" It may be a sign of increasing age and an obsession too far, but I've just spent a couple of nights at the Ramada Park Hall Hotel. I hasten to add that this was partly because our offspring were organising a reunion party at our house and I am writing an article with a tight deadline and needed a bit of peace and quiet, and it's less than ten miles from where we live, but anyway, it was fascinating to discover that Sedgley Park School still flourishes in a rather different incarnation in a multicultural Wolverhampton that Parkers could not have conceived of. I am sending Peter Glynn some photos for his Sedgley Park website when I retrieve the lead that I have left in Birkenhead. If you look at the picture on Peter's site you will see the 'bounds' in front of the building. This is now a car park. The wing of the house to the left is now a quite good Indian restaurant called Kavi. I think that must be the site of the original chapel. The wing to the right is now a ballroom. The Main Door is at it was and there is a blue plaque to the right, partly covered by a hanging basket, commemorating John Philip Kemble the actor, who was a pupil there. We had a room to the rear in a new wing, but there was still a pleasant view of fields, hedgerows and hills to the east which must be little different from how it was in the late seventeen hundreds when the school moved there. There are still fine views to the front, even though the conurbation has reached to the gates. There are a couple of other items relating to the school, a small framed list of bishops who attended Sedgley Park as boys, and a brief history, both in one of the corridors. My main impression is that although it is a handsome building, it must have been really cramped. It was quite moving walking round the grounds, in a different way from Cotton and its state of ruination. My imagination of the past tends to be in black and white, or sepia or pen and ink drawing, and I only get the briefest flashes of the vivid lived reality of the time, such as Bishop Milner suddenly faced with controlling a bolting horse that had been frightened by a cheer from the boys. Peter has just returned me my Husenbeth book and I glanced at a page which had a touching little vignette. Husenbeth is now a mature priest and is visiting old Molly on her death bed. She used to sell 'Socks' at the school (ie she ran the tuck shop and sold cakes and sweets).  He was reading some prayers by her bedside when she gave him 'an arch look' and said: "Ah, Mr Husenbeth, you didna think of this, when you'd used to come and buy socks of may (me)" (p 139).  Husenbeth can be a bit ponderous, but this is a vivid human touch, easy to imagine at any time. He goes on: "This appeal was so irresistibly comical, that all further spiritual colloquy was suspended ..."

Michael McGhee 2006

All photographs courtesy of Michael McGhee