Just found this thread Wendy. I remember the Cowdrill's very well. My dad was a friend or Mr Cowdrill. (I don't know his first name - that's what I called him as a little boy). They had a factory in the old chapel at the bottom of Guildford Street where you could take your bike frame and get it chromium plated. There was the shop in question in Farm Street but also another one just around the corner from Farm Street in Wheeler Street. Here they sold radios as well as bikes and it was here that we would take our acumulator to get charged.
There was a third shop up at Villa Cross at the top of Barker Street. This was a large shop that sold bicycles. I would pass this on my way to work at Wolf Electric, where I worked before going to Art College. I would look longingly at the Dawes racers with double clangers. I was to get one later but from a shop in Cotteridge rather than Cowdrills.
As a little boy of five or six I would be with my mom when she visited an invalided old lady, or at least she was to me, who lived in a flat above another shop in Wheeler Street. I believe that whe was one of the Cowdrill family.
Some fifty years later, when I was teaching in Cambridgeshire, I taught a boy called Cowdrill. He turned out to be the grandson of the Mr Cowdrill I had known.
