By Pam Waddell, Director of Birmingham Science City The Leader of Birmingham City Council recently described Greater Birmingham and the West Midlands as ‘the mother of invention and the father of e…
Source: Evidenced and integrated action to drive innovation in Birmingham & the Midlands
By Pam Waddell, Director of Birmingham Science City The Leader of Birmingham City Council recently described Greater Birmingham and the West Midlands as ‘the mother of invention and the father of e…
Source: Evidenced and integrated action to drive innovation in Birmingham & the Midlands
By Pam Waddell, Director of Birmingham Science City The Leader of Birmingham City Council recently described Greater Birmingham and the West Midlands as ‘the mother of invention and the father of e…
Source: Evidenced and integrated action to drive innovation in Birmingham & the Midlands
Greater #Birmingham grows apace……@BrumIsBrill
By Pam Waddell, Director of Birmingham Science City
The Leader of Birmingham City Council recently described Greater Birmingham and the West Midlands as ‘the mother of invention and the father of enterprise’ and the Chair of the Midlands Engine talked about ‘the start of a golden decade for the Midlands’ – a sign of growing confidence, particularly in our potential for innovation fuelled growth. At the same Conservative Party Conference Fringe Event the Prime Minister anticipated that ‘with the election of West Midlands mayor … we will fire up the Midlands Engine, we will make sure that this economy truly does work for everyone.’
The layers of Midlands geography may seem complex, perhaps a barrier to realising these ambitions, but they are in fact highly complimentary, offering different scales and specialisms for investment and action. A summary of the layers is given below:
At each layer of geography, the role of…
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Can’t wait for the #Bearwood #Festival next #June2017 in @WeAreBearwood…..#Bostin!
For one day only We Are Bearwood are re-opening Coffee Junction for a conversation café where we will be giving free drinks and cakes in exchange for a bit of your time and your stories of Bearwood, both real and imagined.
Come along and meet Little Earthquake Theatre Company who are going to be part of Bearwood Street Festival in 2017, and help inspire them with your ideas. Your story could be part of the festival!
Everyone is welcome so come and be a part of it.
Share a cuppa anytime between 11am and 3pm at Coffee Junction this Saturday
The street festival is happening next June, and we’ll be working on the details furiously over the winter to make it the best arts and music festival around.
More info on the street festival here
THE BATTLE OF BIRMINGHAM
Brum is Burning, Brum is Burning
Fire…..Fire……Fire…..Fire
King Charles Prince Rupert
Was marauding
Throughout the Town
Throughout the Town
Brum was Roundhead
Not for Royalists….
Ride them down…..
Ride them down…..
Rupert killed them
Torched their houses
For supporting
Parliament…..
NOT The Crown;
NOT The Crown
Many murdered…..
Many murdered…..
By Rupert’s Cavalry
Cut them down…!!!
Cut them down…!!!
Yet at Shireland
Was a Skirmish
Where Earl Denbigh
Met his end
Shot him down……!!!
Shot him down……!!!
No Justice!!!
No Justice!!!
For Brummagem!
For Brummagem!
Brum is Burning
Brum is Burning
Fire….Fire…..Fire…Fire
Battle’s over
Battle’s over……
Poor Birmingham
POOR Birmingham…….
BRUMMAGEM!
BRUMMAGEM!
Keith Bracey, Roundhead rather than Royalist
Parliament NOT The King
Commonwealth NOT The Crown
#BrummieBard
#BillShakespeare
#KeithBracey
#1truclaretnblu
Hollywood IS in Birmingham! ………by Keith Bracey, Writer and Brummie
Birmingham’s ‘Film Triumvirate’ is made up of Sir Michael Balcon, Brummie Grammar Schoolboy and Britain’s first ‘Film Mogul’ who at one point worked for Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Victor Savile, who bankrolled Balcon and Oscar Deutsche who founded the ODEON Cinema Chain in Birmingham in the 1930’s were Brum’s three film ‘movers and shakers’ All three could at one time be found on a ride on the Inner Circle number 8 ‘Corporation Buzz’ in Birmingham’s inner city!
