The Green Water Hole Provided Good Fishing – The Chronicle and Advertiser December 2, 1952

Councillor Edward’s Memories of the Green, Castle Bromwich

As one who went to live in Castle Bromwich in 1879 and left the village the day before Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, 1877, Councillor H. W. Edwards, of the Hollies, Parkfield Road, Colehill, has many interesting memories of the place as it was in his youth.

Councillor Edwards, who has been a member of Coleshill Parish Council since 1919, was born at Water Orton and went with his parents to Castle Bromwich, where they resided in a cottage by the Green. Subsequently, as an insurance agent, he worked in the district for 27 years and got to know everything that happened.

Horses used to graze on the green, one end of which was occupied by a deep sand pit, long disused and partly filled with water, he says.

Councillor Edwards is unlikely to forget those horses, and in particular one named Sandy that was owned by an uncle.

“I often played on the village green as a child, and one day – while still a toddler – I must have done something to annoy him for he picked me up with his teeth and galloped full-tilt to the other end where he dropped me beside two cottages that stood near the old Forge,” Councillor Edwards recalls.

About that period men arrived regularly from Birmingham to catch the fish abounding in the big water hole. They used scoops attached to long poles. Green scum at Whateley Green covers the stagnant water in what was then a marl pit and another profitable fishing place. It was when Whateley Green pool was cleaned out that the other pool was stocked with fish from there.

The excavation at the village green was subsequently filled in and the surface levelled, but the holes which appear every now and then in the turf are caused by the settling down of the packing material. Alderman Clayton, a well-known local resident, was responsible, he believes, for having trees planted around the Green.

Alderman Clayton lived at Whateley Green in a house known as the Cedars. But how many people are aware that the house was actually built around a cottage that had stood there for a considerable time? Alderman Clayton did not disturb the old building, but used it as the kitchen premises of his new home.

Councillor Harry William Edwards was born 30 May 1876 in Water Orton and died 23 June 1958 in Coleshill.