Hi Lyn
That's brilliant. Thanks very much. I think you've cracked it.
I'm having a bit of a family history binge, and I've found copies of the auction notices for the two properties in the 1960s. They match completely.
No 38 Sutherland St, the two sheds behind it, and the area along the railway embankment went up for auction on Friday 10 November 1961, sold by the estate of my grandfather, Stanley Victor, but originally purchased by his uncle FW (Frederick William) Rudder sometime before 1914, and used as a timber yard. The early 1900s map seems to show the main shed already erected there.
(The auction notice for No 38 says it had outline planning permission for 5 light industrial units, but there's no evidence from the modern image that the buyer took any advantage of that!)
The buildings at and behind 79-81 Aston Hall Rd were auctioned on Wednesday 8 May, 1963, had two workshops and timber storage sheds and were being sold by the company of my great grandfather CJ (Charles John) Rudder, nineteen years after his death but before the firm's final liquidation.
CJ originally started his packing case manufacturing business at a site on Cambridge St, possibly around 1903. But he seems to have acquired the Aston Hall Rd site after his brother FW died in 1925. After that, CJ managed both companies as separate entities. It must have been something of a fluke that the Aston Hall Rd site became available, because, in effect, the overall site now had two entrances, on different streets, and lots of shared storage by the railway embankment.
The early maps show a property set back from the road on the Aston Hall Road site. It seems to align with the front of the main roadside building from the 1940s, and I wonder if it was simply incorporated into the overall site construction when CJ took over.
The family rode the boom and bust of most of the smaller timber traders of Birmingham -- a period of almost exactly a century. CJ's dad William Daniel was the original founder of Rudders and Paynes business on Chester St, and appears in business directories from 1852, first on Bagot St, and then in Chester St.
I remember a single visit as a young boy to the Aston Hall Rd works around 1958, CJ's picture, with an exotic walrus mustache, was still hanging up in the front office.
My father was already clear in his mind that the business was doomed, and even at my young age I was aware of a sense of some relief on his part. By the time it was all wound up, any remaining value was taken up by death duties, overdue tax and solicitors' fees -- a mess that took another 30 years to resolve. But even before the properties went up for auction, the younger Rudders of our branch had already moved to Essex and London, resolved to find a different line of work and a regular salary.
Many thanks for your help and for the introduction to fabulous online mapping gizmos
