This story set in Castle Bromwich is told by the Rector of Sutton Coldfield in a book about his own family history. In 1883 Rev William Kirkpatrick Riland Bedford described an event which occurred during the ’45. This was the Jacobite rising of 1745, when Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender, tried to regain the British throne for the House of Stuart. Charles Edward Stuart was subsequently decisively defeated by the Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Culloden in Scotland.

Sailing from France, Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in Scotland and raised his standard at a gathering of the Highland clans. He then marched south with an army of some 6000 Highlanders to claim the throne of England from the House of Hanover.

The Duke of Cumberland was the younger son of George II and the most able general in the English army. At the time he was fighting the French in Flanders in the War of the Austrian Succession, but was quickly brought back to deal with the Jacobite uprising.

It was December 1745 when a regiment of Cumberland’s army marched through Castle Bromwich. They were on their way to face the Young Pretender’s rebel Highland army in Scotland. The Redcoat soldiers had made their way from the south of England via Stonebridge and along the Chester Road.

While the troops made their camp on Hodge Hill Common, some of the officers spent the night in comfort at the Bradford Arms. This coaching inn on the Chester Road still thrives to this day.

The officers spent an evening of revelry and consumed a great deal of alcohol. And so it was late the next day, when they were at last in a condition fit to travel. They mounted their horses and rode along the Chester road in the direction of Tamworth to catch up with the regiment of which they had charge.

(Their route took them through Castle Bromwich village, down the steep hill, now only a footpath, to the crossing of the River Tame and to the Tyburn. They then followed Eachelhurst Road through Walmley and along Withy Hill Road to Bassetts Pole.)

Ten miles further on, when they reached Bassett’s Pole, the officer in charge discovered his sword to be missing. Realising that he must have left it at the Bradford Arms, he retraced his steps to recover it.

That officer must have been blessed with a good sense of humour. Well over an hour later, he arrived back at the Bradford Arms to find that he had indeed left his sword there. He laughed and declared that he had enjoyed the episode so much that, as long as he should live, he would pay for a banquet to be held there on the anniversary of the day that he had ridden off to fight for King and Country – without his sword.

And, by all accounts, the officer was true to his promise. The Rector of Sutton attested to the fact that there were in Castle Bromwich people who could remember being told the story by witnesses to the event.

*There is another less jolly tale told in Castle Bromwich probably referring to the same occasion when the Redcoats marched against the Jacobites.

As was usual, the regiment sent an advanced guard to ascertain the best route forward. There were maps at that time, but they lacked detail, were often inaccurate and showed few roads.

When the guard arrived from Castle Bromwich at the Tyburn, they asked directions of a man standing outside the Tyburn House Inn. The poor man had no roof to his mouth and the soldiers could not understand anything he said. Denounced him as a spy, the hapless man was taken to the commanding officer, who immediately ordered him to be shot. The order was carried out instantly. The man’s head was struck off and his body was thrown into a ditch at Eachelhurst near Pype Hayes. The head was stuck on a halberd and carried as far as New Shipton just north of Walmley, where the soldiers threw it up into a tree.

Strange to say, in 1827, the body and head of the poor fellow were both found within weeks of each other. The remains of the body were discovered when the Eachelhurst meadows were being drained and, when an ancient oak was felled near New Shipton Farm, the skull found to be embedded in the branches.

Castle Bromwich is a residential suburb lying just beyond the eastern boundary of Birmingham, some 7 miles from the city centre. Formerly a tiny Warwickshire village, it occupies the northernmost tip of the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull.

Until the 1930s the ancient Warwickshire manor of Castle Bromwich stretched from Stechford in the west almost to Water Orton in the east, a distance of some 4 miles. The manor lay on higher ground, the interfluvial land between the marshy valleys of the River Cole and River Tame. This was anciently part of the Forest of Arden which covered much of the area between Stratford-upon-Avon to Tamworth.