So we see Birmingham’s links to Hollywood are not so tenuous, notwithstanding the eponymously-named village near Earlswood Lakes!
Birmingham was almost single-handedly responsible for the world-wide film industry as we know it.
In 1858 Brummie Alexander Parkes’ invention of the first viable plastic called ‘Parkesine’ in the City’s Jewellery Quarter led directly to the development of celluloid film, also in the Jewellery Quarter and thence to the development of ‘film’ and the entire world-wide film industry, Hollywood, Bollywood et al!
The City of Birmingham is also home to the UK’s oldest existing cinema: ‘The Electric Cinema’ owned by the excellent Tom Lawes which dates from 1909. The oldest surviving ODEON Cinema is ‘The Clifton’ in Perry Barr in North Birmingham.
l well recall watching the early 1970’s BBC TV Black and White TV Series ‘Gangsters’ set in Birmingham echoing ‘The Peaky Blinders’ with an understated lead actor Maurice Colbourne (like a typical Brummie, modest to a fault!) playing the lead role opposite a Pakistani actor ‘Mal’ Malik as they prowled the ‘Mean and Moody Streets’ of Birmingham…..’Sin City’!
Back in 1974 when Cliff Richard starred in the sugary Birmingham-set and made film: ‘Take me High’, I went to see the altogether more hard-nosed Reggae star Jimmy Cliff’s Biopic ‘The Harder they Come’ at the ODEON New Street, founded by a man from a previous Birmingham generation who had also suffered from prejudice in the City, a German Jew called Oscar Deutsche, who founded the ODEON Cinema Chain, still the largest in the UK, based on the acronym ‘Oscar Deutsche Entertains Our Nation’ the Greek for to watch is ‘ODEON’ so you can see Oscar was on the ball with his marketing.
I saw WBA players Cyrille Regis, the late Lawrie Cunningham, who played for Spanish giants Real Madrid, before his untimely early death in a car crash and a young Brendan Batson walking down the stairs of The Odeon New Street after seeing ‘The Harder they Come’.
Here was a real black hero to these young black men……that typified and exemplified Birmingham in the 1970’s for me…..three young black men out for a good time, watching a violent Gangster Film aping reality in a racially tolerant City of Birmingham…….
Birmingham Grammar School Boy Sir Michael Balcon founded The Ealing Studios which gave us those great ‘Ealing Comedies’: ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’, ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’, ‘Passport to Pimlico’, ‘The Ladykillers’ and ‘Whiskey Galore’ should be more celebrated in Birmingham as possibly Britain’s greatest film maker, the man who discovered Alfred Hitchcock, whom many think is Britain’s best film maker…..?
Balcon went to my old school George Dixon Grammar School for Boys from 1906 when the school opened until 1912 when he left after his father a Jewish tailor at 116 Summer Lane, Aston became ill and could no longer afford to send the young Balcon to school
After leaving school in 1912 Balcon joined up in 1914 at the outbreak of The Great War and tried to establish some of the early ‘Birmingham Pals’ Regiments in The Great War but ironically could not fight and serve himself due to defective eyesight……….
Balcon also named his ‘Everyman Copper Hero’ and most enduring character PC George Dixon of ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ after his old school which was named after Education Reformer and the founder of Edgbaston High School for Girls: George Dixon MP, a direct contemporary of Joseph Chamberlain MP the founder of municipal Birmingham.
PC George Dixon first appeared in the 1949 Ealing Studios film: ‘The Blue Lamp’ where he was shot in a bungled cinema robbery by a young Rank Starlet on loan to the Ealing Studios Dirk Bogarde….remember him?
PC George Dixon was miraculously reincarnated in 1952 in the first ‘Police Procedural’: ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ where the young PC Dixon pounds a tough East End Docklands Beat around ‘Dock Green’ keeping law and order with his own brand of homespun bonhomie and gentle kindness and good sense, with a ‘clip round the ear’ for young urchins rather than a spell in ‘The Blue Brick’ (‘nick’)
PC Dixon’s cheery Saturday evening greeting: ‘Evening All’ has gone down in TV folklore.
