Gateway to my Past

I was on a mission this morning, driving down to Solihull as the only store where I could exchange a jacket for my size, in readiness for our family wedding in just over a week's time.  We'd hoped to go to the annual Canwell Show, but the weather forecast was awful and it proved to be every bit as bad as expected.

While I was in South Birmingham I wanted to do a little exploring.  My father played for a cricket club in the 1960s, S and U (short for Sports and Utilities).  It was founded by Clifford Coombs, who more famously was chairman of Birmingham City Football Club from 1965.  The story was that his SandU company offered loans and the then chairman of the football club went to him for credit.  Clifford said yes, on the proviso that he could run the football club.  I have the vaguest memory of my one and only trip to a league football match, between Birmingham City and Middlesborough, and now realise why we were high up on the centre line; we were obviously in the directors box!

Anyway, the ground was idyllic, in the countryside with a white wooden pavilion and picket fence.  The scoreboard was magnificent, fashioned on the scoreboard at Edgbaston Cricket Ground, two and a half storeys high, complete with belted numbers for the batsmen's scores, total, wickets and such.  I remember being allowed to change the numbers by the scorers and took great care not to make any mistakes.

Dad was a prolific batsmen and wicket keeper.  I have cuttings from the old Birmingham Sports Argus of him scoring three successive 100s in Wednesday league matches.  My memories of the ground are still fresh.  Dad played on Sundays and we would often head to the Plough, a Berni Inn on the Stratford Road in Shirley before the game.  Dad never seemed to have a problem playing on a full stomach.  

It wasn't a big ground and it was surrounded on all sides by small country lanes.  The wives, girlfriends and children would often be roped in to finding the cricket ball that the batsmen had launched over the boundary at regular intervals. In those days summer weekends always seemed to be sunny.  We'd have jugs of squash available to us all of the time and if we were lucky Smith's crisps, complete with little blue bag of salt (Oh for the days before ready salted).  There was a public phone, complete with the A and B buttons, which I loved to play with on occasion.

I've struggled to find any images of the ground.  Sadly, while the internet is a marvellous thing and we can find images from the last 20 years or so with relative ease, little has been done to archive older images, other than those of greater significance.  Still I have my memories.

Despite the padlocked gate and wire fence around the ground I did find a gap and took myself back on to the ground for old times sake.  No buildings remain, save for a small wooden shed that could be seen from the road, but was impossible to reach from within the site.  I wondered if it might have been the old tool shed, but somehow doubt it would have survived the 50 years since I last visited.

The old square is now completely overgrown by a thicket of small bushes and trees.  I was delighted to see a couple of Muntjac deer in the thicket.  Certainly happier than they were to be disturbed in an area they probably consider to be their own, I would imagine.  I saw no evidence of any human movement, save for a couple of black sacks, thrown over the fence.  It was great to stand there, in the pouring rain and strong winds, just letting the memories cascade through my brain.  Happy times.

One thing I have found is an old cartoon depicting some of the players from the SandU Cricket Team.  It was drawn by a quite famous local cartoonist, Norman Edwards, who worked for the local newspapers.  From some research, he also wrote some books about the local football teams and from what I can tell was often commissioned to create similar cartoons for other local sides.