Events tagged with "Camp Hill"
Nightingale Camp Hill
The first Nightingale was opened at 50 Camp Hill, Digbeth on the outskirts of Birmingham city centre. At the time this was still a tightly packed industrial area and Camp Hill was a row of dilapidated Victorian shops and offices. The premises were a ...
The Nightingale
Opened in 1967, at 40 years old, The Nightingale, or Gale, is the oldest surviving gay venture in the city. It has a special place in the city's history as it was set up as much as a community venture as a commercial one, a place run for gay people b...
Women's access to bars
Pre 1960s Prior to the 1960s, and well into the 1970s there appears to have been very little opportunity indeed for lesbians to get together openly in a social or public space. All the bars noted as being popular with the gay crowd in the 40s and 50...
Memories tagged with "Camp Hill"
Competition from the Nightingale
"The Nightingale, which was in Camp Hill then (1969), moved to outside the Villa Ground, by the Holt pub (in 1975), for years, then (in 1981) they moved to Thorp Street, so I had to decide what I would have to do to keep the punters coming out of tow...
GLF leafleting the gay scene
"We used to leaflet the gay scene about political things, we had tactics around this as we were often threatened (by other gay people) and we had been beaten up. We used to have to find a route through the pub, hand out the leaflets and get out the o...
Laurie and The Jug
“Laurie Williams worked at the Home Office and he managed to get the Nightingale a late licence, like a Working Man’s Club, in a tin hut in Camp Hill. Then they had a political fall out about whose club it was and Laurie was booted out, so he set up ...
Laurie was unique
Laurie Williams was unique; an interesting and complex figure. He was an openly gay man from the 1940s, a pioneer. He was involved in gay life in World War II in Birmingham. He survived the 1950s because he was so out. That gave him a degree of...
Nightingale - It Was a Bit Seedy!
Norman says "I also used to go the Nightingale, firstly when it was in Camp Hill, only a small place a downstairs bar, with a restaurant and toilets upstairs. People came from miles around. I'd heard people talking about it in the Trocadero. I found ...
remembering the Gale at Camp Hill
The Nightingale started life at Camp Hill (in 1969). “It was a terraced property, which basically consisted of two rooms plus a backyard that was built upon. A long thin tunnel…the restaurant kitchen was on the back; the Manager’s office and the to...
The Nightingale was born
After the ‘Queen Victoria’ closed, there was a barren period in Birmingham in respect of club life. ‘La’ (Laurie Williams) approached me one night in the Imperial Bar and told me he had found a backer who wanted to put up the cash to start a gay memb...
Through the Spy Hole at the Nightingale
“Once I’d discovered the Viking and made some friends, we went round to the Nightingale, which was in those days in Camp Hill in a two-up two-down house. You had to ring a bell and a spy hole would open and you would be perused. It was not very lesbi...