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Aston Lower Grounds

The reason why Aston Villa did not take up the chance to move onto the ALG sports meadow was because it had been demolished and sold for three streets of houses some nine years previously in September 1888, ironically a week before Aston Villa's first Football League match was played at Wellington Road.
 
An aerial view of the Lower Grounds. In the Victorian period it housed a menagerie, a theatre and winter garden. Viv.

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Post 28 shows the map, and at the end of the lower Fish Pond the Polar Bear House...
 
This is why I was confused about the 1872 date for the Lower Grounds. First newspaper extract is April 1859, the second is May 1864. Quilter seems to have really developed the place. Viv

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I came across this website when attempting a little reseach into H.G. Quilter. I wonder if it is the same gent as have a Elkington & Co Decanter engraved "PresentedIMG_0699(2).JPGIMG_0706(1).JPGIMG_0698(1).JPG to H.G.Quilter on his 50th Birthday 1874". It's been in the family many many years but we have no to connection to HGQ as far as I know. It travelled the world with my father, a career RAF Officer and came my way on his death aged 98 in Jan 2019. I only took a closer look at it because decanter fell off a shelve shattering to glass elements sadly.
 
The only H G (Henry George) Quilter I can find died in 1893 in Felixstowe. He is on the 1891 census as a hotel proprieter - listed at the Bath Hotel, Bath Road Felixstowe. He left £4100 which would have an estimated value today of around £ half a million (based on £100 being just over £13,000).
This was the probate
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Charles Henry married in Birmingham in 1878 and he is listed as a hotel keeper at The Holt Hotel Birmingham.
 
In 1871 Henry George is listed on the Birmingham rates books at Aston Park (including Aston Lower Grounds) and also owing houses in Trinity Road.
In the extract below the first column is the occupier and the second is the owner, third column is what the property is. I haven't included the Trinity Road entry but he owns those properties
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Not sure of your connection.
Charles Henry in 1901 and 1911 is the employer listed at The Crown and Anchor Hotel Ipswich (Westgate Street I think).
A bit off title but Charles married Annie Wattis, they seem to have had 2 boys before her death in 1897. He then seems to have married her sister Alice in 1899. After Charles death Alice returned to Birmingham and lived in Phipson Road Sparkhill until her death in 1946.
 
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Henry George Quilter was born around 1824 in Surrey. In 1881 he was in the bankruptcy court and living at Abington House, 77, Trinity Road. It looks like he fits the bill, and maybe he needed the money in 1881 !
 
Sale of Quilter Fine Art collection April 1875.

"Mr. Quilter has been fortunate in realising upon his most fruitful of all treasures in one case, we are told, no less than 55 times the cost of the drawing, and upon his whole collection something like 260 per cent.”
 
It doesn't look as though the pole jumpers had a very soft landing does it Viv? Very interesting to see that Mr Avery was 'Manhattan and (?) New York Timekeeper'. I wonder what LAC stands for after Mr Shearman's name?
 
I think it would be London Athletic club. The following is from https://www.playingpasts.co.uk/arti...the-conflict-between-the-north-and-the-south/ :

Athletics in London during the 1860s and 1870s was dominated by the rivalry of the London Athletic Club (LAC) and the Amateur Athletic Club (AAC).[30] Whilst the AAC was responsible for introducing accurate timing and measurement, the club was also responsible for embedding elitism into amateur athletics.[31] The beginnings of the amateur-professional dichotomy can be observed in the rules of the AAC and, more specifically, in the organisation’s definition of an amateur, which excluded anyone who had ever competed in open competition for financial gain, or had participated or assisted in athletics as a means of livelihood.[32] Further restrictions included a membership clause that barred any mechanic, artisan or labourer from competing, regardless of their being complicit or not with respect to the club’s amateur rules.[33]

In the columns of the Athletic News, the timing of the AAC’s meetings were repeatedly remarked upon by the northern paper, paying particular emphasis to the point that northern athletes faced difficulty in competing, and the newspaper petitioned for the creation of a Northern Championship. The newspaper argued that whilst the LAC’s meetings were of better quality than the AAC’s, taking place during the summer at the height of the athletic season, without consideration for their northern contemporaries, their meets could not be deemed a competitive success. In the writer’s view, ‘London is not England, and the provinces ought to be as well represented as the capital’.[34] These concerns over a lack of northern representation were justified with the championship virtually being contested only by athletes of metropolitan origin.[35] Whilst the LAC wished to be more inclusive, holding their championship event at a more reasonable time in the season, the club failed to convert their metropolitan athletic dominance into national supremacy of the sport, making the creation of a northern championship, free from the problems associated with holding the event in London, a guaranteed conclusion.
 
Researching my GG Grandfather I came across this piece. The image is similar although not exact as Viv's image at post #42 above.
Interesting that the text written post 1908 refers to Aston lower grounds as Aston cross.

JTs  Penny Farthing record..jpg
 
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