Fred Slater (Bsc, Msc, Phd, Cecol, Cenv, FCIEEM, Frags, Pgced)
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Fred Slater (BSc, MSc, PhD, CEcol, CEnv, FCIEEM, FRAgS, PGCEd) From Black to Green: Midlands to Mid-Wales (& The World) Through a Countryman’s Eyes CONTENTS 1. Life by Four Rivers – Early Days by the Tame, Ystwyth, Severn, & Wye 2. Dabbling in the Water – Rivers, Crayfish, Amphibians & Ponds 3. Fuelling My Research – Woodlands Old and New 4. A World of Difference – Pakistan 5. In Lands of Change – Majorca and Cape Verde 6. Ecotravelling Downunder 7. Bits and Pieces from Here and There 8. Mid-Wales – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 9. For Those Who Want to Find Out More 1. Life by Four Rivers – Early Days by the Tame, Ystwyth, Severn, & Wye Introduction This story is about how I came from the sootiest, most industrial of industrial areas to spend the majority of my life in one of the greenest, most rural and least populated parts of England and Wales. To understand the journey, you must understand where I came from, what has influenced and motivated me, and how, at times, a few rivers have, serendipitously, shaped the chapters of my life. This is the world as seen through the eyes of a boy growing up in the Blackcountry in the early post-war years, and why, more than half a century later, it is clear that you can take a man out of the Blackcountry but you cannot take the Blackcountry out of a man. That I am a genuine Blackcountryman is confirmed, in my view, by my deep local roots which can be traced back in Wednesbury to Edward Slater in 1626 and probably, with a change of spelling, to John Sclator in 1554. I remember in Sunday School hearing about the biblical River Jordan and singing “Roll Jordan Roll” and “There’s one more river and that’s the River of Jordan, there’s one more river, one more river to cross” and imagining, in my childhood mind, a mighty waterway bedecked with real life scenes of the biblical illustrations from our Sunday School literature. In those days of the early 1950s, when I spent almost every weekend by the banks of the River Severn, there was no television in my life and each Sunday I attended Sunday School held in the small, 1860s, red brick simplicity of the Jubilee Methodist Chapel in Pentre, in the Severn Valley of Shropshire, which provided the words and music for my imagination to work on. Some three decades later I crossed the Jordan from Israel towards the Golan Heights and was filled with disappointment at what struck me to be more a medium sized canal than the mighty river of my imagination. But subsequently, I have got to know a number of real rivers, first hand, warts and all (if rivers can be said to have warts), without the artistic licence which imagination can conjure, and each, to varying extents, has influenced the pathways I have taken at various points in my story. The ultimate insult to a Blackcountryman is to call him a Brummie, as the unfortunate inhabitants of that alien land called Birmingham are less than affectionately known by their northern neighbours. The Blackcountry essentially pre-dates Birmingham. It is a land once criss-crossed by canals, which then carried the products and lifeblood of industry, and now places such as Tipton, once known as “Tipp’n on the Cut”, and other Blackcountry towns, formerly moated by canals (cuts), are now more frequently crossed and bordered by motorways and feeder roads. Traditionally the Blackcountry was regarded as comprising a number of industrial Staffordshire towns to the northwest of Birmingham including West Bromwich, Dudley, Oldbury, Cradley Heath, Blackheath, Wednesfield, Halesowen, Bilston, Tipton, Darlaston, Wednesbury, and Walsall, the last three of which were where I called home. Today much of this area is subsumed into the Metropolitan District Council areas of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton. But what originally united this area was the so-called “30 foot seam” a band of coal, said to be the thickest in Great Britain, which either outcropped or ran shallowly through this area. This, combined with local iron ore and limestone, provided the essentials for the local metal industries which date back to at least the sixteenth century and by the 1620s it was said that there were 20,000 smiths of all sorts within “10 miles of Dudley Castle”. By the Civil War in 1642, the area was providing Charles I with cannon, guns, shot, swords and pikes. By the nineteenth century the area had been described as one that "cannot be matched, for vast and varied production, by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe” such was the intensity of industrial activity. In 1862 Elihu Burritt was appointed US Consul to Birmingham and wrote about the area, characterising it as “black by day, red by night” he was claimed by some for first bringing the term Blackcountry into common usage, although the area had probably been known by this name much earlier. Indeed, a guidebook of 1851 says “In this Blackcountry, including West Bromwich, Dudley, Darlaston, Bilston and several minor villages, a perpetual twilight reigns during the day, and during the night fires on all sides light up the dark landscape with a fiery glow”. Indeed, even into the 1960s when the blast furnaces were tapped in Bilston Steel Works, some four miles away from my home, the night sky was illuminated with the same “fiery glow” – these furnaces eventually closed in 1979. