BROMSGROVE town centre had to endure five days of earshattering fusillade as men with pneumatic drills tore up eight feet strips of asphalt on either side of the main street.

Protests had been made by shopkeepers and office workers at the noisy interruption and, realising that protest was useless, many fled. Conditions became so bad that even staff at the Messenger were forced to pick up their typewriters and descend on the managing director’s office further into the building.

THE mechanical digger at the council house grounds had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the cave in the lawn was not, as gullible children used to believe, the entrance to a subterranean passage leading to Grafton Manor. It was nothing more than a cool cellar for the wine, or possibly only a shelter for the gardener when what later became the council house was the residence of the vicars of Bromsgrove.

 THE historic Bromsgrove Elizabethan property, the Tudor House, New Road, changed hands.Abid of £5,250 at an auction secured the property for Messrs Luce and Silvers, the Bromsgrove auctioneers who had occupied the property for 47 years.The building was originally the Hop Pole, a high street hostelry built sometime between 1572 and 1582 and was used by Sir Tromas Lyttleton, of Frankley, as his headquarters during the Civil War.