April 1976 - Halesowen meet Wokingham in National Football Competition.
From Plus News; no copyright infringement intended.
Consequently this history is going to be a little sparce, until I can speak with a few olde members and fill out the bones.
Anyway. It all started in the summer of 1974, when the Halesowen Group first opened its doors to the public at large. It was an exciting time to be a plusser, with groups open all over the region (at one point there were more groups in what would now be the Midland Area than there are currently in the whole of the federation). Halesowen was placed in the West Midlands Region of the Midland Area, along with groups like Warley and Dudley. The largest group in the Midlands, indeed one of the largest in the country, was Bromsgrove with a stonking 117 members. During the year we opened, other groups were created in places as diverse as Bridgnorth, Cannock, Castle Bromwich, Chesterfield, Evesham, Huntington, Ludlow, Malvern, Milton Keynes, and Stafford, amongst others.
Unfortunately the actual date of the formation of Halesowen is not recorded. Halesowen is not recorded on the "Groups Opened/Closed" section of the Area Development Officer's report, and hence our opening is not recorded in any NEC/ANC meetings at the time!! At the NEC a year later, it was noted that we had opened (when the previous minutes were approved), but no date was given. The Head Office card index gives an opening of June 1974.
Research has thrown up the original group constitution however, originally signed 25/02/74, actually re-signed and dated following the first AGM of the group, held 12/08/74 (a Monday). The writing is a little unclear but the Chairman appears to have been an M. Hewitt, and the Admin/Secretary was an S. M. Howle. (Next time I'll take a photocopy of it!). The group originally met at the Loyal Lodge public house, Furnace Hill, Halesowen (not far from the current venue, and I do go there as well every week myself!).
The first set of membership statistics, taken at the end of 1974, indicate an initial membership of 31. This rose to 48 in 1975 and 59 in 1976, when we were officially the 19th Biggest Group in the Federation. Also, in our first year we raised £305 for charity (Society of Mentally Handicapped Children), this was the second highest amount of money raised that year (Bromsgrove raised over £440).
Unfortunately this early enthusiam couldn't last and for the next six years we were not present on the charity listings at all! However membership rose throughout the late '70s (apart from a blip in '77) to stand at a peak of 63 members registered in 1978 and 1979. Archives are unfortunately no longer available to find out who these members were, or how they passed their time, but one or two snippets were discovered in Plus News.
In 1978, the Midland Area was restructured, and Halesowen became founder members of the Mid-West Area.
Into the '80s, and the only knowledge that Halesowen even existed was their rare appearence on the Charity breakdown reports (£260 was raised in 1981, £186 raised a couple of years later). Our presence at the ANC can only be confirmed as we never sent in apologies, while some groups (eg Woking, Castle Point) made a point of dominating some ANCs with their arguments.
The mid-80s saw a rapid and major decline in 18 Plus membership. In 1982 Halesowen had 54 members, in 1984 we had 18, and this had dropped to a mere 9 in 1988. However we fared better than others; Bromsgrove, once the biggest group in the entire federation, closed its doors in 1988, having finally only ended up with 1 member, and subsequent efforts to try to relive former glories in the 90s failed. It is also interesting to note that, by the early '80s, all the groups that had opened in the Midlands in the period '74-'75 had failed and closed, except us. By now, the biggest groups in the area were Solihull and Sutton Coldfield, but even so their memberships (in the high 70s) were nowhere near the size of groups historically. Another local group, Dudley, folded in 1990; with Stourbridge, West Bromwich (Sandwell), and Wolverhampton all suffering, and groups at Wednesfield and Walsall having opened and then closed, the future of 18 Plus in the Black Country was looking bleak.
But somehow, Halesowen survived. Membership began to rise again in the early '90s (again, apart from a blip in 1993), so that in 1994 the group stood at 32 members. This ranked as the 15th biggest in the Federation, the biggest we'd ever been but still a far cry from the heady days of the 1970s. Even the bigger groups were suffering, Sutton Coldfield by now only had 34.
..... To be Continued!!
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