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in my part of the Blackcountry, Wednesbury was noted for nail making and coal production and Darlaston for nut and bolt manufacturing and gunlock production, the latter the remaining element of the seventeenth century arms industry which later transferred to Birmingham. I was born in the Blackcountry at my maternal grandparents, Jenny (but Nel to her friends and Ann to me) and George Wadsworths’ end of terrace house at 66 Dora Street, Pleck In Walsall, soon returning to the house were I lived until I was about 13, 229 Park Lane, in Fallings Heath, Wednesbury, a couple of miles away by road from Pleck but physically separated by F H Lloyds, then one of the largest steel foundries in Europe, plus a band of “green belt” including old grassland, Pleck Park, allotments, the railway, including James Bridge station and finally the River Tame. What was then F H Lloyds is now IKEA, and gas holders and the M6 motorway now cover much of the previous areas of green. Our house in Park Lane, which, many years before, was the Seven Stars public house, was populated by myself, my mother Lillian (Lilly), my father Bill, his brother, my Uncle Maurice, my paternal grandfather John (my grandmother Slater (nee Sarah Jane Phillips) died in 1933) and, I firmly believed in those days, the ghost of a little old lady who sometimes sat in a red armchair in our seldom used front room and moved things on the living room sideboard when the house was empty except for me asleep (or listening) upstairs. My grandfather slept in the attic room and probably did not help the spooky feel of the place when he used to place an empty bottle on a draughty stair to create a ghostly whistle! In about 1955, cancer caused my dad to have his right leg completely amputated so we eventually we moved round the corner, from our house with a single cold tap and an outside toilet, into 48 Wood Street, where several members of the Slater family had lived and where we could install the bathroom my dad needed (but still no inside loo!) and look after my ageing great aunt Lizzy. We left the ghostly little old lady in 229 and I felt the new house far less threatening. If you imagine a capital L then 229 Park Lane would be at the end of the short limb backed by a garden which linked to the family business which ran along the long limb of the L and ended at 48 Wood Street. On one side of Park Lane’s garden was the Park Lane Working Men’s’ Club and on the other Les Harvey’s “garage” or more precisely a scrapyard of the wrecked cars which he bought and sold and recovered from road accidents. The family business, run by my father, until he died in 1959, was known as Reuben Slater Heath Works and specialised in making sockets for connecting steam and gas pipes. At that time the standard way of making non-cast iron tubes was by bending flat metal and making the connecting sockets was no different, hammering red hot flat metal into welded rings. At the height of the trade the firm had some twenty blacksmith’s hearths fired by small cherry sized pieces of coke called breeze, which was collected from the factory’s fuel heap using a wide curved fork with many closely spaced tines called a scuvin. Each worker had a hearth, an anvil, a mechanical hammer, (mainly a type called an Oliver) and a range of hand and sledge hammers for beating the strips of metal in to shape, believe you me it took a “real man” to handle the 14lb sledge for any period of time – I can vouch for that from experience! These men were strong, no gym membership in those days, I remember one whose biceps were such that as a “party piece” he could smash a beer bottle in the crook of his arm by clenching his biceps. Each socket was made by heating a strip of iron of appropriate width in the hearth until it was white hot then cutting it to length on the Oliver, wrapping it around a former of correct diameter, reheating and hammering the two ends so that they welded together to make a short tube, after which it was rapidly cooled in a metal tank called a bosh and then it was ready for machining to add an internal screw thread and then, job done.