THE BLOXIDGE TALLYGRAPH

Dateline: 15 November 2009

The past few weeks have really brought home to me firstly how essential it is that there be a local online news and information facility for Bloxwich - The Bloxidge Tallygraph is the first such to really try to address local needs - and secondly, how much of a commitment providing such a facility can be at busy news times!  

On several occasions, I’ve even found myself filling a gap left by the local paper press, specifically covering the Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day events in Bloxwich, and the launch and subsequent formal opening, by the Mayor, of Holland's Bakery shop.  I’ve no doubt that there will be more such gaps to fill at times, and I will continue to do what I can, subject to my many other commitments. 

Of course I make no pretence to be competing with the ‘big boys’ - clearly I don’t have the resources of the Express & Star, Walsall Advertiser or Walsall Chronicle, nor the time to offer the general coverage of the the wider Walsall area which they provide so ably.  What I can do is try to complement their work on a small scale in a more interactive and (to use some emerging jargon) “hyperlocal” fashion, by closely focusing on local events and issues in Bloxwich and district, in some cases in ways which are simply not practical for newspapers which are no longer published in Walsall.  And of course on occasion I can feed back into their work more directly, for example as a columnist and occasional contributor to the Walsall Chronicle.

The Bloxidge Tallygraph is of course primarily a one-man-band operation, albeit I have some support from a handful of local contributors who have kindly allowed me to publish their work, which I regard highly (not to mention that mysterious fellow The Forrener…).  This means that at times when things pile up it can be difficult to keep up. I take my work on the Tallygraph seriously, but I do have my ‘day job’ and increasing family commitments, and also work with a number of groups, local and national.  I also write independently of the Tallygraph, something which I plan to expand considerably in the new year.

This means that, after considerable reflection, I feel that it’s time to put The Bloxidge Tallygraph on a more organised, formalised, predictable production schedule. Partly this is to make it easier for me to manage my commitments, and partly because I think it will help our readers to know when to expect something new.  

So, what does this all mean for the future of The Bloxidge Tallygraph?  

Well, the most significant development is that we are moving to a weekly publication schedule for news, and the Pic of the Day will become Pic of the Week.  Edditorials will also be weekly, time permitting.    Publication day will be Saturday, as was the case for the great local papers of the past.  That doesn’t mean that if a major local story suddenly breaks that the Tallygraph will not cover it in a timely fashion if need be - we will!  That is after all one of the best things about being an independent, online publication.  If a story needs reporting now, it can be done now.  Articles and features do not need to be so topical on the whole, and so they will move to a monthly schedule, and we will do our best to present our readers with at least one new feature or article every month, if possible in the first week of the month.

Some sections of the Tallygraph will also change to reflect that fact that better, more timely or different information is already available elsewhere. We already link to www.theyamyam.com as the topical local news hub for the Walsall area, and support that site by freely allowing items from the Tallygraph and my personal site to be linked from there.  The Sports Page will evolve into a combination of links to other online news sites plus local sporting clubs and organisations.  Occasionally a significant sports story will also feature on the front page, of course.  I will be looking at other sections in a similar light.  Additionally, I want to do more to reflect the cultural side of Bloxwich and district, and to support local business, in 2010.

One thing that will not change, however, is that The Bloxidge Tallygraph will remain fiercely and proudly supportive of the people and places of Bloxwich and district, and will continue to stand up for their distinctiveness and for their independent spirit.  I hope we will continue to receive their, and your, support in return.

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Dateline: 11 October 2009

When we speak of nostalgia, we often get a vision of the world war and brown bread generation sitting around a piano having a sing-song, but there’s more to it than that.  After all, those of us who were born in the Space Age are not getting any younger, and occasionally something a little more recent will strike a chord from the days of our youth.

Last night I was flicking through the Freeview channels when I came across an unexpected delight – a dramatised documentary entitled ‘Micro Men’, starring Alexander Armstrong and Martin Freeman.

Broadly, the play was about those first few years in the 1980s when Britain was the world’s greatest innovator in the home computer revolution, which began almost as a cottage industry. 

More specifically it was about the rivalry between Sinclair Research and Acorn Computers, the brainchildren of Clive Sinclair and his one-time employee Chris Curry, together with Curry’s partner Herman Hauser.  They were the inventors and innovators who, together with their remarkable colleagues and co-conspirators, did for the British computer industry what Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs did for the USA with Apple. 

