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Coalmen

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jmadone said:
I came upon several advertising images for Caswell and Bowden Ltd., described as Coal Brokers,.
View attachment 170618 View attachment 170619 View attachment 170620 View attachment 170621 View attachment 170622

I can make out two addresses from the images, one in Cannon Street and another in New Street. Is anything known about this company. I've searched the forum with no success.
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Newton chambers entrance is where the large arch is, towards the end of Cannon St. ( Looks like the same building. It miust have just been the registered office of the firm there ,as they are listed as one of 13 offices on the first floor in 1921. This moved to Edmund st in WW2.

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The main place of business was Lodge Road and Soho canal wharf. the business started in the mid 1880s , just as a coal merchant, at various sites. They later also dealt in timber. The firm survived till the 1950s
 
Brummie a long time ago said:
I remember going up Liverpool Street round past the bus station to the gasworks with Dad to get coke for the back room fire. We had a hatch in the pavement outside the house that we lifted to dump the coke into the cellar below.
Andrew.
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Does anyone remember a coal man / yard on the corner of Templefield St Small Heath the name was Job (Jobe)
 
Just found the pic below in the family archives...lots of memories. Every month or so the coalman would arrive on his horse drawn cart stacked with one hundredweight (112 lb) sacks of coal. He would hand carry several sacks up to the side of the house and dump them into the ‘coal hole’, a small bunker located inside the house, under the stairs, but with access doors both inside and outside the building. He wore a heavy leather yoke to protect his back and neck while lugging the sacks around…. those blokes were TOUGH! When I was old enough to count, and if I was handy, Nan would station me next to the coal hole on delivery days, with instructions to count how many full sacks were delivered. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure she had been cheated in the past by unscrupulous delivery men who dumped less sacks than ordered or dumped short filled sacks. At the end of the delivery, and before paying (everything was COD back then), she would poke around in the coal to check the quality, and woe betide the coalman who'd brought ‘slack’ (coal crushed into tiny pieces which burned very fast) or ‘bats’ (rock hard pieces mixed in with the cobbles in the middle of the sack to boost its weight). She had a sharp tongue my Nan! Until I learned the coal delivery schedule and made sure I was somewhere else on the appointed day, my final chore was to take a bucket and shovel out to the street and collect any ‘deposits’ left by the horse during his visit. I then had to dump the malodorous bounty in the corner of the back yard, ready for Nan to spread over her flower beds and vegetable patch!

Coalman's Cart.jpg
 
I remember that type of horse and coal cart well. They delivered in Shirley from memory it was a Birmingham Co-op delivery.
 
The Knight family (my gt gt grandparents ran a coal yard at the side of the cut in Glover St.
In 1921, Gt grandad was in court for raking the canal bed and taking a load of coal back home in a wheelbarrow. Entreprenurial? Maybe, but it was alleged he and fellow boatmen used to "accidentally" lose coal from the barge after some of their cargo "fell" overboard to be later recovered with a rake.........
Just looking after the family in very poor times
 
bestcover said:
The Knight family (my gt gt grandparents ran a coal yard at the side of the cut in Glover St.
In 1921, Gt grandad was in court for raking the canal bed and taking a load of coal back home in a wheelbarrow. Entreprenurial? Maybe, but it was alleged he and fellow boatmen used to "accidentally" lose coal from the barge after some of their cargo "fell" overboard to be later recovered with a rake.........
Just looking after the family in very poor times
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Quite creative I would say!
 
bestcover said:
The Knight family (my gt gt grandparents ran a coal yard at the side of the cut in Glover St.
In 1921, Gt grandad was in court for raking the canal bed and taking a load of coal back home in a wheelbarrow. Entreprenurial? Maybe, but it was alleged he and fellow boatmen used to "accidentally" lose coal from the barge after some of their cargo "fell" overboard to be later recovered with a rake.........
Just looking after the family in very poor times
Click to expand...
I went to school with a Martin Knight in the 60s
 
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