“All the big firms they all had a social club. I mean Round Oak social club we used to go dancing there as a teenager, I used to have dances every Friday night… and then Marsh’s one, that’s still standing… and they all had their football teams, and the cricket teams and they used to have outings and children’s parties… I can remember going to children’s parties at the brickyard where dad worked. So it was very much involved, there was all this involvement… There was this sort of sense of pride…and competition.”
Jeanette Grazier, Stourbridge (from audio recording)
“It was a farm of grassed-over pit banks… Ken Thomas (the farmer) used to keep Devon Red cattle… so in those fields on a nice sunny evening you could have the light reflecting off these Devon Red cattle… it was lovely. When they moved out… saw Cis once, that’s his wife, and, you know… apparently the story was she never came back to Merry Hill when they left… she never saw it. “Hello Cis, how you doing?” “Oh, alright”, she says “Not come back have yer? “No”, she says “they’ve put some shops there haven’t they?”
Dave Galley, Brierley Hill (from audio recording)
For more memories gathered during the Brierley Hillness project visit
http://brierleyhillnesstoolkit.wordpress.com/creative-community-responses/memories/audio-extracts/
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