:?
Remember the rounded high fire blue engineering bricks as caps on the red brick walls! (Very wet when drizzle....)
A fabulous revel. You were in a might of hurry to dislocate your arm so.
That shed with the old tools: why were the adults so up-tight? Since you were there then why not just simply introduce you to what they had inherited and were custodians of, while politely informed you guys (albeit firm stern) that you are welcome the front door if you apply for an appointment?
I know what you mean, friend. I did just the same umpteen times of great discovery, as a child - and continued (of course).
The class demarcation system in those days was even more brutal than it is today. If you were from a Boy Scout troop from the nearby Tech then you would be sourly admonished with snapping barks and given the bums' rush. Otherwise you would be treated as a juvenile delinquent bound for a Borstal. That really was the regime.
Of course all that stuff (layout) has been obliterated. Rod Birch had a module on the former VB site of his childhood situation in Aston. It is about as in-depth as it gets. And not untypical, other than the fact his mom and dad owned the house on the street.
Margaret Thatcher (who abolished mandatory school milk dispense when Minister for Education in the Edward Heath regime) introduced legislation that people who had rented municipal housing could retroact rental payments towards purchasing dwelling. It posed a peculiar situation inasmuch as one would be alongside, say in a multi-storey block of flats (hopefull now still being demolished, except perhaps for singles), a rental and a bought outright. (Mortgage being another form of rent.) Yet reliant on the services of the building, or spread if a row house job.
The tragically sad lesson is that of class bigotry. Why not have introduced that programme in the first place? Simply to hold workers vassal? What other explanation could there be? They cannot be relied to act responsibly of their own recognizance?
That spin-off is not so far off the mark. The worse than preposterous posturing by mountebanks (and charlatans) at taxpayer expense was recently amply promulgated with fantastic bombast in the cockamamie proposal to name Moor Street (Railway) Station to the Bull Ring.
Rod Birch posted a poll on the VB Forum site. The reply was effectivelt conspicuous in its absence. I recommended: Moor Street Railway Station at the Bull Ring; New Street Railway Station at The Bull Ring; Snow Hill Railway Station at Civic Centre. (At least travellers are most unlikely to disorientation.)
All those little business, one thinks readily of the "local" dressmaker, were annihilated beginning the 1960s and finished by the mid to latter 1970s.
Such memories are sterling. They aught be maintained in perpetuity in drama reenactments.
Incidentally, has anyone experienced or knows someone who experienced that play done at Birmingham Repertory Theatre a year or two ago:
PINCHING GERTIE SWINNERTON IN THE BULL RING?
The reason I ask is because at the former VB Forum site there was an enthusiastic - elated almost - posting but no further report (as any sensible person would reasonably expect). Was it televised by BBC Birmingham? (Maintaining its mandate.) Has Carl Chinn in-output on the matter? Apparently the author based the play on history of that epicentre of retail (mercantilism) activity from the early 1800s through to aprx. the conclusion of WW I. Surely a classic.
