Stoke

The weighing machine was, as Rob stated, in the field at the junction of Dane Road with Walsgrave Road, and Ansty Road, the farther side of the field on Ansty Road being Wyken Croft Road I think.

Looking at your group of Stoke photos, Rob, I am immediately transported back home, as I know all these streets like the back of my hand and lived in Momus Boulevard from the age of ten. I noted in a recent quiz programme on TV that Momus was the god of mockery. So named perhaps because when built it was merely half of what one would expect a boulevard to be!

Just looking through a 1689 will of one of my ancestors Samuel Harwar. He mentions a close of land called Lamplands which he asks them to sell to pay of his debt to Edward Day, to put towards his financial expenses and to pay off any other debts. Cash flow must have been bad! Has anyone come across the name Lamplands, I can't find it on a map.

If I remember rightly the weighbridge was situated in the area of what became the builders yard belonging to Youells opposite the Walsgrave pub.

That looks as if it is where it was jonboy. This is a 1928 map, no Dane Road but the position is where you describe it.

The Gosford Green end approaching Ball Hill

Good ones Prof. I have to admit I would feel a right nerd sitting up there on my own.

Note the top shops on Walsgrave Rd, on the edge of Stoke Churchyard. I remember them there! Also an early photo as there is no lych-gate, erected in late 1920s.

Prof, Your second picture - was that the library on the right by the blue van? And note all the trees in the third picture, wasn't that somewhere near the cemetery? Remember about that time coming home from the Forum on a dark windy night and finding we were in the graveyard - real scary. Note also the motor bike and sidecar, all the rage in the thirties. Yes, 1948 summer time, and many a night I walked along that road from town to the other side of Ansty, little traffic and no lift. What I did for women! But then I had just spent two years without seeing an English girl, or any girl for that matter - at eighteen, a lost youth, shades of war and after. 'Don't cry for me Angelina'.

Hello Kaga, glad you are better. The Stoke Library on the corner of Kingsway and Walsgrave Road is just to the right but out of the picture, before the pedestrian lights; the red brick affair I think is the gateway to St Margaret's Church. I joined the Stoke Junior Library when I was nine years old, with another boy from my class, who borrowed non-fiction books on isobars, cloud formation and other weather-related topics. I often wonder whether he became a Professor? The b&w photo does show Stoke St Michael's graveyard, where my family are buried, both parents dying young: mother 40 and father 58. No doubt you remember the top shops by the churchyard too? My dad had a motorbike and sidecar in the early thirties but later upgraded to a car, a Lanchester with double declutch mechanism. He worked for Humber all his life, mostly at Rootes shadow factory (Toll Bar End).

Annewiggy. Although I can see the map says weigh house, could it not have been an old mortuary chapel of the 18th-19th century that stood in the bottom of St Michael's cemetery, then converted. It was the custom in Victorian funerals for the body to be set down to rest in a chapel in the graveyard, with the mourners standing round in silence, before the final burial - its ancient form giving it continuity across the centuries, the newly dead emerging with the scattered bones of ancient local people. Standing near the road but just inside the old cemetery, it's about the right size as a single door, an oak or wooden arched door and narrow curved arch windows - fits the bill completely. I have walked through that old cemetery field to reach Bell Green when a kid a number of times.

cf with Rob's post 12

MisterD-Di, hi. There is a photo somewhere on this forum that shows a weighbridge on the Ansty Road. I wondered if you ever visited it, or knew anything about it? It is nothing like any other weighbridge I ever saw in or around Coventry, or what it weighed, and no one in Stoke History seems to know either. Would love to know your thoughts and expertise about this building. Regards, Kaga.

This one, Kaga? "Demolished in the 1950's".

For many years a gentleman called Alfred Clements was Parish Clerk and he is on many censuses as living in Orchard Cottage and he is the rate collector. In a 1916 newspaper it says that he he has given in his notice as he is ill. His address is then given as Weigh House, Walsgrave Road. He died in 1919 and his probate again gives his address as Weigh House. His wife died in 1931 and she was still living there. Surely they could not have been living in that building, although it does have a chimney?