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Posts Tagged ‘West Bromwich’

Who’s Living in Your Vicarage?

Posted in Black Country, Church, history, vicar, Vicarage, tagged , , , , , , , on 3 January, 2024| 3 Comments »

Our Vicarage was beginning to empty out earlier this year. Our lovely Persian lodgers found a flat and moved out just before their baby was born. The Joker got himself an apprenticeship at a law firm in Sheffield after his two wonderful years volunteering at The Oakes, the Queen is working hard at a proper job in Lancaster and the Engineer is mostly at uni now. It was beginning to feel a bit quiet in our Victorian vicarage – the Vicarage Hound only barks when he wants a chew.

So the Vicar and I had a little pray about the next stage of Vicarage life, asking the Lord to guide our steps. And of course, that same week a lady at church told us about her friend who was having trouble finding a new home with her two small daughters. And now we have the Gentle Gs living in the attic whilst they continue to look for somewhere more permanent. And then we had a call from a minister in London who had a church member starting a job very close to us here, and so this Saturday we have a young man coming to stay whilst he settles into a new life in West Brom.

Rev Arthur Benjamin Irvine MA 1838-1907
Louisa Caroline Irvine 1840-1912

Meanwhile, I’ve been rereading some emails from the great granddaughter of the fifth vicar of our church, Rev Arthur Benjamin Irvine. Arthur was in post here from 1874 to 1902. He lived in the Vicarage with his wife Louisa and their seven children. I think this may be the last time that nine people lived here at once, although the Vicar and I are always up for a challenge. Who knows who will join us next?

The Vicarage Children, Amy, William, Maziere, Arthur, Louisa, Constance, John. (Guessing the order from left to right from their ages, and if Louisa was about ten in this photo, taken in about 1885).

Thanks to one of Arthur and Louisa’s great granddaughters, who came to visit our church in 2019, I have some more pictures and stories of life here in the Vicarage in the second half of the reign of Queen Victoria. So there are more stories of the Irvine family to come. I’m not sure I’ll have the full lowdown on how all nine of them bumped along together in the Vicarage, but I like to imagine that it wasn’t all as neat and serious as they look in the photos and was perhaps rather more like our messy Vicarage life now. Mind you, it was almost impossible to get our kids to look at a camera at the same time when they were younger.

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A Year of Church History

Posted in Black Country, Church, history, Vicarage, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 1 January, 2024| 4 Comments »

It’s been so long since I blogged, but I’ve had a project bugging me for ages. It’s a real privilege to live in an old house and to know the names (and profession!) of all its principal inhabitants since it was built. So I want to write about some of the people who lived here in the Vicarage, whose stories I’ve learnt about in the years we’ve lived here (fifteen in the middle of February!). And I want to write a little about the history of our church too. When we arrived in the parish, the then churchwarden was undertaking that enormous task and produced a book from his research, so I have an excellent resource to start from, but the internet gives opportunities to discover more since that project was completed.

So this year I’m going to write about those things, about Rev Arthur Irvine, who lived in the Vicarage with his wife and eight children for most of the second half of Queen Victoria’s reign. One of his daughters made some sketches of the Vicarage family and I have permission from their descendents to share them here. I’m going to share some exerts from our church magazines from the 1920s and 30s, and Rev Benjamin Willmore’s evangelistic talks given here in Lent in 1850, and all sorts of other scraps. I might also write about what’s happening here, now that this Vicarage is emptying of dependent children and taking on a new sort of character.

And to start off, today I have an extract that I found in the electoral roll that was kept from the 1940s to the 1950s. It’s an unusual entry, and gives a reason for removal from the electoral roll that I’m glad that we’re never going to have to log. There’s a modern block at 14 Florence Road now, alongside the Victorian terraced houses that make up the rest of the street.

The Gureton family, Fred, Elizabeth and Lilian, bombed out of their home on 19th November 1940.

The bombing is mentioned on the West Bromwich History Society site:

On the 19th November the Germans launched a nine-hour attack on the Midlands with wave after wave of bombers. In West Bromwich bombs hit, Richard Street South, Lombard Street, Constance Avenue, Florence Road, Paradise Street, the District Hospital in Edward Street, the Corporation Gas Showrooms next to the Central Library, Oak Road and the Corporation Bus Garage and the Palace Cinema in the High Street.
Sometime around 7pm German planes first dropped thermite incendiary bombs that would set the town alight to guide in the next wave of bombers carrying high explosive bombs. German targets may well have been the railway sidings, surrounding factories and the large gas-holder at Swan Village.

https://www.westbromwichhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/WestBromwichBombing1940.pdf

In that same bombing, Edith Clare was injured in a house just along our road and died the next day, and Ernest Lamb, aged just 18, also from our parish, also died from injuries received that night. What an awful night for those families and for the whole parish. Rev Fred Sutton was the vicar then, and was still in post when some of our current church members joined – the connection to the past is close when you’re part of a community with memories.

