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Post. Our Birmingham Post was picked up from Codsall on Friday mornings when my parents went to do their weekend shopping.
Radios were to become an important feature of everybody's life, but at one time they were not available. I think it was about 1923 when the BBC first started. My father helped the people in Codsall Wood to take advantage of this new invention. Because of his electrical training, he made a crystal set and then went on to make crystal sets for just about every other house in Codsall Wood. The reception on these early sets was very poor. If anyone rattled a newspaper you couldn't hear any-
thing. At first the BBC were not allowed to broadcast political information. There was music, talks galore and comedy programmes, and that was about all. There were no discussion programmes or anything controversial.
After the crystal sets the technology advanced with the introduction of valves, so my father start-ed making radios with valves. With a �one�-valve set you still needed earphones, but if you had three valves you could have a loudspeaker. (Just like the one you see on the old 'His Master's Voice' advertisement, with the huge trumpet). The sets all had to run off batteries of course, because there was no mains supply, so we soon had people coming to the house with their batteries to have them recharged. They were big very heavy batteries, the people on the Pendrell Estate were the only ones in the village to have electric light until the late 1920s.

SOME LOCAL CHARACTERS:

�OLD JERVIS�
Sometimes during the Summer a weather-beaten, rough-looking fellow would come to the door. His usual request was for some boiling water to make his tea. He had a small milkcan in which he put his tea and sugar. We supplied some hot water and milk. He never begged for food but was pleased to receive any we might give him. In the summer he did casual work on farms � haymaking, hoeing, harvest work. In the Winter he went into the Union or workhouse at Wombourne. We always knew him as 'Old Jervis'.

�OLD STOCKING�
Whose proper name was Stockton, was a farmworker who worked at several farms, but the remarkable thing about him was that he did any farm job well, managing horses and implements, even though he had only one arm.

Another character was the �tin-whistle man� who came two or three times a year and played his whistle, standing on the wide verge near our group of houses. I remember that some old ladies in the village always wore a black skirt and a black satin blouse with a little lace cap on their hair in the afternoon, having changed out of their working clothes.

GENERAL ELECTIONS
I remember a General Election campaign in the 1920s. In those days Codsall and Codsall Wood were in the Cannock constituency. On election days my father would spend the day ferrying people back- wards and forwards, in the Daimler, to the Polling Station in Codsall Wood. People tended to vote the way that their parents had voted or to follow the guidance of their local landowner. There was little opportunity for them to learn about the Parties and their policies. There were no local papers sold in the village, no political information on the radio and of course no television.