Above: Diogo Jota fires a shot at goal during Wolves’ return to Europe against Crusaders. Jota scored Wolves’ first goal in European competition for 39 years in the 38th minute.
Picture: Matthew Childs/ Reuters
This summer, a sense of history has enveloped Molineux, the home of Wolverhampton Wanderers FC as ‘the Wolves’ returned to European football for the first time since they narrowly lost to PSV Eindhoven in the 1980/81 UEFA Cup. On the hottest July day on record, Wolves played the Belfast club Crusaders, who finished fourth in the Irish Premiership in the 2018/19 season, also winning the Irish Cup. Wolves won 2-0 and went through to the next round after winning by a similar margin in the return leg in Belfast the following week. Before the opening game, highlights of the Molineux team’s historic 1950s triumphs over the likes of Spartak Moscow and Budapest Honved were beamed on the big screens.
Fifties Floodlit Friendlies: Spartak & Honved.
Wolves’ first floodlit friendly against a European team at Molineux had resulted in a 2-0 victory over Glasgow Celtic on 14 October 1953, but their first match against continental opposition had been against the crack Austrian team, First Vienna FC. The match was played on Wednesday night, 13 October 1954, and ended in 0-0 draw. The match against Spartak Moscow had taken place on a foggy Wolverhampton evening of 16 November at Molineux, with the BBC broadcasting the game live. Spartak had recently crushed two of Belgium’s finest sides, Liége and Anderlecht. A week earlier they had beaten Arsenal 2-1 at Highbury, so Wolves knew that they were in for a tough night. Billy Wright led out the Wolves team clad in their fluorescent gold shirts and black shorts. The visitors moved the ball around the pitch with great skill, playing with unbounded enthusiasm and panache. Twice the ball had to be cleared from Wolves’ goal line with Bert Williams beaten. Bert then saved several more good attempts on his goal. Wolves countered with a display of fierce but fair tackling, moving the ball around with purpose, and they finally went ahead in the 62nd minute through the outstanding Dennis Wilshaw. Then, seven minutes from time, with the Russians noticeably tiring, Johnny Hancocks got Wolves’ second. It began to look good for the home team, and Wolves’ superior stamina now began to tell. In the eighty-eighth minute, Roy Swinbourne added a third, followed a minute later by Hancocks making it four. Wolves had scored three in a little over five minutes against one of the tightest defences in Europe. The 4-0 scoreline may have looked a little flattering, but Bill Shorthouse and Billy Wright broke up a series of threatening Russian attacks.
Next came the big one; the amazing Magyar soccer machine was coming to town. The ‘Mighty Magyars’ had burst onto the international scene in the early 1950s, and the Hungarian national team, already Olympic Champions, had been unlucky to lose 3-2 in the 1954 World Cup Final to West Germany. The Honved match was one of the first matches to be televised live the year after the ignominious defeat of the England teams 6-3 defeat to Ferenc Puskás’ crack Hungarian national side in 1953. Hungary was the first national team from outside the British Isles to beat England on home soil. If this wasn’t bad enough, it had been followed in the summer of 1954 by a 7-1 mauling in Budapest. These two humiliating results were still fresh in the minds of English fans, who saw Wolves’ forthcoming match as an opportunity for ‘revenge’. Honved were Hungary’s top team with many famous internationals in their side, including Lieutenant-Colonel Ferenc Puskás and his other well-drilled soldier stars: Bozsik, Kocsis, Grosics, Lóránt, Czibor and Budai; Kocsis having won the leading scorer prize in the World Cup finals in Switzerland. Billy Wright, captain of club and country, had a chance to atone against Puskás’ club side, the army team from the Hungarian capital which also contained the core of the country’s Arány csapat (‘golden team’).
Billy Wright & Ferenc Puskás lead their teams out at Molineux in December 1954.
European Cup Competitions:
The prospect of entertaining the tormentors of Billy Wright and England at Molineux was mouth-watering, especially following Wolves’ sensational win over Moscow Spartak a month earlier. I have written about the match itself and its outcome in more detail elsewhere on this site. Its significance was that on 13 December 1954, under the Molineux lights and in front of the BBC cameras, Wolves, then champions of England, played Hungarian champions Honved in a game many have viewed as being instrumental in the launch of European club competition nine months later. A crowd of 55,000 watched the home side secure a thrilling victory. Wolves went down 2-0 to Honved by half-time, before reviving to win 3-2. They were acclaimed as the champions of the world in the English media before the European Cup was established the following season. It may be thirty-nine years since their last proper European involvement, but Wolves can lay claim to being the pioneers of the former European Cup, now the Champions’ League, after their famous floodlit friendlies midway through the last century. Wolves then became the second English team – after Manchester United – to play in the European Cup in 1958-59 and 1959-60. They also reached the UEFA Cup final in 1972, beating Juventus in the quarter-final before losing to Tottenham in a two-legged final.
These European experiences form a significant part of the impressive Wolves museum at Molineux (pictured above). Back in 1980, the floodlights had gone out as Mel Eves (pictured below) scored but Wolves could not cancel out PSV’s 3-1 first-leg lead. That season they won the League Cup and finished sixth in what was then the Football League’s First Division.
After their victory over Crusaders in the Europa League earlier this summer, Wolves then went on to beat the Arminian club Pyunik, 8-0 on aggregate, and on 29 August, they booked their place in the Europa League group stage after beating Torino in front of a jubilant Molineux. The Black Country side are in the main stage of a European competition for the first time since 1980 after coming through three rounds of qualifiers. Their popular Portuguese manager, who has turned the club around since his 2017 appointment when they were in the Championship, named a strong team, making only four changes from Sunday’s home draw with Burnley. They started the game on the back foot, with Torino dominating possession and Wolves playing a counter-attacking game. But wing-back Traore was lively down the right and forced a save from Salvatore Sirigu after a sensational surging run – before setting up Jimenez for the opener. The Mexican has scored six goals in as many qualifiers this season.
Pictured above, Raoul Jimenez has scored six goals in as many Europa League qualifiers this season.
Raul Jimenez opened the scoring as he hooked home Adama Traore’s cross. Torino needed three goals at that stage and for about 60 seconds they seemed back in the tie when Italy international Belotti headed in Daniele Baselli’s free-kick. That made it 4-3 on aggregate, but before television replays of that goal were even shown, Leander Dendoncker put the game out of reach. Wolves had restored their two-goal aggregate advantage when Diogo Jota’s shot was saved and Dendoncker’s first-time shot from sixteen yards went in via the post. That goal meant Torino, who lost the previous week’s home leg 3-2, needed to score twice to force extra time, and, despite some late chances, a comeback never seemed likely. Wolves discovered their group opponents during last Friday’s draw in Monaco. Manchester United, Arsenal, Celtic and Rangers were also in the draw. No sides from the same country can be in one group, but an English team and Scottish team can be drawn together. United, the 2017 winners, and last season’s beaten finalists Arsenal are among the top seeds.
‘Massive’ Mission accomplished for Wolves:
Wolves’ European run may end up causing problems for their twenty-one-man first-team squad – this was their ninth game in thirty-six days – but that is a problem boss Nuno Espirito Santo wants. He has not bulked up his squad for Europa League action yet, with central defender Jésus Vallejo close to signing on loan from Real Madrid as a first summer signing, so Wolves have been fielding a similar line-up to that of last season. After finishing seventh in the Premier League in May and reaching Wembley for an FA Cup semi-final in which they led Watford 2-0 with eleven minutes remaining, Wolves look set to challenge towards the upper echelons of the Premiership this season, despite a series of tough early games running parallel to their qualifying games in Europe.
Below: Wolves manager Nuno Espirito Santo
After the Thursday night match, Wolves boss Nuno Espirito Santo, seen here saluting the crowd after his side qualified for the Europa League group stage, commented:
“Work started two years ago and this is the next step. This is massive for us.
“It has been tough so far. The way the fans push us, they are the 12th man.
“Tomorrow, after training, we will watch the draw. I don’t want to look too far ahead. We want to improve during the competition and use the games as a tool to improve the team.”
Following the draw on the 30th, Wolves discovered that they would face Besiktas, Braga and Slovan Bratislava in the group stage (Group K). In reaching the Europa League group stage, Wolves have returned to European competition they played a significant role in inspiring sixty-five years ago. Just reaching the Europa League group stage has not been an insignificant task for Wolves. Home and away victories in the play-off round against Torino represented only the 11th time an English club has beaten the same Italian opposition in back-to-back games in the entire history of European competition. It is a notable achievement for a side whose history is based around Europe and has happened in this of all weeks, when two of the oldest clubs in the Football League, Bolton Wanderers and Bury, have been threatened with closure, the latter being expelled from the League.
Mixed Fortunes to Fame Again, 1980-2019:
It is worth remembering that Wolverhampton Wanderers were themselves less than an hour away from going out of business in 1982. It turned out their supposed ‘saviours’, the Bhatti brothers, had had debatable motives in acquiring the famous club. After a land purchase went wrong, investment was cut off. Half of their ground was shut and Wolves were relegated to the fourth tier of English football for the first time before the long climb back to prominence began.
After beating all England’s top six at some stage last season, including the two sides that met in last year’s Europa League final, is it possible Wolves could go all the way and lift the trophy in Gdansk on 27, May 2020? Ex-players, still close to the club, feel it is a distinct possibility. “Yes, they are quite capable of doing it,” said Mel Eves, who made 214 appearances in nine years for his home town club from July 1975. From Darlaston in the Black Country, he grew up as a Wolves fan (see above). He was then eighteen when, on leaving Wolverhampton Grammar School, he joined the club as a professional player. He had already been ‘lucky enough’ to play for the youth team and the reserves. By the time he arrived, the famous players of the fifties had left the club. However, he met many of them when they visited the dressing room on match days and drew inspiration and advice from his heroes.
He did get the chance to play alongside one of Wolves’ ‘legends’ of the seventies, John Richards. Like me, he’d watched John’s career develop and blossom as he became one of the country’s leading goalscorers. Prior to this season, Mel was the last Wolves player to score in Europe, in 1980, something he wrote about in his foreword for John Shipley’s 2003 book, Wolves Against the World, written for the fiftieth anniversary of Wolves’ first floodlit match against European competition.
In the 1979/80 season, Wolves had beaten Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest in the League Cup Final at Wembley. Forest had won the European Cup in 1979 and went on to retain it in 1980. Wolves also finished a creditable sixth in the First Division. So it was that, at the beginning of the 1980/81 season, that Wolves found themselves on another, fourth UEFA Cup adventure.
However, it was short-lived, as ‘Dutch masters’ PSV Eindhoven pretty much put an end to the club’s dreams on Wednesday 17 September by beating Wolves 3-1 in Holland. Just past the half-hour mark, PSV’s impressive trio of K’s: Kerkof, Koster and Kraay, combined well to tee-up the ball for Ernie Brandts. He walloped a twenty-five-yard cannonball that flew past Bradshaw. After that, the Wolves goalkeeper put on a superb display to keep the score to 1-0 at half-time. A minute after the restart Wolves got an equaliser when George Berry sent a looping cross over to Andy Gray, who met it cleanly to score with a great header. But then PSV moved up a gear and the speed of their attacks were at times breathtaking. Dutch international Adri Koster switched wings, creating many problems for Wolves. He fastened onto one of Van der Kerkof’s defence-splitting passes before beating Brazier to fire in a fabulous ball that Kraay put into the Wolves net. In the seventy-sixth minute, another of Koster’s mazy runs was foiled by a strong but seemingly legitimate challenge by Wolves’ Uruguayan centre-back Rafael Villazon. The referee pointed to the spot and the hotly-disputed penalty was converted by Willie Van de Kuylen to give PSV a 3-1 advantage.
