Hagley Historical and Field Society

Our next meeting at St Saviour’s Church Hall is on Tuesday 6th June 2017 at 8.00pm. We are in for a treat as we welcome back Max Keen. He will give a presentation entitled “The English Civil War in Bewdley, Kidderminster, Worcester and Stourbridge”. If you have experienced any of his previous presentations you will already appreciate his flamboyant and entertaining style. He will be dressed in period costume for this event.

Commences 8pm at St Saviour’s Church Hall, DY9 0NS. Visitors are most welcome at all our events – see Home page for details. Annual membership £10

Considering that we do not have Blue Birds in Britain we have a soft spot for them. Donald Campbell drove one, Vera Lynn sang about them and as our speaker this month, Julian Hunt told us, Harry Vincent made them as toffees. Vincent was a 19th-century Evesham confectioner in his early twenties, who set up in business in 1896 to cash in on Victorian England’s ever sweetening tooth. Two years later, he took over an old Birmingham ironworks, called it Toffee Mills, and produced a toffee called Harvino, an exotically Italian-sounding name combining the two halves of his name. Perhaps not an ideal choice, given Birmingham’s propensity to drop its aitches and eventually renamed ‘Blue Bird’.

By the 1920s, however, Harry Vincent had wider ambitions. Just as George Cadbury had moved his factory out of central Birmingham to the unpolluted fringes of the city, Vincent followed suit. He built the Blue Bird Toffee factory at Hunnington as a garden village. The factory buildings still remain on the Halesowen road heading towards Romsley. Alas, Blue Birds no longer fly over Hunnington. They they took flight north from the West Midlands in 1998 to become part of Needler’s in Hull which was subsequently bought out by Ashbury Confectionery who discontinued the brand.

Our next meeting at St Saviour’s Church Hall is on Tuesday 6th June 2017 at 8.00pm. We are in for a treat as we welcome back Max Keen. He will give a presentation entitled “The English Civil War in Bewdley, Kidderminster, Worcester and Stourbridge”. If you have experienced any of his previous presentations you will already appreciate his flamboyant and entertaining style. Visitors are most welcome at all our events – see Home page for details and contacts.

The idea for this new publication was originally developed by the late Dr Peter Bloore, who lived in Middlefield Lane. He was a member of Hagley Historical and Field Society and also Hagley Parish Archivist. His widow offered the file to the Archive Group and they decided that they would continue his research and aim at publishing a summary of his work plus contributions from people, who lived or had lived in the Lane or had first hand knowledge of the residents. The results are now available as an illustrated book of fifty-two pages.

Middlefield Lane front

Middlefield Lane back

The book is priced at £4 and can be purchased from Happy Families or can be ordered online from Hagley History and Field Society.

The book “Hagley Miscellanea” by John-Homery Folkes, the architect of St.Saviour’s Hall, was first published in 1974. It was for private circulation and only 25 copies were printed. Forty years later it is considered sufficiently interesting to merit this reprint. The author (born 1906) has gathered a wide range of reminiscences that together give a picture of Hagley’s inhabitants, houses, industries, celebrations and entertainments in the century and more before the explosion of house-building in the 1960s.

The book includes: the early days of the railway station; the building of St. Saviour’s church and planning the cemetery; houses large and small; an attempt at encroachment in Church Street; the Rifle Corps and the Range; the nursemaid question!; Hagley celebrities; the Sunday postal delivery and church attendance and an eyewitness account of the fire at Hagley Hall on Christmas Eve 1925. The “Illustrations” section includes the programme for the Coronation Celebration of June 1911.

The book is priced at £5 and can be purchased from Happy Families or can be ordered online from Hagley History and Field Society.

The Society has now launched a new book entitled ‘Hagley: A Village at War 1914 – 1918’, researched and written by local author and member, Pat Dunn. It is based on the ‘Hagley Parish Magazines’ of the period and describes how the people of Hagley dealt with the problems presented by the Great War on the Home Front. The people and places featured on the front cover of June’s issue of the Hagley Village News feature in the book along with many others.

The book is priced at £4 and can be purchased at the Hagley Library or ordered online. Click on the book cover below to view the first few pages.