John Williams, usually known as Jack, was the Castle Bromwich village blacksmith, a churchwarden and a long-time bellringer at Castle Bromwich church, he is buried in the church graveyard.

John’s father was also John Williams, born in 1837, the son of James Williams; all were local blacksmiths. James’s father, another John Williams was also a blacksmith with his forge on the Chester Road where Cedar Avenue now runs.

And the churchwardens’ accounts show that yet another John Williams was paid in 1785 for re-hanging the bells. He would almost certainly be an ancestor of John and he too was also the village blacksmith at the time. It is recorded that he was paid £5: 16 shillings: 5 pence for the job. This was a large amount of money in 1785 worth perhaps £10,000s worth of labour at today’s values. But lowering the bells, presumably mending the frame and rehanging the bells was a substantial piece of work.

Lucy née Baumber was born in the tiny village of Digby in Lincolnshire some 12 miles south of the county town. How she came to meet John Williams from Castle Bromwich is not known, but the couple were married in 1899 probably at St Thomas’ Church, Digby. The marriage is recorded in Sleaford Registration District which includes Digby.

They came to live on Castle Bromwich Green, the little 18th-century house to the right of the Coach & Horses, which at that time was a small local pub, not the large building that stands there today. John was set up with his father as a blacksmith with his younger brother Arthur as an apprentice. Arthur was known locally as Clogman on account of the boots he wore. The sign on the house advertised the business as a blacksmiths and coach builders, John Williams & Sons. John specialised in shoeing horses while his brother’s forte was making wagon wheels.

As the business grew, it was decided that Arthur should remain in the old house with his wheelwright’s business while John would set up a new forge on the other side of the Green. By this time motor cars were becoming a more common sight and John began to undertake repairs on them.

This was in 1923 and there were now plans to build a new road, the Bradford Road. The traffic along the Chester Road through the old village was increasingly becoming a problem. John’s workshop was so close to the route of the new road, that he changed its name from the Forge to the Forge Garage and hoped his business would benefit from the motor cars which would be soon passing close by.

Unfortunately he did not live long enough to see the Bradford Road built, dying at the age of 54 on 26 October 1926.

After his death, Lucy took over running the Forge Garage and the blacksmith’s business, but it must have proved too much for her. Trade directories of 1927 do not record the business.

Lucy lived for another 23 years after her husband’s death and died on 29 December 1949 at the age of 78. She was buried with him in Castle Bromwich graveyard.

In memory of John’s many years as a bellringer, Lucy Williams left a bequest in her will for the church bells to be recast. The ring of six derived from an installation of 1717 paid for by Sir John Bridgeman II of Castle Bromwich Hall. These had been recast from an earlier medieval ring at the church. In 1893 to commemorate the wedding of the Duke of York, the future King George V with Princess Mary of Teck, Charles Carr of Smethwick was commissioned to cast a sixth bell.

However, it was found that the third bell was now out of tune with the new peal. Carr therefore cast a new third. It is not known how the new peal of six sounded. However, it may be that John Williams was never happy with the new bells for his wife to have left such a large sum of money in his memory to have them recast.

The 1717 bells were cast by Joseph Smith of Edgbaston long before the days of scientific tuning. However, studies of Smith’s remaining bells have been undertaken which show the remarkable skill of his casting and the accuracy of the harmonics of his bells. The old Castle Bromwich third bell, which is now in the Roundhouse at Derby College, is testament to this. By Charles Carr’s time, scientific tuning had been discovered and pretty much perfected by some bell founders, though Carr’s success in this field was less secure. It may be that Carr’s bells did not sound good or that they did not fit in with Smith’s earlier bells.

In 1952 the six bells were taken down by Gillett & Johnston, renowned bell founders of Croydon. A new fine-sounding ring was cast using the old metal, some of which dated from the Middle Ages.

The new bells were first officially rung on 22 November 1952 nearly three years after Lucy’s death and 26 years after the death of her husband.