That deficit was always going to be difficult to reverse, even at Molineux, where such things had happened before in European matches. Richards and Gray did everything they could to get the ball in the net, in spite of the fouls perpetrated against them. The Dutch ‘keeper stopped everything that came his way, but it looked as if Wolves might just come out on top. Then, in the 38th minute, the lights suddenly went out, as the stadium and much of Woverhampton’s town centre was thrown into darkness by a power-cut. The players and spectators stood around for twenty-five minutes until the game could be restarted, but it was not until the second half that a Wolves goal came, following a fiftieth-minute goalmouth melée, with Darlaston-born Mel Eves the scorer of what was destined to be the last Wolves’ goal to be scored in a European competition.
Wolves were denied two penalties and, urged on by Emlyn Hughes (above), they threw everything into attack, but failed to get another breakthrough. Once again, the dream was over. As Mel Eves later wrote, neither the players nor the fans envisaged the catastrophes that were looming on the horizon, nor that this would turn out to be their last European adventure for a very long time:
I often get asked what it was like to be the last Wolves player to score a goal in a European competition; the answer is simple: at the time, neither I, nor anyone else that I know of, could have imagined that this would be Wolves’ last European goal; I’d never have believed it if someone had told me that. I suppose my best answer is that it was great to score any goal for Wolves. Now I can’t wait to lose the tag because for someone to score a European goal would mean we’d have regained our rightful place in the top echelon of English football, back where Wolves belong.
Mel Eves has had to wait another sixteen years for this to happen when Diego Jota scored Wolves’ first goal against Crusaders in July 2019:
“Nobody under forty will have any recollection of Wolves being a European team but those who are older do and it is that success the current owners are trying to emulate.
“In the 1970s we were always capable of competing with the likes of Liverpool and Manchester United, even if we weren’t consistent enough to win league titles.
“This week, with all that has happened at Bury and Bolton, it has been easy to remember when it was us, when Wolves were the ones in trouble and falling down the leagues.
“Our owners now want to return us back to where we were in the glory days – and everyone is loving it.”
As a Wolves fan of fifty years, I hope the ‘glory days’ are finally back for the team in old gold and black. As the club and town motto attests, Out of Darkness Cometh Light!
The first black Gospel group to make an impact in Britain were ‘The Singing Stewarts’. They were originally from Trinidad and Aruba, where the five brothers and three sisters of the Stewart family were born. They migrated to Handsworth in Birmingham in 1961, part of the second major wave of Windrush migrants who came to Britain just before the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 ended the ‘open door’ policy for British overseas nationals. This was the period when many families were settling in Britain, many rejoining ‘menfolk’ who had come on their own some years earlier (see picture below). Many people moved to Britain before the Act was passed because they thought it would be difficult to get in afterwards. Immigration doubled from fifty-eight thousand in 1960 to over 115,000 in 1961, and to nearly 120,000 in 1962. The Stewarts were all members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and under the training of their strict and devoted mother began to sing in an a cappella style songs that mixed traditional Southern gospel songs written by composers like Vep Ellis and Albert Brumley. To this material, they added a distinctly Trinidadian calypso flavour and by the mid-sixties were performing all around the Midlands. In later years they were joined by a double bass affectionately referred to as ‘Betty’. From childhood growing up in the church, they would refuse all offers to sing ‘secular’ music.
Above: Caribbean families arriving in Britain in the early 1960s
Settling in Handsworth, they quickly made a name for themselves in West Birmingham and what is known as Sandwell today (then as Smethwick and Warley), especially among the nonconformist churches where most of the Caribbean immigrant families were to be found. They also appeared at a variety of cross-cultural events and at institutions such as hospitals, schools and prisons. They performed on local radio and TV which brought them to the attention of a local radio producer and folk-music enthusiast Charles Parker, who heard in the group’s unlikely musical fusion of jubilee harmonies, Southern gospel songs and a Trinidadian flavour something unique. In 1964 they were the subject of a TV documentary produced by him which brought them to national attention. Parker helped them to cultivate their talent, and to become more ‘professional’, opening them up to wider audiences. They took his advice and guidance on board and reaped dividends on the back of their TV appearances and national and European tours that increased their exposure and widened their fan base. The most significant TV project was a documentary entitled ‘The Colony’, broadcast in June 1964. It was the first British television programme to give a voice to the new working-class Caribbean settlers.
For a while, in the early sixties, they were the only black Gospel group in the UK media spotlight. It was difficult to place them in a single category at the time, as they sang both ‘negro spirituals’ and traditional Gospel songs, which made them a novelty to British and European audiences. The Singing Stewarts were able to undertake a European tour where they played to crowds of white non-churchgoers. Thousands warmed to them, captivated by their natural and effortless harmonies. They possessed a remarkable ability to permeate cultural barriers that was unprecedented at the time, due to the racial tensions which existed in West Birmingham, Warley and Smethwick in the late sixties and seventies, stirred up by the Wolverhampton MP and Government Minister, Enoch Powell, who made his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham in 1968, and in local election campaigns in Smethwick run by the National Front. Meanwhile, in the US in 1967, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, a Berkeley-based ensemble called the Northern California State Youth Choir found that a track on their independent album – a soulful arrangement of a Victorian hymn penned by Philip Doddridge – started getting plays on a San Francisco pop station. The choir, renamed as the Edwin Hawkins Singers, were quickly signed to Buddah Records and “Oh Happy Day” went on to become a huge international pop hit.
In Britain the British record companies alerted to the commercial potential of US gospel music, looked around for a British-based version of that music and in 1968 The Singing Stewarts were signed to PYE Records. The following year, they were the first British gospel group to be recorded by a major record company when PYE Records released their album Oh Happy Day. Cyril Stapleton, PYE Records’ leading A&R executive, and a legendary big band conductor had invited the family to his London studio, where he produced the new classic and extremely rare album. Hardly surprisingly, The Singing Stewarts’ single of “Oh Happy Day” didn’t sell, since pop fans were already familiar with the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Nor did the album sell well, partly because it was given the clumsy, long-winded title of Oh Happy Day And Other West Indian Spirituals Sung By The Singing Stewarts. It was released on the budget line Marble Arch Records. Also in 1969, they appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, where they were exposed to a wider and more musically diverse public. Their folksy Trinidadian flavour delighted the arts festivalgoers. The family went on to make more albums which sold better, but they never wavered from their original Christian message and mission. They continued to sing at a variety of venues, including many churches, performing well into retirement age. Neither did they compromise their style of music, helping to raise awareness of spirituals and gospel songs. They were pioneers of the British Black Gospel Scene and toured all over the world helping to put UK-based black gospel music on the map.
My own experience of ‘The Singing Stewarts’ came as a fourteen-year-old at the Baptist Church in Bearwood, Warley, where my father, Rev. Arthur J. Chandler, was the first minister of the newly-built church. We had moved to Birmingham in 1965, and by that time West Birmingham and Sandwell were becoming multi-cultural areas with large numbers of Irish, Welsh, Polish, Indian, Pakistani and Caribbean communities.
My grammar school on City Road in Edgbaston was like a microcosm of the United Nations. In the early seventies, it appointed one of the first black head boys in Birmingham, and was also a community of many faiths, including Anglicans, Nonconformists, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and followers of ‘Mammon’! Our neighbourhood, which ran along the city boundary between Birmingham and the Black Country in Edgbaston (the ‘border’ was literally at the end of the Manse garden), was similarly mixed, though still mostly white. Birmingham possessed a relatively wealthy working class, due to the car industry, so the distinctions between the working class and middle-class members of our church were already blurred. There were no more than a handful of ‘West Indian’ members of the congregation at that time, from the mid-sixties to mid-seventies, though after my father retired in 1979, it shared its premises with one of the new black-led congregations. During the sixties and seventies, there were also more black children in the Sunday School, Boys’ and Girls’ Brigades and Youth Club, who attended these local facilities independently of their parents. These children and youths were especially popular when we played sports against other Baptist congregation in the West Birmingham area, except perhaps when it came to the annual Swimming gala!
The Stewart Family came to our church, at my father’s invitation, in 1970. Previously, my experience of Gospel music had been limited to singing a small number of well-known spirituals, calypso and gospel songs in the school choir or accompanying my sister on the guitar in a performance of ‘This Little Light of Mine’ and other songs which had not yet made it into an alternative to ‘the Baptist Hymn Book’. I guess I must also have heard some of the renditions by Pete Seeger and the popular English folk group ‘the Spinners’, on the radio and TV. Then there were the Christmas songs like the ‘Calypso Carol’ and Harry Belafonte’s version of ‘Mary’s Boy Child’. Most of the ‘pop’ songs performed by ‘northern soul’ singers were massively over-produced, and even the ‘folk songs’ sung by white folk seemed to lack authenticity. I don’t think I’d heard a group sing a capella before, either, and it wasn’t until some years later, in Wales, that I heard such beautiful, natural, improvised harmonies again. I was inspired and moved by the whole experience, transformed by the deep ‘well-spring’ of joy that the Welsh call ‘hwyl’. There isn’t a single English word that does this emotion justice. At the end of the ‘service’, a ‘call’ to commitment was made, and I found myself, together with several others, standing and moving forward to receive God’s grace.
This was unlike any other experience in my Christian upbringing to that date. The following Whitsun, in 1971, I was baptised and received into church membership. In 1974, a group of us from Bearwood and south Birmingham, who had formed our own Christian folk-rock group, attended the first Greenbelt Christian Music Festival, where Andrae Crouch and the Disciples were among the ‘headline acts’. Thus began a love affair with Gospel music of various forms which has endured ever since. We were inspired by this event to write and perform our own musical based on the Gospel of James, which we toured around the Baptist churches in west and south Birmingham. In 2013, I attended the fortieth Greenbelt Festival with my ten-year-old son, at which the London Community Gospel Choir (formed by Rev Bazil Meade and others in 1982, pictured below)‘headlined’, singing ‘O Happy Day!’ among other spirituals and hymns (like ‘The Old Rugged Cross’) …
The service led by the Stewart Singers in Bearwood also began, more importantly, my own ministry of reconciliation. I have heard and read many stories about the coldness displayed by many ‘white Anglo-Saxon’ churches towards the Windrush migrants, and they make me feel guilty that we did not do more to challenge prejudiced behaviour, at least in our own congregations, to challenge prejudiced behaviour among our fellow Christians. However, I also feel that it is all too easy for current generations to judge the previous ones. You only have to look at what was happening in the southern United States and in ‘Apartheid’ South Africa to see that this was a totally different time in the life of the Church in many parts of the world. It was not that many Christians were prejudiced against people of colour, though some were, or that they were ‘forgetful to entertain strangers’. Many sincerely, though wrongly (as we now know from Science) that God had created separate races to live separately. In its extreme forms, this led to the policies of ‘separate development’ of the South African state, underpinned by the theology of the Dutch Reformed Church, and the belief in, and practice of, ‘segregation’, supported by Southern Baptists and others in the United States.
