Art at the Woodhouse

In 1993, when I was looking for a new surname, I thought of 'Woodhouse', which had been part of my personal history. My first home was Wood House Cottage, where my grandparents lived, and later I lived in Woodhouse Road, in one of the first of the council houses to be built on former Wood House Estate.

Recently I produced a short handmade book, telling the story of Tettenhall Wood House and my own small part in it. Below is a transcript and some of the pictures:

There was once Tettenhall Wood House .........

Until the 1950s, it was surrounded by an estate which included woodland and farm fields. The farm was called The Grange, and Mr Blything was the tenant farmer. Living on the estate, we used to walk to the farm to collect our post and buy milk and bread.

This was the Wood House in earlier times.

(photo scanned from Tettenhall, by John Raven)

An example of Victorian gothic, the house was designed by the architect Thomas Rickman, who was normally associated with the design of churches.

The last family to own the Woodhouse were the Hickmans, whose fortunes had been made in the local steel industry. They also owned Wightwick Hall and Wergs Hall. The elderly Mrs Hickman was the last of the Hickmans to live in the Wood House; sometimes she was joined there by her daughter Clare.

The Head Gardener was Albert Aubrey (my grandfather), and he lived in Wood House Cottage with Eva, my grandmother. They had two daughters, Evelyn and Mildred. Mildred (my mother) met her future husband Dennis during World War II, and I was born in 1944.

After the war, Evelyn, who had been working in a munitions factory, returned to domestic labour and was employed by a Mr and Mrs Bayliss, whose family had been previous owners of the Wood House. My mother and I lived in Woodhouse Cottage with my grandparents.

My father continued in the army until the end of the war, and then the three of us moved for a short while to his home town of Littlehampton, where he returned to work as a clerk at Butts timber works. We stayed with my other grandparents who lived in a terrace of council houses, near a gasworks. I've been told I took my first steps on Littlehampton beach (at eighteen months old, so rather late). But soon my father enrolled on an emergency teacher training course at Leavesden Green, Hertfordshire, and my mother and I returned to Wood House Cottage.

This is Eva Aubrey(my grandmother) in the Cottage garden, early 1940s:



This is Mildred (my mother):

And below is Albert (my grandfather) with Evelyn (right) and Mildred:

There was no electricity in the Cottage, nor inside toilet. Our evenings were lit by oil lamp, and our beds warmed by a brass warming pan. There was an outhouse for laundry across the yard, and the toilet behind it. Some of the rooms of the cottage were rarely lived in.

These photos were taken in the Wood House garden:

Helping' my grandfather:

And these below were taken in the adjacent farmland, probably by my father, when he came to stay while on holiday from his teacher training.

There were no other children to play with, but the photos give the impression that life was happy and carefree. I can remember, on one of the rare occasions my mother took me to town (Wolverhampton) on the bus, how I watched some children playing as we waited at the bus-stop to come home, and how I felt quite curious and bemused. It didn't seem to occur to me that I was a child, like they were.

After my father completed his teacher training, we moved to a council prefab. The address was 100 Henwood Road, and we were within walking distance of Wood House Cottage, so still had regular contact with my grandparents. Now we had electricity, a real bathroom, and even a fridge. No central heating, of course, so in the winter I would wake with ice on the inside of my bedroom window.

It was hard to adjust to being encouraged to play with other children, and before long having to go to school. Frequently I took refuge in illness, real or imaginary, and I spent many solitary hours playing in the small rectangular back garden with my 'pretty stones' and fragments of crockery. (The prefabs had been built on landfill.) My stones all had names, as did my marbles. I eventually had a friend; I showed her my collection, and she called it 'treasure'. Her family moved away, and it was a while before I had another friend.

When I was nine years old, we moved to a new three-bedroomed council house. Soon after we moved, my sister Anne was born.

Our new house was one of the first to be built on what was to become a large council estate. The address was 93 Woodhouse Road, Tettenhall, and the house was built on the site of what had been land belonging to the Wood House. We still had fields and a small wood at the back of the house.

My grandfather continued working in the Wood House garden until he was in his seventies, because he needed to keep his home - Wood House Cottage - which was tied to the House. The Cottage still had no electricity. Finally his doctor persuaded him to give up the work for health reasons, and my aunt Evie bought a terraced house in Newbridge Street, Wolverhampton, with money saved from her domestic employment and perhaps the occasional small inheritance. The three of them - Grandfather, Grandmother and Aunt - lived there together, though sadly it wasn't all that long before my Gran died of cancer, so she didn't have so many years to appreciate the electricity she'd longed for. My grandfather, however, lived until he was almost 92. He'd continued to do gardening jobs for the local vicar. Maybe all that gardening wasn't so bad for him.

In the 1960s, I was eager to have a life of my own and I moved to London. I wasn't around when Wood House Cottage was knocked down.

Nor when the Wood House itself was demolished in 1969, following old Mrs Hickman's death at age 103, and the land bought by a private building company.

My parents and sister continued to live in Woodhouse Road until 1976, when they moved to Rustington, near Littlehampton. By that time all four grandparents had died. My father's brother, Barrie, was still living in Littlehampton. I was in Kent, where my two sons were born. My aunt Evie was still living in Wolverhampton.

The Grange Farm House remains, though now surrounded by council houses instead of farmland. So does the Lodge, in Wood Road. And Woodhouse Road, when I visited in the1990s, still looked pretty much the same.

After my aunt Evie died, in 2003, I remembered all the things I'd needed to ask her. About herself and my family. Also about the Wood House and its history. My mother, who had died of Alzheimer's in 1999, had always said that Evie was the one with the 'good memory'. Now that good memory had gone, and all the memories with it.

The following year I made a number of enquiries.

Patrick Hickman was not aware that his family had lived in the Wood House, and he had no records or photographs.

Andrew Clement Davies wrote and told me that members of his family had lived in Woodhouse Lodge from around 1900 to 1920. His grandfather was a groom to Sir Alfred Hickman, and his grandmother had been a parlour maid, a 'below stairs' romance.

Mrs Steed, living in Birmingham, remembered a farmer who preceded Mr Blything at the Grange; he had two young daughters who she used to play with. By the Cottage there had been three 'boffy buildings' where young single lads lived and worked in the gardens. She had spent many happy hours, she said, walking through the fields and woods.

Mrs Hawley, who had lived next door to my aunt Evie after she moved to Newbridge Street, sent me some photographs taken by a friend, just before the Wood House was demolished. This is one of them:

In Jon Raven's book on 'Tettenhall', he writes that the demolition of The Wood House was a 'tragedy of classic proportions'. I'm not sure how many lives were personally touched by this 'tragedy', but for me, the tragedy wasn't just the destruction of the house, monstrous though this was. It was also the disappearance of the garden. Where I'd messed around in the potting shed with my grandfather. Where I'd walked on numerous occasions with my mother. Where my grandfather had worked in all seasons for so many years of his life.

Below, a photograph of my grandfather, Albert Aubrey, some years after his retirement from the Wood House Garden: