When people wanted the chimney sweep about half a dozen of them would get together and elect to have their chimneys done on the same day. Then the sweep would come out for the day. His name was Plant and he came over from Brewood in his pony and trap. People in Codsall had Mr Milton. They used brushes in those days of course and the soot was a valuable fertiliser for the garden.
RADIOS AND NEWSPAPERS
Tom Bright realised that as there were no newspapers there was an opportunity here for someone to provide a service, so he began a delivery, but this wasn't until I was at the High School. My parents had the Birmingham Weekly Post, so that as Birmingham people they could keep in touch. In the same way, the employees who had come with the
Gaskells from Liverpool had the Liverpool Weekly 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 anything. 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 started 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.
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