Agnes was born on 27th February 1900 in Aston, then part of Warwickshire. Walter was aged 32 and Emily Jane was 29. Agnes was baptised in the same year. At the age of 14 she passed the entrance examination for the Birmingham College of Art, but things being things meant she couldn’t attend. “Things” in this case meant her wage was important to Walter, he had just discovered that there were too many babies being born, and probably a fatherly edict prohibited her from attending. That didn’t restrict her life-long desire for self-improvement which she inflicted on son Ian, and nephew Harry (thank goodness). She worked from probably the school leaving age of 14 for Cadbury’s in Bournville. She had two or three strokes in the early 60’s and died in 1964 aged 64.

On the 19th March 1921 when she was 21 in the Quaker meeting room in Bournville she married Charles Hill who was born in 1890. More on Charles here. Charles died in 1970.

Their Son Ian Charles was born on 2nd December 1928 in Birmingham. There is more on and from Ian here.

Their daughter Marguerite Agnes was born in 1934 passing away in 1942 – an event which had a profound effect on all three of them.

Agnes died at 84 Yardley Green Road, Little Bromwich on 13 June 1964.

Picture taken circa 1962 in the garden of 166 Kineton Green Road. Ivy and Bert had gone to Jersey on holiday and they babysat Harry.

The Rayboulds, one of the families remembered by Ian, a grandson.

These notes are all from memory, and where I have been inaccurate I do apologise, and please let me know.

My Mother

Agnes Emily Raybould, 1900-1964. She was the second surviving eldest child after her sister Gladys. There had been a baby boy, died either at or soon after childbirth, many years before; her sisters Doris and Nancy died as young adults.

My Father

Charles Hill, 1890-1970. His father was also Charles Hill. I never knew his father, and his mother Phoebe died when he was about 17. He served in the Great War 1914-19, as a Staff-Sergeant in a mobile workshop repairing artillery guns near the fronts in France and Italy. After the War he got a job at Cadbury’s factory.

They married 19 03 1921, in the Quaker Meeting Room in Bournville, in the Quaker fashion, all present signing the certificate. The original George Cadbury gave them a large family bible.

Charles Hill

At the time of my birth my father was a full-time freelance musician: on my birth certificate his occupation was recorded as Vocalist. Three serious, important and life-changing events, happening about the same time, caused that part of his career to change, but it was not eliminated, since he carried on singing in evening and weekend engagements until after the Second World War. Before the war he travelled to concert halls, broadcast on early radio, and made several 78rpm records. He gave most of them away. His real strength was Oratorio. Some of his papers are with City of Birmingham Archives.  Click here to listen to Charles singing.

He would come home from work, blue overalls and black lines on his hands, have a meal, change, and venture into the musical world looking the star in his black evening suit and white tie. I might wake up in the morning to find a balloon tied to a ribbon waving over my bed.

Those serious, important and life-changing events:

1 The Talkies: he used to earn some of his income by singing in silent cinemas, sometimes as interval entertainment with other musicians, sometimes accompanying the film. The posh ones in the city combined cinema and restaurant, diners or tea-drinkers on a balcony. The Talkies did for all that, and left many of his old colleagues unemployed. Some busked in the City Streets, and turned away in embarrassment when they saw him.

2 The Great Depression: millions of workers became unemployed; he got a temporary job as a clerk in a Labour Exchange, and when a vacancy came across his desk that suited him he went for it. He returned to engineering, first in a factory making car parts (Fisher and Ludlow – making the formers that pressed the wings of a new model), left at half-an-hour’s notice on a Saturday (job done), and then became foreman in a factory maintenance workshop (Southalls) till his retirement.

3 Me: baby Ian Charles Hill b 02 12 1928 in Birmingham Maternity Hospital, Loveday Street, in the town centre; d not yet. I’m probably one of the few real Brummies, born within the sound of Big Brum (that’s what I always called it), the clock bell in the tower of the Council House.

My mother suffered considerably from my birth, and was told she should not have any more children. So a few years later they adopted my sister Marguerite Agnes Hill 1934-1942; died of diphtheria.

My fondest memory was when Marguerite and I went to bed and were tucked up by my mother, with, every night, “Good night and God bless,” when mother and father then both rehearsed a song or sequence of songs for a concert coming up, mother at the piano (she learned especially to accompany my father, and was taking lessons every week).

Agnes Hill neé Raybould

When my mother was 14 she passed the entrance exam to go to Birmingham College of Art, but family circumstances (old enough to earn a wage, with lots of younger children in the family) forbade it, probably enforced by her father. She worked for some years at Cadbury’s factory, where, after the Great War she met my father.

As was usual in those days, she was a full-time mother to me and my sister. I started at the same school my mother has gone to, with the same teacher. With the domestic facilities available at the time, being mother really was a full-time job, like living in a present-day Folk Museum. During the Second World War she got our family extra cheese by registering herself for vegetarian rations.

