LEIGH VALLEY LIGHT RAILWAY

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WAGONS

Some full sized Mark Williams wagons were built by the Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Company Limited while Webb Brothers Battledown Works apparently had its own narrow gauge railway. The enterprise founded by Roland and Harold Webb in 1897 certainly supplied bricks for most of the buildings constructed in Cheltenham during the first half of the 20th Century. These included Cheltenham Town Hall, the former brewery in Henrietta Street and Cheltenham General Hospital.

The Battledown Brick and Terra Cotta Company was sold to the Webb Brothers by the Reverend Arthur Armitage, and Roland and Harold also inherited a Tivoli based coal merchant's business from their father. Other Webb Brothers businesses diversified into gravel, sand , turf and lime and they took leases on Cheltenham's Winter Gardens ( where they staged Britain's first recorded indoor tennis tournament ) and Montpellier Gardens. The 30 acre Battledown Works site occupied Coltham Fields, an area bounded by Hales Road, Rosehill Street, Haywards Road and Battledown Approach. Today's Queen Elizabeth playing fields stand on the site of the clay pits and the industrial estate in King Alfred's Way stand on the works complex.

Backed by the Webbs and directors such as John Haddon ( half of the well known Cheltenham retailer Shirer and Haddon ) the well funded company invested heavily in new brick producing plant. Soon 30 000 bricks were being produced a day. Cheltenham clay was unusually hard, so to make it workable water was added along with "grog" - a mix of ground baked clay, ashes and sand. This sqidgy blend was then extruded in a continuous line and cut by wire into bricks measuring 4" x 3" x 9" ready for firing. Battledown bricks had six flat faces, distinctly different from mould made bricks of other firms that had a "frog" or triangular sectioned recess. The advantages of Battledown bricks were greater structural strength and the need to use less mortar. The disadavantage was that they were more expensive to produce. Webb's bought all other Cheltenham brickmakers and by 1907 Battledown was the only brick works in the spa town. But by the 1960s the London Brick Company ( of which Norman Wisdom was a director ) was the largest manufacturer of its kind in the World and Webbs could not complete and went into voluntary liquidation in 1971.

BRAKE VAN

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