Queen Street Southern End

A Memory of Droitwich Spa.

This view is of Queen Street, just before the junction with High Street. The TOBACCO shop building is still there and is now a newsagent. The properties between this and the Royal Exchange were demolished and replaced with modern buildings, probably in the 1970s.
The electrical business, Abel and Smith, provided a long defunct service of recharging low voltage batteries (lead acid 'accumulators') for those who had no electricity in their homes, so had to use battery powered valve radios. These accumulators were about 1/4 the size of a car battery and used as a 'low tension' power source for the valve 'heaters'. Old radios also needed a 'high tension' battery and a 'grid bias' battery, both of which were non-rechargeable.
When I was about 10 (1952), and living in St Peter's Road, Witton, one of my tasks was to take an accumulator to Abel and Smith's every week and swap it for a fully charged one, on behalf of an old lady who lived in a victorian semi across the road from our house. My job was to connect up her radio, check all the batteries were OK and fetch replacements for those that had gone flat. If I remember correctly, this earned me 3d a week.
The Royal Exchange building is still there, much modernised and occupied now by the Spa Housing Association.