There were a few people who all promised to return next week with some interesting stories. Billy was on a Sunday run, when he stopped by for a breather, he said that his mother was a retired district nurse and would have lots of anecdotes. Arthur works as a security guard at the hospital, and he confirmed Ken Watson's story about the secret passage running under the Moseley Hall.
Naz stopped by towards the end of the day, he was born in Moseley, his parents originally coming from Kashmir. He told me the story of how he and his brother went hunting for pearls in Moseley Park after a school friend told him they were worth millions. He later emailed me the full story.
"The Pearl of Moseley
I must have been 9/ 10 years old, I was attending Park Hill School. One day a friend at the school told me something so interesting. It was absolutely amazing. When I went home I told my younger brother, Zahir. Zahir is 2 years younger than me so he must have been around 7/8 years old.
Well this friend had told me that if we find this thing in the sea or pond we will become millionaires.
He describe the thing to be a shell that opens up and inside there is a special stone and if we were ever to find it we will become so rich.
So I said to my brother, look this is what this boy told me at school, so let’s go to find this thing.
So we went to Moseley Park. We must of climbed over the fence from the bottom of Chantry Rd as we never had a key. To be honest with you I can’t remember if we had taken a child’s fishing net or we made some sort of rod. I think it was a Saturday.
Guess what? I think we caught something that was very similar to what Juggy had described at school. So we took it home. But we had a big problem. This stupid thing was still alive, and it was too cruel to kill it.
So I put it in water in and a week later it had died. At that time I was thankful it had. Then I opened the shell and with my fingers and hands I had worked through the flesh of this creature looking for this special stone. And bingo. There it was, I had found it. I took it to my mum and told her we will be rich, we had found what we were looking for and this will make us so much money it will be unbelievable.
My parents are from the Valleys of Kashmir and the sea is not close to where they had lived and my mother wasn’t too sure of what we had found. Any way she decided that we go to see my granddad bless him, as he was the wise guy, to see if he could assist us in our fortunes. So off we went and we showed it to him. He told us this was a pearl and it was not going make us so rich.
Ased Naseem. Age 40, "
Naz says he still has the pearl somewhere and will try to find it to show me.
Geoff Jones was trying to find the hospital entrance, on his way to visit a friend, when he wandered into the Dovecote garden. Geoff told me that he used to be a fireman on the railways, when steam engines were still being used. The fireman would stand on the engine foot plate and shovel coal into the fire box - a physically difficult and technical job that required a long training period . He had written down his memories of his first day at work at Tyseley and how he progressed from an engine cleaner to a fireman. He later sent me a copy, some extracts of which are below. It also turned out that Geoff wrote stories and in particular had written several plot ideas for Flash Gordon comic books.
"I had worked at the Tyseley loco sheds since August 13th 1951, and wondered when I would get my first firing turn; of course it was all down to that word 'seniority'.
However on Monday 25th February 1952, I was promoted to what was known as a 'passed' cleaner, I was to have my very first official firing turn albeit in the loco yard.
There were 247 sets of enginemen and firemen at the Tyseley depot, of who 72 were classified disabled in some way, most cases were due to deteriorating eye sight. My driver for that day was Bob Chambers, he was one of the 72, in his case it was a broken neck, and he had to wear a special collar.
I asked "how do you know when to put the coal on the fire?' Bob would look into the fire box and say something like "it needs a light shovel full in each of the front corners and a little heavier charge in each of the back corners".
All in all it was a successful day. When asked by another driver concerning my progress; Bob said that I was doing fine and that I had the makings of a good fireman. However, it appeared that I had two main faults, when using the shovel I tended to put the coal on the fire upside down and I had the bad habit of twisting the steam!
I was just 15 years old. I would go on to have another 130 firing turns, all in the shunting yards or local trip work, before becoming a registered fireman. Then it was a slow case of climbing up the goods 'links'. Firing on express freight, parcel or passenger trains would be in the future, 'seniority' being the golden rule."
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