Category: Civilian Garden

Carols in the Cemetery

How lucky are we ? The sun shone and the rain stayed away for the visit of the choir from St Albans R C Primary School who walked up to the cemetery to sing a mix of traditional and modern carols interspersed with interludes of Wham and Shakin’ Stevens songs!

The pupils have recently been singing in Touchwood shopping centre in Solihull so we were so pleased to welcome them. Parents joined FBEC members and Bereavement Officers to enjoy a lovely start to Christmas festivities. It was followed by a moment of quiet when pupils selected an interesting grave nearby and said a short prayer for those buried within.

Our thanks to all the pupils and their Teachers who made time in their busy school day to come into Brandwood End. We all really enjoyed it !!

 

Article by Dr Carl Chinn.

Dr Carl Chinn produced an article carried in the Birmingham Mail on Wednesday 23rd October. He has been kind enough to allow us to reproduce it below. It follows him unveiling our new Memorial stone in the Civilian Garden area.

 

Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery Memorial Blitz Victims

Birmingham’s people and their industries were crucial in the British effort to defeat Nazi Germany in the Second World War. In a secret paper written before the evacuation from Dunkirk in May/June 1940, the Chiefs of Staff told the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, that “Germany could gain complete air superiority unless she could not knock out our air force and the aircraft industries, some vital portions of which are concentrated at Coventry and Birmingham”.

They were right. Castle Bromwich became the most important factory making Spitfires, the iconic British fighter plane, with the BSA contributing its Browning machine guns. The Rover turned out Bristol Hercules engines; Fisher and Ludlow manufactured Lancaster wings, shell cases and bombs; and Reynold’s produced Spitfire wing spans and light alloy tubing.

Up to the Battle of Britain, all the aero-carburettors for the RAF’s Spitfires and Hurricanes came from SU Carburettors – and if it had been destroyed the air force would have suffered a mortal blow; whilst the Serck was responsible for all their radiators and air coolers.

Bur Birmingham was not only essential to the aircraft industries as its array of war work was staggering. Workers at the Dunlop, Kynochs, the Norton, James Cycle, Lucas, the Metropolitan-Cammell, Morris Commercial, the Wolseley and many more all strove hard for victory.

By 1944, 400,000 Brummies were involved in war work, a higher percentage of the population than anywhere else in the UK. It was their vital contribution that drew bombing from the Luftwaffe, ensuring that Birmingham would be the second most heavily bombed city in the country. And along with the whole of Merseyside, it lost more of its citizens to enemy action than any place outside London.

The Blitz killed 2,241 people, some of whom are buried in the Civilian Garden of Remembrance at Brandwood End Cemetery, Kings Heath. It holds sixty-three bodies, nine of whom are unidentified but all of whom are now honoured with a memorial thanks to the Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery. Most were killed in the three months of death and destruction at the end of 1940.

On the 14 October, Clementine Churchill, the wife of the Prime Minister, went to two Birmingham factories and a neighbourhood badly damaged by bombing. One of the local women placed a Union Jack on a pile of tiles and Mrs Churchill then spoke to Mr and Mrs Hartle whose house was in ruins. They told her, “Our house is down, but our spirits are still up”. The reporter added that “the demonstration of unflinching courage in this typical working-class suburban district was the same everywhere”.

The next night, 15/16 October, fifty-nine people were killed when over one hundred high explosive bombs, several delayed action bombs, and hundreds of incendiaries blasted the city. Rowton House lodging house in Alcester Street took a direct hit. About 200 working men were in the dining room having their evening meal, but “by a merciful chance only one death and no more than ten injuries were caused by the explosion”.

Nearby, ninety-five people sheltering in the basement of the Jewish school in St Luke’s Road, off Bristol Street, were also fortunate to survive when a bomb came through the ceiling. Sadly, round the corner in Belgrave Road, the O’Neill family suffered indescribable sorrow with five killed: Christopher was forty-five; his children Margaret and Neal were both five, his son Thomas was four, and the youngest, John, was eighteen months.

Belgrave Road-The result of bombing

The next month, the Germans announced they’d “plastered Birmingham, the centre of the British armament and supply industries, with bomb”. According to the enemy High Command, “in a succession of attacks hundreds of bomber planes discharged more than 500,000 kilogrammes of bombs (nearly 450 tons), some of the heaviest calibre”. Fires and explosions were visible at a great distance and they “were even more widespread than those in the raid on Coventry”.

This horrific raid began at 7.17 p.m. on Tuesday 19 November when the first of 350 planes dropped flares and incendiaries, lighting up their targets for the heavy bombers to drop their loads of death. Scenes of destruction abounded in Birmingham and on Holloway Head, the whole of Grant Street was laid waste. Amongst the victims was the Bramham family.

Sixty-year-old Charles was a clerk and volunteer with the Auxiliary Fire Service; his wife, Eleanor fifty-eight, was a retired clerk; and their daughter Joan, aged twenty, was a designer and first aid volunteer with Air Raid Precautions.

Allah Ditta Shamsuddin was also killed. Aged 45, nothing is known of him except that his name indicates that he was a South Asian Muslim and that he was a pioneer of his people’s migration to Birmingham. Intriguingly, in 1939, four-year old Ben Abdullah Shamsuddin was living with Fanny Baker in a back-to-back in Latimer Street, close to Grant Street.

There was no let up for the people of Birmingham as air raid followed air raid. Then, on the evening of 11/12 December, they endured the longest night of bombing in the war. Two hundred bombers blasted the city for over thirteen hours, killing 263 people and badly injuring 245 others.