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Surprising Summer Shots from the Inner City

Posted in Black Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on 15 July, 2015| Leave a Comment »

A couple of weeks ago Dreamer and I and Freddie the Dog took a walk around the local park. It’s bigger than you might think. It even has a couple of lakes. It was looking fabulous, as you can see. So if you were holding off applying for our Ministry Trainee position because you thought you might miss nature, think again. We’re still looking for someone!

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Anyone For Cake?

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 18 May, 2015| Leave a Comment »

And training, and the opportunity to preach and to lead youth work, school assemblies and Sunday services, the experience of living in a busy inner city vicarage with a messy family which includes a couple of teenagers (and a younger one), and a year or two seeing what God is up to in multi cultural West Bromwich? Anyone?

The Shropshire Lad is moving away next month to a new job and to be closer to his beloved. King is spending another year in the attic and so now we are looking for an attic mate for him. Maybe you? Or someone you know?

Our Ministry Trainee scheme has produced three ordinands to date, two of whom are now curates. Another is waiting to hear about his BAP. So it’s a great way to explore vocation in the Church of England – and our Diocesan Director of Ordinands is very friendly and helpful. But you don’t have to be thinking about ordination and others have joined us and taken the skills they’ve learnt into other fields. There are many opportunities to serve in the church – music, technology, visiting, evangelism, teaching the Bible to all sorts of people in all sorts of ways. There is great flexibility for development of existing gifts and discovery of ones you never even knew you had. And it’s lots of fun. And there is cake.

Generally our MTs attend the Midlands Ministry Training Course one day a week and there are opportunities to attend other training conferences and courses through the year. The Vicar meets with the MTs for supervision and there is also training in youth and children’s work with Dreamer, our Families and Community worker. Our church website is a bit undeveloped at the moment after it fell over a few months ago, but details of the post can be found there (and if you can do websites well that would be great too!).

And did I mention the cake?

Muffins and cheese straws NB Church hall table cloth!

Muffins and cheese straws (please excuse the church hall table cloth)

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The Vicar on Video

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on 14 March, 2012| 6 Comments »

We’ve slowly been souping up our rather basic church website over the past few months. The best thing we did was get our kind computer-literate friend to change it to a WordPress platform, which was familiar to us from blogging. The old site used Joomla and was just too difficult for us to get our heads around.

We try and update the site a couple of times a week to keep it live, and it seems that people are beginning to use it a little. Most of our congregation aren’t on the internet, but we think that the website is especially important for those who aren’t yet in church.

In our quest to make the site friendly and useful, a video of the Vicar has now been produced by Capable, a church member, and Compassion, who is a great friend of our congregation. I think they’ve done a great job and we’re hoping it’ll be a good introduction for people visiting the website. At least they won’t be surprised by the Vicar’s Scottish accent!

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High Street Blues

Posted in Inner city, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 11 July, 2011| Leave a Comment »

This weekend the Engineer’s godmother, Song, told me that our tow-un had been mentioned on Radio 4’s Food Programme. But not in a good way. It was in a programme looking at the effects and prevalence of trans-fats – factory produced fats which are used in cheap foods and which are linked to obesity and other health problems. Some national companies like McDonalds and KFC have signed up to a pledge to remove all trans-fats from their food by the end of this year. But small independent companies, like most of the ones in our high street, have generally not signed up.

The Food Programme’s presenter, Sheila Dillon, visited our high street (at around 15 minutes into the programme) with Sandwell’s Director of Public Health, Dr John Middleton. Dr Middleton says that Sandwell has been described as ‘fat central’ and that the quality of food that can be bought in the area is a factor in the obesity issues here.

And last week our local paper posted an article about how the high street here is one of the worst in the UK. The rental prices for retail property in the town have plummeted because the profits that can be made are so low that retailers are reluctant to operate here. So nearly all the shops sell cheap or heavily discounted products, which brings us trans-fats in the cut-price food and then the associated health problems.

So here, unlike Bristol, here we’re waiting for Tesco to save and regenerate our high street, as their new superstore is built. Saving and regenerating the town’s people, however, is something only God can do.

