This section of the website has been overdue for a refresh for some considerable time now – but at long last I’ve been able to get to it. Highlights are

• Separate pages for each of the volumes one and two
• Updated the cover image for volume 1 – now uses the image from the 2nd Edition

I would just like to add an historical note which is very pertinent to Charlie’s Journals, and that is that before you reach his next entry, which will release next Sunday and was originally written on July 22, 1922, he reached the tender age of 18 years old just two days earlier on the 20th of July 1922.

Which brings me to an announcement about our website.  Firstly, and we may already have let slip this change, Charlie’s written output expanded enormously after the end of July 1922, a point we are scheduled to reach in about 3 weeks time.  From then on, with very few exceptions, his day trips are much more eloquently described, which is great news for all our readers.  Secondly, In response to our questionnaire of a few days ago, the response is overwhelmingly in favour of releasing items more than once a week.  Bearing this in mind, I shall start work on scheduling more stories, all of them in midweek, so that to some extent we start to catch up our backlog, which stretches ahead for years to come.

We also now have a new contributor, Fiona Thomas, our daughter, who is busy promoting this website and all aspects of Charlie on Twitter and Facebook, and she has made a wonderful contact in Tamia Nelson, whose Florida-based website writes in great praise of Charlie Chadwick. She writes eloquently of Charlie and his literary style and I am indebted to her fulsome contribution to the memory and works of Charlie.

No date has yet been set for the increase in our website output, but probably it will be next January, which is only nine more Sundays away.  We are also looking into linking future entries with a geographical listing so that stories about certain geographical areas are all listed together and cross linked to the actual article.  Patience a little longer, please !

Here is this winter’s publishing schedule

• October 5 – 10 July 1922, Manchester Ship Canal
• October 12 – 13 July 1922, Flixton and Urmston
• October 19 – 15 July 1922, Castle Mill
• October 26 – 17 July 1922, Warburton
• November 2 – 22 July 1922, Thelwall and Lymm
• November 9 – 27 July 1922, Bolton Moors
• November 19 – 30 July 1922, Northeast Cheshire
• November 23 – 5 August 1922, Sale and Baguley
• November 30 – 13 August 1922, Boothstown and Blackrod
• December 7 – 19 August 1922, Chelford and Knutsford
• December 14 – 20 August 1922, Culcheth
• December 23 – 26 August 1922, Llangollen
• December 28 – 27 August 1922, Langollen to Bolton

It is good to have David back from his summer travels. It means that we can find the time to sit down together again (albeit separated by almost 200 miles) and do some proper planning for the next developments of the website – and some much needed maintenance!

My plan is to try and keep you updated, through this channel, of what you have to look forward to over the coming weeks and months. I hope that you will find what we have planned for you as exciting as we do. Here are some of the headlines, but I’ll also add other posts to fill in some of the detail as well.

• We are currently working our way through a backlog of items from 1922 – see a forthcoming post from David on this
• The ‘Book” pages are currently undergoing a revamp, not least to take into the fact there are now two volumes with the third well on its way
• Opening up a whole new ‘regional’ area of the website – see another post from David on the rationale for this

As always we welcome your feedback so please don’t be shy. You can tell us what you think by clicking on the reply button below.

I have just received details from David of the articles that will be released over the next couple of months and I wanted to share these with you now.

• October 27 – 5 January 1924, Millington
• November 3 – 29 January 1924, Potato Pie Supper
• November 10 – 2 March 1924, CTC ride Ribchester
• November 17 – 4 March 1924, Thelwall Brook
• November 24 – 17 February 1924, The Cloud
• December 1 – 23 February 1924, Millington
• December 8 – 23 March 1924, Ribchester
• December 15 – 30 March 1924, Wildboarclough
• December 22 – 25 March 1924, Castle Mill

I haven’t had a chance to look through this list yet to see if there is an underlying theme. Maybe you can spot one, or maybe David will let us in on it in due course.

During December we will be publishing Charlie’s diary entries for December 1924.

You can see the headlines here but the actual items will appear on the dates – so you can follow Charlie’s progress throughout the month.

A significant aspect of the Charlie Chadwick archive are the 4,000-5,000 colour transparencies that are currently stored in David’s loft. We have been pondering how best to deal with these and finally we concluded that probably it would be worth our while to invest in a Slide Scanner.

Fortunately a friend had passed on some back copies of PhotoPlus, one of which contained a review of scanners and in the end I was happy to go with their recommendation of the Canon CS5600F Film Scanner. Even better when I was able to pick this up for just £102 from dabs.com. Although there was a small delay getting the order fulfilled – even though you can virtually see the main Dabs warehouse from David’s house – it was recently delivered and although I haven’t yet seen it in operation David seems to be getting the hang of it. The first slide to be scanned is one of Atherton House.

Many of the slides are in poor condition and many of the mounts are rather dirty so it remains to be seen how many of them will be useful to us. The other thing, of course, is that the transparencies come from a different part of Charlie’s life (i.e. post-war) as opposed to his writing and drawing (predominantly from the twenties) so in many ways it seems unlikely that they will be suitable to illustrate Charlie’s stories.

The process of working out what to publish next is starting to crystalise now and there is not doubt that having a plan does make things a great deal easier.

Having spent a couple of days visiting with David we did take the time out to do some planning and what we agreed on is that the next major pieces to publish would focus on Charlie’s “Bolton Wakes Week” holidays for 1923 and 1924. Bolton Wakes Week was at the end of June / early July and so we thought it would be good to publish these so that they cover broadly the same period, i.e. late June / early July. Arbitrarily I have decided to interleave these years with the entries for 1923 appearing on Sundays and the 1924 entries appearing on Thursdays.

This will leave a slight gap from the end of existing April Publishing schedule but we have found that Charlie’s Easter tour of 1923 seems to fit quite neatly into this gap.

So, the final schedule looks like this

• May 2 – Easter 1923, Bolton to Bala
• May 4 – Easter 1923, Bala to Bettws-y-coed
• May 6 – Easter 1923, Bettws-y-coed to Whitchurch
• May 8 – Easter 1923, Whitchurch to Bolton
• May 12 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Chester
• May 16 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, Scarborough
• May 19 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Conway and the Sychnant Pass
• May 23 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, Hayburn Wyke, Hackness and the Forge Valley
• May 26 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Nant Ffrancon and Glyder Fawr
• May 30 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, Scarborough Head and the Yorkshire Wolds
• June 2 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Pont Aberglaslyn to Barmouth
• June 6 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, Goathland Moors, Whitby and Robin Hood’s Bay
• June 9 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Arthog and Penmaenpool
• June 13 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, Castle Howard and Rievaulx Abbey
• June 16 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Aberdovey to Aberystwyth
• June 20 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, York, Tadcaster, Leeds and Blackstone Edge
• June 23 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Tal-y-Llyn Pass
• June 30 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Vale of Edeyrnion and Llangollen
• July 7 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Langollen – Chester – Bolton

I can’t promise that it will all run smoothly – but at least we do have something for me to work to.