Description:Horace West pictured outside his home Forge Cottage (also known as The Smithy) in Hill Ridware, where he lived with his wife Frances (known as Dolly) nee Astbury, from around 1918 to the 1960s.
Horace was born at Budbrooke near Warwick in 1891. He was a blacksmith who was apprenticed aged 17 in Warwick, where he met Dolly who was a housemaid. She (a twin) was born in Rugeley in 1890. Her parents were from two then well-known Rugeley families. Her father - George Astbury {sometime Asbury} and his father John before him were butchers at Horsefair from around 1868. Her mother's family, the Tingay’s came from Great Yarmouth where her father was a baker and confectioner coming to Rugeley around 1870, initially working for A.W. Whitworth. He set up on his own account in Upper Brook Street about 1911.
Horace (1891-1972) and Dolly (1890-1983), were married at St. Augustine’s Church, Rugeley in 1918. They had three daughters: Mary was a wartime nurse who married Sydney Elkin; Frances (called Betty) was a call-operator at Staffordshire Police HQ at Baswich, Stafford, who married Frederick Heath, and Nancy who married local footballer William Harvey.
Over the years Dolly ran a shop from the forge premises in the village selling home-made sweets and a variety of goods. She died at Rugeley Hospital in 1983.
During the First World War Horace shoed horses for the Army. When the Blacksmith work declined, he pedalled around the village with an ice-cream bicycle, he also started selling petrol from outside the forge. During the Second World War, he was a member of the Home Guard and he raised money for the British Red Cross weekly in the village hall. He went to work as a blacksmith where he did the forge work in the maintenance department at Edward Johns & Co., Armitage Ware, from where he retired aged 70. In his spare time Horace was head bell-ringer and a church warden at St. Nicolas Church, Mavesyn Ridware. By his death in 1972 he was living in a bungalow at 7, School Lane.
Forge Cottage was demolished in the 1960s and replaced by a new Rectory. This in turn was demolished and the site redeveloped and occupied with new houses.