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The Public – A Visitor’s View

Posted in Inner city, Sandwell, State, tagged , , , , , , , , on 8 September, 2009| 3 Comments »

Our family visited West Bromwich’s very expensive new art gallery this weekend. We had been at the baptism of Polly’s baby at the local catholic church and had time before the chicken roasting in the Vicarage oven was going to be cooked, so we dropped into the big black fish tank with Babapapa windows.

Is it a huge waste of money or an investment for the future?

A huge waste of money or an investment for the future?

We have been in before (for expensive coffee and a view of the glitzy loos), but the art gallery part has only just opened, so this was our first opportunity to gauge whether the £67 million that was spent has been really worthwhile.

Of course, the word on the street is that it is a complete waste of money for a town which has no cinema, no bowling alley and no swimming pool. But let’s give it a chance, eh? We loved the art gallery in Wolverhampton, where you could look at beautiful pictures, dress up as a Georgian, feel textured sculptures and eat wonderful salad selections. I would sometimes just pop in with the kids for half an hour to visit their favourite exhibits.

So how was the Public going to shape up? Would the kids enjoy it? And would the grown ups?

First off, I have to say that the curators are a bit overkeen. I like to look at the art and spend time in my own head in a gallery. And the kids like to do their own thing. So having three or four curators launch themselves at us telling us what to do was a little off-putting.  Maybe they were a bit bored – there seems to be rather too many of them.  It’s great to have them there to ask things of, but when they just started suggesting what we do, I felt rather patronised. Like we were ignorant and wouldn’t know what to do and might not be able to read any instructions or labels. It made me a bit grumpy, to tell the truth. If I want people to leap on me and ask me if I need any help, I’ll go to a posh frock shop.

Secondly, there’s not a lot there. And I don’t want to sound ignorant or anything, but I don’t think that much of it was what I’d call art. There were four sculptures and some good photos of the Black Country from the 1960s. But the rest consisted of the following:

  • What the kids called ‘dance mats’ and were basically slightly weird and not very good computer games.
  • Some fun video projectors which enabled you to see yourself sitting on a bench with people sitting on a different bench.
  • Some touch screen digital photo frames with photos of art projects that have happened at the Public over the summer.
  • A couple of short movies (one on the Public and one on Malcolm X).
  • A chance to make an animation of yourself.
  • Some gadgets which you could swirl your hands in to make coloured bubbles appear on some round projector screens.

I’d much rather look at a couple of good paintings and let the kids dress up in funky ’60s clothing, like in Wolverhampton’s pop art gallery.

Now from their latest magazine, I can see that there is more to the place than the exhibition, and we enjoyed hearing wafts of live jazz as we ambled down the long wooden ramp that most of the gallery seems to comprise of. And I liked the look of their Saturday art club and might even bring the kids along one week.

But as for the exhibition, the children enjoyed jumping about on the ‘dance mats’ and swirling their hands to make bubbles. And they liked the free self portrait photo. But the Vicar and I were pretty bored. And I can’t see the gallery exciting my kids about art, especially not compared to what they could experience in Wolverhampton. I wonder what they could have done with a cheap refurbished factory and money spent on real art instead? Or money spent on artists in every primary school in Sandwell.

So in my view, the Public seems rather like the Millenium Dome. A visionary building with less than visionary contents. The Public has so far failed to impress this section of West Brom’s public.

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The Vicar in the news

Posted in Lads mags, Sandwell, vicar, tagged , , , , , , , , on 18 March, 2009| 2 Comments »

On the day of his induction service, when he was handed the keys to the church and officially started work, the Vicar received a telephone call from the Express and Star, our local daily newspaper.

The journalist was following the diary of the Mayor of Sandwell and wanted to know what he was doing coming to our church that evening. The Vicar explained that he (the Vicar) would be starting work in the parish, and the journalist ended up interviewing him and sending round a photographer.

For some reason, though, the article didn’t make it to the E&S website, so I’ve scanned it for you to see in all its glory. Unless you have x-ray vision, you’ll probably have to use the Ctrl and + keys to zoom in to read it.

The Vicar in the paper

The Vicar in the paper

The lack of cropping is because of my poor technical skills, but gives you a flavour of the rather eclectic style of the E&S – see how the article about the vicar is on the same page as (and rather larger than) one about the New York financier Bernard Madoff and his £37.5 billion fraud.

And just so you know, we think the journalist misheard ‘England’ as ‘Ireland’ when the Vicar was talking about the places he’d lived. And more on my recent lads mags encounter at Sainsbury’s soon.

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