Milestone Anniversary
Birmingham Press Club celebrates a milestone anniversary this year – its 160th birthday.
And one of its major events will be the staging of the Midlands Media Awards for the first time since the outbreak of Covid.
Press Club chairman Llewela Bailey said: “Prior to Covid, the Awards were one of the highlights of our annual calendar and we’re delighted to be able to bring them back this autumn.”
The first event of the year is on Thursday 20 March in association with Digbeth Dining Club when advertising guru Trevor Beattie – remember his controversial Wonderbra and FCUK campaigns? - will be talking about his career as part of the “Birmingham’s Finest” series held at Hockley Social Club.
Balsall Heath-born Trevor, who made history in 2023 when he fulfilled a boyhood dream to become the first Brummie to blast off into space (as a passenger on board a Virgin Galactic flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico) studied at Moseley School of Art and Wolverhampton Polytechnic – the stepping-stones which led him to becoming one of the leading figures in advertising in Britain.
A founding partner, chairman and creative director of Beattie McGuinness Bungay, 65-year-old award-winning Trevor has been responsible for several high-profile advertising campaigns, among them the FCUK campaign for UK-based global retailer French Connection and the 1994 Playtex Wonderbra campaign featuring model Eva Herzigova. He has also managed campaigns for the Labour Party, devised the marketing campaign for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism programme and, in 2008, moved into the movie industry, producing the Bafta winning science fiction film “Moon.”
Broadcast journalist Nick Ferrari who in 2024 completed 20 years as host of LBC’s breakfast show, will be a Press Club guest speaker later in the year.
After a highly successful career in the national press and television news, Nick (pictured) joined LBC in 2001, launching the brand-new Nick Ferrari at Breakfast in 2004. Ten years later, the programme went national, along with LBC, which is now the UK’s number one commercial news talk brand.
Nick has a reputation as a straight-talking, tenacious interviewer – and over the past two decades has interviewed thousands of national and world leaders from politics, business and entertainment.
Also lined up as a guest speaker is a senior executive of the Daily Mail, first published in 1896 and today is one of the paid-for newspapers with the highest circulation figures in Britain (667,299 as of November 2024).
For those who don’t know, the Press Club was founded in December 1865 when a group of journalists gathered in the now long-gone Suffield’s Hotel for a meeting held for the purpose of establishing a club “for promoting social enjoyment and literary recreation among reporters and others connected with the newspaper press of Birmingham.”
Originally known as The Junior Pickwick Club, it changed its name five years later. For many years afterwards it was headquartered at the city’s Midland Hotel, now the Macdonald Burlington Hotel, however, existing members of a certain age will recall Prime Minister Harold Wilson officially opening the club’s premises in Corporation Street in 1966 – and another Prime Minister, John Major, performing a similar duty when the club relocated to the Grand Hotel in April 1997.
“Club records indicate that over the years the club has experienced more than its fair share of financial worries. And the reality of today is that we would not be able to survive without the continued support of our valued members and the financial backing of past and present sponsors such as Amazon UK, HSBC and Royal Mail,” said Llewela.
Photo credit: Alamy
