Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smethwick

Our very own Roving Reporter Dennis revisits the Black Country to find out what's still there and what has changed.

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Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smethwick

Postby Dennis » Mon Oct 17, 2011 6:59 pm

(click on photo to enlarge)


Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit (Virgil), ‘Perhaps one day we'll look back even on these things with joy.’ I think that time has come.

I haven't always been this old. In fact I was quite ridiculously young some time ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles first LP’, as another poet, Philip Larkin, famously wrote. Not long after those innocent bike rides to Clent I told you about earlier, something very odd started happening to me which involved a lot of Radio Luxemburg, Tru-Gel in my hair and an iridescent brown suit made by Burton's in Blackheath. I wasn't the only one to enter this chrysalis stage. With a few exceptions – those chaps who were reluctant to leave behind Meccano and model steam engines – we were all silently and purposefully heading in the same direction, like programmed robots in a B-movie. But how do you meet a girl when you almost never see one ? When you have three punishing hours of homework every night and six at the weekend ? If you're stuck at a boys’ school in Birmingham that takes an eternity on a Midland Red ‘bus to get to? But there was, I have to say, one girl named Anna who always got on at Causeway Green, demure, brown eyes. We talked for weeks, I asked her out to see Cliff in Summer Holiday, biked round and round her street, and then lost my nerve at the last minute.

Happily, contemporaries faced with a similar problem had found the solution. If you couldn't join a youth club or get introduced to your sister's classmates, there was always the Saturday dance. {simpletext} Quinton Parish Church
At Langley Baths the pool was boarded over for the winter and transformed into a dance hall full of teenagers looking like…well, brooding extras from Mad Men. Ditto church halls all around the district. And thus it was, my friends, that I ended up one evening in 1964 sitting next to a girl named Jackie at the back of a cinema in Quinton named – now was it the Danilo then, or the Essoldo ? (which amazingly is still standing and called the Reel Cinema) – occasionally looking at a film about Helen of Troy that was already ancient itself. How had such a hopelessly longed-for result come about ? Simples : the dance at Quinton Parish Church Hall the week before…

Quinton, like other border towns between the Black Country and Birmingham such as Bearwood and West Smethwick, had not yet had a noisy motorway driven right through the middle of it. I wouldn't say Quinton was exactly rural then, but at least it was quiet and had a palatial pub with towers at its heart, the King's Highway, now buried somewhere under a modern store. I had relatives in Quinton, and was also taken there every six months to see a half-mad Viennese dentist who talked like Henry Kissinger and refused on principle ever to use local anaesthetic. He always told my Mum that I was like a racehorse – I think it was meant as a compliment (better than a bargehorse …) and, as I moaned under his agonizingly slow drill, he would quiz me about Caesar’s Gallic War, on which he believed, quite inexplicably, that I was Asda Store, Quinton - on site of the Kings Highway pub M5 Motorway, Quinton some kind of expert. Quinton was also the home of my friend, the future archaeologist Mick Aston, whose eyrie at the top of his parents’ house was full of his brilliant Alan Sorrell-type drawings reconstructing Iron Age villages and which often resounded to Ray Charles’ What’d I Say ? Our charismatic and now sadly deceased mutual friend was Martin Elliott, the ultimate girl magnet and later the photographer responsible for the Athena poster Tennis Girl. Martin left the Fonz standing – he was confident, handsome, a snappy dresser and full of comical stories about his latest amours told with that characteristic wink. But he was also enough of an Everyman to make every boy think he could one day be like him – well, this one anyway, right down to driving a zippy red sports car like his.

Anybody who remembers the 1960s will recall how, out of nowhere, ten-pin bowling suddenly arrived in our midst from America and for a year or two was an extraordinary craze – extraordinary, that is, considering the generally modest pleasure it afforded those who played it. {simpletext} The Art Deco Warley Odeon of my childhood, with its façade of cream tiles, situated at the intersection of the Wolverhampton New Road and the Hagley Road, had been in decline for some time. It was now reborn as the Top Rank Bowling Alley, and all self-respecting teenagers sooner or later made their way there. There was an odd ritual which involved collecting sanitized bowling shoes of the right size and waiting around a long time for a game. Trigate House, built on the site of the Warley Odeon, later Top Rank Bowling Alley
You generally learned how to play by the end of the evening - that is if the sinews of your arm held out that long. The bowls felt as heavy as cannon balls. Anyway, Martin Elliott and other friends congregated there from time to time. The ceaseless clatter of skittles wasn't conducive to conversation, but there was always a sense that something nice could happen at any time, perhaps you might meet someone… ‘Youth lives on hope, old age on remembrance’. There's no trace of the Warley Bowl now, it lies beneath an office block called TriGate House.

