Description:The Service Girls’ home at 375 Moseley Road was considered to be inadequate by the Board of Guardians who ran it so a house on Beaufort Road was leased and adapted to replace it.
The new service girls’ home opened in July 1914. Miss C Charles and Miss A Atkinson were appointed matron and assistant matron respectively. They were previously the foster mother and assistant foster mother at Ivy Lodge Convalescent Home (part of Marston Green Cottage Homes).
The idea of the service girls’ home was that it would be for older girls under the care of the Guardians, who had finished their schooling and training, and would be found jobs in domestic service (generally as maids). They would move out of the cottage homes to live at the Service Girls’ Home until they were settled in their jobs and no longer under the care of the Guardians. In this way, the service girls’ homes were the forerunners of the working girls’ hostels.
It was not uncommon for young women to move back into the Service Girls’ Homes if they lost their jobs – this was largely because many of the jobs in domestic service were live-in and so, if they lost their jobs, they would have nowhere to live. According to the Union minutes of the time, young women would then be helped to find alternative work.
In 1921, the Board looked at moving the home to Greenfield Crescent, Edgbaston as the lease on Beaufort Road was due to expire. However, when these plans fell through, the home was moved on a temporary basis to Oaklands in Selly Oak. Later that year, the home with its residents moved to its more permanent home of Riversdale on the Bristol Road.
33 Beaufort Road has since been demolished.
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Image: A promotional shot used by Birmingham's children's Department in 1967. At this stage, the Birmingham Children's Homes project does not have any photographs of this children's home.
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Source: This history was compiled by the Birmingham Children's Homes Project, an initiative to explore Birmingham City Council-run children’s homes between 1949 and 1990.