Living museum trip brings back memories of grandparents' wedding day
A family have taken a trip down memory lane ahead of a big wedding day to see how the bride-to-be's grandparents had their wedding cake made.
As his daughter looks forward to her big day later this month, Andy Day and his family visited the bakery where her grandparents’ wedding cake had been made 70 years earlier, the bakery having been rebuilt brick-by-brick at Black Country Living Museum.
For Andy Day, whose daughter Bethany will soon be walking down the aisle with fiancé Luke, there was a unique opportunity to visit the bakery where his parents’ wedding cake was made for their 1951 wedding and see what it would have been like in the 1900s
He said: “My parents, Sam and Pauline Day, lived in Oldbury all their lives. They were married at Christ Church in Oldbury and held their reception over the road in The Bull’s Head.
"Their wedding cake was very of the time, with flowers and a vase on top.”
Sam and Pauline’s wedding cake had been made by Samuel Harvey who ran the bakery and associated shop at 50 Birmingham Street, Oldbury, with his wife until it closed in 1952.
Prior to the Harveys’ ownership, the bakery and shop had been run by George Veal, a confectioner, in the 1870s. After his death, his widow remarried, and the property remained in the family until the 1920s.
The museum rescued the bakery, originally built c. 1845, in 1977, when it was entirely derelict, with virtually no roof remaining.
It was rebuilt brick-by-brick and the interior was completed with fittings from Clarke’s bakery in Bilston.
Mr Day said: “Mum always used to say, ‘That bakery is in the Black Country Living Museum now’. She was very proud of that fact.”
To complement the rebuilt bakery, the museum replicated Veal’s Bakery Shop as well as 48 Birmingham Street, T. Cook’s Sweet Shop, with the shops and bakery set in 1900.
With just a few days until her own wedding, Bethany said: “It means a lot coming to the museum and walking around the bakery.
"It’s lovely to be able to connect with not just Nan and Granddad, but also that generation.
"It’s nice to see, as an adult, how they would have lived and what they went through. It’s lovely to be able to connect with them through the Black Country Living Museum.”
