Keeping the home fires burning in the cold winter of 1970 were members of Link, a charity for elderly people led by… Stafford’s Pageant Day in 1971 saw Merlin Maddock take up the challenge to fly for 50 metres without the assistance of a… MOURNERS gathered around the graveside in a South Welsh village cemetery were not unduly surprised to hear the minister utter the prayer… In the name of the Father, the Son and into the hole he goes. After all, they were saying farewell to a joker, an eccentric, a man who had lived in Stafford for the best part of 25 years before departing for the village of his birth where he lost none of the qualities of an oddball.