Page 43 - WHO'S WHO OF DUDLEY ROTARY

Cycling Club at the time of ‘penny farthings’. He was a Past Master of the Dudley Harmonic
Lodge of Freemasons.

121 William Henry PLANT (1875-1945) (Elected 4.10.1926; membership terminated 19.3.1928.)
‘Engineer’. Works Manager, later Managing Director, of the Vono Company’s Duport Foundry
at Dudley Port, Tipton. He followed in the footsteps of his father, uncle and uncle’s cousin,
‘ironmasters’ trading as Plant and Fisher, who operated another, smaller, Dudley Port Foundry
which was bought out in 1891. His home was at Beacon House, Dudley Port, which he inherited
from his father, but in 1940 he retired to Wall Heath.

122 Jabez Harold ROUND (1882-1955) (Elected 4.10.1926; resigned 30.4.1934.) Commissioner for
Oaths. Solicitor in partnership with Otto Bergendorff (who joined the club 2 months after him,
member #130). They bought the practice of Sydney Hooper shortly before his death in 1924
and continued to trade as S Guest Hooper & Co. with offices in Wolverhampton Street, Dudley
and Colmore Row, Birmingham. Bergendorff left in 1928 to set up a new practice in his own
name in Dudley. Harold Round kept the firm going under the name of Hooper Round & Co., still
with offices in Dudley and Birmingham. Ten years or so later he took his cousin Baden Round
into partnership. He started as a solicitor’s clerk with Sydney Hooper on leaving school at the
age of 14, and remained with the practice, under its various changes of names as partners came
and went, for the whole of his working career. He seems to have qualified as a solicitor about
1910. He was a member of the Dudley Literary Society, the Dudley Bohemian Society, and a
freemason in the Harmonic Lodge and Dudley Castle Lodge. For most of the time his home was
in Stourbridge although after the death of his first wife in 1933 he moved to Harborne and
remarried, returning eventually to Stourbridge.

123 Arthur Martin WRIGHT (1884-1953) (Elected 4.10.1926; resigned 19.9.1927.) Wholesale Grocer
& Provision merchant. He was general manager of Goodwin Foster Brown Limited, probably the
largest wholesale grocers in Dudley at that time. Born the son of a grocer on Smethwick High
Street, at the age of 17 he was a grocer’s assistant in Oxford and in his mid 20s was an employer
dealing in groceries, wines and spirits back in Smethwick. He received unwelcome publicity in
1915 when he was sued at West Bromwich County Court over a gambling debt: the judge held
that the debt was not enforceable in law but if the defendant was a man of honour he would
pay. Arthur Wright was in Dudley only a few years, moving to Harborne about 1935.

124 Samuel Dudley HEATH (1892-1968) (Associate Member elected 18.10.1926; membership
terminated 8.4.1929) Electrical Engineer. Partner from the early 1920s with Gerald Walker in
the firm of G G Walker & Co., Electric Light & Power Engineers of Hall Street, Dudley. (He was
proposed for membership as ‘Electrical Contractor’ but joined as an Associate under the same
classification as his partner, who was elected on the same day - member #126.) He was brought
up in Tipton and started work as a clerk in an iron works but by 1913, at the age of 21, both he
and Gerald Walker were officials of the Dudley Corporation Electrical Power Department
operating the municipal power station at Spring’s Mire, Dudley. Then in May 1916 he was called
up in the Great War. He saw action in France with the South Staffordshire Regiment but in
August 1918 was transferred to the Hertfordshire Regiment. Days later, in a battle near
Cambrai, he received a bullet wound to the left wrist which left him permanently disabled. That
did not prevent him becoming captain of the Dudley Conservative Club’s bowling club. In
retirement he moved from Dudley to Torquay.

125 William SHADDICK (1887-1977) (Elected 18.10.1926; resigned 18.6.1928.) Metallic bedstead
manufacture. He was a Manager at H Marlow Limited’s Excelsior Works, Wellington Road,
Dudley, manufacturer of brass and enamelled iron bedsteads ‘in all the latest colour shades’,
‘also in imitation oak, mahogany, walnut, teak, etc, to match the bedroom suite’.