Another piece of village blacksmith’s work identified (but not yet revealed!)

For those of you who have been following these blogs, you’ll know that we have yet to complete our brief overview of the village blacksmiths Ernest and Albert Rhodes. In fact, we’ll be revealing the final part – Albert Rhodes business transition into Rhodes Engineering – at our meeting on 22 September. But that’s not all.

We’ll also have news about another piece of Albert Rhodes’ work – but we’re not identifying where it is until our September meeting. You might be able guess its location from the photograph accompanying this blog. It’s not that far away and dates from 1957. It was gifted by Albert Rhodes and his wife as they were old friends of the rector of the parish church concerned (another clue).

You may remember we have been able to identify that Brimington Parish Church railings (pictured bottom) were made by Ernest and Albert Rhodes. Additionally, we might have also identified another piece of the Rhodes’ work – but, again, you’ll have to wait until our September meeting to find out the results of our detective work.

We hope to see you at Brimington Community Centre on Thursday 22 September 2022 when Paul Freeman’s and Philip Cousins’ talk, ‘Missed our blog? Or some asides on Brimington’s and Tapton’s history’ will reveal all.

Doors open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start.

We’ll also be revealing the answer to a long-standing mystery about a ‘rogue’ coat of arms at Tapton, in the same talk. More about this in our next post.

Our previous blogs about the Rhodes family can be found here and here.

Everyone is welcome to attend our meetings. Further details can be found here.

This post was slightly revised on 12 September 2022, to reflect that the newly identified blacksmith’s work may not have actually been made in Brimington.

At our September meeting revealed that the mystery photograph is of work at Newbold Parish Church. We’ll be publishing a new blog on this in due course.