Kingstanding Ex-Servicemen’s Club

Harry Felton remembered a collector calling at his family’s house every week for half a crown. The money was to build a club for the men who had come back from the war. His uncle, Bill Hall, who had served in North Africa, was a founder member of the ex-servicemen’s club on Warren Farm Road, and the first club, Harry wrote on Voices of Kingstanding, had its entrance in Danesbury Crescent.

Writing from Australia, where he had settled, he could not resist a comparison. When he told Australian veterans that “we had whip rounds to build our exservice clubs and British Legions they are open mouthed”.

Next door to the baths

The club stood on Warren Farm Road beside Kingstanding Swimming Baths, near the little crescent of shops that residents list with affection: the Home and Colonial, Friends’ grocery, Browns the newsagent, Fred the cobbler and the fish and chip shop. Roy Bashford and his friends in the Kingstanding swimming club taught children and grown-ups to swim at the baths, then would “pop in next door to ex-service club”. George Vickers’ father worked behind its bar for many years; the coal yard where George fetched barrow-loads of nutty slack was just past the back of the club.

It was run as a members’ club. A notice in the Birmingham Mail in February 1971 told members of “The Kingstanding Ex-Servicemen’s Social Club Ltd, Warren Farm Road” that their subscriptions were due by the end of the month, and one daughter has found a share certificate for the club among her father’s papers.

Saturday nights upstairs

Entertainment was upstairs on Saturday and Sunday nights. Keith Dearne’s father, Jack Dearne, was chairman of entertainment for many years, with friends including Vic Leeson, Dennis Bevington and Horace Warrilow. Rob Wells, who worked behind the bar in 1976 and 1977, remembered Glad and Fred running the club. Phil Brown showed big-screen films there on Sunday nights in the early 1970s; members loved “a table full of drinks and snacks while watching a bond movie or seven brides for seven brothers”. Carl Westwood, a teenage barman in the late 1970s, remembered Ken Dodd appearing one Saturday night. Rosemarie Hunt went with her parents as a child: she “loved the shows and all the sweets I got from the grown ups”.

Pat Mills’ father, Sam Banks, made it his local and in the 1970s became a doorman. “Many a saturday night he came home a bit worse for wear falling over the privet hedge,” she remembered.

Still on Warren Farm Road

The baths have gone. The club has not: in 2012 David Mitchell described the ex-service club as “still there with a space beside it which was the swimming baths”. Today the Kingstanding Inn trades from 72 Warren Farm Road, the club’s address. In 2021 Keith Dearne called in at “the new pub” and had a pint of M&B Mild. “It was bloody lovely,” he wrote. Something those half-crowns built is still pulling pints.