At Davos For The Duration

Move your pointing device over the image to zoom to detail. If using a mouse click on the image to toggle zoom.
When in zoom mode use + or - keys to adjust level of image zoom.

Date:1941

Description:This article was printed in the Weekly Post. Davos was the home of Christian Kunzle who owned the Kunzle's factory and cake shops in Birmingham. Kunzle came from Davos in Switzerland and every year he paid for sick Birmingham children to recuperate and improve their health at his family home there. The clean mountain air was a dramatic improvement over the polluted air the youngsters were used to breathing.

The focus of the article is on the 27 children effectively stranded at Davos since the outbreak of the war. Twelve of the children are reported as being directly referred from the Children's Hospital, which at that time was still on Ladywood Middleway. Some of the children from Birmingham are listed in the article; these being Dorothy Hewitt (of 5 Sunnydale Road, Tyseley), Robin Holmes (of 58 Vernon Road, Edgbaston), Kenneth Fear (of 132 Highter's Heath Lane, Yardley Wood), Mary Vickers (of 59 Sandy Lane, Great Barr), William Stretch (of 139 Croydon Road, Erdington), Arthur Snape (of 101 Grant Street, Edgbaston), Maurice Roughton (of 24 Maney Hill Road, Sutton Coldfield)and Victor Fletcher (of 107 Victoria Road, Handsworth). Fletcher is pictured on the left of the photograph. To the right is Elsie Willy (formerly of 25 Liddon Road, Acocks Green) who had gone to Davos as a patient and ended up staying as a helper at the home.

Share:


Image courtesy of: Birmingham Libraries

Donor ref:Birmingham Libraries (66/9058)

Source: Birmingham Libraries ,  Woodview Primary School

Copyright information: Copyrights to all resources are retained by the individual rights holders. They have kindly made their collections available for non-commercial private study & educational use. Re-distribution of resources in any form is only permitted subject to strict adherence to the usage guidelines.