A Century (or more) of Birmingham geographical history on one thread

[Greg N'Ash]

yeah but you'd have to at least recognise them as working girls so they'd have to be dressed erm.... a certain way. It's just why would you choose the back of the main store in one of the busiest main roads in Birmingham??

The back of Rackhams is pretty quiet during the night.

In fact, it would have been even more quiet back then, I imagine.

worst spelling of "remember" evoh!

[pauliewalnuts]

yeah but you'd have to at least recognise them as working girls so they'd have to be dressed erm.... a certain way. It's just why would you choose the back of the main store in one of the busiest main roads in Birmingham??

The back of Rackhams is pretty quiet during the night.

In fact, it would have been even more quiet back then, I imagine.

worst spelling of "remember" evoh!

Oh, Gregory!

[Bald Eagle]

yeah but you'd have to at least recognise them as working girls so they'd have to be dressed erm.... a certain way. It's just why would you choose the back of the main store in one of the busiest main roads in Birmingham??

The back of Rackhams is pretty quiet during the night.

In fact, it would have been even more quiet back then, I imagine.

Have you ever bumped into my Mrs. Paulie.

[pauliewalnuts]

yeah but you'd have to at least recognise them as working girls so they'd have to be dressed erm.... a certain way. It's just why would you choose the back of the main store in one of the busiest main roads in Birmingham??

The back of Rackhams is pretty quiet during the night.

In fact, it would have been even more quiet back then, I imagine.

Have you ever bumped into my Mrs. Paulie.

Does she work on the burger van?

[Bald Eagle]

yeah but you'd have to at least recognise them as working girls so they'd have to be dressed erm.... a certain way. It's just why would you choose the back of the main store in one of the busiest main roads in Birmingham??

The back of Rackhams is pretty quiet during the night.

In fact, it would have been even more quiet back then, I imagine.

Have you ever bumped into my Mrs. Paulie.

Does she work on the burger van?

No! Underneath it.

[Brian Taylor]

Round the back of Rackhams was where you picked up the night bus on Colmore Row..A Streetcar named Desire had yet to come into it back then..
Then if you missed your bus or didn't have the fare I suppose you had to do something..

[Dr Butler]

One of the things that makes me think I could never give it (it being Villa) up properly is the fact that I know the club is in my family since the very early days, and that no matter how annoyed, disheartened, disappointed and wound up I might get, sat there watching us toil every other week, I'm staring at the same rectangle of grass all my ancestors did, and probably going through exactly the same things they did (as are a dozen or so of my family at the same time).

To give it up would be a bit like letting them down.

both sides of my family are all Birmingham born and bred, one side Blues(Moms) and the other side Villa(Dads).
My grandfather watched the Villa, my Dad and now me, sadly it looks like I'm the last of this line.

UTV
The Doc

[Brian Taylor]

It'll be 'round the back of Beckhams' in future if that transfer ever transpires.

[SteveN]

I remember getting a bad school report in my 1st year at St. Phillips grammar school. My mother said she should have sent me to Gem street. If memory serves it was in Gosta green .

You learn something every day.  My late dad, God bless him, went to Hastings Road School but always maintained that Gem Street Tech was the ultimate school for scholars.  I always assumed that it was fictional but after 55 years or so I find that is not the case.   Next someone will tell me the tooth fairy isn't real.

[CJ]

Back in the 70's when I lived in Birmingham, if someone had bought something a bit flash, and you asked them 'what did that cost you', the answer was invariably 'a sore arse round the back of Rackhams'. So clearly lots of stuff going on there. 

As an aside my former mother-in-law worked in Rackhams.  Not sure what she did for extra money at Christmas.

[adrenachrome]

I remember getting a bad school report in my 1st year at St. Phillips grammar school. My mother said she should have sent me to Gem street. If memory serves it was in Gosta green .

You learn something every day.  My late dad, God bless him, went to Hastings Road School but always maintained that Gem Street Tech was the ultimate school for scholars.  I always assumed that it was fictional but after 55 years or so I find that is not the case.   Next someone will tell me the tooth fairy isn't real.

