| Description | An interview with Peter MILLINGTON, a married man with two sons, who is a Information Officer, Disability W.M., born in Birmingham and now living in Birmingham. Peter MILLINGTON’s father was a White collar worker, Rover, born in England and his mother a housewife born in England. In the interview, he talks about …
'MILLINGTON, Peter MS2255/2/035
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I was born in Birmingham on Christmas Day in 1961. I was brought up in Harborne and I still live in the Harborne area. I’ve never actually lived outside Birmingham, I live now in Quinton. Father brought up in Ladywood. Mother’s parents were Irish immigrants from Dublin-came to Birmingham in 1930s. Mother also lived in Ladywood.
1.34 Parents bought a house in Station Road, Harborne in 1961 and have lived there ever since. Peter was born at home. Large,terraced house.
2.26 I went to school at Station Road Primary School….My parents are both Catholics but for some reason they didn’t send us to the local Catholic school….My mum and dad, for some reason, stopped going to mass for quite a long period, and it wasn’t until we were teenagers that they started attending St. Mary’s. Thinks Station Road provided a good education.
3.48 Describes the gentrification of Harborne in the 1980s and 90s. When slum areas of Ladywood were cleared in the early 60s, a lot of families moved into new council estates, but his parents had contacts in Harborne.
02
Had friends who were also children of white collar workers in similar situation. Part of a trend of people from quite deprived backgrounds moving into better areas.
48” Memories of childhood. There was still that transition where technology was still coming in, so we grew up in a house with no central heating, which people take for granted these days, and no double glazing, and we didn’t have hot water…. Father used to carry buckets of hot water upstairs for bathing. Way of living seemed more healthy because exposed to the elements.
3.15 In terms of technology, we didn’t have a television as very young children. …I have vague memories of the big, black and white televisions that you would have to be constantly adjusting this huge aerial and moving it around the room to try and get a picture….you’d always have the smell of burning or heating elements at the back of the television…. Contrasts his childhood with that of children today.
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Remembers playing outside as a child. Issue of child safety not so pronounced as today. Down the road from us was the original Chad Valley Toy factory…I remember it closing down. They had warehouses where they still had a lot of old stock in there, and we, as kids, would actually crawl through this waste -ground…we’d go in and get old toys and things.
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At Primary School mix of children from different backgrounds. However no black pupils in same class. Now black and Asian communities are spread throughout the city. I remember having no exposure to black people, even though there were large numbers of people living in Birmingham….
2.10 What I remember, actually, and it always stays with me, was we used to have groups of overseas teaching students, and they would come and visit our school, obviously from Birmingham University…and a large number of these students were from African and Asian backgrounds. I remember, particularly Nigerian students would come for a week….one woman teaching us Nigerian folk songs….but I do remember this undercurrent of quite a racist response from young children….adults disguise their racism in different forms….I remember children making monkey noises….
4.45 I went to King Edward’s Five Ways School, it was a grammar school in Bartley Green and again was a largely white school during the 70s.
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Anecdote about fellow pupil who was black. It was an unchallenged thing, people would make racist taunts towards this guy….which he would laugh off…I think that’s something that has changed enormously…there’s been a lot more awareness and anti-racist practise in education…Obviously I don’t want to be too naïve about that to say it’s still not a problem….
2.27 I was at primary school from about 1965-66….and I left grammar school in 1978-79.
3.00 Describes taking 11+ exam. Older brother already attended Five Ways Grammar School.
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I remember very good friends from the same area, who I’d been at school with, getting their second choice…..and being devastated, and you think, what an unfair system really. You wonder about the accuracy of the testing procedure. I always feel that middle class kids are at an advantage in terms of that type of thing because I’m not certain that it is testing intelligence. People can be prepared for those types of tests…From my own point of view I was very pleased to get to that school..
2.14 It was an all-boys school and I happen to think that there’s a lot of disadvantages for boys, to use a fairly strong term, an ‘abnormal’ environment to have single sex schools…it takes longer to mature as a person and to find out about relationships…
3.30 I think one of the things about the 11+ system in the 1970s…there were far more kids from working-class backgrounds going to grammar schools and I think that was a challenge that the schools themselves hadn’t come to terms with. School focussed on getting pupils to university.
