Demolition around Coventry

Hi Vince. Thanks for your post. You may be interested to see this small tribute to your late father and our friend.

We miss your dad at the breaky times too. Looking forward to meeting you one day. We have a breaky meet up this Saturday morning at the Flying Standard in Coventry city centre. Best wishes & happy Christmas. I say that with meaning, as I'm coming to terms with an empty chair in my home.

Hi Vince and welcome. As the others have said, your dad Norm is sadly missed but hope you will remain with us for some new history chats. Thanks for joining.

More precious info from Tom Daly on FB - On demolishing the Dun Cow at the same time as the Lea Francis car factory, when we took the roof off we found a thatched roof underneath the tiles. The main purlin holding up the roof was a complete tree trunk with some bark still on it. The museum was contacted and they came over and we had to stop work and eventually take the inner roof down and we were told that it would be kept in the museum. We also took down buildings piece by piece in Much Park St and they were resurrected in Spon St I believe. I achieved some momentary fame in the papers and TV news when I handed in an amount of money I found under the floorboards of Blackmore's electrical shop on Ford St. The money was all cash and would have purchased 3 semi-detached homes at the time.

I'd heard about the thatching before, but not the rest. Very interesting. Thatching was illegal in the city from some ridiculously early date (well before the Great Fire of London) but people still tried to slip it in. I wonder if the thatching was left from before tiling became the norm? And or did it serve as insulation?

Helen I've just realised Tom Daly is user Tom on here who now lives Down Under. Hasn't posted for a long while but I've asked him about possibly knowing NormK who we lost sadly in 2022. Its snippets like these that are so valuable and could easily be lost without anyone else knowing hence why I was keen to pass on here.