I found this while having a quick search for information re schools in Gem Street:

When contemplating the reasons why the Industrial School was built at Balden Road in Harborne, one might well wonder why the School Boards went to all the trouble to build in an enormous sports ground, and an indoor swimming pool. The answers to this puzzle may be found in the prevailing conditions in homes and in the community generally in 1901. The property - that is the land, was acquired for the purposes of providing good food and exercise for the boys in the main School in Gem Street near where Lancaster Circus is now. The sad fact is that back then when the transport system was chiefly horse drawn, the air pollution was even worse than it is now. Nowadays, in Gosta Green where the new Council offices are being built, there are only asthma inducing exhaust fumes with heavy metals from ill maintained diesel vehicles. Back then, the fumes were considerably more worrying with many boys having skin lesions and a danger of cholera, so the health of the young was at risk. It was very evident that the boys were in danger, and the move was achieved in 1903 “with very few fatalities”. It had become evident that recruits going to the Boer War were lamentably undersized in weight and height, and while this was not universal, it was important to raise the general health of the community. Many schools were being built, and because a standard treatment was “fresh air”, many very large windows were built in to enable them to be flung open wide. This was a consistent feature of the treatment for Pthisis or Consumption, later to be called Tuberculosis. Although there were many philanthropists, it was beginning to become apparent that with education of the poor, a more equitable society was beginning to emerge.

Vital Amines were identified in the 1940s and later called Vitamins. Antibiotics were made during World War II, and their immediate precursors, the Sulphonamides, derived from the dyeing process, were only finally developed and made available in the early years of the same war. So in 1903 to 1923, with the danger of Diphtheria, TB, and Whooping cough, not to mention the risks of Weils disease from a very healthy rat population, a newly built school in the countryside as it was then was a very good idea. To teach furthermore, band music and football, as well as manufacture of uniforms and boots and a cadet force of little soldiers was to give the next generation of boys a better chance of growing up healthy, strong and compliant. A boy born in 1904 would be very likely to stay quite small until he became fully adult. At 15 years of age, he would be very undersized, yet quite a few passed muster in the recruitment process. Even though the men accepted for military service at the beginning of World War I were at least 5’7” in height, by the end of the war, if they were healthy, they could be accepted at 5’6” or 5’5”. The need for a healthy workforce was hardly to be dismissed either.

So a need for health and vigour in the workforce had been demonstrated, the history of the Ansell/Tennal schools was not entirely unusual, and demonstrated the need not only for strong soldiers, and healthy workers, but also removing the boys for the most part from the crime figures, saved a lot of money spent on the Prison service.

http://www.spaghettigazetti.com/2010/11/health-and-efficiency-article-by.html

[adrenachrome]

I can see why Gem Street was used as an epithet now:

BIRMINGHAM FREE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL, Lichfield Street (1846–50); Gem Street (1850–1902). St. Philip's Ragged Sch. opened 1846 by the Rector of St. Philip's, in a hired workshop (47) at no. 19 Lichfield St.(46) The sch. was undenominational and the committee originally included some dissenters though most of them had withdrawn by 1868. A master and his wife managed the sch. which provided a free meal 3 times a week and training in mending and making clothes and shoes as well as some ordinary teaching.(47) H.M.I. reported 1846 that general management was very good, though standard of education was necessarily low; present: 30 B, 32 G.(1) Later called St. Philip's Free Industrial Sch. Moved 1850 to new building in Gem St. (site given by governors of Grammar Sch.) and renamed Birmingham Free Industrial Sch.(47) Accom. 330 in 3 depts.: a day sch. for B and G over 7 yrs. old; industrial classes for B and G over 7, an asylum for orphaned and deserted children, accom. c. 35. All free except the asylum in which £8 a year was charged for each child.(46) The free meals which had been 'an infallible means of procuring a large and regular attendance' were given up through lack of funds 1866. By 1868 it was catering less than before for the very poorest children (see also St. Philip's Ragged Sch., Queen St.).(47) Placed under the Industrial Schools Act in 1868 (10) and later moved to Harborne.(21)