Mayor and MPS lead the way on ’60s charity walk
53 YEARS ago around 200 people gathered at West Bromwich Town Hall for the start of a charity fund raising walk.
The date was Sunday, September 15, 1968, and the walk had been organised by the Mayor of West Bromwich, Lilian Peckover. Her aim was to raise £10,000 for her Mayor’s Holiday Home for the Aged Project.
These pictures were taken on the day – do you recognise any of the walkers? Did you take part and what was the route around West Bromwich?
The mayor was joined on the walk by two neighbouring Labour Members of Parliament, Peter Archer and John Stonehouse.
Although Peter Archer was born in Wednesbury in 1926, he never represented his home town in Parliament. After serving as a Bevin Boy in the Second World War, he studied Philosophy and Law at the London School of Economics and University College London and was called to the Bar.
Election
He unsuccessfully stood for Brierley Hill in the 1964 general election but in 1966 Archer won the seat of Rowley Regis and Tipton. Boundary changes saw the constituency abolished and at the February 1974 general election Archer won the new seat of Warley West. In the new Labour government he was appointed Solicitor General, holding the post until 1979.
Peter Archer retired from the Commons in 1992 and joined the House of Lords as Baron Archer of Sandwell. He passed away in 2012, aged 85.
John Stonehouse was one of the most controversial figures ever to have represented a Black Country seat in Parliament.
Born in Southampton
in 1925, he won the seat of Wednesbury in a 1957 byelection. It is alleged that in 1962 he began spying for Czechoslovak military intelligence, receiving money for government plans and technical details of aircraft.
In 1968 he was appointed Postmaster General, later becoming Minister of Posts and Telecommunications. When the Wednesbury seat was abolished in 1974, Stonehouse successfully stood for the new constituency
of Walsall North.
By that time, Stonehouse was in severe financial difficulties and to escape his creditors he faked his own death on November 20, 1974, making it appear that he had drowned while swimming off a beach in Miami.
Traced
A few months later he was traced to Australia, where police initially suspected that he was the missing Earl of Lucan. He
was deported back to the UK and stood trial for fraud, but he did not resign his seat in Parliament. He was convicted in August 1976, and sentenced to seven years in prison. Only then did he resign from the Privy Council and the House of Commons.
Stonehouse was released from prison in August 1979, after suffering three heart attacks. He had further health problems and died in 1988, aged 62.