People often forget that it was Sinclair (later Sir Clive) and his team who invented the digital watch, the pocket calculator, the miniature TV and the affordable home computer, decades before the digital age.  He also came up with the C5, but we’ll pass over that…  Curry and his compatriots were looking to take the next step, in competition with Sinclair, and devised a new microcomputer (the Proton!) which would stand up to the rigours of educational use, control robots and interface with scientific instruments.  Winning the BBC Micro contract and renamed the BBC Micro, it would come to dominate educational computing and computer literacy initiatives, inspiring hobbyists to do their own thing in ways which before had been impossible.  Sinclair’s ultra-cheap ZX81 and Spectrum on the other hand ruled the home market for years and pretty much single-handedly facilitated the computer games revolution. 

Those were the great days when home computing was fun, when it was a challenge, and at first you often had to build your own kit and write your own programmes, which was all part of the excitement!  Remember the BBC’s Computer Programme and the effort to get a computer into every school, and later into every home?  That was Acorn leading the field with the British-made BBC Model B and its descendants.  When was the last time you saw a British-made computer, watch or calculator?

Later, computer life was often about the challenge of getting programmes to load off worn tape cassettes, or listening to the coffee-grinder sound of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk failing to load,  or the surreptitious whisper of the tape chewing up in a Microdrive.  Not to mention dot-matrix printers which jammed at the drop of a hat and tore holes in cheap paper with a sound like a machine-gun in overdrive.

Those of you who have only known the gigabyte generation will hardly believe that in the 80s RAM came in tiny chunks like 1k or 16k bytes, and then 32k or 48k was a huge innovation, with the peak, years later, being 128k.  Some computers, like the Acorn BBC Micro, even had a real keyboard instead of rubber buttons!  You programmed your home computer in Assembly Language or various arcane versions of BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).  Programmes were mostly on cassette or in ROM.  Processors were 8-bit or rarely 16.  Eight, sixteen or 32 colours was the name of the game, high resolution was 160 or 320 pixels, a hard disc was something you threw about on the beach, and windows were something you smashed with a cricket ball :O)

Back then I fancied myself as a bit of a hacker, and I well remember using a 300 baud acoustic coupler (army surplus), with an old ICL dumb terminal and running up £250 a quarter ‘phone bills in the days before public access to the internet.  I even wrote on communications for some of the home computer magazines, and edited pages on Prestel.  Ah, those were the days, when Twitter was for the birds...

Those of you of like mind and similar age (I recently hit 50) will no doubt remember all the computers I owned: Sinclair ZX81, Sinclair Spectrum, Oric Atmos, Atari 800, Commodore 64, Dragon 32, BBC Model B and Master 128k, TI 99/4A, Amstrad CPC 464, 664 and 6128. Not to mention the Sinclair QL…  But I never had a Jupiter Ace, sadly (remember the Forth language with reverse Polish notation?).

In the early 80s I co-founded the West Midlands Amstrad User Group which later morphed into the Serious Micro User Group as our interests widened.  Where are all the computer clubs now?

The Japanese tried to take over the business with their own unifying standard, MSX, but they failed dismally, and it was too late.  The writing was already on the wall for home computing, and 8-bit had lost its bite.  Later I went on to the sixteen-bit power generation including the Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes and the Commodore Amiga, but while fun, they didn’t have the fascination of those DIY days.

The home computer business couldn’t last, sadly, and the bubble began to burst in the late 1980s/early 90s, when the barrow boys and big business took over and stifled the golden age of true home computing, bringing in the era of Boring Business Machines.  The fun went out of the game as the big guns took over with IBM, Apple, Digital Research and Microsoft powering ahead with machines which were tools, not toys, where user input was not required just to get them to work (most of time, anyway!).  Computers became commonplace, and the end of the typewriter was in sight.

Things have changed since then, of course.  Today the operating system is king and computer life is basically a choice of worshipping the dark elder god Microsoft or becoming an acolyte of the shining cult of Apple.  But that’s another story.