In about 1943 the war, the permanent blackout where the piano was, the news, my sister’s death and her age overcame her natural brightness and joie-de-vivre, and she developed a severe depression. It took about a year to resolve itself. I remember taking her during the school summer holiday to a clinic at some hospital where she had been given the then new idea of electric brain shocks. I had to wait about an hour in the open porch, not being allowed to go through the doors and know what they were doing to her: I read one of the books set for the following term. She was totally dazed and disoriented when she came out, and I guided her onto a tram and a bus to get home. As it happened, I did not need the book, because the teachers then thought that I was too young for that final year and I was relegated. Why do I still remember the title of that book? Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon. Association with my Mom? And, no, I don’t remember a thing in it.

Some time after that, as she recovered, she took a job at the hospital across the road (then called The City Sanatorium, full of TB patients) with a group of ladies repairing linen sheets and the like. Later she applied for a job as an emergency supply teacher, though she never had any training as a teacher. In the interviews she was asked which University she went to, and she surprised herself – and the interviewer – and me – with her reply of “University of Life” and got the job. She was often called by phone, at no notice, in the morning, when a real teacher had reported sick or something, and mother had to go and do anything, in any subject, in any school reachable by bus, for any age group. She had recovered her brightness enough to at least keep them amused, if nothing else… and remembering how she used to exercise my growing mind I bet the children got something interesting out of it.

“Exercise my mind”? Oh, yes. She would be cooking, washing-up, or doing something useful (I don’t remember what I was doing) (honest) when she would call out something like, “a G, an I, two Ds, U, N and a P, put them together and spell it for me!” and I had to work it out – in my head – and come up with the answer: that one was “PUDDING”, when she would call out another one, using the same rhythm and rhyming system. You wonder why I still like crossword puzzles? And I still go for the anagrams. In the kitchen (where we lived during the war, the front room being mostly full of an air-raid shelter and its wooden struts), we used to have an old black grate with hobs, and a large wooden beam over it carrying the mantelpiece shelf. My Dad had painted it an unfortunate green; well, he was colour-blind. She would encourage me to write in chalk on it in cypher. I invented it myself to see if my mother could cope. Nothing special: I just used shapes instead of letters – say, a star for an A, a square for a B, a circle for a C, and so on; I have a feeling I was not consistent every time I challenged her with a word or a sentence after she had challenged me with an anagram (of course, I didn’t know that word then). Could she cope? Could she. I was astonished. Sometime she told me a little secret: E is the commonest letter in English, so she would check out the commonest sign I’d made and guess my childish imagination from there. She should have been in in Bletchley: the war would have been over before it started.

Evacuation

My memory tells me that it was 3 September 1939: first day of war, first day at Grammar School. Did my mother walk me down and tell me what was happening? I don’t remember: she may have been busy with my little sister doing the same thing. Lined up in the playground, we never went inside. Marched off in a crocodile, new boys and girls, no established schoolmates, we walked to a railway station. Ended up in Hinckley, Leicestershire; taken in by a local family and showed to a small bedroom. Went to the local school: first day, frogmarched between two big boys, they stole the fountain pen I had been given for starting school. It was some time before I caught the name of the family I was with: Knott. In the evenings, a young man (their son, I presume) and his father cocked their heads to listen to aircraft passing overhead: “Going to Birmingham,” they said to each other, “I ’spect they’ll get it in Birmingham tonight,” “Ah.”

One Sunday afternoon my parents turned up to visit me, 40 miles northeast of home; they had spent the morning visiting my sister, who had been evacuated to a farm in Pershore, 40 miles southwest, on their tandem bicycle,160 miles round trip. A little later I was out for a walk at the edge of a field, with the class I was in, the teacher leading in front. From behind, my mother appeared, half running: “I’m taking you home,” she said. I had lasted a month; Marguerite came home two weeks later. We spent our nights by going to bed and being woken up by bombs and anti-aircraft guns. Once the house was full of shattered window-glass, and we went outside, in the dark early morning, waiting by a bus-stop, hoping. The first vehicle to arrive was an open lorry, and by this and other means somehow the family arrived at the house of one of mother’s friends, oddly enough in Leicester, while our house was repaired fit enough to live in. Father had gone back to work and firewatch. I would a million times rather face the bombs with my Mom and Dad than be safe in Paradise… or Leicester.

[The John Brown Story]…involved a little ditty around the Aston area about local brewers and inn-keepers: “Smith’s Brown Stone Jug”. Somehow it involved some of the Brown family (or a Brown family?) coming down from Scotland and settling as hoteliers in Warwick, though I believe my mother was born in Aston.

