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Recollections Of The Crooked House STAR LETTER
Like many others, I was very upset to hear about the recent fire at the Crooked House pub in Gornalwood, and its demolition. My parents and ancestors were from the Gornal area, and the Crooked House very much featured as part of their lives.
I am now in my 90s, but one of my own memories of the Crooked House involves being taken there when I was roughly 10 or 11 years old in about 1942 by my father (William Walter Burrows), a Gornalite. We were staying nearby at the family home, 4 Straits Road with my Aunty Ruth, Uncle Enoch and cousin Ethel. We walked to Hopyard Lane into Brick Kiln Lane and down to Himley Road, where we crossed into another unsurfaced road leading to the pub. The building stood alone in a wooded area about a quarter of a mile down the lane. I recall its official name was the Glynne Arms – but it was also known locally as the Siden House, meaning the ‘Sunken House’.
I was struck by the sight of the pub standing at a considerable angle from the vertical, and supported at its left-hand gable by two massive brick buttresses. One of the rooms we went in contained a kitchen table in front of a leaning window and some wall shelving which had been levelled up, leaving angled slots in the many coats of whitewash. The building’s leaning walls gave rise to various optical illusions including objects apparently rolling uphill.
Two men at the table had a stoneware bottle held at the table end. “Which way will the bottle go when we let go?” they asked me. “It’ll fall off and land on the floor,” I said straight away. They then let go of the bottle and, surprisingly to me, it started to roll ‘uphill’ according to my view of the window behind it. One man caught it as it fell to the floor at the ‘top’ of the table. “How about that?” they said. I was suitably impressed.
We went to the front door where I was turned to face down the passage to the back door. “There’s half-a-crown if you can run to the back door without touching the wall.”
Half-a-crown (50p nowadays) was a lot to a young boy in those days, so I set off. However, I soon cannoned into the wall on my left as I ran. It was impossible not to touch the wall. No half-crown for me!
Since hearing the tragic n
