Ebenezer Memorial Congregational Church

In September 1962 Malcolm Stevens married his bride in the church he had grown up beside. He had lived in Brackenbury Road for nineteen years, within 200 yards of it. He had gone to its Sunday school, joined its Wolf Cubs and then its Scout troop, which met in the church hall. The Reverend Light took the service, and Malcolm later shared his own photograph of the church that year.

Most people knew it simply as the Congregational church on the corner. Avril Purvis went for years before she learned its proper name: Ebenezer Memorial Church.

A church for the new estates

The congregation was founded in 1927, as the first estates were being planned. Its church was completed in 1934, the Victoria County History records, “to serve the population of new housing estates”. It was designed by Harrison and Tracey of Birmingham and built of rustic facing brick, and with its site and furniture it cost £12,000. There were seats for 508. In 1957 the church had 109 members.

A photograph of the church in the Library of Birmingham is catalogued as a reprint of one taken “in the 1920s”, and a copy is dated 1925. If the church was finished in 1934, that date looks too early.

Scouts, choirs and the Madison

The hall at the back was busy. The troop was the 1st Kingstanding, the 213th Birmingham. In the early 1940s, Dennis remembered, Mr Howe was scoutmaster and his wife ran the Guides. Around 1950 Mr Lowe, the caretaker, helped with the scouts too. In the 1960s Michael Reynolds and his friends represented the group abroad two years running, in Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium, and he scored the winner in a football final.

There was a choir. Kenneth Laight sang in it in the early 1950s, one of several Handsworth Grammar School boys recruited by a choirmaster who had been there himself. In the 1960s Jean Allaway was paid a shilling for every wedding, with Miss Maisey at the organ, and appeared in the pantomime one year as a fairy.

In the evenings the hall rocked. Avril Purvis remembered rock and roll nights and a boy called Pete, she thought, who taught them the Madison: “Must have been the first line dance ever.” She was thirteen or fourteen, in thick black eye make-up, white lipstick and back-combed hair. Jean remembered jiving.

The Lights

Many memories come back to the minister and his wife. Mr Light was the minister people remember best; Mrs Light taught religious instruction at Dulwich Road School. “I remember Mr and Mrs Light,” wrote Dorothy Capewell, “lovely people.” Janine Parry’s parents married here on 20 February 1954. Frances Fletcher married here in 1967 and had her first child christened here.

Gone from the corner

The church has gone. Avril Jarvis wrote that it was torn down to make way for homes for older residents. When it closed, and when it was demolished, is not recorded on Voices of Kingstanding.

But its troop outlived it. In 2014 Pam Salloway wrote that she had just relaunched the 213th Kingstanding scout group, meeting now at the St John’s Centre beside Christ the King. The church on the corner is gone; the number on the scout scarves came back.