The Warriors Club, Lambeth Road

The photograph shows a long table laid for a dinner, with balloons and paper streamers overhead, a Union Jack lettered “Legion” on the wall and pints of dark beer on the cloth. Around it stand and sit some thirty men in their best suits. It was taken at the British Legion club on Lambeth Road in the 1940s.

Lesley Harper’s father, Peter Harper, is at that table. She was told, she wrote on Voices of Kingstanding, that the men in the photograph “actually helped erect the building itself”, and she remembers another photograph of them, her father among them, at work on its construction.

Kingstanding called the club the Warriors. Barry Gater remembered the No. 29A bus that ran out past the Kingstanding pub “to the ‘Warrior’s club’ and the Pheasey estate”.

Built by its members

Albert Roberts was one of the builders, and both his granddaughters have written about him. Carole Haden said he became president of the club and “had a room named after him”. Christine Sutton remembered him as chairman of the committee, and the lounge they called the Albert. He and his son helped to build the club, and when he died on Christmas Day 1958, she was told, a couple of coaches of members went to his funeral.

Joan Crook knew faces at the dinner: Sam Banks, the tall man at the back on the right, and Billy Bonsor, sitting between the standing men. Her parents, Vince and Elsie Hughes, “spent many happy evenings at the Warriors”. She added: “No lager I see, only mild and bitter!”

Parties in the ballroom

It was more than a bar. Carole Haden’s family held “many family parties in the ballroom there”. Wendy Walker’s father was pensions officer for the Kingstanding branch of the British Legion in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The Crown

The club was registered as a society, the Royal British Legion Warriors Club (Kingstanding) Limited. In about 2011, a Birmingham History Forum post reported, the running of the club was taken over by an outside company, while the Legion branch carried on. Christine Sutton wrote in 2017 that the old building “has been knocked down now”. A members’ club called the Crown stands on Lambeth Road today, and CAMRA lists it as formerly the Kingstanding Royal British Legion Warriors Club.

The men around that 1940s table built their own club with their own hands. Their grandchildren are still putting names to their faces.