I remember discussing these issues with my father, who was by no means a white supremacist, but who had fears about the ability of Birmingham and the Black Country, the area he had grown up in and where he had become a Jazz pianist and bandleader in the thirties before training for the Ministry, to integrate so many newcomers, even though they were fellow Christians. However, rather than closing down discussion on the issue, as so many did in the churches at that time, mainly to avoid embarrassment, he sought to open it up among the generations in the congregation, asking me to do a ‘Q&A’ session in the Sunday evening service in 1975. There were some very direct questions and comments fired at me, but found common ground in believing that whether or not God had intended the races to develop separately, first slavery and then famine and poverty, resulting from human sinfulness, had caused migration, and it was wrong to blame the migrants for the process they had undergone. Moreover, in the case of the Windrush migrants (we simply referred to them as ‘West Indians’ then), they had been invited to come and take jobs that were vital to the welfare and prosperity of our shared community. In the mid-seventies to eighties, I became involved in the Anti-Nazi League in Birmingham. At university in north Wales, I campaigned against discrimination experienced by Welsh-speaking students, despite experiencing anti-English prejudice from some of them. In the early eighties, I joined the Anti-Apartheid movement, welcoming Donald Woods to Swansea to talk about his book on Steve Biko, and leading the South Wales Campaign against Racism in Sport in opposition to the tour by the South African Barbarians at the invitation of the Welsh Rugby Union.
The singing Adventists continued to perform to black and white audiences and even performed on the same stage as Cliff Richard. In 1977 the group were signed to Christian label Word Records, then in the process of dropping their Sacred Records name. The Singing Stewarts’ Word album ‘Here Is A Song’ was produced by Alan Nin and was another mix of old spirituals (“Every time I Feel The Spirit”), country gospel favourites (Albert Brumley’s “I’ll Fly Away”) and hymns (“Amazing Grace”). With accompaniment consisting of little more than a double bass and an acoustic guitar, it was, in truth, a long, long way from the funkier gospel sounds that acts like Andrae Crouch were beginning to pioneer. The Singing Stewarts soldiered on for a few more years but clearly their popularity, even with the middle of the road white audience, gradually receded. In his book British Black Gospel, author Steve Alexander Smith paid tribute to The Singing Stewarts as one of the first black gospel groups to make an impact in Britain and the first gospel group to be recorded by a major record company. They clearly played their part in UK gospel’s continuing development.
In the mid-1980s, while working for the Quakers in the West Midlands, I ‘facilitated’ a joint Christian Education Movement schools’ publication involving teachers from the West Midlands and Northern Ireland. Conflict and Reconciliation (1990)based on examples of community cohesion in Handsworth. The ‘riots’ there in the early 1980s, partly stage-managed by the tabloid press, had threatened to unpick all the work done by the ‘Windrush generation’. David Forbes, a black community worker living in Handsworth, visited ‘white flight’ schools in south Birmingham and Walsall to talk about his work and that of others in Handsworth, contrasted with the negative stereotyping which his neighbourhood had received. More recently and since moving to Hungary, I have supported international campaigns against anti-Semitism.
Frank Stewart (one of the brothers, pictured right) was also one of the first black people to play gospel music on a BBC radio station with The Frank Stewart Gospel Hour on BBC Radio WM. Sadly, his The death in Birmingham on 2nd April 2012 was the closing chapter in a key part of the development of British gospel music over half a century and more. For although in recent years it was Frank’s radio work where for more than a decade he presented The Frank Stewart Gospel Hour on BBC Radio WM, it was the many years he spent running The Singing Stewarts which was arguably his most significant contribution to UK Christian music history and black music history.
My experiences with the Windrush migrants shaped my interests and actions in opposing racism in a variety of forms over the subsequent decades, and they continue to do so today. In particular, I continue to research into migration and to argue the case for channelling and integrating migrants, rather than controlling and assimilating them. Like the Singing Stewarts, and the Welsh Male Voice choirs before them, working-class migrants are often able and willing to contribute much from their own cultures. Multi-cultural Britain has not been made in a ‘melting pot’ but through the interaction of cultures and identities in mutual respect. That is the reconciliation through integration and integration through reconciliation which I believe that Christians must work towards.
Unfortunately, there are no CDs or online recordings of this LP, or these songs. However, there is a youtube recording of the group in concert, the link for which is given below.
Chapter Five: Migrant Women, Work and Marriage in the West Midlands of England.
In Birmingham, Coventry, and other areas of the West Midlands, where juveniles or young adults were placed in large-scale industrial concerns, the government Transference Scheme appears to have been more successful throughout the thirties. Such employment was better-paid and facilitated the maintenance of some measure of group identity in the work, domestic and leisure experiences of the transferees. The regional dimension to this contrast is highlighted by a 1934 memorandum from the Midland Divisional Controller to the Ministry:
There is really no comparison between the Midlands Division and say, London, because all the London vacancies are hotel and domestic posts.
Those local Juvenile Employment Committees who considered the transference work a priority ensured that the juveniles were met at the station and escorted to their lodgings. They might also ensure that social contacts were made and that parents were kept informed of the progress of their son or daughter. The officers of the Birmingham Juvenile Employment Bureau were involved with the Merthyr Bureau in each stage of the transference process. They visited Merthyr to interview the juveniles and to explain to their parents the various types of vacancies available. In 1937, this resulted in sixteen boys and seven girls being transferred. The link between the local officials led to a firm of electrical engineers employing an entire family from Merthyr. They were given a bungalow from which the mother looked after a number of the apprentices. Much of this work was undertaken under the auspices of the special After Care Committee of the JEC, and the effectiveness of their work was recorded by A J Lush, in his report for the South Wales and Monmouthshire Council of Social Service:
A large number from South Wales have secured employment in the area of South Birmingham. It is gratifying to note that from the employers, comparitively few complaints have been received. With regard to the boys themselves, the general difficulty experienced is that having been in Birmingham for a month or two, they wish to experiment by changing their lodgings and also their jobs, just to see what other kinds of work and other parts of Birmingham are like…
The lack of after-care provision in smaller ‘Black Country’ townships such as Cradley Heath and Halesowen was reported as being the cause of much concern to Ministry officials. On the other hand, juvenile transference to Coventry and Rugby was said to be of fairly considerable dimensions. The relative success of the Scheme to these centres was due in no small part to the ability of local officials to change attitudes among local employers. At the beginning of 1928, the Coventry District Engineering Employers’ Association was ‘unanimous’ in its opinion that it was very dangerous proceeding to bring large numbers of boys and girls into any area without parental control. By 1937, the employers’ attitudes had changed to the extent that they were willing to consider the provision of a hostel, as in Birmingham, and to guarantee continuous employment for the juveniles over a period of twelve months.
In Coventry, Welsh immigrants were not as concentrated in either domestic or industrial terms as they were in Cowley. In 1937, the Juvenile Employment Committee recognised that the wide dissemination throughout the city of those requiring supervision was a major cause for concern. Oral evidence reveals that it was also a cause of anxiety and homesickness among many of the immigrants. However, although it was more difficult to recreate a sense of neighbourhood, it would be wrong to assume that the majority of immigrants felt scattered and isolated. In the first place, there were pockets of Welsh immigrants in Longford, Holbrooks and Wyken. The Hen Lane estate, in particular, was said to have a large concentration of Welsh workers. Secondly, there is evidence that familial and fraternal relationships were just as significant as in Cowley. Labour was engaged in a similar way, usually at the factory gates, except that Coventry firms actively recruited in the depressed areas by means of advertisements and ‘scouts’. This encouraged still further the tendency towards networked migration, and many men in well-paid jobs found definite openings for friends and relatives. Some, like Haydn Roberts, were ‘second stage’ migrants, attracted to Coventry from metropolitan London by the better pay and more secure terms of employment on offer. The prospect of a more settled, married life in Coventry was a huge incentive:
I met my fist wife, she was a girl from Nantymoel. She was a maid in Northwood College for girls… I went to Nantymoel and met Bill Narberth and the bands… He came to Coventry in 1934 to play for Vauxhall Crossroads Band… He got a job in Alfred Herbert’s in the hardening shop. He came up for the Band… they wanted cornet players in the Vauxhall and he applied and got the job… and quite a few others… I met Bill and he was talking about the money he earned… So I threw up my job and got a single ticket, came up by train… There were quite a few Welsh people around that area in Longford and Holbrooks because the factories were there… Herberts, the Gasworks, Morris Bodies and Morris Engines.
The importance of these kinship and friendship networks can be traced through the electoral registers and civic directories of the period, as well as from The Roll of the Fallen: A Record of Citizens of Coventry who fell in the Second World War, 1939-45 (published in 1945, including the birthplaces of those killed in action, 1939-45/ by enemy action, i.e. bombing of the City in 1940-41) and the Queens Road Baptist Church Roll. From these, it is possible to reconstruct eighty-six ‘Welsh households’ in Coventry, forty-eight of which showed clear signs of sub-letting, in many cases to obvious adult relatives or friends of Welsh origin. Jehu Shepherd married and bought a house in 1939, but he was one of the earliest Rhondda immigrants to Coventry, who remained a powerful influence on Coventry Welsh life throughout the period and well beyond. He was one of a family of nine, all of whom left Wales. He left the Rhondda just before the General Strike and was found a job at the Morris Works by his brother-in-law, going to live in his sister’s house. He then found a job at the same factory for his brother Fred, who brought his wife Gwenllian with him, and they were followed by Haydn who got a job at Courtaulds. Another sister, Elizabeth and her husband moved to Coventry in 1927. The family in general, and Jehu, in particular, appear to have given early cohesion to the Welsh community in Coventry, especially through the formation of the Coventry Welsh Glee Singers. He met and married Mary, from Ystradgynlais, in Coventry in the late thirties, and they bought a house together in 1939. She was a nurse who later became a senior sister and ward matron in the Gulson Road Hospital and Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital in the post-war NHS.
Aneurin Bevan, Minister for Health and Housing, meeting NHS nursing staff.
Jehu was also choirmaster at Queens Road Baptist Church from 1926, but in 1937 he decided that he had to give up this duty in favour of keeping the Gleemen together because most of them didn’t go to church, some of them liked a drink… and he felt he must keep them together. In February 1929, the Society and the Gleemen had combined to give a performance in aid of the Lord Mayor of Coventry’s Fund for the Distressed Areas. The Midland Daily Telegraph praised the careful training given by Mr Shepherd to his singers during their weekly rehearsals. The exiles’ empathy with those they had left behind in the valleys was portrayed to full effect when Miss Chrissie Thomas played God Bless the Prince of Wales on her mandolin, in reference to the Prince’s recent visit to the distressed areas.
There can be little doubt that, as with the Glee Singers, the majority of the Welsh immigrants to Coventry did not attend church regularly, and that the working men’s clubs in Holbrooks and Wyken were more important centres of Welsh life than were Queens Road Baptist Church or West Orchard Congregational Church. Nonetheless, these churches attracted larger numbers of them than their counterparts in London. The attractiveness of these chapels was due, in no small part, to their inspirational Welsh Ministers, Howard Ingli James and Ivor Reece, respectively. From his induction in 1931, Ingli James provided strong leadership for those among the Welsh who were chapel-goers. When Mary Nicholas and Martha Jones, sisters from Tonypandy, first started attending Queens Road on arrival in Coventry in 1932, they found that there were a great many Welsh already in the congregation. In his sermons, Ingli James affirmed to a wide audience, the society and culture from which they had come, as Mary Shepherd, recalled:
I always remember once when he talked about the miners he said, “I had a load of coal and paid for it the other day – did I say ‘paid for it’ ? No, never, when I think what those poor men had to go through to get that coal for me to enjoy – and then I say, ‘I paid for it’ – no money would pay for what they did!” I can see him now in that pulpit.
