The Beechwood Hotel Garden and Roller. With thanks to Charles Bartlett for this picture.
How did our regular Edgbaston (and occasionally other grounds) visiting group, the Heavy Rollers, end up staying at possibly the worst hotel of all time? After all, we comprise a bunch of reasonably discerning, sensible people.
The very worst hotels only happen to stupid people, right? Wrong.
But this event does needs some context and explanation in our defence before the exposition.
Context
For several years, our excursion was based around the Wadderton Conference Centre, which was the Children’s Society place in rural Worcestershire, just outside Birmingham. David Steed, who was one of our number in the Heavy Rollers, ran the place and lived on site. The Children’s Society was pleased for a bit of income from guests in the quiet summer period and it was mighty convenient and pleasant for us, with a suitable garden for pre-match cricket antics.
Reports on those pre-test-match games held in the Wadderton gardens are now available on Ogblog, not least the one from 2004 linked here and below:
But Wadderton had closed down permanently in the 2004/2005 winter.
In 2005 we spent one splendid night, before the match, at Tye Towers. We then spent on night at Harbourne Hall – VSO’s equivalent place to The Children’s Society’s Wadderton – a place to which we returned subsequently several times before it declined.
But for some reason people, after that first stay, wanted an alternative. It was perhaps perceived as too far from the ground (although it was much closer than Wadderton). Perhaps people felt it reminded them too much of Wadderton without “being” Wadderton.
David Steed, living locally, said he’d sort something out.
Now David Steed, bless him, ran Wadderton wonderfully and was subsequently a superb host at his Birmingham house. But he possibly wasn’t the best judge of a hotel. Cheap and near the ground seemed sufficient criteria for him. His e-mail a few weeks before the match:
Accommodation is confirmed as previously written about and subsequent telephone chat at Beechwood Hotel on the Bristol Road approx. 200 yards from the main entrance at Edgbaston…
…No deposits required and as we have spoken – do people want to come early enough on the Wednesday to perform on our local green followed by supper at ours with a meal out locally or in Brum on the Thurs. night. Any thoughts ?
That “subsequent telephone chat” was not with me. Anyone dare to confess?
Of course, in a more modern era we might have looked at TripAdvisor or one of its competitor/predecessor sites to check the Beechwood Hotel, but back then those web sites didn’t exist, or barely existed.
The earliest reviews of the Beechwood Hotel on holidaywatchdog.com, for example, were in 2007. Let’s just say that I would not have dreamt of staying in a place described by one reviewer as:
“Hell hole”
…while another reviewer pleaded:
“DO NOT STAY THERE, you’d be better off in a cardboard box.”
Indeed, if you want a laugh, do look at those reviews in full on the above link to the Beechwood Hotel page on holidaywatchdog.com – indeed here is the link again.
The “gentleman” who held himself out to us as the owner/proprietor, I suppose must have been the infamous Tom mentioned in several of the reviews.
Exposition
Nigel recalls that the main light in Adam’s room didn’t work because the light bulb had blown. When Adam approached Tom for a replacement light bulb, he was told to fill in a form to apply for a replacement – the replacement was thus not forthcoming during our stay.
The place was presumably used in part as a sort-of social services half-way house for people who were having a multitude of difficulties. I shall post an aside presently based on my notes about my alarming next door neighbour – (update: now posted here).
Although David had promised us that the rooms came
“each with private bathroom”…
…I seem to recall having to toddle down the corridor to get to said bathroom. “Private”, I suppose, does not necessarily mean “en suite” in this Beechwood world. I also recall some very inappropriate jokes about Zyklon B from my companions during conversations about those ghastly showers.
But the most bizarre conversations were with Tom, who tended to sidle up to us in the bar/common parts areas of the hotel and bend our ears with tales of his roller-coaster and/or imagined past. I made some fragmented notes:
“I was a millionaire at 21…a multi-millionaire at 24…lost it all at 33. I’ve been out with Miss Jamaica, Miss Bromsgrove, the lot. I had an Aston Martin – would cost about £125,000 today. Do fast cars while you’re young, young man, you won’t fancy it once you are your dad’s age. I made a million when a million was real money. When a million was really a million…”
…you get the idea.
But Tom was not the owner/proprietor, if the little bit of Companies House due diligence I have done this weekend (another form of on-line check not readily available back then) is reliable. Tom must have been employed as some sort of manager by the owners; his name does not appear on any of the Companies House papers for the Company that owned the property, 199-201 Bristol Road, it was owned by members of a family, named, perhaps ironically, Kang.
A couple of years after our stay, the place was a squat for Earth First Social Justice Permaculture warriors, as evidenced by the following links:
(Just in case anything ever happens to the Earth First website or to the Birmingham Mail, I have scraped the relevant pages here).
