Memories by Betty Hagglund
Birmingham Lesbian Song c.1978
Birmingham Lesbian Song by Caroline Hutton, Lorna Eady and Betty Hagglund (local group ‘Rubyfruit’) - to be sung to the tune of ‘Lily Marlene’ I brought up my family, I left my old man And then set up house with my lover Suzanne Me and the kids we...
London easier to come out than Chicago
“I’m Betty, I grew up in Chicago in the United States, I was the eldest of three children. Gill and I have six children between us. I came on holiday came to England in 1969 aged 19 and stayed, and came to Birmingham in 1974. I was exploring issues o...
Meeting women at the Gateways, London
B: “I spent several years trying to decide if I was lesbian or bisexual. I had been involved with women in short term relationships dating somebody for a couple of months and I had lived with one woman for 8 - 9 months. The main place I met women wa...
Sociable crowd at the Greyhound in 1975
Gill: “Very fortunately, though he didn’t know it, my husband had decided he would have the children on Tuesday evenings, so that left me free to go to The Greyhound (laughter). It had just started, around 1975; and you (Betty) were going to The Grey...
'Private parties' for lesbians at the Greyhound
G: “The Greyhound in Holloway Head must have just opened (around 1975) because I can remember Den and Sharon who’d founded it. Basically, they’d gone round all the pubs in Birmingham to find somewhere that would take a women only group, which would h...
Lesbians were 'woman-identified' in the 70s
Gill and Betty said they were both identifying with the Women's Liberation Movement in the mid 1970s. B: “There was some sort of crossover then; for a while there used to be things like women's discos, where you would get lesbians going but also stra...
Dress codes in the late 1970s
In the mid to late 1970s, Gill and Betty note that there was more mixing between lesbian and heterosexual feminists but that there was a dress code which helped identify their sexual identity: G: “I used to notice the way in which the straight women...
Once was enough at the Grosvenor
Betty: “I think I went to The Grosvenor House Hotel once, I think once was enough”. Gill: “I couldn’t really afford it actually. It was quite expensive and I was on a student grant at the time”....
All happening at the Gay Centre, Digbeth, 1977
The Gay Community Centre in Bordesley Street was set up not long after the time that Gill and Betty moved to Birmingham (1975) Gill: “Somebody secured the premises on the corner of Bordesley Street and Allison Street and people put a lot of effort i...
Lesbians' attitudes to children
Betty: “In Birmingham I don’t think boy children was an issue, like in London. I remember noticing when I moved up from London to Birmingham that in London there were things like the Women’s Arts Alliance which wouldn’t even allow newborn boys in bec...
Gay Centre too noisy for the neighbours
G: “The neighbours complained that there was too much noise (at the Gay Community Centre), and I think Birmingham City Council eventually decided it could no longer be run in the way that it had been run in those premises. (I don’t even know if we h...
Never as happy in Gay Centre number two - '84+
After the first Gay Community Centre had to close in 1978, the committee continued to meet, ultimately finding an alternative location for a Lesbian and Gay Community Centre, in Aston, in 1984.Gill: “A lot of work went into finding somewhere else, an...
Meetings at the Women's Centre, mid-70s
Gill: “We were also marginally involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement, who had rented a house on Brighton Road and it was used as a Women's Centre until Birmingham City Council got wind that this house was being used as something that it shouldn...
Consciousness raising
Betty: “I was in a mixed lesbian and straight feminist consciousness raising group from about the time I came to Birmingham (1974).”...
Gay Times at the Peace Centre
“I also had links with the Peace Centre; there were a large number of gay people involved with the Peace Centre. The Peace Centre sold Oz, Gay News, including the controversial copy of Gay News that had the poem that Mary Whitehouse took against and ...
Switchboard stickers in the medical books
Betty: “I was on Switchboard; Switchboard had some women on, more men, including Helen Rose, Anna, Anne Bromwich, and a couple of others; we managed to keep West Midlands Switchboard fairly balanced for a while and we used to quite often have a woman...
'Don't come looking here' launched c.1980
Betty: “There was a women's writing group with some lesbians in it, we met at Tindal Street School. We had our book launch at the Old Mo, when we brought out a book of poetry and writings called ‘Don't Come Looking Here’ ; then there was a second one...
