A Blacksmith Goes to War
Bill Chedham was a hero of mine, and of many another kid back in the 1950s. He and his father ran a blacksmith’s yard half way down Church Walk in Wellesbourne, which is now something of a heritage centre, but back then in those years after World War Two, was a very cosy refuge for the Chapel Street gang of kids who’d hang around the yard watching Bill, in army trousers and singlet, hammer out a piece of steel or iron into a gate finial, or a metal tyre for the few remaining farm carts still in use. His father, Albert (with open waistcoat and battered trilby hat firmly in place), would, by this time in his long career, be on bellows duty to the right of Bill and to the left of the fire. We just loved the physical openness of the place and Bill’s precision hammering as raw metal was turned into something recognisable and useful. It was mesmerising, and Bill and his dad never seemed to mind our presence often sending us off on errands for tobacco, or a jug of beer from the Stag’s Head just round the corner. I know it all sounds a bit Dickensian, which it was of course, and had been for over a hundred years. We knew Bill had been in the army and we were always asking him questions about his experiences, but he never opened up, telling us we didn’t want to hear about that. Only then, if we kept asking, would he tell us to clear off with a face that had lost its smile. We’d then congregate at my father’s bakery up a lane opposite the butchers in Chapel Street where, and with free buns we’d plan our next daring raid against the Nazi, or take on a gang of cattle rustlers, depending on which film we’d seen at the Womens Institute hut the previous week.
Bill always came to work on a fixed-wheel sit-up-and-beg bicycle with just one pedal (adapted by Bill) for his good leg, with his injured leg stiffly immobile, and a fag clamped in the corner of his mouth.
Born in 1928, Bill Chedham had just missed enlistment during WWII, but on his 18th birthday in 1946 the letter from the War Office arrived and he was in the army and soon undergoing training for deployment to the vicious hot spot that was Palestine.
I always understood from my father that Bill had been a paratrooper, which in Palestine would have been the 6th Airborne, who were deployed against Jewish insurgents fighting the British for the right to establish Israel. It was a bloody and…