By the end of ‘Micro Men’, I had retrieved much which I had thought lost forever in my own non-volatile RAM, and I’m not ashamed to admit I shed a tear or two of real nostalgia.  Those were the days of my youth, when computing was fun and scientists did their best work in a shed at the bottom of a garden in Cambridge.  Not a Vera Lynn LP or Biggles book in sight, either.

It’s true what they say, you know.  Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.  But perhaps some of those great days can be recalled, even now.  Maybe I’m just an aging geek at heart, but I’m sure I can hear the still, small voice of my dear old Beeb beeping softly from up in the loft, “Let me out of the box, let me out…”  And maybe, just maybe, I will.

The Edditer

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Dateline:  26 August 2009

In 1939 Pat Collins, the legendary ‘king of showmen’,

celebrated his eightieth birthday whilst he was Mayor and congratulatory letters and telegrams poured into Bloxwich from all parts of the world.  Of Walsall he said at the time, “There is no better place under the sun. I love the old town and particularly this old village of Bloxwich”.

While taking part in this year’s celebration of dear old Pat’s 150th birthday, his statement of affection set me to thinking.  In Pat’s time, and in the 1950s when E.J. Homeshaw wrote ‘The Story of Bloxwich’, my birthplace and home was simply described as ‘A South Staffordshire village’.  A romantic description indeed, redolent of old England and the heritage that surrounds us here, even in the early years of the 21st century.  Today, Bloxwich is often referred to as a town rather than a village, but is that strictly true?

The shorter OED on historical principles describes the word ‘town’ in many ways, some of them archaic, but one of its definitions is “Now commonly designating an assemblage of buildings, public and private, larger than a village, and having more complete and independent local government; applied not only to a ‘borough’, and a ‘city’, but also to an ‘urban district’ and sometimes to small inhabited places below the rank of an ‘urban district’”.  Of the designation ‘village’ it says in part “A collection of dwelling-houses and other buildings, larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town, or having simpler organization and administration than the latter.”

Bloxwich has no ”complete and independent local government”, and never has; there are some mentions of a Manor of Bloxwich in the 16th century, but there are no records of a court or any other elements of manorial government in Bloxwich.  It seems that Bloxwich was part of the medieval Manor of Walsall for centuries, despite the fact that Bloxwich is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 and Walsall is not.  That Manor was taken over by the old Borough of Walsall.  There is no Bloxwich Town Hall or Council House.  Bloxwich Councillors are members of Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council, and have been since 1835 when, under the Municipal Reform Act, Walsall became governed by elected councillors rather than selected ‘burgesses’ from the old corporation.  Bloxwich then came under the Foreign Ward, and was represented on Walsall Town Council by two aldermen and six councillors who were elected by the ratepayers.

Over the decades, Bloxwich industry has drastically declined, many large factories have closed and mining has disappeared altogether. Bloxwich has spread somewhat over the years, it is true, but only by the addition of housing estates that have covered the fields with which it was once surrounded.  Blakenall Heath was the first of the new estates, going straight from hamlet to housing in the mid 1920s-30s.  Beechdale and Mossley are both primarily post-war, as is the slightly later Lower Farm Estate which expanded on Little Bloxwich.  But in practice these are just increases in population.  Size is, after all, not everything.

Bloxwich still has its own distinctive Black Country village character, spirit and people.  While governed from Walsall, many would not see it as being part of Walsall, and the same is true of many other towns and villages now within the present Metropolitan Borough.  Some would even argue that Bloxwich should be part of Staffordshire, not the amorphous non-county that is West Midlands (or Greater Birmingham as the brummies would have it!).

By both definition and tradition, therefore, I would argue that Bloxwich may still be called a village, despite the fact that today it is often referred to as a town.  We still have, in its leafy centre, our village green (Bloxwich Park), our chapel green (Elmore Green) and our village church (All Saints), our Post Office and our village schools.  We have a selection of village pubs, many close to the greens (though for how long is anyone’s guess!) and no shortage of shops along the old High Street.  Indeed apart from the ASDA, the addition of some poor 1960s buildings and changes in the various shops, much is still as it was in the centre of Bloxwich in the 1950s.  A stroll along Bloxwich High Street to the church on a sunny summer’s day, or through autumn leaves on the old green, will soon evoke much of the true character of this ancient place.

Bloxwich - town or village?  I say village.  What say you?

