Iron workers met at corner public house
OUR tour of some of the lost pubs of our region takes us along Bromford Lane in West Bromwich, to the White Swan, that stood at the junction with Lyttleton Street.
Once again we thank Peter Hill for supplying these old pictures of the place. Pete has been touring the country with the Black Country Ale Tairsters since the 1980s, on a mission to sup in every pub in the country. He carefully records every pub he’s been to and has amassed a vast collection of information and pictures.
The White Swan was pub number 1,727 in Pete’s endless pub crawl when he first photographed it back in 1990. Two years later Pete published details of the pub in his guidebook A Black Country Pub Crawl of West Bromwich. Then the landlord of the White Swan was Mick Scott and he served Hansons Mild, Ansells Bitter, Castlemaine, Skol, Stella Artois, Strongbow and Guinness.
The pub dates back to at least the 1860s, when Thomas Hale was the licensee, according to Tony Hitchmough’s research (see www. longpull.co.uk).
Tony has also uncovered reports of local ironworkers, in the 1880s, using the White Swan as a meeting place, where they discussed industrial relations and disputes.
The late Victorian era saw the rise of the big brewery chains and the White Swan was to pass though the ownership of several companies. In the 1890s it was acquired by Henry Swain and Company, which was based at the Albion Brewery in Tatbank Road, Oldbury. That company was taken over by its near neighbours Showell’s Brewery Company, Crosswells Brewery, Oldbury.
The take-overs continued and Showell’s were swallowed up by Samuel Allsopp and Sons of Burton-ontrent, which merged with the Essex company Ind Coope in the 1930s.
1961 saw one of the biggest mergers in British brewing when Ind Coope combined with Tetley Walker of Leeds and Birmingham’s Ansells Brewery, to form Allied Breweries. The White Swan then became an Ansells pub.
Chains
of the
Changes to the pub industry saw the large brewery chains forced to give up many of their tied houses. As a result, the White Swan was given over to the Pubmaster chain and later to Admiral Taverns. Both these companies gave the old pub a spruce-up, as Pete’s later photographs show.
Sadly, the White Swan was not able to combat the general slide in fortune of the British boozer, and it rang last orders for the final time in 2014 and was subsequently converted into a Turkish restaurant.