From the Norman Conquest in 1066, there was always a string of cottages along the Chester Road, forming a linear village close to the castle and later to Castle Bromwich Hall. The castle, then the hall, was the seat of the lords of the manor for almost a thousand years and a focus of employment in this agricultural district.

Although there was something of a village centre, this was a manor typical of forest areas; there were scattered farms and dwellings, with a handful of landowners holding most of the land and property.

From medieval times Coleshill was the local market town, being only 4 miles to the east. However, as it grew from its small beginnings, Birmingham, 7 miles to the west, increasingly became the predominant local market.

During the late 18th and especially during the 19th century, wealthy Birmingham businessmen built a number of large rural retreats in this picturesque corner of leafy Warwickshire. At times the hall itself was not occupied by the manorial family, but let. In 1773 this ‘capitol mansion house’ was advertised in Aris’s Gazette, a Birmingham newspaper, to be let fully furnished.

20th Century Castle Bromwich

Having been a rural community dependent on farming for a thousand years, during the 20th century Castle Bromwich transformed into a suburb dependent on the commerce and industry of the great city of Birmingham within a period of less than 50 years.

In 1931 the west and south of the manor, which included Bromford, Hodge Hill, Bucklands End and Shard End, became part of the City of Birmingham. There was extensive private house building before World War 2 on the Birmingham side and large-scale council house building there after the war. Private housing developments continued on the rest of the manor throughout the second half of the 20th century.

By the 1950s building was underway on the estates both east and west of Hurst Lane North, with the Hall estate around Southfield Avenue soon to follow. Most of the district had been built up by 1960, with the last developments taking place in the late 1970s and early 1980s along the remaining agricultural land, a 2-mile stretch south of the Chelmsley Collector Road.

With the development of the Kingshurst estate and later the extensive Chelmsley Wood housing estate in the 1960s, Castle Bromwich became continuous with the Birmingham conurbation except for a thin strip of farmland, just two fields in width, which still separates it from the Warwickshire village of Water Orton.

Castle Bromwich: Population

Early population figures can only be estimated, but the number of inhabitants at the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 probably amounted to only a couple of dozen across the whole manor.

By the time of the 1861 Census, the population was still only 613. Moving forward to the 1920s there were some 1000 people living in the district (This still included Bromford, Hodge Hill, Bucklands End and Shard End which were soon to be ceded to Birmingham).

After the Second World War the population recorded in the decennial censuses increased to 4356 in 1951, 9205 in 1961 and 15,941 in 1971. The 2011 Census recorded 11,217 residents.

Castle Bromwich: Local Government

Castle Bromwich Rural District Council (RDC) was created by the 1894 Local Government Act that sought to modernise and regularise the confused system of governance that had developed from the Middle Ages. It derived from the Aston Rural Sanitary District which had been created in 1837 and included the Aston Poor Law Union (Castle Bromwich had been part of the ancient manor and parish of Aston since Anglo-Saxon times). Castle Bromwich RDC also included Curdworth, Minworth, Water Orton and Wishaw civil parishes.

In 1912 Castle Bromwich Rural District became part of a much larger local authority, Meriden Rural District which, until 1974, covered a rural area much of which is now designated Green Belt between Coventry and Birmingham.

When local government was reorganised again in 1974, Castle Bromwich, now a wholly urban district, transferred from Meriden Rural District in Warwickshire to a newly expanded Metropolitan Borough of Solihull within the new metropolitan County of West Midlands.

Castle Bromwich Parish Council

However, despite various reorganisations of local government, Castle Bromwich Parish Council, which was set up on 4th December 1894, still exists. The initial meeting was held in the school on 22 December 1894 (The school, now demolished, had been built in the 1870s on the Chester Road by The Green).

The first councillors were almost all wealthy local dignitaries and included the Rt Hon George Bridgeman, Viscount Newport, eldest son of the Earl of Bradford, and Alderman Thomas Clayton, the canal magnate.

The parish council now meets in Arden Hall, a multi-purpose meeting hall on Water Orton Road.