Before I started this reply, I trawled through the whole of this thread and really enjoyed your memories, which prompted me to look out photographs to post which my grandfather had taken before and during the First World War. I also wanted to give a little on the background on how I came across the pictures and my beginning to research my family history and ending up joining this forum.
I was born in ‘Colmore’ which is what is written on my birth certificate, whether that means Loveday Street, I’m not sure and then brought up in SuttonColdfield on the Chester Road, the boundary between Sutton and Birmingham. In fact the end of our very long garden was the boundary.
We had a fierce pride in Sutton, the Royal Borough and I remember that any letter which arrived and had Erdington as the postal district written on it, were despised, or so it seemed to me.
My father died in Highcroft Hospital in 1954 following an operation to remove a brain tumour at the QE hospital. So that my mother could go back to work, my brother and I were sent to the convent boarding house in Westbourne Road, Harborne. As far as I was concerned a million miles away from home. From there we walked to the Oratory School in Ladywood. At the age of seven, it was daunting. The roads and the back-to-back houses, the old Victorian school. I hated it…….
We stayed at the convent for about five years returning home to live in 1960. My brother went to another school but I continued to travel to Ladywood from Chester Road, because by this time I liked my school and all my friends were there.
I would sometimes visit friends houses and I was quite taken aback to find they had no inside bathrooms or toilets. I couldn’t believe it.
So why tell you all this, in a thread Sutton Park. Well I used to tell friends at school about the place and how much fun could be had there. A few of them came over to my house and we went to Sutton Park where some of them saw their very first cow, they had never been out of the Ladywood district - amazing and sad. They also thought we were very posh because we had an upstairs bathroom and toilet, and a hall……little did they know we were near to destitute after my father died and his plastics tool making business was sold off.
Most of my school holidays was spent in Sutton Park, going to Keepers Pool everyday and then going off on another adventure wherever it took us returning home usually after teatime totally exhausted.. Great days.
When I was thirteen I, like Goffy I think it was said in this thread, joined the sea cadets at Boldmere gate. Every Friday and Sunday morning we took part in activities including sailing and pulling (rowing - not birds) on Powels Pool. Thirty years later as an instructor in the sea cadets in Somerset I took groups of cadets to Sutton sea cadets for canoe training. All three of my children canoed or sailed there and I was full of telling them how I virtually lived in the park as a kid…
Before I go on - the next photograph, taken at the same time as the first. In the first picture , my grandfather is the person with moustache, standing at the back in the middle wearing the boater, his wife standing next to him. My mother is the little girl sitting at the front with blond hair. Picture no2 my grandfather must have been taking the picture.
