Tony Hoskins has provided this interesting recollection:
Tony Hoskins here (senior partner GWRA Railwayana Auctions now living next to the main line in Bredon)
I've just been perusing Gerald Wadley notes and then Mick Rock.
I haven't seen Gerald since I left the Grammar School in Worcester but the last I saw Mick was just after he left Worcester to go teaching at Weymouth, I guess this was around the time I joined the RAF in 1967 or perhaps a few years later, I can't really remember.
Nice to know he's still around. I have fond memories of Rocky, Ringer Reynolds and myself, then known as as Flogger Hoskins, playing 'hand tennis' on the Bredicot road at Spetchley on summer evenings in the early 60s. In between trains, we used to knock a tennis ball around each other with open bare hands and I remember Rocky's hands sometimes bleeding due to the battering they took as a fireman. We would often stay beyond dusk and use a powerful torch to get the loco numbers, it wasn't always successful, much depended on the speed of the trains!.
I've lost my notes from those days at Bredicot and Spetchley just retaining some from a few trips I made with the Worcester Loco Club to South Wales and some odds and ends from private trips of mine to places such as Swindon, Wolverhampton and Tamworth (plus an interesting trip from Worcester to Newark and back, by Midland Red - in a day!).
I have two particular memories of Spetchley that have never left me.
Occasionally, on a summer Saturday, we would congregate at the footbridge just south of the old Spetchley Yard. It was a great vantage point and we would never be bothered by passing cars and lorries (not that there were many in those days) One Saturday, possibly 1961 or 1962, there was great excitement when Jubilee No.45680 'Camperdown', roared south on a summer special. This was a rare sighting indeed because I'm pretty sure it was then a Carlisle loco.
The second which became a real teaser, was when I cycled to Bredicot one Saturday morning and arrived before anyone else. I put my bike against the fence on the Crowle side of the line just as the roar of a northbound train, approaching at great speed, fell upon my ears. I waited for the train to appear beneath the bridge and it was a Royal Scot. Although it escapes me, I did get the number and I think it was 46148 The Manchester Regiment, but to my utter amazement, there was another Scot right behind it double heading. I was so taken aback that I missed it completely!! Of course when everyone else arrived, they just wouldn't believe me. I'm sure someone somewhere would have seen this but to this day, I doubt if anyone would still believe me! I never saw a double headed Scot after and I haven't even seen a photograph of one anywhere.
Regards, Tony Hoskins