My mother was Mabel Helen Whitehouse, nee Jones. Her father was Jeremiah William Jones who was the Working Director and Manager of Jeremiah Smith & Sons circa 1920. 

He lived at 9 Newbridge Street until the mid 1930s, when he moved to a new semi detached house at Pendeford Lane, Wolverhampton. The other directors of Jeremiah Smith & Sons Limited were Fred and Ernie Smith; but I have no recollection of where they lived or their background.

Numbers 9 & 10 Newbridge Street.  A pair of late 19th century houses with an access way between them which once lead to the lockworks.

I was born on 31 January 1925 at 87 Newbridge Street, which is almost opposite to number 9.

Number 87 was at that time owned by J. W. Jones. We certainly paid rent to him right up to his death during World War II, when it was willed to my mother.

From an early age, once I had become mobile, probably from 4 years onwards, I was a frequent visitor to the lockworks and often played in the comparative safety of the yard. Number nine itself was the home of J. W. Jones, thought eventually it came to serve as an office building.  In the yard behind the house there were four distinct buildings. All the buildings were of typical early/mid Victorian industry style with arched metal framed windows. The manufacturing interiors were brick or earth ground floors, solid wooden stairs and floors at first floor. There were no ceilings. All the beams and roof structure were exposed.

87 Newbridge Street

The works seen from Newbridge Street.  The gate piers to the right  gave access to the works but were not generally used.  Mr. Hill's house would have been to the right of them but is has now been replaced by modern houses.

The lockworks of Jeremiah Smith & Sons Ltd., circa 1930. 1:  the warehouse, with the office at the Newbridge Street end. 2:  the main workshop,  3A:  the casting shop 3B:   the machine shop 3C:   derelict workshop, originally with internal stairs to the upper floor.  Disused before 1925.  Demolished by 1999. Behind No.10 is its garden.  Behind that, next to the main workshop, was the garden area for No.9.  The area between the warehouse and the derelict workshop was rough, disused garden ground. The house on the right was that of Mr. Hill, the Secretary.

detail of buildings 2, 3A and 3B above. 1:  coke and sand store 2:  casting shop sand tray; there was a plinth on the other two sides. 3:  machine shop bellows forge. 4:  line shafts, with drive from - 5:  gas engine  6:  The main workshop, of two storeys.  There were work benches round all sides of both floors, with stairs in the centre.

A particular feature, which I well remember, was the gas engine, which was a single cylinder and crank machine driven from the town gas supply. It had a large flywheel about 6/7 ft in diameter which had to be swung, rather like an aircraft propeller, to start the engine. There was a pilot jet to fire the gas, which was admitted and regulated by a set of rotating governors half linked to the output drive. When running, the intermittent thump thump of the engine was a workday feature of the neighbourhood. But I cannot recall anyone complaining about it.

Even with the machinery, files were very much a work tool and I remember small sacks of files going out for re-cutting and into the works as new. Where they went or came from I never knew.

The main workshop seen from the St. Jude's School end.

The real place of interest was always the casting shop, where there was a hand bellows operated coke furnace in the corner.  Brass would come in as either small ingots or scrap and be dropped into what looked like a grey graphite crucible pot nestled into the hot coke.  When the moulds had been prepared and all was ready, the caster would lift out the pot of molten brass with hand tongs, scrape off floating dross and then pour the liquid metal into three separate holes in each mould block until they were just full, then move on. Usually there would be four, perhaps five, mould frames.  When pouring was going on the small casting shop filled with grey sulphurous fumes, with bits floating in the air like snowflakes.

The next process was to allow the brass to set and then to break open the mould blocks to reveal the still hot and smoking raw castings, looking rough and blackened, attached to the main mould feeds. The useful castings, usually the lock casings, were then broken off, quenched and sent as a batch to the workshop.