The Nuffield Survey’s war-time report on Coventry and East Warwickshire found that the City’s sixty thousand houses and shops were a goodly number for the population as it stood at the outbreak of war and that, although large houses were few, the great majority of houses provided accommodation superior to the average for the whole country. Mary Nicholas, originally from the Rhondda, described her reaction to the change in accommodation which her move to Coventry involved:
Comparing the house I was living in with the house I came from I thought I was in heaven. I thought of the old house and black leading the grates…
In Birmingham, the connection with a particular coalfield area again played an important part in establishing a significant immigrant community. A significant proportion of those who settled in South West Birmingham during the period was from the Monmouthshire mining villages of Blaina, Nantyglo and Risca. In particular, there seems to have been a close link between Cadbury’s at Bournville and the authorities and officials in Blaina and Nantyglo; a large number of juvenile transferees, girls and boys, from this area went to Bournville direct from secondary school. The Quaker-founded Company had always operated a strict marriage bar, so there was a constant demand for single women. J. B. Priestley described the type of work done by the young women at the ‘works’ when he visited in the Autumn of 1933:
The manufacture of chocolate is a much more elaborate process (than that of cocoa) … there were miles of it, and thousands of men and girls, very spruce in overalls, looking after the hundred-and-one machines that pounded and churned and cooled and weighed and packed the chocolate, that covered the various bits of confectionery with chocolate, that printed labels and wrappers and cut them up and stuck them onand then packed everything into boxes that some other machine had made. The most impressive room I have ever seen in a factory was that in which the cardboard boxes were made and the labels, in that shiny purple or crimson paper, were being printed: there is a kind of gangway running down the length of it, perhaps twenty feet from the floor, and from this you had a most astonishing view of hundreds of white-capped girls seeing that the greedy machines were properly fed with coloured paper and ink and cardboard. In some smaller rooms there was hardly any machinery. In one of them I saw a lot of girls neatly cutting up green and brown cakes of marzipan into pretty little pieces; and they all seemed to be enjoying themselves; though I was told that actually they preferred to do something monotonous with the machines. I know now the life history of an almond whirl. There is a little mechanical device that makes the whirl on the top, as deft as you please. I saw thousands of marsh-mallows hurrying on an endless moving band… to the slow cascade of chocolate that swallowed them for a moment and then turned them out on the other side, to be cooled, as genuine chocolate marsh-mallows…
There was a girl whose duty it was, for forty-two hours a week, to watch those marsh-mallows hurrying towards their chocolate Niagara. “Wouldn’t that girl be furious,” I sad to the director who was showing me round, “if she found that her Christmas present was a box of chocolate marsh-mallows?” But he was not at all sure. “We consider our staff among our best customers,” he told me. … Such is the passion now for chocolate that though you spend all your days helping to make it, though you smell and breathe it from morning until night, you must munch away like the rest of the world. This says a good deal for the purity of the processes, which seemed to me exemplary…
By the autumn of 1934, the Monmouthshire migrants were well-enough settled to form an organisation known as the Birmingham Association for the Relief of the Distressed Areas (BARDA), together with immigrants from Durham. Its aims were to help families who already had one or more members settled in Birmingham to remove their homes to the city. It had a membership of about two hundred, whose meetings were held at the Friends’ Meeting House in Cotteridge, just along the Bristol Road from Bournville. Over the period over a hundred individual members of families were reunited in this way, and the families were often related. Fifty-five of this hundred, including mothers not seeking paid work, had members in regular employment by the early months of 1937; twenty-two were still at school and only four of the fathers who had followed their daughters and sons to Birmingham were without full-time, permanent work. Of these four, two were approaching pensionable age, and the other two had temporary or part-time work.
Once a young migrant had become sufficiently established to ask her or his parents to join them and make a home, the Association set to work finding a house for them. Since landlords were averse to accepting unemployed tenants, BARDA’s recommendation of an employed son or daughter as a responsible tenant helped to overcome this problem.In some cases, houses were purchased on a new estate from a fund created for the purpose and in others, help was given in order for families to furnish their new homes adequately. By these means, BARDA enabled a large number families to become independent, self-supporting and self-confident. Its meetings provided an opportunity for them to come together, deal collectively with individual problems of settlement and family reunification and to discuss the broader issues relating to unemployment, migration and the problems of the distressed areas.
BARDA entered into lengthy correspondence concerning the way in which the means test regulations presented a major obstacle to the reunification of families in Birmingham. Parents were already faced with the prospect additional household expenditure in the provision of equipment for the reunited family, in the replacement of clothing and in the higher costs of lighting and heating which obtained in Birmingham. They were therefore understandably reluctant to move unless they could be sure that the unemployment allowances would not be decreased before they had had a reasonable period to look for work and establish the household. BARDA had written to various officials, setting out specific cases which showed the obstructiveness of the regulations to their work:
The kind of case we have specially in mind is of a family where two youths over school age have been successful in obtaining employment in Birmingham – one in a regular position and the other in more temporary employment. The father is about forty-two years and has a wife and two children of school age. Presumably, whilst living in a distressed area the parents with their two children obtain full public assistance but if they transfer to live with their two sons,… they would receive no public assistance as the wages of the two sons would be viewed as sufficient for the household. There would be the added risk that the one son in temporary employment might become unemployed so that the parents and four children would be dependent upon the earnings of one youth. The alternative appears to be for the family to continue to receive public assistance until they qualify for old age pension, in which case the two children, now of school age, might also become a charge on the public assistance. Whereas if the whole family removed to this area there might be a prospect of the whole family obtaining employment.
This case illustrates graphically the disjunction which existed between unemployment policy and voluntary migration and why so many migrants chose to have nothing to do with the transference schemes of the Ministry of Labour. To solve this most peculiar paradox in policy, BARDA advocated that no deductions should be made from parental unemployment allowances for a minimum of six months. Nevertheless, its advocacy was of no avail. Although, as an example of autonomous organisation of migration, BARDA was successful in attracting interest in government and the national press, its practical influence was limited to South West Birmingham and did not extend to the nearby town of Smethwick, where Rhondda people had been able to find homes in close proximity to each other and were working in the Tangyies Munitions Factory by 1936-37. Instead, they made good use of the local chapels and, as in Oxford and Coventry, formed a male voice choir. However, the Welsh causes which existed in the centre of Birmingham, like those in London, had been founded in the early and mid-nineteenth century, their congregations mainly made up of professional, Welsh-speaking people from rural Wales, the language of worship also being Welsh. The mostly English-speaking immigrants from Monmouthshire who were able to afford the bus fare into the city centre soon found that they had little in common with their Welsh-speaking country cousins. The new exiles took little interest in the activities of the two Welsh societies, Y Brythoniad and Y Cymrodorion.
Haydn Roberts, who had moved from London to Coventry in the mid-thirties, and became foreman at the GEC, recalled how trade unionism spread to the factory from the Standard Works when the latter sacked a lot of trade union members. He remembered a Welsh shop steward in the Model Room who had been at the Standard Works and was a bit militant because Sir John Black had kowtowed to them. Again, although Roberts acknowledged the importance of strong trade union traditions to the mining community he had left as a teenager, he had seen no need for those traditions in the new industrial context in which he found himself. He had not been a miner or a member of the SWMF himself, but had followed his father’s sense of grievance against the mine owners, and saw no relevance in applying these grievances to his new industrial context. Moreover, the jobs and processes involved at the GEC were far more diverse than at the Standard Works, and Roberts was responsible for the supervision of ‘girls’ or ladies who had just got married but continued to work on a part-time track. Although women workers elsewhere in Coventry had been instrumental in resisting the introduction of the Bedaux System, involving thespeeding-up of production lines, according to Roberts the GEC women were uninterested in trade unionism. Some of these women were Welsh in origin, and all of them shared Roberts’ perception of their new environment. However, as noted in chapter three, there were some ‘wildcat’ or spontaneous strikes involving women in the late thirties, but these occurred on the full-time track involving younger, single women.
When J. B. Priestley visited the city in 1933, there were still plenty of unemployed there, about twelve thousand he was told. The graph above shows this estimate to be quite accurate for the time of year (autumn) of his visit. By then, the city had got well past the worst period of the depression in 1931-32, when unemployment had risen to over twenty percent. Factories that were working on short time in that period, were back on double shifts in 1933. He saw their lights and heard the deep roar of their machinery, late that night of his sojourn.
In Coventry, the factors which led to Labour gaining control of the City Council in the 1937 municipal elections were more complex than in either Oxford or Birmingham. They included a general shift away from shop-floor ‘syndicalism’ towards a more rounded concept of municipal socialism. Unlike in the Chamberlains’ Birmingham, the ruling Liberal-Conservative Progressive Coalitionin Coventry had failed to respond to the demands of a spiralling population through proper planning and provision of social services. The Labour ‘take-over’ was also greatly facilitated by the mushroom growth of a large individual membership section in the local Party which enabled many managerial, professional and clerical workers to play an increasingly important role alongside shop stewards and trade union officials. This growth was carefully nurtured by a number of key local politicians, shaping the Party into an organisation which was capable of winning elections and of running the City successfully. In addition, the radical Liberalism of many chapel-goers in the City became detached from its more Gladstonian leadership, much of it being transferred into support for the Labour Party.
This ideological shift was reinforced by the Christian Socialism advocated by leading Unitarian, Methodist and Baptist preachers, some of whom defied deacons and elders to speak on Labour platforms. This ‘social gospel’ influence was fuelled by the influx of workers from the depressed areas in general, and South Wales in particular, where it was still comparatively strong among those who had continued to attend the Nonconformist chapels, as an alternative to the outright Marxism of many in the SWMF. The Progressive candidates, Tories and Liberals, often made the mistake of disparaging this shift by playing upon the fears and prejudices of ‘old Coventrian’ electors. They suggested that Labour’s 1937 victory resulted from the coming of so many of the Labour Party’s supporters to Coventry, whom they referred to as the sweepings of Great Britain. The local Labour leader, George Hodgkinson, however, considered that the low turn-out in 1938 was
… an index that the municipal conscience was by no means fully developed, probably through the fact that many newcomers had not got their roots in Coventry and so had not formed political allegiances.
Clearly, whilst the immigrants may have been predominantly socialist in outlook, this did not mean that this general allegiance was automatically and immediately translated into a particular interest in local politics. Even by 1937-38, many migrants did not regard their situations in Coventry as anything more than temporary, especially with the economic recovery of South Wales underway, and therefore did not see themselves as having the right and/or duty to vote as citizens of Coventry. Comparisons of oral evidence with the electoral registers reveal that many were not registered to vote for as long as five years after their arrival in Coventry. In many cases, this was due to the temporary nature of their lodgings, which resulted in multiple sub-lettings and transient residence among the migrants. They were far more scattered around the city than their counterparts in Cowley and were therefore not as settled by the late 1930s. Thus, the argument advanced by The Midland Daily Telegraph and other Conservative agencies within the City in November 1937 that the large influx of labour from socialist areas was responsible for Labour’s victory reflected their belief in the myth of the old Coventrian at least as much as it did the reality of the situation.
