Description:Home 6 was not one of the initial homes built in the Shenley Fields Cottage Homes complex. It was built a few years later – probably one of the two homes built in 1893 for 24 children. As such, it would have been a home for boys only.
In the 1920s, Miss Harris was the housemother.
While it was a home for 24 boys of all ages in its early years, by 1948, it was a residential nursery, or babies’ home as they were known then. It took in babies and young children up to the age of 3 years after which time they went into one of the other homes. In the 1940s, it was the only babies’ home in the Shenley Fields complex.
In 1949, Home 6 was renamed Greenways.
An edited extract from someone who was in Greenways in the 1960s:
“I was in Greenways since the age of five. I remember it pretty good to be honest. They looked after us there – Mr and Mrs Brooke were the houseparents. There was about anything from about twelve to fourteen kids in there at any one time. We shared rooms. I was probably the youngest when I went in there. It was pretty evenly split between boys and girls.
“They used to give you tokens. You had tokens instead of paying for school dinrters and stuff like that. Anywhere you went – pictures, roller skating we never had to pay. You used to take these letters from the homes so they’d let you in at certain times. e did get to do a lot of things but like, you know you were, it wasn’t very nice walking in with tokens to be honest because everybody knows where you were from.
“Greenways was in a complex of about, from what I can remember, somewhere in the region of about ten to twelve houses all in the same complex with a big fence around the outside. We had our own hospital which was called the sick bay. All the houses, all the houses had fourteen kids in, so there was a lot of us. We were a community amongst ourselves.
“I was there until I was about 11 and then we all moved – Mr and Mrs Brookes and the children – into Brooklands.”
In 1966, along with all the other cottage homes, Greenways became an independent unit, responsible for arranging its own placements and all purchasing. In 1968 Greenways residential nursery was reduced to 10 beds - less than half the number it had when first built.
An edited extract from an oral history interview with a former member of staff:
"I had twelve under fours, I think five was the maximum age, maybe four or five. Twelve babies and it was lovely. Good staff, brilliant. No night staff at the time when I was there so I had to get up to the children in the night. There was myself and my deputy slept in, lived there. So very often we’d have maybe a six week old baby in a carry cot thing at the side of our bed and we used to get up and feed, we used to take turns getting up to feed the baby and if we had little tiny ones, if anybody cried in the night we got up and sorted them. I was on duty 24 hours. I think we had two days off a week. But we lived there so if there was a problem, we just did it. But we didn’t really mind because it was really nice, it was happy. It was very short stay - they came either through crisis or because their parents couldn’t cope. After being at Greenways, the children then went either go back home, go to foster parents or adoption. So we were involved in all of that."
In 1981, Elmdene, needing more space to fulfil its plans to become mixed, moved into Greenways which had closed as a residential nursery as part of the new Social Services policy to reduce the numbers of very young children taken into residential care. The new home kept the name Elmdene.
Elmdene, based at Greenways, closed in 1982.
The Drive has been demolished and rebuilt as housing. Two of the new roads created there have been given names immortalising the Cottage Homes. One street is now known as Pinewoods and the other is Greenways.
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Image: One of the few surviving registers of children in residential care in Birmingham. This one, for Shenley Fields Homes, is kept at Birmingham Archives and Heritage.
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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.