Stuart Williams – Image from Southcart Books.
It is my sad duty to share the news with readers here that yesterday afternoon, Tuesday 15th October 2019, fellow local blogger, friend of the Brownhills Blog, total geek and dedicated local historian Stuart Williams passed away following a period of illness.
Stuart was a great writer and creative and was one of the establishing bloggers of the Walsall online and social media scene I stumbled into a decade ago. At that point, Stuart’s Bloxidge Tallygraph – he always was, and remained a passionate Bloxwich lad – was well established and a beacon of engaging and beautifully written, well researched online history and news, that was totally professional in both presentation and content.
Stuart did great work at the Walsall Local History Centre where he spent the majority of his working life, but also in his own time with a huge range of clubs, societies, writers groups and more – Stuart covered everything from Star Trek to astronomy; from photography to poetry. He was both remarkably talented, and socially engaged.
Stuart had so many side projects that I feel sure the whole of Walsall must have known him. He wrote, performed, blogged, photographed, lectured, protested, educated, made, programmed and re-enacted. All with great humour and a charming, self-effacing and relaxed attitude to life.
Rest in peace old lad. The cold, cold wind takes another of the online community we were all bound up together by in the whirlwind of 2009: You were there on the front page of the Yam Yam with me, the Plastic Hippo and other writers of the day. I like to think you’re up there now in some bar, laughing with Mark Blackstock and the Hippo himself and remembering those days, before animatedly discussing Aldus Huxley with the big lad, while Mark takes the piss.
My condolences to Andy, Stuart’s brother, to his family and to the immense number of friends Stuart made both online and in the real world.
Tara a bit, Bloxidge Mon.
And now, we are fewer once more.