Babysitting blues
Gill: “I was less involved in other stuff. Partly because I’d got two children and one of them had disabilities and I was also firstly studying and then working. I had babysitting issues and a hostile husband who wasn’t going to approve of me going o...
Long time on and off before pairing up
Gill: “We’d known each other since we first met at a lesbian conference in Bristol in 1975, I went there from Aberystwyth.” (Where Gill was living at that time). Betty: “And that is the conference of which my abiding memory is...
Joining the Quakers
Gill and Betty were both Quakers since they were in their late teens, long before they got together. Gill: “I joined the Quakers because my parents were both pacifists, my father was a conscientious objector but they were Church of England and I foun...
Quakers positive about homosexuality in 1960s
Betty: “In recent years there have been points where I have thought that there would be almost no way of going to worship anywhere else because there is almost nowhere else where my lesbianism would be as comfortably accepted. The book ‘Towards a Qua...
Quaker Lesbian and Gay Fellowship
Gill and Betty are both Quakers. B: “Quakers, as a religious body, are accepting of lesbian and gay couples, and the Quaker Lesbian and Gay Fellowship is what is known as a listed group so that there are various small interest groups that nonet...
Our Quaker Friends cherished us
Gill and Betty are both Quakers.Gill: “In the mid ‘90s when we (their Quaker meeting) had some discussions around sexuality at a discussion group, they were really very keen that Betty and I should have a proper commitment ceremony…”Betty: “…and we d...
Discrete about our sexuality in Sparkhill
Gill and Betty live in Sparkhill, a predominantly Muslim area. GILL : “Initially we were living in two houses, for a time I moved into Betty’s because her children were quite young and then when we decided that the children really should fend for the...
1977 Womens Liberation Songbook - like gold!
“I have this memory of conferences and things in other bits of the country ending with people singing. Always ‘Bridget O’Reilly’ among others which was the anti Catholic Church contraception song. I have a copy of the 1977 Women’s Liberation Conferen...
They shouted at Dory Previn
Betty: “I remember going to a Cris Williamson concert. And a whole bunch of the Holloway crowd of lesbians went to hear Dory Previn. We were on the right hand side of the upstairs balcony and I remember being embarrassed because a woman who went off ...
Kerb Crawling Song by Rubyfruit, late 70s
The Kerb Crawling Song by Rubyfruit"We were all living in Balsall Heath at the time which may have been relevant because this song was all about kerb crawlers and it was: “Underneath a street light waiting for a bus, Along comes a creepy guy to hav...
Rubyfruit played Birmingham and Chicago
“Rubyfruit consisted of Caroline Hutton, Lorna Eady and myself. Rubyfruit came about because some of us had been to Frankie Armstrong’s voice workshops; Caroline Hutton took me along, so there was already this interest in women's music, and all those...
Women's Swing Band plays Glenn Miller 1980s
Betty continued to be involved in women's music.“In the 80s there was the Women's Swing Band which was about thirteen or fourteen women, which wasn’t exclusively lesbian. I have memories of humping the speakers up those wretched stairs at the Mermaid...
Chaos and hostility at the WLM Conference, 1978
Betty: “Women’s Liberation Conferences at that point were annual conferences, the last one, was in Birmingham in 1978, at a school in Ladywood. Different women’s and lesbian groups took responsibility for certain things. The Socialist feminists were ...
Birmingham activists just changed hats, 1970s
Betty: “In the ‘70’s, the Gay Community Centre started, but also the Peace Centre, and GLF (Gay Liberation Front). Around that time a mixture of gay and lesbian people including Pete Kirby and Helen Rose put on a musical starting with the song “There...
Making the tea for GLF in 1971
“I was involved with Gay Liberation Front in London, back in the early days when the lesbians were expected to make the tea. Everything in those early days seemed to be in pink with yellow writing and therefore totally unreadable.”...
Lots happening for lesbians in the 1980s
Betty ‘Henrietta's Out’ (after Henrietta the Engine in Thomas the Tank Engine) had a logo with this train on it that somebody created. Catherine M was involved, the moving light in that was Liz Davidge.” Gill: “This was back around the same time as w...