Tags
Black Country, Black Country Living Museum, Blackpole, Cadbury's, chocolate, Dudley, railways, Railways in Worchester, Trains., Winston Churchill, Worchester, Worchester News
According to my notes, this is a “O-6-OST Manning Wardle locomotive built at the Boyne Engine Works, Leeds in 1923” (I hope I have made a note of this correctly, for those of you who are interested in the technicalities of these things), but I’m going to refer to it as Winston.
For those of you more interested in chocolate than steam locomotives you might be interested to know that Winston was ordered in 1923 by the Cadbury brothers, of Cadbury’s Chocolate fame, and spent a considerable time at Cadbury’s Blackpole factory, near Worchester (a place I had previous known absolutely nothing about).
According to the Worchester News, the Cadbury brothers bought the former munitions factory site at Blackpole from the Government in 1921 and it became a centre for “marzipan manufacturing” and “the sorting of nuts“, amongst other things. In 1966 the Board of Trade refused permission for a new cake factory on the site and by 1971 production had moved to Moreton-in-the-Wirral. To quote from the newspaper again, “…of the 680 employees losing their jobs, 320 were described as “part-time married women“”.
Another interesting fact from the BBC News website, “The site had its own sports ground – BBC Hereford & Worcester’s Dave Bradley remembers that cricket teams loved playing there, as they were served chocolate cake“. That sounds like my sort of gig!
The Railways in Worchester website has some wonderful photographs of trains working at the Blackpole factory and they give a good impression of how busy the factory must have been in its hay day.
The Antics Roadshow blog 