There were a number of Welsh workers, some of them women, who came to the City in the late 1930s and who began to play a significant role in local politics following the war. William Parfitt started work in the mines at Tylorstown in the Rhondda at the age of fourteen, becoming Secretary of his Lodge at the age of twenty-one. In December 1926, he appeared in Court with a number of others, charged with riotous assembly at Tylorstown for leading a crowd who attacked a crane being used to transfer coal from a dump to be sent to Tonyrefail. When Sergeant Evans spoke to Parfitt, he replied we are driven to it, we cannot help ourselves. He later became an organiser for the National Council of Labour Colleges, enduring periods of unemployment before leaving the Rhondda. William Parfitt arrived in Coventry in 1937 and began work as a milling machinist in the Daimler factory. After the war, he became Industrial Relations Officer for the National Coal Board. He was elected to the City Council in 1945 and twenty years later became Lord Mayor of Coventry.
Harry Richards was also born in the Rhondda, at Tonypandy, in 1922. On moving to Coventry in 1939, he became an apprentice draughtsman at Armstrong Siddeley Motors and a design draughtsman at Morris Motors. He then became a schoolteacher after the war and was elected to the City Council in 1954. Like Parfitt, he went on to become Lord Mayor in 1979-80. No doubt Parfitt, Richards and other immigrants who became involved in post-war politics, shared the motivation for their involvement which arose out of the determination of both leaders and led to attain better living conditions than those which most of the immigrants from the coalfields had been forced to endure for much of the inter-war period. Similarly, Councillor Elsie Jones, made the following poetic contribution in 1958, celebrating twenty-one years of Labour rule in the City, in which she both echoed and transposed some of the themes she drew from Llewellyn’s 1939 book and the subsequent popular war-time film:
Born and reared in a mining area I realised the need for reforms very early in life –
Because I loved light and sunshine I knew men and young boys who, during winter, seldom saw either –
Because I loved peace and a tranquil home, and I saw peaceful men become violent at the spectacle of their semi-starved families –
Because I loved music and culture, and the arts, and I knew boys and girls with wonderful natural gifts who would never get a chance to express them –
Because I loved freedom and independence, and saw proud men grovelling for the ‘privilege’ of working for a week for a week road-mending.
How green and beautiful was my valley.
How black the despair in the hearts of its people.
It is significant that when the post-1945 Labour Government’s housing policy came under attack in 1947, Aneurin Bevan chose to go to Coventry to defend it. It would seem that his choice may not have been entirely coincidental, as when he issued a challenge to Anthony Eden to debate the issue, he was given…
…a great reception from the people of Coventry, in particular from members of the Welsh community, many of whom knew him in their native valleys.
The Cheylesmore Estate in Coventry, newly built after the war.
The growth of municipal socialism in the City from 1937 onwards can clearly be seen as a practical expression of that impetus to reform, progress and planning which Bevan himself epitomised. Another Welsh ‘Dick Whittington’, this time in Birmingham, was William Tegfryn Bowen, who worked as a miner in the Rhondda between 1916 and 1926 before leaving for Birmingham in 1927. He studied economics, social services and philosophy at Fircroft College in Selly Oak before going to work at the Austin Motor Company’s works further down the Bristol Road in 1928. There he led a strike against the introduction of the Bedaux system in defiance of more senior union officials. Following this, he endured several periods of unemployment and odd-jobbing until the war, when he became a City Councillor in 1941, and an Alderman in 1945. Between 1946 and 1949 he was both Chairman of the Council Labour group and Chairman of the Health Committee. This latter position led to his appointment as a member of the Executive Council of the NHS and also as a member of the Regional Hospital Board. Effectively, he was Bevan’s architect of the NHS in Birmingham, a city which, under the Chamberlain ‘dynasty’, had been first a Liberal Unionist and then a Tory stronghold for many decades since mid-Victorian times. On becoming Lord Mayor in 1952, Bowen was asked to account for Labour’s currently and apparently secure hold on the City. He referred to the large influx of workers from other areas, with a different political outlook.
In Coventry, from 1929 onwards, it was musical engagements which enabled Philip Handley, the City’s Employment Officer, to champion the immigrant cause, often in the teeth of criticism from other civic leaders, trade unionists and employers, and to attempt to construct a far more positive narrative and vision of a progressive, cosmopolitan city:
The Welshman’s love of music and art, the Irishman’s physical vigour and courage, the Scotsman’s canny thoroughness, the tough fibre of the Northumbrian, the enterprise of the Lancastrian – Yes, the Coventrian of twenty-five years hence should be a better man in body and possibly in brain…
Of course, Handley meant ‘man’ in the generic sense, and the contribution of these ‘new Coventrians’ of both genders in terms of ‘brain’ cannot be underestimated or marginalised, certainly not in the second and third generations. Through the better system of secondary education which existed at that time in Wales and the high standard of adult education in the coalfield communities, the new industry towns acquired significant numbers of youngsters whose talents lay in their heads as well as their hands. In their new environment, there were a number of ways in which these talents could be expressed. As was also the case in Cowley, Welsh families had a more positive attitude towards education, so that local schools, both elementary and secondary, suddenly found themselves with some very able and highly motivated pupils, a theme which was revisited by local politicians after the war.
There is some evidence to suggest that in Coventry the impact of these immigrant children was quite dramatic, both in terms of quantity and quality. In 1936-37, the number of school children admitted from other districts exceeded those leaving Coventry by more than 1,100. In February 1938 The Midland Daily Telegraph then carried out research for a major report entitled Coventry as the Nation’s School in which it claimed that Coventry’s school problem was being aggravated by the influx of newcomers from the Special Areas. For the previous twelve months, it went on, children had been pouring into the city at a rate of a hundred a month. Most of them went to live on the new housing estates on the city’s outskirts where few schools had been built. Sufficient children were moving into the city every year to fill ‘two good-sized schools’ and although there were enough school places available throughout the city to accommodate the newcomers, the schools were in the wrong places.
Coventry’s schools remained significantly more overcrowded than the national average throughout the decade, and despite the increasing press speculation, no new secondary schools were built, although six new elementary schools were added between 1935 and 1939. Despite this, throughout the period 1925-37, the cost of elementary education per child Coventry schools remained below the average cost in county boroughs in England and Wales. Whilst the school rolls were falling in most English authorities, in Coventry they were rising sharply. It is in this context that the Education Committee’s gradual shift towards the idea of building bipartite comprehensive schools, combining grammar and technical ‘streams’ began in the late 1930s. The idea of academic and technical secondary education working in tandem on the same sites made sense as a solution to cater for the sons and daughters of immigrants who valued secondary education. The emphasis which was placed on education in coalfield societies was a positive dividend of interwar migration to the City’s schools after the war.
There was also a dearth of shopping and general social facilities in Coventry, throwing an increased burden on the central shopping area. Philip Handley, as the Employment Exchange Officer, was clear that the City’s obsession with the elemental question of housing and employment had been to the exclusion of any significant attempt to develop social and cultural amenities, with the result that the new housing areas lacked halls, churches and libraries. Since he was responsible for the reception and after-care of young immigrants, he shared some of the concerns of those in the social service movement who viewed the ‘new areas’ as lacking the ‘right sort’ of social and cultural institutions to receive them. In particular, in his correspondence with Sir William Deedes, he referred to the problems they faced in the ‘settling in’ period, during which the public house and the cinema are more attractive than the strange church which may be, and usually is, some distance away.
Many who migrated, both men and women, were in a poor physical condition and sometimes unable to stand the strain of their new employment, and others were simply not fit enough to find employment in the first place. Social and healthcare services often simply could not cope with the problems that the influx of men and women on the borderline destitution created. In the year 1935-36, despite an increase in the population of Oxford of two thousand, only one bed was added to the city’s hospitals. In Coventry, the Public Assistance Committee was forced to either make the cases of sick immigrants chargeable to the local authority from which they came or remove them entirely, as was the case with one family from Burry Port. Lack of adequate financial provision for young adults in time of sickness was one of the main causes of their early return to the depressed areas. Those whose migration and settlement were aided by financial support from voluntary agencies stood a greater chance of ‘survival’ in the new area, as in this case:
Case E434. This family came from a distressed area, to seek work, the husband having been out of work for four years. The United Services Fund … made a grant for the removal of the household goods and supplied the railway fares. The man obtained work after a few weeks as a labourer, earning two pounds ten shillings weekly. The eldest daughter, aged seventeen, was found a situation, which proved very satisfactory. The daughter of fourteen , who had been a tubercular subject most of her childhood was in a debilitated state of health, and the CCAS (Coventry City Aid Society) did not think she should take up work until she was quite strong. She was sent to Eastbourne for three weeks, and was placed in a situation on her return. Unfortunately, the husband, a builder’s labourer, contracted rheumatism. Through the office he was sent to Droitwich for three weeks. He is convalescing at the present time, and we hope will soon be back to work in some occupation more suited to his health.
Coventry’s churches and chapels provide ample evidence of religious activity, the diversity of which seems a natural corollary of mass migration from numerous points of origin with attendant religious traditions. All children attended Sunday school, with parental encouragement, either to get them out of the house or to get that religious instruction which even agnostic guardians seem to have regarded as a positive stage in constructing a morality for their children. For children, it was enjoyable; there were stories, and outings at least once a year. ‘A bun and a ha’penny’ attracted any waverers. Also, it provided companionship on an otherwise quiet day for boisterous young children. But family observance was a minority feature of Sundays in Coventry. Families, generally, did not pray together or say grace. A minority of families attended church or chapel regularly, perhaps sang in the choir, so that for those children Sunday school was only one of a number of religious services they might participate in on a Sunday.
As has been stated already, in Coventry many of the Welsh immigrants were attracted to those churches with Welsh ministers, most notably to the ministry of Howard Ingli James at Queen’s Road Baptist Church and Ivor Reece at West Orchard Street Congregational Church. Since the Welsh population in Coventry was not as geographically concentrated and as stable as in Cowley, it was not as easy for the immigrants to be appointed as deacons. Nevertheless, the impact of immigration upon the congregation and upon the city was a major factor in the development and direction of Ingli James’ ministry, as his 1936 article for The Midland Daily Telegraph reveals:
Coventry is today faced with the difficult task of welding a host of newcomers into a community, in fact of making a city, which is not the same thing as a mere collection of streets, or conglomeration of people…Almost every week strangers appear in our congregation, often in such numbers that one has difficulty in getting into touch with them. Many are young, and trying their wings for the first time. It is an important part of our work to meet their needs both spiritual and social, to provide them with a place where they may find friends and feel at home.
Above: Coventry City centre (Broadgate) in 1939
James wrote in his book Communism and the Christian Faith in 1945, that he had had little contact with either socialists or communists during his time as a minister in Swansea in the twenties and early thirties, but had become ‘radicalised’ through his contact with the young migrants in his congregation and, no doubt, by the municipal socialists he met in the city more widely. Finding friends was often a dilemma faced by the Welsh immigrants to Coventry, as in Cowley. In Coventry, the marked tendency for Welsh women to select their own countrywomen as friends rather than their immediate neighbours was noted in the University of Birmingham’s Survey of the early 1950s. So, too, were the continuing stereotypes of the immigrants used by ‘Coventrians’. In particular, Coventrian women thought of the women from the older industrial areas in their cities as being unemancipated by comparison with themselves. Interestingly, and paradoxically, as well as being labelled as ‘clannish’, ‘all out for themselves and ‘rootless’, they were also said to be ‘thrusting’, trying to get onto committees and councils whereby they could ‘run the town’, showing a lack of respect for the real Coventrians.
