Page 207 - Redditch People

Redditch People

RAY SAUNDERS

Ray has written a number of books about Redditch, a couple of them
compiled with Alan Foxall. He remembers the change from horses to cars,
the first double-decker bus and a visit to Smallwood hospital. He left
school at 13, you could leave early as long as you went to help on a farm.
The farmer had two Italian prisoners of war working for him and they
played football with the boys at lunchtime. The Italians enjoyed their life
on the farm so much they returned on visits many times when the war was
over.
When he left the farm he worked as an engineer with various Redditch
companies, mainly making fishing tackle. In 1977 he joined a colleague to
form R and S Antiques, selling chiefly at market fairs.

PAUL BETTERTON

Amazingly, Paul was working in the needle trade from the age of ten. He
worked as a blacksmith with his father and grandfather at the Brabant
Needle Company, on the coke ovens, heating the tooling to red heat,
quenching them to harden the tooling and then tempering the blocks.
When leaving school each afternoon, he would call in to the factory to
see if he could help. It annoyed his mother considerably as he would still
be wearing his school uniform, including a white shirt.

This is a lovely picture of life in a needle making factory in the 1950s. It
goes through all the processes of needle-making through the eyes of a
teenager.

BERT HANSON

His ancestors came to Redditch with a group of needlemakers from Long
Crendon. His great, great grandmother kept the old cemetery off
Plymouth Road. Bert made surgical needles for eye surgery. Some were
only 2mm.

He was only two when he started his first school, Miss Heaphy’s. ‘The
Monkey Run’ is a well-known piece of Redditch history but rarely men-
tioned in interviews. Bert Hanson is the only one to describe it:

“Every Sunday all the young people used to dress up in their best
clothes and walk up and down from the hospital to the Congrega-
tional church, a distance of about 200 yards (about 182 m). That
was the ‘’Monkey Run. They used to go in droves, the boys in one group, the girls in
another, pretending they were there for the walk but eyeing up the talent. It was just
a method of ‘clicking’ as they used to call it, getting acquainted, chatting up a girl. It
was all orderly. No sign of misbehaviour, nothing like that. No trouble no fights nothing

© RLHS 2015 Page: 207