The New Home in Cradley Heath
Aus: Eric A. Barnsley, Childhood in England
In late 1940, our home in Balsall Heath was damaged by bomb blast, and we moved to the Black Country where my mother had been born. The Black Country lies roughly to the West of Birmingham, and it is a collection of some twenty small industrial towns. Its development began, in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, with the mining of thick seams of coal that were relatively near to the surface, and which could be transported to other areas on the canals that were being developed in England at this time. Ironmaking developed because iron ores and limestone were also found locally, and later, iron ore was also imported into the area on canal barges. The mining and burning of coal, iron making, and the working of iron into useful products produced much smoke, dirt and dust, and indubitably the burning of coal in the workers’ houses also added to the pollution. Hence the name, Black Country.
Our first stop after Balsall Heath was in Old Hill, roughly seven and a half miles to the West, at the home of one of my mother’s brothers (probably Benjamin). After about a fortnight, my mother found a small house, a little over half a mile further West, at 18 Corngreaves Road, Cradley Heath, and this became my home until I left to do my National Service in 1955.
If our homes in Balsall Heath and Old Hill were workman’s terraced houses, the new home was a workman’s cottage that, I believe, had already been condemned as unfit for habitation. There was at this time, however, a great shortage of housing. Although the address was formally Corngreaves Road, the house was on a side lane known locally as the Quarry Hole, and it was one of a number of such pairs of cottages there. I have no adequate photographs of the house as a whole, or recorded dimensions, but I can estimate approximately our living area, and I have sketched a plan of the ground floor. The building is marked on the Godfrey Edition (1955) of an Ordnance Survey map («Staffordshire Sheet 71.08» dating from 1904), with a scale of about 16 inches to 1 mile.
There was a house floor area not more than 260 squarefeet (24.2 square metres), divided into a front living room of about 172 square feet (16.0 square metres) and the rear scullery and pantry, together 88 square feet (8.2 square metres). A wall of the front room had a fireplace, with side hobs for cooking, on one side of this was a cupboard, and on the other a staircase to the upper front bedroom. The scullery had a large sink with a single cold water tap, a wash-copper (referred to as «the copper») supported on brick foundations within which a fire could be lit to heat water, and there was also a gas stove. A galvanized tub, in which washing could be maided, was stored together with the wooden maid in the space under the stairs. The lavatory was outside, about two and a half yards (2.3 metres) from the back door, and was shared with the adjacent cottage. There were no facilities for bathing other than a small galvanized iron bath hung on the scullery wall, but I do recollect that at some time a longer galvanised iron bath, perhaps about 5 feet long, was hung on the outside back wall.
The stairs to the upper floor were open at the top and led directly into the main front bedroom. At the top of the stairs, a door on the right led into the rear bedroom. My mother and father slept in the front bedroom, and my brother and I each had a bed in the rear bedroom. I suppose Ciss (my father’s youngest sister) must have slept on the couch downstairs, but this thought came to my mind for the first time only as I began to write this text. It was only after the death of my father in 1943 that she slept in the double bed with my mother.
There was gas lighting on the ground floor of the house, with one light in the centre of the living room ceiling and a second on a wall of the scullery. In the pantry and bedrooms we used candles or small oil lamps. The outside lavatory was unlit until sometime after I had left school in 1950.
Whatever its deficiencies as a home, 18 Corngreaves Road was relatively peaceful. There was an air-raid shelter built next to the churchyard wall, a rectangular, eightfeet walled construction, two bricks thick, with a reinforced concrete roof. Between it and the churchyard gate was a large «static water tank», placed to provide a water supply for the fire brigade should the water mains be cut. At night, we could hear aeroplanes, and see searchlights sweeping the sky, but never went to an air-raid shelter.