The confused and contradictory nature of this stereotyping reveals what Ginzberg described as the classic pattern of a dominant majority irked by a foreign minority in its midst, except that, by the 1950s, it was difficult to tell who the real Coventrians were. However, before the ‘Blitz’ of 1940, Coventry was primarily identified as an engineering city, as testified to by J. B. Priestley following his 1933 sojourn in the city. In his English Journey, he describes walking at night to a hill from which he had a good view of the old constellations remotely and mildly beaming, and the new Morris works, a tower of steel and glass, flashing above the city of gears and crank-shafts. Its high-paid factory work acted as a powerful magnet to migrants from far and wide, who generally found in it a welcoming working-class city without the social hierarchy which existed in Oxford and London and, to a lesser extent, in Birmingham. Although many of the women migrants may not, at first, have gone into the factories, this changed dramatically after 1936, with the growing demands of the shadow factories for labour, and they also made a broader contribution to working-class life and politics throughout the city.
Below: A Family evicted for supporting the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union
I grew up on the outskirts of Birmingham as the son of a Baptist minister who had been a draughtsman in a Black Country steelworks before the Second World War. My mother was the daughter of a Warwickshire collier whose own grandfather, Vinson Gulliver, had helped Joseph Arch, the Methodist lay-preacher to establish the Warwickshire Agricultural Labourers’ Union in the early 1870s. This was the first union of unskilled workers, and their strike found support from the Nonconformist British Quarterly Review, which in 1872 expressed the view that…
… the movement which commenced a few months since in Warwickshire, and which is spreading gradually over the whole agricultural region of south and mid-England, is not unlike the first of those upheavals which occurred five centuries ago. Like that, it is an attempt to escape from… an intolerable and hopeless bondage, with the difference that… the present is an attempt to exact better terms for manual labour. Just as the poor priests of Wycliffe’s training were the agents… by whom communications were made between the various disaffected regions, so on the present occasion the ministers or preachers of those humbler sects, whose religious impulses are energetic, and perhaps sensational, have been found the national leaders of a struggle after social emancipation. A religious revival has constantly been accompanied by an attempt to better the material conditions of those who are the objects of the impulse… A generation ago the agricultural labourer strove to arrest the operation of changes which oppressed him… by machine breaking and rick burning. Now the agricultural labourer has adopted the machinery of a trade union and a strike, and has conducted his agitation in a strictly peaceful and law-abiding manner.
Above: Rev Arthur J Chandler, during his ministry at Wednesbury, 1940s.
Although my father was from a working-class ‘Tory’ background, like many born in Birmingham and the Black Country in Edwardian times, he understood the Baptist emphasis on a ‘social gospel’ and encouraged me in my radical views. I learnt from him that ‘the truth is never found in extremes’, a mantra which has stayed with me ever since. I heard him preach many sermons in which he referred to Dr John Clifford, the prominent Baptist leader and President of the Christian Socialist League. This was the successor organisation to the Christian Socialist Society which took over the management of the Christian Socialist magazine from the Land Reform Union. Clifford (1836-1923) was a member of the Fabian Society as well as a liberal evangelical minister in Paddington from 1858. In a tract published by the Fabians, Socialism and the Teaching of Christ (1897), Clifford wrote of the Collectivist Gospel as having at least four distinguishing merits, in that…
while it does not change human nature, It destroys many of the evils of modern society because it sets everybody alike to his share of the work, and gives to him his share of reward;
it ennobles the struggle of life, leaving man free for the finer toils of intellect and heart: free ’to seek first the kingdom of God and his justice’, so that .. exists ’not for the sake of life, but of a good life’… in keeping with ’the mind of Christ’;
it offers a better environment for the development of the teaching of Jesus concerning wealth and the ideals of labour and brotherhood,..
it fosters a higher ideal of human and social worth and well-being through a more Christian conception of industry; one in which every man is a worker, and each worker does not toil for himself exclusively, but for all the necessities, comforts and privileges he shares with all members of the community.
Clifford set this new ideal of life and labour against what he called the hard individualism of late Victorian society. It was this individualism that he saw as partial, hollow, unreal and disastrous, fostering the serfdom of one class and the indolence of another. It had created, on the one hand, a large class of submissive, silent… slaves undergoing grinding toil and continuous anxiety, and on the other a smaller class suffering debasing indolence. It spawned hatred and ill-will on the one hand, and scorn and contempt on the other. This was at odds with the common ideal in both the soul of Collectivism and the revelation of the brotherhood of man in Christ Jesus. Evidence for the early role of Christian Socialists in the move towards an independent politics can be found in that, as early as March 1895, a ‘Christian Socialist’ candidate fighting alone against the Liberal candidate for East Bristol missed election by only 183 votes in a total poll of over seven thousand. The Welsh Religious Revival of 1904-5 also helped promote the rise of Labour politics, first in the Liberal Party, but then in the development of a separate party.
Sources:
John Briggs & Ian Sellers (1973), Victorian Nonconformity: Documents of Modern History. London: Edward Arnold.
Henry Pelling (1965), Origins of the Labour Party. Oxford: OUP.
John Gorman (1980), To Build Jerusalem. London: Scorpion Publications.
A century and a quarter ago, on Monday 2nd September 1889 at 5.30 p.m. a crowd of around 3,900 spectators gathered at ‘Molineux’ (pronounced ‘MOL-i-new’), the new home ground of Wolverhampton Wanderers to watch a friendly game against their Midland rivals Aston Villa. The previous year, ‘Wolves’ had joined the Football League for the 1888/89 season, playing their first ever league fixture on their sloping pitch at Dudley Road on 8 September 1889, a 1-1 draw, also with the Villa.
The club had come into being in 1877 when St Luke’s school in Blakenhall formed a football team, which became Wolverhampton Wanderers a couple of years later when it merged with Blakenhall Wanderers cricket club. They soon became known popularly as ‘The Wolves’, since the town’s name comes from the Mercian royal Saxon name of Wulfrun or Wulfhere, derived from the totemic Wolf symbol, the townspeople are known as Wulfrinians, and the town’s nickname is ‘Wolftown’(the suffixes ‘ham’and ‘ton’referred to a fortified farmstead, or manor in Saxon times).
The Molineux Family
In simple terms, Molineux takes its name from the family that owned and lived on the site in the eighteenth century. The ancestors of the Molineux family brought their name to England in the wave of migration after the Norman Conquest of 1066 and, like many Norman-French noble names, is a reference to the family’s place of residence prior to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, Moulineaux-Sur-Seine, near Rouen, in Normandy, which is the site of Castle Molineux. The Norman-English family settled on the manors they were given and developed into two branches, one in Lancashire, around Merseyside especially, and the other throughout Nottinghamshire. A third branch settled around Calais and settled in Staffordshire as merchants and makers of woollen cloth in the time of Isabella of France’s reign over England, during the first half of the fourteenth century, first as wife of Edward II and then as Regent to her son, Edward III, whose taxes on the wool trade brought Flemish weavers and wool-workers to settle and begin the domestic industry and trade in woollens in England. Wolverhampton then became an important wool town and, as the trade progressed, famous throughout Europe.
The dawning of the industrial era created a great deal of wealth for those who had the vision, craft and acumen to capitalise on the the technological innovation that followed the Quaker ironmaster, Abraham Darby’s successful introduction of coke smelting in 1709. In these early stages of the revolution in iron production in Shropshire and Staffordshire, which led to the area becoming known as ‘the Black Country’, John Molineux (b. 1675) was an ironmonger, supplying manufacturers with their raw materials, then selling their finished goods. He became an extremely successful and wealthy businessman. He began by selling Black Country hardware such as brass and iron in Dublin, then returned to Wolverhampton and set himself up as an ironmaster in Horseley Fields, where he had two houses with workshops at the back. John and his wife Mary had five sons and three daughters. Their fifth and youngest son, Benjamin, became an ironmonger like his father, and ran his uncle Daniel’s warehouse in Dublin, where he stored and sold all kinds of goods such as locks, hinges, tools, and saddler’s goods. He also sold Birmingham-made steel toys. At the time, the trade between Britain and the West Indies had increased greatly, and so Benjamin exported many of his goods to that region. He also imported Jamaica rum, and in 1775 opened a Jamaica rum warehouse in Wolverhampton, where he also became a banker. He invested in the local canals, and made many astute loans, becoming one of the most successful businessmen in the area. Another of their children, Thomas, also became wealthy and built himself a large house in Dudley Street, Wolverhampton. The house, which was built in 1751, had imposing entrance gates, and an ornamental garden that extended to Pipers Row. Thomas married Margaret Gisborne on the 5th August, 1732, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. They had nine sons and three daughters, most of whom died in infancy.
The family residence in Tup Street, Wolverhampton, which became known as ‘Mr Molineuxe’s Close’, came into the possession of the family in 1744 after the death of the original owner, John Rotton, who owed Benjamin Molineux £700. The beneficiaries of his will (his wife, and his business partner Richard Wilkes), agreed to sell the property, and around eight acres of surrounding land, to the Molineux family to pay off the debt. Little is known about the original property, which was probably built around 1720. The Molineux family extended the house, and added a fine rear extension, which looked even better than the main façade. What is certain that by 1750 work had finished on the house, and the rear formal garden, because they appear on Isaac Taylor’s map (see opposite), which was drawn during that year. By the time the ‘Tithe Map’ was published, in 1842, it had become known as ‘Molineux House’. It stood proudly on a hill overlooking extensive gardens, with delightful views of the Clee Hills and the Wrekin, together with panoramic views of Chillington and the woods. one of the largest houses in the town.
Benjamin Molineux died in 1772, by which time the family had already become accepted into the ranks of the local gentry. They continued to reside in Molineux House until 1856, the last family occupant being Charles Edward Molineux. On 6 April 1859, the house was advertised for sale by private treaty, being described as ‘a handsome and spacious mansion, with extensive out-offices, buildings, coach-houses, stabling, and beautiful grounds, plus gardens, pool, elegant conservatory and greenhouses, four and a half acres within the walls. A further three-and-a-half extending from the grounds of Molineux House and fronting the Waterloo Road could be purchased separately.
So it was that the estate was bought in 1860 by Mr O E McGregor, obviously another man with a vision. He retained the name ‘Molineux Grounds’, spending seven thousand pounds on returning the house to its former glory, and converting the rest of the estate into a pleasure park, which he then opened to the public for a small admission fee. The ‘Grounds’, the first park of its kind in Wolverhampton, boasted a number of different attractions, including a skating rink, a boating lake with fountain, croquet lawns, flower-beds, walkways and lawns, plus amenities for football and cricket, and soon became established as a popular place of recreation, with many fetes and galas being held there, including the 1869 South Staffordshire Industrial and Fine Arts Exhibition.
The Wolves arrive at the Molineux Grounds, 1889
By 1872, the grounds had been further developed to include a number of other attractions, and the arena facilities were used to stage a number of sporting events including cycle racing, football and cricket matches. When, subsequently, Northampton Brewery acquired the entire site, they converted Molineux House into a hotel and, in 1889 rented the grounds to Wolverhampton Wanderers for a very low annual rent of fifty pounds.