I never could find my mother’s birth in the 1901 census, nor the house she lived in at 52 Solihull Road, Sparkhill, which must have been later, and which I visited often with mother to see my Granny, and Grandad feeding his chickens in a coop in the yard. I don’t remember my father visiting: he told me once that Walter Raybould thought that he and my mother should not continue with their wedding – already arranged, I think – because either Doris or Nancy had recently died; and Dad told me that Walter cursed them both as they walked down the street towards their wedding, and would not attend. Does this next say something? My mother had had her 21st birthday and therefore her majority less than three weeks before…

I once asked my Auntie Ivy about her father: “Grandad was supposed to be a butcher, wasn’t he? I never saw his shop. What did he do?” Auntie Ivy looked at me sideways, the glance telling me as much as her words: “Did anybody know?” or words to that effect.

Me, I went where my mother had wanted to go herself, and so did my cousin Arthur, though we scarcely ever met there: Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts. When built it had been one of the foremost places of learning in one of the foremost cities practicing the subject – not just engineering, of which we were all proud.

Arthur Short Junior

He was one of many cousins I loved and used to meet, but Arthur and I were special: I was born two days after him, son of my mother’s older sister Gladys. We never forgot that two-days’ difference, but we were often like twin brothers, meeting, playing, staying in each others houses, going on holiday together, following each other’s development into later life. At the College of Art I studied Architecture, while Arthur studied Silversmithing (he was also a fine artist); coincidentally, one of history’s greatest architects – Brunelleschi – was trained and worked as a goldsmith, not as an architect. That seems to tie us even closer.

Harry writes:

“Agnes and Charles appeared in my life around the age of 6/7 maybe (1952/3). They would visit driven by Ian who had recently returned from Egypt after serving there as part of his National Service I guess. I was interested in collecting post cards from around the world and they provided me with a selection when they travelled (for example to the Brussels world Expo. They gave me a Schuco toy clockwork racing car which was my favourite for many years. Ian was an architect in Coventry and designed an extension for our then house – 127 Pierce Avenue, Olton. That they were an educated couple was obvious and they had a marvelous ability to stretch my boundaries and encouraged me to explore classical music, the arts, The Birmingham Rep, and the Communist Bookshop in Dale End Birmingham. Charles was an interesting character who appeared on the stage in musical variety shows, and I believe he might have been an actor.

They lived at 84 Yardley Green Road, Yardley, Birmingham. An interesting house which I always loved visiting, mainly because Aunty Agnes always produced interesting meals (favourite was cheese pasta bake I think, but that was too exotic a dish for me to be familiar with).

When my parents decided to buy a car in 1962 and to buy me driving lessons, Charles offered to sit beside me as the authorised driver on practice sessions in their car – a Hillman Minx convertible, licence plate ROC 54, which they had bought off Ian. The only definition of an authorised driver is that he should be in possession of a driving licence; which he was but he did not take a test to obtain one, he just bought it as he could because of driving before licences came into legal being”.

Episodes from the life of Agnes Emily Hill née Raybould

In 1943 my mother had a deep depression; partly menopause (she was 43), partly the death of my adopted sister aged 8, of diphtheria shortly before Christmas 1942, partly the death of her mother (Emily Jane Raybould) earlier in that year; and partly the wartime permanent blackout of the room her piano was in (blue paper drawing-pinned to the window-frames – couldn’t afford special blackout curtains for that room).  She would sit catatonic on the edge of her bed, having been in hospital for something.

At the age of 14, during the school summer holidays of 1943, I had to take her frequently – weekly, I suppose, maybe more often – on a bus, changing to a tram – to a clinic somewhere in Birmingham, where she was given the then fairly new electro-convulsive treatment to her head, causing violent body convulsions, and shepherd her back home.  She was quite dazed and disoriented.  I had to sit waiting in a porch while she was taken away, through dull brown doors with obscuring glass panes, and I remember reading “Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man” by Siegfried Sassoon, a book for the next school year.  (When I got back to school they put me in a different class, back a year. A wasted read; all I remember is the title, but I remember a lot about my Mom).  She scarcely knew what was happening, and could – or chose – to tell me almost nothing about it.  She did improve, after what seemed a long time, almost back to her old self.

I learned a lot from her, before this regression.  She had been lively, and interested in everything; she wrote poetry (I still have some, and later I typed some out for her).  She encouraged me with word games, such as: I remember her at the kitchen sink, her back to me; she would turn and say something like, “O, U and a B, D, L and an E, put them together and spell it for me.”  On the old wooden mantelpiece in the kitchen I would invent a common word or phrase and chalk it up, on the spur of the moment – but using symbols instead of letters, like squares, circles, or triangles.  My Mum took a look, thought a bit, and got it in one.  We used to play “Lexicon”, a card game using playing cards with letters instead of suits, spelling and altering words.

Oh, that rhyming anagram?  (She always made them rhyme).  DOUBLE.  I’d be – what – 11? 12?  Before that brain episode, I’m sure.

I can still sort out anagrams, and my friends can’t believe my luck at Scrabble.

The Rayboulds, one of the families remembered by Ian, a grandson.

These notes are all from memory, and where I have been inaccurate I do apologise, and please let me know.