Once I’d got to secondary school age, I used to go play snooker. I don’t recall the outings in the summer, as invariably granddad used to take me to the MCL summers outings. They always had an annual children’s Christmas party. In the canteen upstairs there were two three-quarter size snooker tables. It was sold to the council for a special school, so we had to go back to playing on the parks. The one goal was almost hard up against the tennis chain link fence and the other came somewhere between the boundary and central square of the cricket ground. So what they did was clear the rest of the ground grounds up to the tennis courts and beside the pavilion and beside the railway line. The cricketers and Harry Bastable, the groundsman, didn’t want a football pitch over the cricket square. The football team wanted somewhere to play, because playing on parks pitches was for the birds. I went into the cricket team when I started at Myers. Our father was captain of the cricket team for many years, even while I was growing up. ![]() They had a sports ground on Causeway Green Road, which they sold in the 70s. When I started, there was an active cricket club and they had started a football club, but they didn’t have a football ground. The wire forming machines were called multiform machines, because they were capable of different operations on different planes simultaneously. They would start with a coil of wire and come out as a completed spring handle that was clipped into the foldback clips. And there also wire folding machines for the wire handles on the foldback clips. You would feed flat metal in and it would fold it, put rolls in it, whatever you wanted to do with different slides coming in, instead of an up and down press. How can I describe it? They weren’t actually presses they were horizontal and they were folding, piercing and blanking machines and it was on those that they made the Bulldog clip springs, the barrel. They also had a Heenan and Froude section. Later on, though it was up and running when I started, they had a small plastic moulding section. ![]() I worked making press tools - hand press tools, single action press tools, progressive press tooling with different actions in one tool for power presses. I don’t think he ever knew his right age.Ībout 300-350 people worked there at Myers it was never an Accles and Pollock, it was never thousands. After my dad died, mom married again and they moved over to Bushbury area in Wolverhampton and grandad found a job at Chubb locks and safes, just labouring. We always said, ‘The minute he stops work he’ll drop dead’ and he did virtually. Granddad worked at Albrights and went later to MCL around his retirement age. So Nan was left to look after my sister Sheila while dad, mom and granddad all went to the factory. Her parents lived with us, so the authorities said, well, you can go back to work. Mom was more or less pressed back into service. Myers started making pen nibs in Birmingham and they still made a lot when they moved up to Langley, but when World War Two hit they were making bomb clips and that sort of stuff for the war effort, not office stationary equipment. Our father died the year after I started. ![]() It was a five-year apprenticeship, 16 to 21, but I didn’t complete it. I left school at 16, as I went to Oldbury Tec started off at Flash Road Road - the original one, now knocked down - finished up at the new one at Pound Road. When I left school I went to work at Myers in 1963, as a tool-making apprentice. Then they transferred to Langley, behind the railway station, near to where the old picture house, the Regent, was. She was a Black Country woman, and he was a Brummie, born and bred in Ladywood. That’s where he met mom, in the old factory. My dad worked at Myers, it was the only place he ever worked, even from the old factory in Birmingham. I remember them going up when I was four, five, six years old. In those days the house was opposite where the council houses are. “My sister and I were both born in Parkfield Road, Causeway Green, Langley. Roy’s sister, Sheila Munday, still lives locally. They emigrated to Australia in the 1970s. Roy and Jacqueline Forge both worked at Myers in Langley Green.
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