They calculated that they could make many times that from the thirsty thousands who would attend each match. By 1901, the building was purchased by W. Butler & Co., the Wolverhampton brewers. It still maintained it architectural attraction when I went to watch games with my father in the 1960s and 70s (see photo left), but closed in 1979 and the fine old building was allowed, tragically, to fall into dereliction.
The Wolves had first played a game on ‘The Molineux Grounds’, as they were then known, in 1886, losing 2-1 to their neighbours, Walsall Town in the final of the Walsall Cup. In 1888, the club reached its first FA Cup final, losing 1-0 to Preston North End. The new grounds matched the growing aspirations of the committee members who decided to accept the offer to move to the Molineux Leisure Grounds, and so the ‘legendary’ Molineux story began.
Prior to playing on the Dudley Road pitch, from 1881, Wolves had played on three other sites, starting at Windmill Field, Goldthorn Hill, from 1877 to 1879, then John Harper’s Field, Lower Villiers Street, from 1879 to 1881, and occasionally at the cricket ground of Blakenhall Wanderers, one of the founding clubs. The quality of all these pitches left a great deal to be desired, so now the team had a far better surface on which to match themselves against the best opposition in the new Football League.
However, before Wolves could move into their new home, the land between the house and the track had to be cleared of trees, fencing had to be removed and the bandstand had to be pulled down. The lake was drained and filled in and the iron bridge that spanned its narrowest point was dismantled. The brewery paid for the construction of players’ changing rooms, refurbished the existing three hundred-seat grandstand and built a shelter alongside this to house a further four thousand spectators on a raised embankment, with a further narrow cinder bank on the north side of the pitch. Thus, MOLINEUX was built and opened.
From the grandstand and the new embankments, the spectators watched ‘The Wolves’ beat ‘The Villa’ 1-0, with centre-forward Wykes scoring the winning goal with a low shot. Of course, there were no floodlights then, hence the 5.30 kick-off, allowing just enough time for the local supporters and players to walk or cycle there from work. Apparently, upon entering the ground, many could hardly recognise the place. The freshly-laid 115 x 75 yard pitch looked as level as a billiard-table. Chairman of the Wanderers Committee, Councillor Hollingsworth, kicked off for Wolves. After the game, seventy people, players, friends and officials, were entertained to dinner at the Molineux Hotel. Five days later, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, at 4.20 p.m. (the game having been delayed by the late arrival of the visitors), Wolves kicked off their first League fixture at the ground.
Their opponents that day were Notts County, whom they beat 2-0. Once again, the turn-out was below capacity, at only four thousand. This shows that ‘Association Football’ had not yet captured the imagination of the people of Wolverhampton, especially with the cricket season not yet over. Throughout the first part of that season, the ‘gates’ only rarely reached five thousand, but the Boxing Day match against Blackburn Rovers attracted nineteen thousand, vindicating the faith of both the Committee and Butler’s brewery. Interestingly, yesterday’s clash (30 August 2014) with Blackburn in the Football League Championship attracted just over 21,000 to the new all-seater Molineux, whose capacity is 32,000. Wolves went on to reach the semi-final of the FA Cup in their first season at Molineux, and eventually won the FA Cup in 1893, reaching the final again in 1896.
During these pioneering years, the Molineux Hotel hosted a number of meetings for the Football League, and in March 1891 the ground played host to England’s international with Ireland, which the home nation won 6-1. It was also chosen to host the 1892 FA Cup semi-final, and three more semi-finals and a further international match followed, but its basic facilities for spectators soon fell behind those of its neighbours, including West Bromwich Albion. It changed little until a curved roof was built over half of the north end, in 1911, made from corrugated iron, earning it the nickname ‘the Cowshed’, which was where I stood as a boy, the name still in use then, despite the demolition of the original structure in the 1920s.
Molineux in the Twentieth Century
In 1923, the club bought the Molineux freehold from the brewery and Wolverhampton Wanderers Limited came into being. However, they had to wait another thirty years to win the old First Division Championship (now replaced by the ‘Premiership’). Following their title-winning season in 1953-54, Wolves played hosts to a number of European club sides under the new floodlights at Molineux. The most famous of these was the game against Budapest Honved, the crack team of the Hungarian Army, eight of whom, including captain Ferenc Puskás, had been in the team which had beaten England 6-3 at Wembley (the first time England had lost to a continental side on home soil), and 7-1 in Budapest in the previous season.
The Hungarian national team should have won the World Cup that summer in Switzerland, but were beaten in the final by a West German side which came from 2-0 down at half-time to win 3-2. The England team did not meet the Hungarians in the finals, so this club match at Molineux was billed as the chance for revenge for Billy Wright (Wolves and England captain) and his boys. Again, Honved went 2-0 up in the first quarter of an hour, but Wolves came back to win 3-2 in a match which was televised live (my cousin watched it in his national service barracks). The Hungarian uprising of 1956 put paid to this magnificent Magyar team, who were touring at the time, but two years later, almost to the day, a benefit match was played, again floodlit, with MTK (Red Banner) Budapest. The team included Hidegkuti at centre-forward, and three other internationals, and raised 2,300 pounds for the Hungarian Relief Fund. The 1-1 scoreline was largely irrelevant, and the match did not live up to the heritage of the Hungarians, no matter how hard they tried, though Hidegkuti and Palotas combined brilliantly at times. What may better be remembered was the speech of the Wolves Chairman, James Baker, at the pre-match banquet, when he referred to the Wolves’ motto ‘out of darkness cometh light’, and hoped that very soon that would be the way in their native land.
‘Fast-forward’ nearly forty years, to December 1993, and the Hungarians were again in town, having emerged from more than three decades of ‘darkness’ into the light in 1989. To mark the opening of the stand completing the ‘new Molineux’ on 7 December 1993, a capacity crowd of 28,245 watched the visitors, Kispest Honved, hold Wolves to a 2-2 draw. For the first time in nine years, Molineux was once more a four-sided stadium. Interestingly, just prior to kick-off there was a short delay due to problems with the floodlighting. Once again, the message went out (with a touch of Black Country humour this time!): ‘Nothing to worry about, for as all Wolves fans know – Out of Darkness Cometh Light!’ In this 1993/94 season, on the fiftieth anniversary of their first floodlit games at Molineux, it was fitting that Wolverhampton Wanderers were back again in the top flight of English football.
Twenty seasons later, and Wolves are already in third place in the Championship, promising an early return to the Premiership, after dropping two divisions and gaining promotion last season. Let’s hope that after celebrating 125 years at Molinuex, Wolves can again return to the top flight, where a club with such a great history as theirs, truly belongs. But then, success in the modern game is no longer based on heritage and tradition, if it ever was.
Printed Source:
John Shipley (2003), Wolves Against the World: European Nights, 1953-1980. Stroud: Tempus Publishing.
The name Easter derives from Eostre or Eastre, the pagan Goddess of Spring. Her month was April and this became the Paschal month of the Christian Church. This was grafted on the celebration of the Greco-Roman celebration of the dead and risen God of Spring, Adonis, and it is interesting that the New Testament refers to Jesus as ‘Adonai’, the supreme being. For Christians, ‘Pasg’ in Welsh or ‘Pasque’ in French, begins with the Feast of the Resurrection on the Day of Jesus’ rising from the tomb, and its timing is directly related to the Jewish Feast of Passover, or ‘Pesach’ in Hebrew. It is by far the oldest of the Christian festivals, dating from the time of Cedd in the Celtic Church in Britain, before the Anglo-Saxon invasions and the missions of Cuthbert and Augustine to them, hence the different name in Welsh. The monks arriving after the Norman Conquest enriched the festival and the pageants grew more elaborate, with instrumental and vocal music being added. For some, they grew too splendid for some. In 1470 the properties provided for the Easter Play at St Mary Radcliffe, Bristol, included:
a new Sepulchre, well gilt with gold, an image of God rising from the sepulchre; Heaven, made of timber and dyed cloth; Hell, made of wood and iron; four pairs of Angel’s wings of well painted wood; the Holy Ghost coming out of Heaven into the Sepulchre’.
In some churches, the Paschal Candle forms a focal point, with its five grains of incense inserted in the form of a cross. It is lit at midnight as Easter Day begins, and remains lit until the Ascension, reminding us of the period the Risen Lord spent on earth, revealing himself to his disciples in various metaphysical form to his disciples, as referred to by Paul. It’s generally accepted that Mary Magdalene entered the garden containing the tomb and made the first encounter with the risen Lord ‘at the rising of the sun’, and it was common at one time for people to get out into the fields at dawn and greet the sunrise from the top of a nearby mound, such as the Wrekin in Shropshire. So, at Easter, we don’t go ‘all round the Wrekin’, as the Black Country saying goes, describing the way the lengths some people go to avoid confronting the truth. The challenge of the central truth of our faith, the Resurrection, needs to be met head-on.
‘I handed on to you, as the central fact of our Christian faith, the account I was given…”He died and was buried. On the third day he was raised to life. He was seen by Peter; then by ‘The Twelve’. After that, he was seen by more than five hundred at once; most of them are still living, but some have since died. He was then seen by James, his brother; then by all his close friends. Last of all, long after anybody could have hoped, he was seen by me also.’
Paul is writing to Christian friends who even some twenty years after the execution of Jesus are finding it difficult to understand what ‘the resurrection from the dead’ means. Whatever happened was a fact, but it remained difficult to describe or explain to those who had not themselves experienced seeing the body of the risen Christ. My son, aged eight, watching a cartoon version of the resurrection yesterday asked ‘was he body or spirit?’ He wanted to know how he could suddenly appear and disappear like that, through locked doors and walls. Like Paul, I felt a sense of passing on what was ‘handed on’, rather than simply expressing my own opinion.This was the authoritative account given from the beginning. His description of his own experience is quite brief, but he says it was like that of Peter and the others. This is our earliest written evidence that something very unexpected had happened ‘on the third day’, something contained within the ‘most important’ statement given to Paul at his baptism two years later. Various accounts had been circulating among the Christian communities of how on our ‘Easter Sunday‘, the tomb had been found empty. No description of the disappearance of Jesus’ body exists because we presume that nobody witnessed it, unlike the raising of Lazarus from his tomb by Jesus about ten days earlier. Only his ‘appearances’ are described. The accounts differ very much among themselves on many matters – who was the first to see Jesus, what the women did when they got to the tomb, where the appearances took place – in/ near Jerusalem, or in Galilee. But all agree that the tomb was found empty with the stone rolled away. After Paul, Mark’s earliest gospel account runs like this:
‘When the Holy Day of the Jews was over, three women friends of Jesus – Mary of Magdala, Mary who was James’ mother, and Salome, brought sweet-smelling oils to anoint his body. They got to his grave very early on Sunday, just as the sun was rising. “Who will roll away the stone from the cave’s mouth for us?” they said to one another. It was a very big stone. They looked up and saw that it had already been rolled away.
