A big celebration was recently held in Tipton to commemorate the centenary of the building now housing the world-famous Mad O’Rourke’s Pie Factory. Norman Bartlam from the Ladywood History Group reported on the occasion, noting the rich history of the site.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 My name is Robert Hazel, I'm the chair of the Tipton Town and Glory Bridge Local History Group
00:04 and we were established in 2009 and one of our things that we like to do is pass on milestones
00:11 of history to the local community and we became aware that there'd been a pub on this site since
00:18 1923 which was the Doughty Arms, although there was a pub earlier but it's 100 years of the
00:25 building that we're celebrating today and most people know the Pye Factory, it was opened in
00:32 1987 and it's one of those destination pubs of the black country so today we're unveiling a bleed plaque.
00:50 Robert did a crowdfunding platform to raise the money which was successful and well you see the
00:57 plaque is the result and it's a good story because there are three separate identities to the pub
01:04 over the years it's had three names so there's three whole stories to tell about the history
01:09 starting with the Five Ways Hotel which was the old pub, the earliest record of that is 1857
01:16 and we think that was built to take advantage of the new Turnpike Road which this was
01:23 the Tivodale to Sedgley Turnpike Road which opened in the 1840s so they probably saw a commercial
01:29 opportunity there on the new road so they built that at the crossroads and this crossroads became
01:35 known as the Five Ways which is a bit strange because there's only four ways today, only four
01:40 roads but in the back in Victorian times there was a fifth track, there's really only a track we think
01:47 that led over towards Cosley. I'm Steve James I'm a pubs and breweries historian I've been doing this
01:53 research for about 20 years and I published a book last year called Pubs and Breweries of the Black Country
01:58 which features 18 Tipton, the Doughty Arms and I went into a lot of research about it when
02:05 Councillor Doughty who was chairman of the licensing committee said there won't be another new pub in
02:10 Tipton unless you name it after me and so they called it the Doughty Arms. We're not sure
02:17 actually when it opened in 1923 but it was probably around this time of year. In the 1990s an Irish chap
02:24 called Colm O'Rourke he opened a chain of pubs called the Little Pubs so we had the the pie
02:30 factory was the only one that wasn't a little pub, there was a little chop house, the little sausage
02:35 factory, the little fisherman, the tumbling sailor, all sorts of pubs and their signature dish was the
02:41 Desperate Dan Cow Pie and you got a certificate if you could finish it and I think they still do
02:50 that now here you get a certificate if you finish the Desperate Dan Cow Pie so this is the only one
02:57 left of Colm O'Rourke's chain. It was a really well-known pub and a great advert for Tipton.