End of Day's brought out a Dawley crowd

This picture from Bridgnorth postcard collector Ray Farlow shows a Dawley business with a landmark chimney which was wiped from the map a little over 100 years ago.

It was taken from somewhere in the Pool Hill area and to help you get your bearings, the row of buildings in the distance beyond the right hand chimney is part of Station Road, Dawley, and unlike the works, still stands. Today the Dawley bypass runs between the works and those Station Road homes.

The postcard describes this as "Sanitary Pipe Works, Dawley" and was franked at Bridgnorth on March 1, 1910. It seems it was also once known as Brandlee Brick Works but by 1902 it was called Day's Pipe Works or, in full, Day's Automatic Waste Water Closet & Sanitary Pipe Syndicate Co Ltd, mostly making sewerage pipes of about a foot in diameter.

In 1903, according to one website (but not others), it became an engineering firm called the Bridge & Roof Works, but in any event it had closed by 1915.

Happily the ultimate fate of the works is well recorded - as it was of interest to soldiers from the Dawley area who were fighting far from home during the Great War.

In autumn 1915 the Brotherhood and Sisterhood of Dawley Baptist Church launched a little newsletter, full of local news and gossip, to be sent to the local lads in the trenches. Initially it was called the Weekly Report, and later was called Dawley News.

The issue of February 29, 1916, told the soldiers: "Before the war, you remember Day's Pipe Works? Well, almost all their buildings are now taken down, only a few stacks remain.

"As you come down the slope from Brandlee you can now see the Horsehay Cinder Hill, right across the site where Day's main building used to stand. They have not yet touched the high circular chimney stack but I suppose that also is doomed.

"Were you one of the lads carried to the top of this stack when it was in building?

"If you wish to have one more glimpse of the glorious panorama of Dawley from the top of it, you must make haste home or it will be down with a bang!"

And to remind Dawley soldiers what the chimney stack looked like, the newsletter included a sketch, complete with a soldier at the top of the stack.

There was an update in the July 11, 1916, edition to say the buildings were slowly being dismantled, but the stacks were still standing, and then on July 25: "At the Dawley end of the town the sensation of the week has been the fall of the tall chimney stack on the now almost vacant site of Day's Works. It took place on Saturday last, when many local celebrities were present."

It was all captured for posterity on camera. Completed on January 29, 1898, the stack, which stood 155ft from concrete foundation to top, was felled on July 22, 1916 by Mr William Shepherd of Brandlee, who had built the stack in the first place.

The method of demolition is not clear from the photos, and despite the prediction in the newsletter that it would come down "with a bang" there is no evidence of smoke from an explosion. One rather unclear photo shows what appears to be a process of knocking away some bricks from one side of the bottom of the stack - surely a very hazardous method if the one used.

Postcards were produced of the event, with proceeds from their sale going to Red Cross funds.

Today the site of the long-disappeared pipe works is covered by businesses including Doseley Motors.