They went into the cave and they were amazed to see a young man in white clothes sitting on the right-hand side. “Don’t be frightened,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was put to death. He has risen. You won’t find him here; you cannot see where they put his body. Go and tell his friends that he will be in Galilee before you and you will see him there, as he told you. And don’t forget Peter.” They ran out of the cave trembling with terror. They were so frightened that they didn’t say a word to anyone.’ (Mk 16, vv 1-8)
It is important to remember that it was not the empty tomb that convinced his friends that Jesus had been ‘raised from death’ but the new experience of God which Jesus made possible. What they believed God had done was the ground of their conviction. The empty tomb, by itself, doesn’t prove anything. It looks as if these first friends had their hands on an early report that they didn’t know what to do with, and there is no reason to doubt that the women among them found the tomb empty, as Jewish scholars also confirm, and that they were certain that it was the tomb in which they had seen Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus place the body the evening before.
But the convincing evidence, as Paul saw and stated, was the fresh experience of God which changed the whole way in which the friends of Jesus lived and thought, and which made them new men and women. This fresh experience of the risen Christ is something which his millions of followers can now share this day and on every day. Each one experiences the Resurrection in his own way, but it is also a common experience which binds Christians together and which they pass on from generation to generation, from regeneration to regeneration, as in Baptism we die with Him and are raised with Him to immortal life.
Prayer: To me also (1 Corinthians 15 v 8):
We thank you, Father, for every Christian who bears witness to the power of the risen Christ. We have not seen as the apostles have seen, but we have met him in our lives; and we shall never be the same again. That meeting has changed us. As faithful ambassadors, may we be able to introduce others to him, that they too may meet with our Lord and Saviour Jesus. Amen
Apparently, today (16/1) marks the 150th anniversary of the Football Association. My team, Wolverhampton Wanderers, came into being in 1877. Like other teams, they grew out of a local school team, St Luke’s, who joined together with Blakenhall Wanderers Cricket Club to form the town’s football club and entered the FA Cup for the first time in 1883, reaching the second round. In 1860, Mr O E McGregor had bought the eight acres of land extending around Molineux House, a ‘handsome and spacious mansion’ which had been built for the gentry family of that name by 1750. McGregor was a man of vision who also respected tradition, keeping the Molineux name for the Grounds and restoring the House to its former glory.
He converted the estate into a pleasure park, which he then opened to the public for an admission fee. The first park of its kind in Wolverhampton, it contained a number of attractions, including a skating rink, a boating lake with fountain, croquet lawns, walkways, lawns as well as facilities for cricket and football. The park soon became a popular place of recreation, also become the venue for many fétes, galas and exhibitions. By 1872 the grounds were able to stage a variety of major sporting events, including cycle racing, athletics meetings and cricket and football matches. However, to begin with, Wolves played their matches on a sloping pitch at Dudley Road from 1881. It wasn’t until five years later that they played their first game at the Molineux grounds in 1886, losing 2-1 to Walsall Town in a local cup competition.
They reached their first Cup Final in 1888, losing 1-0 to Preston North End. By then, on 2nd March, 1888, Wolves had become one of the founding members of the Football League for the 1888/9 season, drawing their first match with Aston Villa, 1-1 on the 8th September. With these results, the foundations for greatness had been laid, and the club needed a more permanent and prestigious home to match their aspirations. When the Northampton Brewery acquired the Molineux Leisure Grounds in 1889, the House was converted into a hotel and the grounds were rented to Wolverhampton Wanderers at an annual rent of fifty pounds. No doubt the brewers saw an opportunity to make more money by meeting the needs of thirsty supporters. Wolves now had a much better playing surface on which to entertain the best teams in League and Cup.
The brewery paid for the construction of players’ changing rooms, refurbishing the 300-seat grandstand, and also built a shelter for 4,000 next to it and embankments on both South and North sides of the pitch. The Molineux legend had begun, and on Monday 2nd September 1889 Wolves beat their local rivals, Aston Villa, 1-0 there, in a pre-season friendly watched by nearly four thousand spectators on their way home from work, the kick-off being at 5.30 p.m. Apparently, the freshly laid pitch looked as level as a billiard table. Five days later, Wolves welcomed Notts County to their new lair, beating them 2-0. However, it took some months for the spectacle of Association Football to capture the imagination of the Black Country folk, as league games failed to attract even five thousand spectators. However, on Boxing Day, a crowd of 19,000 turned out to watch Wolves play Blackburn Rovers. With the Hotel on site, the ground became a popular venue for League meetings as well as important FA Cup and international matches. However, its facilities were soon overtaken by the new stadia built by its neighbours, Birmingham, West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa. Only in 1911 was a roof built over the north end of the ground, its nickname ‘the Cowshed’ coming from the iron fencing surrounding it. Although this was demolished in the 1920s, that part of the ground still retained the nickname when I began attending matches in the sixties.
By then, Wolves had won the FA Cup twice, in 1893 and 1908, also reaching the final in 1889, 1896 and 1921.
My own experience of ‘The Singing Stewarts’ came as a fourteen-year-old at the Baptist Church in Bearwood, Warley, where my father, Rev. Arthur J. Chandler, was the first minister of the newly-built church. We had moved to Birmingham in 1965, and by that time West Birmingham and Sandwell were becoming multi-cultural areas with large numbers of Irish, Welsh, Polish, Indian, Pakistani and Caribbean communities.
Frank Stewart (one of the brothers, pictured right) was also one of the first black people to play gospel music on a BBC radio station with The Frank Stewart Gospel Hour on BBC Radio WM. Sadly, his The death in Birmingham on 2nd April 2012 was the closing chapter in a key part of the development of British gospel music over half a century and more. For although in recent years it was Frank’s radio work where for more than a decade he presented The Frank Stewart Gospel Hour on BBC Radio WM, it was the many years he spent running The Singing Stewarts which was arguably his most significant contribution to UK Christian music history and black music history.
The Singing Stewarts:
The family residence in Tup Street, Wolverhampton, which became known as ‘Mr Molineuxe’s Close’, came into the possession of the family in 1744 after the death of the original owner, John Rotton, who owed Benjamin Molineux £700. The beneficiaries of his will (his wife, and his business partner Richard Wilkes), agreed to sell the property, and around eight acres of surrounding land, to the Molineux family to pay off the debt. Little is known about the original property, which was probably built around 1720. 
The Molineux family extended the house, and added a fine rear extension, which looked even better than the main façade. What is certain that by 1750 work had finished on the house, and the rear formal garden, because they appear on Isaac Taylor’s map (see opposite), which was drawn during that year. By the time the ‘Tithe Map’ was published, in 1842, it had become known as ‘Molineux House’. It stood proudly on a hill overlooking extensive gardens, with delightful views of the Clee Hills and the Wrekin, together with panoramic views of Chillington and the woods. one of the largest houses in the town.
So it was that the estate was bought in 1860 by Mr O E McGregor, obviously another man with a vision. He retained the name ‘Molineux Grounds’, spending seven thousand pounds on returning the house to its former glory, and converting the rest of the estate into a pleasure park, which he then opened to the public for a small admission fee. The ‘Grounds’, the first park of its kind in Wolverhampton, boasted a number of different attractions, including a skating rink, a boating lake with fountain, croquet lawns, flower-beds, walkways and lawns, plus amenities for football and cricket, and soon became established as a popular place of recreation, with many fetes and galas being held there, including the 1869 South Staffordshire Industrial and Fine Arts Exhibition.
By 1872, the grounds had been further developed to include a number of other attractions, and the arena facilities were used to stage a number of sporting events including cycle racing, football and cricket matches. When, subsequently, Northampton Brewery acquired the entire site, they converted Molineux House into a hotel and, in 1889 rented the grounds to Wolverhampton Wanderers for a very low annual rent of fifty pounds.
The Wolves had first played a game on ‘The Molineux Grounds’, as they were then known, in 1886, losing 2-1 to their neighbours, Walsall Town in the final of the Walsall Cup. In 1888, the club reached its first FA Cup final, losing 1-0 to Preston North End. The new grounds matched the growing aspirations of the committee members who decided to accept the offer to move to the Molineux Leisure Grounds, and so the ‘legendary’ Molineux story began.
From the grandstand and the new embankments, the spectators watched ‘The Wolves’ beat ‘The Villa’ 1-0, with centre-forward Wykes scoring the winning goal with a low shot. Of course, there were no floodlights then, hence the 5.30 kick-off, allowing just enough time for the local supporters and players to walk or cycle there from work. Apparently, upon entering the ground, many could hardly recognise the place. The freshly-laid 115 x 75 yard pitch looked as level as a billiard-table. Chairman of the Wanderers Committee, Councillor Hollingsworth, kicked off for Wolves. After the game, seventy people, players, friends and officials, were entertained to dinner at the Molineux Hotel. Five days later, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, at 4.20 p.m. (the game having been delayed by the late arrival of the visitors), Wolves kicked off their first League fixture at the ground.
In 1923, the club bought the Molineux freehold from the brewery and Wolverhampton Wanderers Limited came into being. However, they had to wait another thirty years to win the old First Division Championship (now replaced by the ‘Premiership’). Following their title-winning season in 1953-54, Wolves played hosts to a number of European club sides under the new floodlights at Molineux. The most famous of these was the game against Budapest Honved, the crack team of the Hungarian Army, eight of whom, including captain Ferenc Puskás, had been in the team which had beaten England 6-3 at Wembley (the first time England had lost to a continental side on home soil), and 7-1 in Budapest in the previous season.
he Hungarian national team should have won the World Cup that summer in Switzerland, but were beaten in the final by a West German side which came from 2-0 down at half-time to win 3-2. The England team did not meet the Hungarians in the finals, so this club match at Molineux was billed as the chance for revenge for Billy Wright (Wolves and England captain) and his boys. Again, Honved went 2-0 up in the first quarter of an hour, but Wolves came back to win 3-2 in a match which was televised live (my cousin watched it in his national service barracks). The Hungarian uprising of 1956 put paid to this magnificent Magyar team, who were touring at the time, but two years later, almost to the day, a benefit match was played, again floodlit, with MTK (Red Banner) Budapest. The team included Hidegkuti at centre-forward, and three other internationals, and raised 2,300 pounds for the Hungarian Relief Fund. The 1-1 scoreline was largely irrelevant, and the match did not live up to the heritage of the Hungarians, no matter how hard they tried, though Hidegkuti and Palotas combined brilliantly at times. What may better be remembered was the speech of the Wolves Chairman, James Baker, at the pre-match banquet, when he referred to the Wolves’ motto ‘out of darkness cometh light’, and hoped that very soon that would be the way in their native land.
‘Fast-forward’ nearly forty years, to December 1993, and the Hungarians were again in town, having emerged from more than three decades of ‘darkness’ into the light in 1989. To mark the opening of the stand completing the ‘new Molineux’ on 7 December 1993, a capacity crowd of 28,245 watched the visitors, Kispest Honved, hold Wolves to a 2-2 draw. For the first time in nine years, Molineux was once more a four-sided stadium. Interestingly, just prior to kick-off there was a short delay due to problems with the floodlighting. Once again, the message went out (with a touch of Black Country humour this time!): ‘Nothing to worry about, for as all Wolves fans know – Out of Darkness Cometh Light!’ In this 1993/94 season, on the fiftieth anniversary of their first floodlit games at Molineux, it was fitting that Wolverhampton Wanderers were back again in the top flight of English football.
Twenty seasons later, and Wolves are already in third place in the Championship, promising an early return to the Premiership, after dropping two divisions and gaining promotion last season. Let’s hope that after celebrating 125 years at Molinuex, Wolves can again return to the top flight, where a club with such a great history as theirs, truly belongs. But then, success in the modern game is no longer based on heritage and tradition, if it ever was.
Andrew James 
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