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Any kids that didn’t co-operate with that were very quickly alienated. I don’t think the teachers knew how to deal with them….Anyone who was showing artistic flair….
Pupils who didn’t want to go to university were encouraged to leave at the end of the fifth form.
2.04 Describes sports at the school. Anecdote about pupil who was taken out of the school. He was from a council housing estate in Woodgate Valley and his dad ran this soccer team… and I remember the father, he obviously hadn’t done his research, and so this guy arrived at school, and was sent home with his rugby kit and the father, “my kid’s not gonna play rugby, he’s a soccer player!”…and he took him out of King Edwards and put him in the local comp….
Cross country running.
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Regrets that school didn’t offer more arts and social science based subjects.
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Stopped on at school in lower-sixth, but left before upper-sixth. 1977, I remember because it was the year that punk rock came out. It was a very exciting time to be a teenager, to be part of that movement of popular culture. Silver jubilee year.
1.34 Young people became more politicised in the late 70s. I remember joining Youth CND in Birmingham…
2.21 Political climate of the late 70s. At the time I left school I had very few materialistic ambitions because there was so much going on…for young people at that stage….It was more of a European thing , I think, often when you see images of the 1960s it seems a peculiarly British thing….
3.42 Fashion of the late 70s. When punk first came out all you had to do was literally turn your jeans in….so you had drainpipes, and we used to get safety pins and just cut the ends off, so you could clip it onto your ear….
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Music in Birmingham. We’d go to all sorts of places like the Bournbrook Hotel on the Bristol road was a favourite place, which is now The Varsity Tavern. It used to be a biker’s pub….there was a movement called Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League….
Rum Runner Pub on Broad Street. UB40 at Digbeth Civic Hall, then later became very famous.
2.20 You always felt that there was a potential…that working class kids could…own the culture. It was their culture as opposed to being a commercially produced culture. It was a sort of street thing really…
Merger of reggae and punk.
3.10 In the mid-70s…there used to be a disco in Bournville, and it was reggae, a black Jamaican disco, and it was every Saturday night. It was quite a strange place for this event to take place because it was in this nice middle-class estate…. The no.11 bus would be absolutely packed with black kids that were coming from Handsworth….
4.27 Anecdote about going to Barbarellas nightclub, seeing Rankin’ Roger.
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Continues to discuss popular culture.
1.58 Anecdote about becoming a Mod.
4.00 Remembers gangs of skinheads congregating in the small park near the Rotunda.
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Anecdote about being confronted by a gang of skinheads in Sparkhill. They had big sticks and they said, “you can be in our gang. What we do is we wander around Sparkhill all night. We attack Paki gangs” . Very fortunately from my point of view, the police came along….
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Describes grandparents and their home in Lee Bank.
2.02 We’d use my grandparents’ house as a sort of launch pad to go into town on a Saturday afternoon… changes in cityscape. As kids, town was like a playground to a large extent…we’d go off into what is now the Pallisades….you could get lost in the network of escalators…
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King Kong, this huge gorilla, made of hardened plastic. I’m not sure why he was put there. The city obviously bought this gorilla, I remember him being about 20 feet tall…. And it seemed a very typical Birmingham piece of art….people would gather to eat their chips or sandwiches….
Reflects on public sculpture in Birmingham.
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First job assisting uncle who was a painter and decorator. Then worked in Woolworths over Christmas period 1979, washing up in the restaurant.
1.01 I was stuck in this room with steam, and they had this washing up machine that was very poorly designed. You used to stack all the stuff on crates and it would pass through this machine on a conveyor belt. You had to attend to everything at the end of the line before the plates crashed off the end….the plates would reach the end where there was a wall, the plates would start moving up the wall….
2.15 My first professional training, was as a general nurse at Dudley Road Hospital, which is now City Hospital…I moved into the nurse’s home at Dudley Road Hospital….I was one of only 3 male nurses…
Contrasts training in 1980 with today.