Less fashionable, perhaps, but no less pleasant was a walk with Mick, Martin and my old friend Ian Davies, all of Oldbury Grammar School, to Thimblemill Road Baths, somewhere on the borders of Bearwood and {simpletext}{simpletext} Smethwick. If the Schwimmmeister turned the other way or had slipped out for a fag, Martin would inevitably do a ‘bomb’ from one of the boards, temporarily emptying the deep end… There was a Friday night ritual which on the way home which meant fish and chips (or just chips for Mick, a vegetarian even then) on the hill past the Abbey pub and a stroll across Warley Woods. Odd the things that stick in your mind : when I got home I'd watch the ITV detective series It's Dark Outside, a very stylish film noir. For some reason I remember Anna Cropper as the secretary and a smoky, smoochy, late-night jazz theme, a bit like Miles Davis’ sublime ‘Blue In Green’…

{simpletext}{simpletext} {simpletext} {simpletext}








Bearwood always had a ‘bus depot and was the place we'd change to get to my great aunt's house in Winson Green. It later became part of the deadening daily ritual of school. When I wasn't chatting up Anna (v. sup.), I was jolting through Bearwood on the ‘bus, desperately revising something ghastly and probably pointless for a test.
{simpletext} {simpletext} {simpletext} Drinking Fountain, Lightwoods Park, Bearwood Entrance to Shakespeare Garden, Lighwoods Park, Bearwood Lightwoods House, Lighwoods Park, Bearwood - built by Jonathan Grundy probably in 1780
{simpletext}Bandstand at Lighwoods Park, Bearwood



With all that far behind me, it's nice to look around Lightwoods Park again. It's lost its paddling (or was it boating ?) pool and aviary, and the late eighteenth-century house is boarded up, but the bandstand's still there, as well as a Shakespeare Garden full of flora mentioned by the Bard. But it isn't the park I spent much of my adolescence in. To get there we have to drive back up to Thimblemill Baths and past the lovely, glassy lake which presumably held the water to drive the original thimble mill, and down into West Smethwick Park. West Smethwick Park, Pool and Jetty. The healing spring is beyond the far end of the pool
How many hours I passed fishing from the jetty where the water runs down a cascade on its long journey to the Trent ! I think too of my Dad, sent by his mother as a boy to collect water from the healing spring at the other end of the lake to bathe her sore eyes. Yes, ‘perhaps one day we'll look back even on these things with joy…’





© Dennis Wood 2011
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby Rob » Thu Oct 20, 2011 9:33 pm

Now i feel sad as i always do after Denis's walks through my childhood.
I'm going to get another Grolsch out of the fridge and have a think.
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby Dennis » Thu Oct 20, 2011 9:42 pm

Chin up, Rob, we're still alive :grin:
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby Rob » Thu Oct 20, 2011 10:21 pm

I've just been home to Whiteheath.
All we have left are our memories but i'm glad i was there there when i was because there's no going back.It's all changed and not for the better.
So we go on living for today!! :lol:
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby Antie Em » Fri Oct 21, 2011 5:04 am

Thanks Dennis - so many wonderful memories. I take my grandson to Lightwoods Park every year collecting conkers and we had to go and try out the new Skateboard area last Sunday - which used to be the pool. I suppose that's progress, although it does provide the kids with a safe place to play on their skateboards and the place was packed. Another "fun" place in Bearwood was the ice rink which used to be the Windsor Cinema.