The company that owned the property was only struck off a few months ago at the time of writing, December 2015, so I imagine the property is now in the hands of the Mortgage provider, Nat West, who surely could find some property developer somewhere who might adapt the premises into some jolly useful affordable housing in leafy Edgbaston.
Two Nights and Two Days of Cricket
Why were we there? Oh yes, cricket.
We had a net at Edgbaston itself on the Wednesday evening. I’m not entirely sure how our evening panned out, but – having now also seen an e-mail from Nigel sent to us ahead of the trip – I suspect that the net was late afternoon – Nigel’s e-mail suggests 17:00 start – and that the game on David’s local green was therefore a that same evening at, say, 19:00.
I also suspect that my conversation with my Beechwood Hotel neighbour – click here- was also that same first evening, while I was popping back to the room to get an extra warm layer ahead of the evening activities.
Anyway, the muck-about game on David’s local green, the night before the test match started, did not go well for me, as evidenced by this page of my jotter.
Nigel “Father Barry” and son did well, as did a local lad, Craig, who wandered along and asked if he could play with us.
Harish (Harsha Ghoble) also had a good go, although I do recall bowling him on one occasion with one of my moon balls which descended vertically onto the stumps. “How are you supposed to play a ball like that?”, complained Harish. Nigel then dispatched my next, similar ball for six. “Like that”, said Nigel.
I also recall lots of bites on my legs afterwards, although whether those were from the green or the hotel is a matter of some conjecture. Perhaps a bit of both.
Postscript March 2017 – the scorecard relic and narrative about the park muckabout game is a false memory from 2006 – that happened in 2008 and the text is transposed to that piece, together with a link to Charles Bartlett’s wonderful 2008 photographs that helped me to disambiguate. It seemed a ridiculous idea, that we had a net AND a muckabout in the park the same evening…it was ridiculous – didn’t happen.
The dinner at David’s on the Wednesday evening was typically delicious and (equally typically) the wine flowed plentifully. We had a great evening, that Wednesday before the game.
With thanks to Charles Bartlett for this picture.
I don’t remember all that much about the test match, but I do recall that England did well and here is a link to the scorecard which proves such.
With thanks to Charles Bartlett for this picture.
I’m not 100% sure where we ate on the Thursday night, but I think it was that year we went to a local Indian place near Steed Towers. Others might recall better. I think I was in “Beechwood Hotel shock” by then. It really was not a place for the faint-hearted.
Or, as Charley the Gent Malloy would put it, “that hotel was no place for a wuss.”
I recall a sense of silent bewilderment at dinner (which was indeed at a restaurant local to David’s place) caused largely by the realisation that squatters would have tended a rubbish review of the ‘hotel’. We imagined homeless people turning it down, opting gratefully for the suggested cardboard box. It really was a “hell-hole” and the home-spun homilies from “Tom” merely accentuated our plight. He maintained he had made his fortune (maybe one of those he subsequently lost, en route to Miss Redditch perhaps?) from the early Midlands rave scene enabling him to wade through heaps of notes the morning after…. When the conversation did turn to cricket he even dropped Beefy’s name and the more gullible of us had visions of him turning out later wearing the three lions. I suspect he was more likely to have been wearing an electronic tag.
Excellent additional recollections there, Mr Hinks. I fear, though, that the additional e-mail I have found from you to the rollers is at least circumstantial evidence pointing towards you as the person with whom David had the conversation and therefore tacit consent to book the Beechwood Hotel.
I’m not sure our governance processes have improved much, if at all, since then, but the outcomes have undoubtedly improved, reaching new heights this year (2016) in my humble opinion.
Did we play in the Edgbaston nets on the Wednesday evening before the game on David’s local green? I can’t work out how else we’d have fitted both in.
“Circumstantial”, “tacit”………I rest my case.
The comparisons between 2006 and 2016 are limited to the numerals involved. Delighted to say the Eaton Hotel was missing the ‘1’ (who was likely spinning some tale to some unfortunate on his offending programme about Miss Bromsgrove).
I regret that, despite vivid recollections of the Edgbaston indoor net-Adam’s spell including Chas routinely walking into the ball and wearing several- and the ‘game’ on Steed Park – not just because there is evidence that I had a successful outing- I fail to resolve their sequence.
I am happy to reflect how athletic we were in those days to even contemplate such activity.
I do recall the unforgiving midgies and young Craig too, who professed to be with the WBA Academy and who impressively turned his back on the other youthful park-based activities in order to try his hand at cricket. He showed immense promise and caught me one-handed as he approached us asking to join in. I quickly cited age-old ‘Heavy Roller’ laws preventing a young Baggies apprentice claiming such a casual catch, despite said laws allowing Nick to be given out ‘Ct adjacent oak trees B Hinks, N’.