‘Dixon of Dock Green’ ran from 1952 until 1976 when Jack Warner, the actor who played PC Dixon for all those years became too old for the role.
Sir Michael Balcon would premiere his Ealing Films to the Cinema Club at his old school
There are also links to Hollywood as his Grandson is possibly the greatest ever screen actor the three-time Oscar winner for ‘Best Actor’ Daniel Day-Lewis.
You can see the film and TV legacy of Birmingham-born Sir Michael Balcon and TV’s Birmingham-set ‘Gangsters’.
Today we have the BBC’s latest Birmingham-set Gangster show: ‘The Peaky Blinders’. But It all began all those years ago in Birmingham by our own Sir Michael Balcon and his creation PC George Dixon, born in Birmingham……..’Evenin’ All’!
#Birmingham #GunQuarter where Birmingham Small Arms (BSA) was founded and Brummagem’s #Gun trade began in 1630 as a response to the political and Revolutionary foment and upheaval that England, Scotland and Ireland was undergoing fully 160 years before the supposedly anarchic and Revolutionary French had their rebellion against the excesses of the French monarchy and aristos came to its head with the 1789 French Revolution…..in 1649 in London, the political, economic and Royal centre of Britain.
England’s Parliamentarians, who had won the English Civil War (ECW) at the Battle of Worcester when the King of England Charles I’s heir presumptive and supposed successor Charles II was defeated and vanquished and driven into exile in The Netherlands. Parliament and it’s Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell executed Charles I in Parliament Square in Westminster thereby creating the Protectorate in England……
Birmingham played an important role on the Parliamentarian side in the English Civil War providing muskets, swords and cannon for the Parliamentarians and was the site of a battle in 1642 which was really merely a skirmish when Prince Rupert was despatched by the King from the Royalist stronghold of Worcester ( the Royalist “Commandery” still exists as a major attraction for tourists to Worcester today….) to “teach those “Bromwichams” (Brummagems) a lesson for supporting Parliament against the King and supplying them with arms).
Rupert raised the area of Digbeth and Deritend to the ground by setting Fire to it and killing a number of Birmingham folk…..Brummies were not to take this lying down and as the Royalists rode through Birmingham laying waste to the town at Cape Hill to the West of Birmingham on the border with Staffordshire Royalist Commander: The Earl of Denbigh was cut down while exiting the town of Birmingham and riding through the Shireland Brook by a Parliamentarian musketeer in a skirmish……
This antipathy between Birmingham folk and the King and Crown stems from Brummies opposition to the Royalists by taking Parliament’s side in the Civil War and the Battle of Birmingham when the town was burned to the ground by Prince Rupert and his mercenary Royalists
#Birmingham #HMPBirmingham #WinsonGreenPrison #TheGreen #TheBlueBrickBirmingham #PrisonRadio #SortsRadioBirmingham
The Friends of the Charles Parker Trust will hold their annual general meeting on Thursday 20 October 2016 in the Heritage Learning Space, Floor 4, Library of Birmingham, 3.30pm – 5.00pm.
Phil Maguire, a new Trustee of the Charles Parker Trust will speak about his work as founding chief executive of the Prison Radio Association (PRA). The PRA is a charity set up in 2006 following pilot project based at BBC Birmingham and HMP Birmingham (better known locally as Winson Green prison). In a feature on literacy and publishing in prisons on 17 Feb 2008, the Independent reported that the Prison Radio Association had been launched at Winson Green in July 2006, with the aim of providing training to prisoners to help with communications and literacy within prisons.
The Prison Radio Association aims to contribute to a reduction in reoffending by using the power of radio. The National Prison Radio is…
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#WeAreBearwood #BrillBearwood #TheBear
Keith Bracey the Brummie Bard Birmingham & Black Country poet & writer 