Category: Key update

We’ll be launching our public call-out for memories of Woodside Library – one of the largest translocation projects within BCLM: Forging Ahead – on Wednesday 19 September. Do you have any personal stories or a family connection with the Library? Did you borrow there, study there, or dance there? If you do have anything you would like to share to help our interpretation of the library, please pop in and see the Collections team in the Rolfe Street offices.

A bit about Woodside Library

The library was opened in 1894 to serve the south west part of Dudley. The land for the library and Woodside Park were donated by the Earl of Dudley, who also offered help with the funds to build the library out of the takings from his fetes at Dudley Castle. As such the library, and the adjacent police-houses and fire station, were constructed with a covenant limiting it to public use only. The opening ceremony for this, and Netherton library, built at the same time, was on 24^th July 1894. The Earl and Countess of Dudley, along with many local dignitaries, processed from Dudley Central Library, to Netherton, to Woodside. The building featured a Reading Room and Lending Library on the ground floor, and a Recreation Room and Retiring Room upstairs, and was intended for the benefit of the working people of the Woodside area. At the beginning, the library was “closed stack” – visitors had to request books from the librarian – but converted to open access in 1934.

After World War Two, libraries began to modernise and Dudley libraries were at the forefront – they increased their book stocks by 15,000 a year, included paperbacks for the first time and gramophone records, mostly classical music and language learning tools. The upstairs rooms were used for a variety of clubs and societies, and dances hosted by local compere Horace Robinson. The building was refurbished in the early 1970s and operated until 2008.

Why Woodside Library?

The building is currently in very poor condition and because of the covenant, has proved very difficult to repurpose. We are therefore proud to be able to salvage this beautiful building and give it a new lease of life. Woodside Library also enables us to continue stories of education and children’s lives, social life and the role of local authorities in everyday life in the Black Country. It will complement some of the other buildings by showing civic life in the post-war period, and provide an architecturally impressive sight in the midst of the new development.

To coincide with the seventieth anniversary of the NHS, we’ll be launching our public call-out for memories of Lea Road Infant Welfare Centre tomorrow (18th July). Do you have any personal stories or family connection with the Centre? Were you taken as a child and dosed with cod liver oil? If you do have anything you would like to share to help in our re-creation of the shop, please pop in and see the Collections team in the Rolfe Street offices.

A bit about Lea Road Infant Welfare Centre

This centre was opened in 1928 to serve the Penn Fields area of Wolverhampton. It was designed as somewhere for new and expectant mothers to meet, learn about their and their babies’ health, and have their children fed, weighed and vaccinated. Twenty years later, the Centre became part of the new National Health Service. Visitors to Lea Road in the 1950s and 1960s would have found a busy environment, overseen by staff and volunteers. The main hall was a waiting room, but doubled up as a venue for ante-natal and “mothercraft” classes, baby clothes sales, and as a social gathering for new mothers – always with a fresh cup of tea in hand. Worried new mums could receive advice on anything from birthing anaesthetics to family planning – though this was strictly for married women only. Babies were weighed and checked regularly, and vaccinated against a range of diseases. Outbreaks of measles, smallpox and polio still occurred from time to time, and diphtheria was a particular Black Country problem: at points during the 1950s, for example, Coseley was responsible for a third of all cases nationally! Most memorably, the centres also distributed welfare foods: vitamins, bottles of thick, sticky orange juice, tins of National Dried Milk, and the hated cod liver oil.

Why Lea Road?

We are rebuilding this centre to tell the story of the birth of the NHS; the influx in junior doctors from countries such as India and Pakistan during the 50s & 60s; the lives of young women and children in this period; and also to help in our understanding of public health in the present day.