Category: Local resources

This is an undated interview of three sisters. Similar interviews were taken in the 1980s.

Miss. Brettle: What other shops were there?

Mrs. Porter: Well there was a chemist. He was a bit of a doctor, he used to help the women out in Stirchley didn’t he, Mr. Churchill.

Mrs. Langley: Oh yes the chemist. He’d take teeth out as well.

Mrs. Porter: Our mom used to say he was ever so good with all the mothers in Stirchley. They used to go to him for a bit of help hadn’t they, if they couldn’t afford the doctor.

Mrs. Langley: …

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This is an undated interview of three sisters. Similar interviews were taken in the 1980s.

Interviewer: Where did you live in Stirchley?

Miss. Brettle: We lived in Ivy Road and we lived at the bottom and I mean if you walk down there now it’s nothing like it was. Well I mean Marge [Mrs Langley] can remember cows opposite you see.

Mrs. Langley: Well when we lived down there we lived in a yard with four houses.

Mrs. Porter: With a pump …

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Some more from the “Memories of Stirchley” gathered from local people in the 1980s. These are memories of Stirchley School and childhood during the Second World War, taken from Ron Allcock, Pat Collins, and Ivor Gornall. All three attended Stirchley School from 1940, and left between 1945 and 1948. The photograph shows the school over twenty years previously (we couldn’t find many pictures of Stirchley during WW2).

Early in the War when the children were evacuated, school was held in private houses but the children soon returned to Stirchley. …

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The Ten Acres and Stirchley Street Co-operative Society (later TASCO), as it states in the picture above, was established on 1875. It was begun in the front room of a house on Hazelwell Lane, the house in the photograph below, by the group of men also pictured. The humble little shop opened its doors on 5 June that year.

The history of co-op’s goes back to 1844, when the first was set up in Rochdale, Lancashire. The food sold to working people was often either expensive, or of poor quality and mixed with other, less edible, ingredients. Co-op’s charged …

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The library is home to several oral histories which were recorded in the 1980s, and are still kept on cassette tape. Thankfully, the histories were transcribed, because tape players are a rare thing to find now!

One local history was given by George Phillips about the Umberslade Road area of Stirchley:

“I’m 76 years old and I’m George Phillips. I’ve lived in Umberslade Road all my life. We live about half way down in a block of ten houses. At first there were just these …

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