance the skyline of Birmingham with the Post Office tower about 8 miles away, then Kate's Hill and Rowley, the Clent Hills 5 or 6 miles away, the clump of woods around Netherton church. In the foreground Dudley market, which still appears to have the Woolworths I remember. We used to come on the Midland Red single decker "over the top" from Whiteheath fifty years ago, past the rather troubling Hangman's Tree in Oakham. Sometimes we'd take the trolleybus on through Sedgley to Wolverhampton. Behind is a dizzying drop to the courtyard with the crenellated Keep projected onto it by the bright sunshine and the suburbs of Wolverhampton far off in the distance.

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View from Keep looking towards Birmingham and Rowley

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Dudley market area, Netherton church and Clent Hills seen from Keep of Dudley Castle

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Courtyard from the Keep .........................For full view of Dudley Castle photos, click on the images in our Gallery here

It's later than I thought and I need to move on to West Bromwich. In no time at all I'm back at the entrance, but my eye is caught by a couple of flamingoes wading next to a tastefully contrived waterfall. I just love flamingoes, in the wild they look fantastic flying against a sunset. Odd shape though, Lewis Carroll certainly had a point: "The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo! - Time I was gone.
© Dennis Wood 2009

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Flamingoes ........................For full view, click on the image in our Gallery ...here
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Re: Our Den - Out and About

Postby grangers14 » Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:33 pm

I'm still reading and looking through, not got it all yet.
Just wanted to say thank you Den!
I have never been to the area though my family were from there, but one day...
Makes it so more real in a way, brilliant!
Jo :)
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Re: Our Den - Out and About

Postby mallosa » Mon Oct 26, 2009 12:10 am

I know what you mean Jo, it brings to life some of the areas my mom told me about.
So a big thankyou from me too, Our Den :wink: Cant wait for your next journey!
If you would like to have your ancestors photo's included in our Gallery, please send me a pm.

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Re: Our Den - Out and About

Postby Dennis » Mon Oct 26, 2009 7:51 am

Many thanks peterd, Annie, Rob, Jo, San, everybody! I'll write another as soon as I've got used to Winter Time :grin:
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Re: Our Den - Out and About

Postby linell » Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:42 pm

Thanks for the memories Dennis, not been to the Castle for many a year, probably about 45 years :!: Like you we used to shop at Dudley, my Nan was a good friend of the Cooks, we used to have afternoon tea in their Coffee Shop. As a post script, I was reading about some intrepid explorer back in the 18th Century, who remarked that there were more people underground in the Black Country than there were on the surface :!: I thought that to be a very apt observation. Look forward to your next instalment, from Linell.
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Re: Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Postby Dennis » Tue Nov 17, 2009 7:47 am

My old friend Ian Davies, with whom I used to explore the area when we were at school, has very kindly pointed out this link on the state of the buildings at Dudley Zoo:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/colum ... cture.html
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Re: Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Postby Rob » Tue Nov 17, 2009 6:21 pm

Ian Davies!! Good Shepherd and Oldbury Grammar!! Couldn't play football for toffee!! A nice lad nevertheless!!
"Lemon" !! The things you remember!! :grin: :lol:
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Re: Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Postby Dennis » Tue Nov 17, 2009 10:12 pm

You'd better tread carefully, Rob, Ian reads this! :-) We were inseparable in our teens. It was through Ian that I got to know the Oldbury Grammar people, Mick Aston, Martin Elliott (did you see him last night on Sue Perkins' poster art programme on BBC2?), Godfrey "Dick" Hickton who sadly died last year and quite a few others. I passed for Oldbury Grammar, but went to St Philip's in Edgbaston, OGS was always "the road not taken"...
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Re: Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Postby Rob » Thu Nov 19, 2009 12:03 am

Ian if you read this i was a mate of Micheal Cox and Ray Walters and Janice Young.
Nice to hear your name again.Take care out there!!
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Re: Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Postby Dennis » Thu Nov 19, 2009 8:28 am

I knew them all, Rob. In fact I talked to Janice at the funeral of Ian's mother earlier this year.
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Re: Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Postby IanD » Tue Dec 22, 2009 10:42 pm

Only just noticed this. I'm an infequent visitor ... usually when Dennis tells me about something new!!

These Black Country Rides are a real nostalgia trip for me ... they revisit great slices of the teenage years that I shared with Dennis and often stir up memories of my own.

You're quite right Rob, I was rubbish at ball games. I did get better (but not much!!) when I started wearing glasses. I suddenly found that I could focus on a ball well enough to hit/kick/catch it ... well, for some of the time anyway!!

But which Rob are you?? Of course I remember Michael, Ray and Janice. The Youngs lived next door and I'm still in touch with Ralph and Janice .. but I can think of several Roberts from way back then including at least two from the Close.

If you were at Good Shepherd then I have at least one class photograph with Miss Sherratt and Mr Frost from my time there. There may well be more but I haven't had time yet to sort everything out since Mum died in the summer. She was a real squirrel and never threw anything away so we have quite a big pile of old photographs. Incidentally, linell, she actually worked in the offices in Cooks' department store on the hill in Dudley back in the 60s.

Mum's death ends my family ties in Oldbury itself; everybody else moved away. But I'm determined that this year I'll make good on an old (and often repeated) promise to share at least one of Dennis's walks ... the question is just where??.

Have a great Xmas everybody!!
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Re: Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Postby mallosa » Tue Dec 22, 2009 11:30 pm

Hi Ian, I'm so pleased that you are enjoying the 'Black Country Rides' as much as I am :grin:
Sorry to hear of your sad loss but guess you have lots of happy memories?

I can't wait to see where Dennis is going next - I've got my fingers poised ready to add his numerous and delighful photos.
Talking of which, I'm always on the look out for more interesting photos :wink:

Wishing you a Happy Christmas

Mally
If you would like to have your ancestors photo's included in our Gallery, please send me a pm.

Researching: Evans, Rollason, Henley/Hendley, Brookes, Taylor (Wilson - Birmingham)
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Re: Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Postby Rob » Tue Dec 22, 2009 11:51 pm

Hi IanD i certainly am an old boy of Good Shepherd.I think i was two years below you.I was in Janice Young's class and i'm sure she'd remember me so when you see her again give her my fondest regards please.
I'd love to see that class photo you have with Miss Sharratt and Mr Frost on it.I've put some photos of Good Shepherd and a photo of the choir in 1956 in the gallery on here.Is Janice on it?
My condolances for the loss of your mother.
I was originally from Eel Street but i knew all the kids of around my age from Richards Close.Carol Jukes.A fellow member of Mrs Booth's dancing classes Parish Rooms Oldbury but thats another story!! :lol:
Carol Mallard,Stevie Probert.I've played football many a time in the oval outside Micky and Ray's house before going over the pitches at Borough Crescent.Happy days.
Merry Christmas Ian D.
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Re: Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Postby Dennis » Wed Dec 23, 2009 8:19 am

Splendid to see you folks getting together here. I keep checking the groundhog to see whether it's safe to venture out again, but he's still deep asleep :-)
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Re: Black Country Ride No 2 - Dudley Castle

Postby Dennis » Wed Dec 23, 2009 12:52 pm

... And of course a very Happy Christmas and New Year to you all!
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