To commemorate the Diamond Anniversary of the bells, St Mary & St Margaret’s bellringers planted bulbs on the grave of the couple; the bulbs which were kindly donated by Hall’s Garden Centre were, appropriately, bluebells. Robert Hall was pleased to contribute to this event. His family’s business was founded in Castle Bromwich also in 1952 and his parents too are buried in the graveyard. The bells were then rung in memory of the Williams couple.

A small stone chapel had been built at Castle Bromwich by the 12th century. This was greatly extended with the addition of a large timber building during the 15th century. Then between 1726 and 1730 the timber-framed church was entirely encased in brick in a Renaissance style. Above the north and south doors inside the church is an inscription stating the dates when the church had been ‘rebuilt’. It was therefore assumed in later years that the old church had been demolished and that nothing remained of the earlier buildings.

In 1893 Charles Bateman was commissioned to carry out restoration work on Castle Bromwich church. The uneven damaged floor of stone flags was to be replaced with encaustic tiles, a central heating system was to be installed with pipes and radiators and a figure of Christ ascending in glory was to replace the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments and the Creed in the east window.

(The same year Lord Bradford ordered a sixth bell to be hung in the tower to commemorate the wedding of the Duke of York, who would later become King George V and Princess Mary of Teck, a close friend of Lady Bradford. Charles Carr of Smethwick was employed to cast the bell and to fit a new bell frame to accommodate it.)

Before starting work, Bateman decided to make a thorough investigation of the church and to draw up an architectural plan of the building.

There were peculiarities that had puzzled Bateman about the layout of the church. The architect is thought to have been Thomas White of Worcester. He was a pupil of Christopher Wren and well knew the rules of the Renaissance style. And yet the columns of the arcade separating the side aisles from the nave are not aligned with the window piers. Nor are the arches between the columns of classical proportions. These are not mistakes that would have been made by an architect such as Thomas White. Furthermore, the chancel was very large for an 18th-century church when chancels built at that time were often small apsidal additions.

Bateman made a large number of drawings of both the exterior and interior of the building. He also decided to climb up into the church loft to inspect the construction of the roof. High up in the ceiling near the south door is a small trapdoor some 10 metres above the floor. Pushing open the trapdoor, Bateman shone his oil light into the roof-space, and found more than he could have suspected and the answer to his questions about the church’s design.

Here were the slender Georgian roof beams that he had expected to see, but further away in the gloom Bateman could make out a massive structure of large timber beams and trusses and supports that could only be of a medieval date.

Bateman returned to the roof space again and again in the coming weeks making precise drawings of the whole construction, drawings which still exist. The structure appeared to date from the middle of the 15th century. Near the east end some infilling still remained of wattle and daub, showing where the original end wall of the old church was. The Georgian church was longer than its medieval predecessor. At the east end there was a length of wooden moulding indicating the chancel arch with evidence of medieval paintwork. Bateman was probably the first person to have seen the sight since the roof had been ceiled in 1731.

The discovery of the medieval roof led the architect then to suspect that the Georgian columns inside the church might conceal medieval timber uprights. He removed part of the wooden cladding on one of the columns in the north aisle and found that beneath the 18th-century plaster there were indeed pillars made from the trunks of enormous ancient oaks that had held up the roof since the 15th century.

Bateman made many architect’s drawings of the building and drew a view of the church conjecturing how it must have looked when it was built around 1450, probably during the reign of Henry VI. He had discovered a unique church building, a timber-framed church encased in 18th brick, and the only one of its kind in the country.

Bateman’s investigations did not end there. Remarkably there was more to be revealed.

A drawing of Castle Bromwich Hall and church had been made by Henry Beighton for William Dugdale’s ‘Antiquities of Warwickshire’ which was published in 1730. By that date the hall had probably been rebuilt, but the church would not be finished until 1731. Beighton shows the church rebuilt in brick in Renaissance style, but the chancel is shown made of stone. The chancel is actually built of brick. The local architect suspected that behind the brick might be the Norman stone chapel which had also been encased in brick as had the medieval timber church.

He removed some of the wooden panelling in the chancel to reveal a part of the church that was even older than the rest. Behind the woodwork was a stone wall, part of the original Norman chapel which had been built over 700 years earlier in the early 12th century.

The Georgian church was, in fact, a church within a church and was far older than anyone had ever expected.