One of the lucky ones was my Great-Granny Florence ‘Brockton’ Chinn at 54, Alfred Street, Sparkbrook. Our Dad told me that Billy the Fire Watcher from Gorton’s Woodyard came chasing down the street to Our Grandad’s at number 19, put his head round the door and shouted: “Alf! Alf! Brockton’s house has been hit”.

With great-uncle Wal, Granddad set off up the road and found that the back of their mom’s house had been blown away. Digging furiously through the rubble they found her alive, hidden beneath a sheet of corrugated iron which her sons had put under her stairs to protect her.

Across the street at number 4, the Budd family were not so fortunate as all of them were killed. Alfred Sidney was thirty-seven and a window cleaner and his wife, Ethel, was five years younger. They’d recently moved from Stratford Street, Sparkhill and unhappily, it led to their deaths and those of their four children: Ronald Sidney, eleven; Barbara, seven; Dennis, four; and Doreen, twenty-two months.

Overturned bus in Highgate Street near where the Budd family lost their lives.

The last major air raid pounded Birmingham during Holy Week in 1941, halfway between Palm Sunday and Easter. On the night of 9/10 April, 200 bombers dropped 650 high explosive bombs and 170 set of incendiaries. The first bomb fell on Bordesley Green at 9.35 pm and within minutes reports were coming in of high explosive bombs landing in Aston, Small Heath, Stechford and Kings Heath.

By early the next morning, much of Birmingham had been battered. Clusters of bombs had also struck Saltley, Spring Hill, Ladywood, Holloway Head, Sparkbrook, and Hockley. A trail of explosives followed Summer Lane from Constitution Hill to Gower Street, Lozells. Another line of explosives had been strung out along Long Acre and Cromwell Street, Nechells. And a mass of bombs and incendiaries had thundered upon Deritend, Highgate, and Digbeth.

Closer to the city centre the whole of the Midland Arcade was a mass of flames from High Street to New Street. The road itself was ablaze and “a molten stream of blazing tar pushed its way downhill towards New Street Station”.

On the recently built Dawberry Estate, five people living on Dawberry Road were killed. Thomas Joseph Orme was eighteen and a machinist and his sister Alice May was three years younger. Other family members came through the horror alive.

Their next-door neighbour, Bertram Olaf Battista, also died. Aged thirty-seven and from an Italian family long established in Birmingham, he was survived by his wife, Elizabeth nee Hill and formerly Holyoak. Her daughter, Kathleen eighteen and a press worker, was another victim, although her three siblings lived, as did her half-brother, Bertram Battista.

The last person killed was Reginald Hands aged seventeen and a GPO telephone messenger, carrying out an important role for Air Raid Precautions. He lived with his mother, father, and three siblings in Waldrons Moor, running off Dawberry Road.

Reginald Hands, Bertram Battista, the Ormes, the Budds, Allah Ditta Shamsuddin, the O’Neills, the Bramhams, and the others in the Civilian Garden of Remembrance at Brandwood End Cemetery are now honoured with a memorial naming them. Lest we forget.

Lee Bank , Holliday Street Five Ways.I pay tribute to the Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery for commissioning the memorial. Thanks also to Deacon David Fairbotham of the Catholic Parish of St. Dunstan and St. Jude and the standard bearers of the Federation of Birmingham Ex-Service Associations for their attendance at the unveiling.

 

Open event in Civilian Garden

September was an unusually busy month for FBEC  with the inclusion of two ‘main’ events for us. We have featured the unveiling of our new Memorial stone but we also had an Open Event for Heritage and were able to tell visitors the stories behind the names on the Memorial.

 

We were very pleased to welcome the new local Selly Oak MP and Minister for Veterans. Al Carns. He was very interested in the records showing the sites of bomb damage and relating to the deaths of those listed on the new Memorial.

Our thanks to all those interested people who called in to chat.

 

 

New Memorial unveiled by Dr Carl Chinn.

All our work came good today as Dr Carl Chinn unveiled our Memorial in the Civilian Garden of Remembrance. Now the names of those buried in this area can be read by visitors. We were also pleased to welcome Councillors John Cotton and David Barker as well as Brian Wright and Matt Felkin representing BARRA accompanied by 4 Standard Bearers. Several of our volunteers joined us, as well as representatives of local history groups and FBEC committee members.

       

 

The Memorial is now on view in The Civilian Garden of Remembrance and on Saturday the 14th we will be there to give visitors more information about the people whose names are displayed.

 

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HERITAGE WEEK BEGINS IN BRANDWOOD END

Take part in some of the Heritage Open  events in Brandwood End Cemetery. Add them to your diary now…

  • WEDNESDAY 11TH SEPTEMBER 2024- 2PM Join Ian Binnie as he takes you on a Tour of the memorials to those killed in 1944. (The 80th anniversary of D Day and other crucial battles). Ian will present biographies of several men and women who served and died and are buried in Brandwood End. There is no need to book this event. (THE TOUR WILL LAST APPROX. ONE HOUR. MEET BY THE LODGE, ON THE MAIN DRIVE. )
  • THURSDAY 12TH SEPTEMBER AT 7.30PM ‘Over by Christmas 1944’ A ZOOM event. To receive a ZOOM link please e mail Ian Binnie on warwickfus@btinternet.com
  • SATURDAY 14TH SEPTEMBER 11AM TILL 2 PM Who Lies Beneath? Join the Friends for an open event in the Civilian Garden of Remembrance (in Section 33) to learn more about those bombing victims buried in this communal peaceful space and see our recently installed Memorial stone carrying their names. We will be joined by local WW2 Air Raid and BARRA Historian, Matt Felkin, who will happily share his records and knowledge with visitors.

friendsofbec@gmail.com