The Edditer 

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Dateline:  4 June 2009

It seemed like a good idea to publish this year’s Summer Edditorial at a time when not only has the weather warmed up, but UK politicians are in hot water! 

The current fevered debate in the media and the country over the alleged claiming of extravagant expenses by a minority of Members of Parliament and the resulting political fallout is set to run for some time to come, especially with the results of today’s European and (in some other parts of the UK) local elections bound to add to the controversy.  The perceived lack of confidence in MPs of all parties may have severe consequences for the standing of those parties, deserved or not.

Inevitably, this will have its effect on local politics as well, albeit not this time around in Walsall Metropolitan Borough.  I have always felt the best way to decide on voting is to consider who has done the best for the town, and to consider the consequences of change.  Sometimes change is necessary to improve things, but be careful what you wish for – you may get it, and be stuck with it!

I do know that we have always been able to count on our Labour MP for Walsall North, David Winnick, who has done a good and conscientious job locally over many years and has conspicuously stood up for what is right in Parliament.  And for the most part our Bloxwich Councillors of whichever party affiliation have worked hard for us under difficult circumstances for many years.  

None of these good people are standing in the Euro elections, which offer a very different selection of parties and candidates, but these elections are still being seen as a referendum on mainstream politics, so who knows who will get in?  However things turn out, European decision-making does have an (often unwanted!) effect on us locally and nationally, and it is likely that there will be dramatic changes in the political landscape for years to come.

I am not going to tell you who to vote for, that is a matter of personal conscience, but if you have the vote, then I would strongly urge you to use it, and decide carefully, for without your efforts our ancient democracy will be made even weaker than some in Westminster have made it already. 

The Edditer

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Spring has finally sprung in Bloxwich (in between the showers of rain!), and as always the many parks and green spaces in and around the town are a delight to the eye and to those of us who like to get out and about.  Walsall may have its grand (if rather dilapidated) Arboretum, but we Bloxidge folk are well-blessed for greenery ourselves, what with Bloxwich Park (the old Village Green or Short Heath), Elmore Green, King George V Playing Fields, Leamore Park and last but not least the Promenade Gardens, scene of so much carnival history.

Speaking of the Promenade Gardens, hopefully it will not be too many weeks before we see the return of the famous Bloxwich Fountain which has been spending time in Birmingham for restoration, repair and repainting.  What colour it will turn out to be next remains to be seen, so keep an eye on the Tallygraph's front page for the first pictures!  More importantly, it is to be hoped it will be properly looked after in future, and not neglected as has been past tradition. 

Of course this leads on to the thorny topic of Bloxwich Carnival and the likely loss of its traditional parade this year due to a lack of sponsorship in the way of trucks and lorries for floats.  One can of course understand hard-pressed companies wishing to save money, but this kind of thing can only reflect badly on those who appear to have lost their community spirit and are also missing an opportunity to advertise themselves to a large audience of appreciative Bloxwich folk. 

Bloxwich Carnival Committee have not lost their community spirit, however - and they will be doing their very best this year as always to make carnival day (Saturday 1st August) the best possible day for us all.  I hope you will continue to give them your every support, as will The Bloxidge Tallygraph - see you there!

The Edditer, 30th April 2009

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To download a copy of the first issue of the original single page 1874 Bloxidge Tallygraph (reduced to A4 from the original broadsheet size, colour jpeg, 2.2mb), click on this link.

To download a copy of the later descendant of the Tallygraph - 'The Bloxwich Telegraph' (21 January 1886, reduced to A4 from the original broadsheet size, colour jpeg, 1.7mb) - click on this link.

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WANTED:  PHOTOS OR POSTCARDS OF OLD BLOXWICH POLICE STATIONS, THE OLD BLOXWICH RAILWAY STATION AND OLD BLOXWICH LIBRARIES   Do you have any photographs of the above buildings?  If so, please get in touch as we need more to add to our forthcoming features, and also, with your permission, to the archives at Walsall Local History Centre - you could help us make history!

Link to some past Edditorials

Past Edditorials

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Stuart Williams is The Edditer of  The Bloxidge Tallygraph.

Email:  the.edditer@thebloxidgetallygraph.com

Published by The Little Bloxwich Press, Little Bloxwich, Staffordshire.  Copyright 2006, 7, 8, 9 - All Rights Reserved.

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