4.29 I think it was still very unusual for them to have male nurses. The stereotype was either that you were gay or that there must be some other peculiar reason….
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Continues to discuss the problems of being in a profession that was predominantly female. Culture of the Matrons.
1.44 On nursing: It brings you into contact with the widest range of human beings that you are ever going to meet, but not just in contact, in contact on a very basic level….people when they’re ill are stripped of an awful lot of their ego and class and culture….
3.14 Anecdote about 3 patients who’d suffered heart attacks on the same ward.
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Continues anecdote.
56” Anecdote about patients at Moseley Hall Hospital.
3.00 Value of nursing as a profession.
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After I finished my nursing training….I moved into a flat in Gillot Road, which is known as bed-sit land. I wasn’t employed for 2 years, but I did actually get into all sorts of community work and youth type work….I got involved in community Arts in Small Heath.
55” I got involved with a guy called Paul Murphy who was working for an organisation called The National Anti-Racist Movement in Education. We organised a trip to Belfast in Northern Ireland, the object of which was to explore similarities between sectarianism and racism….we were a very multi-racial group. It was followed up on a television programme called ‘Here and Now’….
2.15 How he became involved in disability. Taking children with disabilities on holiday camps as a volunteer nurse. More committed after a time. Became leader of one camp. The kids came mainly from a school in Northfield called Victoria School….
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Unusual for these children to be able to have access to this kind of camp. Pete did this for 8 years and met his wife Theresa, who was one of the volunteers. Some of the family would often come along on the holidays. Ultimately it was a huge responsibility and he felt that he would like to do something else.
1.56 Worked with a man called Paul Bowler who was proficient in computing and together they used a Commodore 64 to run off publicity material. Having contact with Paul, who has Cerebral Palsy, had a great effect on Pete’s perception of disability.
4.05 In the mid-1980s I went to Westhill College and I trained as a Community and Youth Worker…..worked with young offenders, but my main interest was in disability. I went to work in a place called Hillcrest, which is a rehabilitation unit….based at Moseley Hall Hospital…
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I worked at Hillcrest from about 1985-1990. In 1990 I started working for an organisation called Disability West Midlands….managed by disabled people and employs disabled people. The key thing being that it works to a social model of disability as opposed to a medical model of disability…..disability is actually a rights issue and about discrimination….access is the big issue.
Describes the work of the organisation.
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I was interested in learning to speak Urdu and Punjabi…in the work I did for Disability West Midlands, I was initially employed as a Mobile Information Officer…one of the things I noticed was that not many people from an Asian background asked for these leaflets (in Punjabi/Urdu script) .What I thought would be of greater value would be to learn the spoken language. I enrolled on a night school course at Bournville College. Gives details.
2.04 Anecdote about the tutor being white.
3.43 How the media manipulate race issues.
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Followed up the spoken course with a course in Punjabi script at Handsworth Girls’ School.
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I consider my roots to be working-class….on the other hand, I’m in quite a middle-class profession….I’m a home owner….I probably have certain middle-class values…Family background. Anglo-Irish element of Birmingham.
4.29 I suppose Sparkhill became the place for the last wave of Irish immigrants…in the 1950s….there were pockets of Irish people…and intermarriage in Birmingham…
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In terms of my own identity…I think when I was a kid, going back to the early 70s, this was around the time of the Birmingham pub bombings….there was this anti-Irish feeling….I remember telling my grandmother, what I now consider to be racist jokes, …and I’d obviously picked up those jokes from the media or friends….I never felt that I had an Irish identity. My mum and dad became more Irish in the late 70s….they started going to the Irish Centre… Wife’s background.
2.50 Started attending Our Lady of Fatima Church in Quinton.
Comments on Irish history.
4.31 People of Anglo-Irish descent are referred to as Plastic Paddies…I can see the critique behind it because I suppose, especially in Birmingham you’ve seen the creation of these Irish theme pubs which maybe Irish people feel is trivialising the culture….
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Continued.
1.08 I think what happens with second and third generation people, more so with third generation immigrants actually, is that the second generation take on the new culture…. How living in Ireland might be problematic for someone brought up as a Brummie.
ENDS. |