Arthur Taylor was born in 1922 at River Street, Deritend to Arthur senior and Ethel F Pearce. He was the seventh of nine children and remembered how they slept covered with coats in one bed. Their house was up a yard and once a year they used to burn sulphur to rid the house of bugs. He loved being a child of Deritend as he felt it made him a ‘real’ Brummie! He attended Allcock Street school and was shocked at the dilapidated state it was in when he took his granddaughter to see it in 1993. He was even more shocked in Allison St when he worked out the site of his childhood home and realised what a tiny plot it stood on.

His father had been a Royal Marine and found his sons were entitled to an education at naval school. Young Arthur was the first of the brothers to go to the newly opened Royal Hospital School in the Suffolk countryside.
 

 He excelled at music and went to The Royal Marine School of Music in Deal, Kent. From there he served, as a bandsman, on HMS Nelson throughout the Second World War, which had started on his 17th birthday! As well as band duties, he manned the guns and worked in the TS- the nerve centre of communication aboard ship. 

 
When Battle Stations was sounded all hatches were battened down which meant that anyone in the TS was, effectively, trapped below decks until the order to Stand Down was given.

 

Discharged from the service after the war on medical grounds Arthur found it hard to adjust to civvy life. He took a job in a factory; as a collector and a barman. He had met Irene Wiseman, a Scot, at work and the couple married in 1950.

They had two children Stuart and Moira and the majority of their childhood was spent in Ansell’s pubs when Arthur became a pub manager. He had The Shareholders Arms, Park Lane, Aston; The Stork Inn, High Street, Aston; The Porchester Arms, Porchester Street, Lozells and, finally, The Cottage of Content, Winson Green.

Widowed in 1988 Arthur moved to Scotland five years later with daughter Moira and granddaughter Jennie. He spent 12 happy years in a friendly little village and died in 2005.

 
Arthur was a brilliant Dad and Grampa who was very proud of being a Royal Marine (once a Marine, always a Marine!) but proudest of all to be called a Brummie.