We lived in Old Warley and my kids went to Lightwoods School (used to be Casle Road School), their summer was entirely spent playing in Warley Woods - in the days when you weren't scared to let your kids out of your sight, and it was a great place for sledging in the days when we seemed to have more snow in the winter.
There's no place like home ......
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby Annie » Fri Oct 21, 2011 2:17 pm

Thank you Dennis another lovely Black Country Ride, even though I don't have memories of these places like some of the members I enjoy reading them and wonder if my ancestors ever visited the places which is possible. :grin:

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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby Dennis » Fri Oct 21, 2011 10:04 pm

Thank you, Antie Em and Annie!
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby Northern Lass » Sat Oct 22, 2011 7:26 am

Fabulous!
I hope cousin Dennis you are producing a book with all these in soon!
Put me down for a copy.

And well done Mally too
any chance when we click on a photo or hovver over it we find instantly what it is
or where it is? As I don't know the area at all.

I must one day put down my "leaping through yellow ragwort" memories
for my kids. But then how much can you say on the back of a fag packet :(

Keep them coming Our Den
You have a fine style :wink:
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby mallosa » Sat Oct 22, 2011 10:29 am

Northern Lass wrote:any chance when we click on a photo or hovver over it we find instantly what it is
or where it is? As I don't know the area at all.


...were you reading my mind NL? :grin: Try it now!

I left that question with Admin last night and he's come up trumps again this morning, advising me how to achieve just that!

NICE ONE admin!! Thanks for all your help over the last few days, I only had to ask and you were there with the answers :thumbup:

...also my thanks to Dennis for taking us on another great journey!!
If you would like to have your ancestors photo's included in our Gallery, please send me a pm.

Researching: Evans, Rollason, Henley/Hendley, Brookes, Taylor (Wilson - Birmingham)
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby Annie » Sat Oct 22, 2011 12:05 pm

Northern Lass wrote:Fabulous!
I hope cousin Dennis you are producing a book with all these in soon!
Put me down for a copy.

And well done Mally too
any chance when we click on a photo or hovver over it we find instantly what it is
or where it is? As I don't know the area at all.

I must one day put down my "leaping through yellow ragwort" memories
for my kids. But then how much can you say on the back of a fag packet :(

Keep them coming Our Den
You have a fine style :wink:


A book would be lovely , something you could keep picking up and reading , so I'll be number two on the list for one.
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby Northern Lass » Sat Oct 22, 2011 1:23 pm

That is lovely San you work really hard with these photos and I love what you have done with
this one with the photos dotted about excellent :clap:
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby mallosa » Sat Oct 22, 2011 2:45 pm

:oops: Thanks NL, I'm really pleased with it!
If you would like to have your ancestors photo's included in our Gallery, please send me a pm.

Researching: Evans, Rollason, Henley/Hendley, Brookes, Taylor (Wilson - Birmingham)
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby Dennis » Sun Oct 23, 2011 7:37 pm

Many thanks, Cousin Jan and for all your work, San. The trouble is now I'm starting to run out of places I've not done! :oops: I could make it more thematic than location-based, while still Black Country, I suppose e.g. schools, growing up, memorable events of different kinds. But then it would be less of a "ride". Of course a lot of other things happened while I was still based there but temporarily living somewhere else e.g. teaching in Paris for a year where I lived through the riots of May 1968. Exciting but not a Black Country Ride! Any thoughts, folks? Yes, I'd love to publish it one day.
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby MarkCDodd » Mon Oct 24, 2011 11:04 am

My Uncle Collin Ford swears he got his polio from those swimming baths. (My mum thinks it was the Rofle baths..)

I thought if you remembered the 60's you wern't really there?

Fascinating stuff as usual Prof. Wood.
Black Holes happen when God divides by zero.
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Re: Black Country Ride No 10 - Quinton, Bearwood, West Smeth

Postby Dennis » Mon Oct 24, 2011 5:34 pm

I'm very sorry to hear about your uncle, Mark. Poliomyelitis was very much a part of the 1950s and struck fear into every child - the prospect of being crippled or spending the rest of your life in an iron lung. When Jeff Hall, who played for Birmingham City, died of it in 1955, people queued up to get the American Salk vaccine, later replaced by the oral Sabin vaccine. I'd not heard about Thimblemill or Rolfe Street Baths as a source of it, but my Mum was always anxious about the lads who swam in the wide basin of the Portway Branch of the Titford canal when the weather was hot, she was convinced they'd end up with polio. By the 1990s the vaccine had got rid of it in Europe.
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