Boys Brigade on parade 50 years ago
PETE Hill of the Black Country Ale Tairsters has sent in these two photo- graphs from his younger days growing up in West Bromwich.
Pete writes, “I have recently received two photos of an 8th Boys Brigade march, which I never knew existed, taken around c.1969-70.”
The photo on the left shows Mr Cooksey leading the parade somewhere in the Greets Green area and Pete can name some of the boys. Mr Cooksey is followed by an uknown lad, Michael Smith, Carl Evitts, Pete Hill and Wayne Hill. Sadly, Mr Cooksey died inapril 2020 in his 90s.
The pictures belong to Pete’s friend Steve Evitts and he is the tall lad in the second photograph. The boy in glasses following him will be well known to Bugle readers. Pete told us “The one right in the middle of the photo, with the glasses, is my old mate, blind Dave Heeley.”
Can you name any of the other boys in these photographs?
The 8th Boys Brigade were based at Greets Green Methodist Church.
Methodists began meeting there in 1821 and a chapel was built on the corner of Ryders Green Road and Greets Green Road in 1835. It was replaced by the present church on the same site in 1873.
The Boys Brigade was founded in Glasgow in 1883 as a non-denominational Christian youth organisation. It proved very popular and spread quickly across the country. It was taken throughout the British Empire and beyond and by the early 20th century was established around the globe. In 1926 the Boys Brigade merged with the Boys Life Brigade, which led to the dropping of the overtly military aspects of the Boys Brigade. Today there are around 750,000 members of the Boys Brigade in 60 countries.
BY coincidence, presumably, Bugle 1480 (January 6) shows opposite sides of Dartmouth Square, West Bromwich on page 3 and 15.
Broadhead’s bakery was on the corner of High Street and Paradise Street and the building to the rear of the trams was on the corner of High Street and Bull Street with the Birmingham Co-op shop being on the other corner of those two streets.
The other two corners of the square, ie High Street/spon Lane/ Paradise Street, were occupied by two public houses, one of which went by the name of The Wrexham.
Perhaps your readers can name those pubs and can remember traffic at the junction being controlled by a policeman who stood on point duty somewhere in front of the line of people in the photograph of the trams. He was replaced by traffic lights in, probably, the early 1950s.
Douglas Parish Rowley Regis