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Click to hear Winifred part 7 - Keeping Healthy (9mins 02secs)
Medical care in pre-World War 1 era was sparse and somewhat rudimentary; Folk remedies, therefore, were widely applied to illnesses and the Doctor (who had to be paid) was only summoned as last resort.

Click to hear Winifred part 6 - Street Games (9mins 21secs)
Growing up in a town has always presented problems for children who wanted to ‘play out’, i.e. outside the house. Unthinkable today, the most natural (and safest) place to do this was the road; the traffic, such as it was, was slow-moving and easily avoided by the children.

Click to hear Winifred part 5 - Starting School (10mins 05secs)
1912 was not only significant for the arrival of moving pictures in Birmingham, it was also the year when Winifred first started school. As always, learning to read and write were the first skills to master – but using very different teaching strategies from today’s.

Click to hear Winifred part 4 - Moving Pictures (9mins 18secs)
By comparison with the traditional homespun entertainment to which people were accustomed, the arrival of moving pictures in Kings Heath in 1912 must have been stunning.

Winefred, aged five, was taken to this magical experience by her elder brother, Ted.

Click to hear Winifred part 3 - Family Entertainment (9mins 27secs)
While life in the 20th Century was hard for the majority of people, there was still opportunity and appetite for entertainment. Yet again this was based on the family and amateur standards; external temptations, like moving pictures, had still to reach Kings Heath, Birmingham.

Consequently, every member of the family was expected to have a party piece of some kind up their sleeve, in case of need.

Click to hear Winifred part 2 - Keeping Sunday Special (6mins 35secs)
In the early years of the 20th Century the family was the strong framework which gave shape and meaning to society. Unlike today, when we all do our own thing in separate, centrally heated rooms, the family was a complete society within itself, with its own rhythms, regulations and responsibilities. How different from today!

Sunday was a very special day.

Click to hear Winifred part 1 - Family Life (7mins 29secs)
Winifred Barber was a remarkable woman; born in Birmingham in 1907, she was able to recall almost any event as if it had happened the day before.

At the age of 93 she made a series of recordings for the period 1907-1945 which were broadcast on BBC local radio as a unique record of English social history.

Her family have kindly agreed to these pieces being included on this blog with the series beginning in the year of her birth. After a reign of 64 years, Queen Victoria had died only six years earlier and had been followed by King Edward VII. at a time when the stability of the Victorian era was being replaced by rapid social change and growing menace in Europe.

Click to hear Cheers! 3/3 (11mins 27secs)

In the last of the three programmes in which we have been following making beer in a typical micro-brewery we complete the first day’s operations and pass on to consider how you market your output in the face of ‘tied’ public houses – those linked exclusively to a brewery.

Click to hear Cheers! 2/3 (10mins 06secs)

In the first programme we looked at the origins of beer-making and began to follow the process of brewing 198 gallons at the Bewdley Brewery.

In this second programme we take it a stage further to the end of the first day, when the mixture can finally be called beer, although there are still several more stages to come.

This piece begins in the relative warmth and comfort of the office, on what was, outside, a cold, unforgiving Winter’s day.

Click to hear Cheers! 1/3 (9mins 24secs)

It’s is believed that people have been drinking for more than 11,000 years. When man discovered how to grow cereals for food, eventually he must have stumbled on the fact that cereals were good to drink as well. the Sumerians thought it was so important that they appointed a goddess to keep an eye on things.

In today’s language what they stumbled upon was how to release the natural starches and enzymes in the cereals and use yeast to ferment them into alcohol. Fruits, honey, spices – and even narcotics – were added to the mix to enhance the flavour of the beer and its effects. Adding hops began about 1200 years ago.

Small-scale, domestic, brewing of beer was eventually replaced by units capable of industrial scale output but, more recently, micro-breweries have arrived and begun to make serious inroads into the market, with increasingly popular products which have more taste and less fizz.

Typical of these newcomers is Bewdley Brewery, which started production two and a half years ago in the picturesque Worcestershire town on the banks of the river Severn. This is the first of three pieces on how they do it.