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The Green Man was situated at 59 Oxford Street. This pub was closed and demolished in the 1980s. Known as The Market Hall Vaults between 1866 and 1894.

Source: Keith Lawrence

This pub was run by my grandparents and my father was brought up there. I have the back door key hanging on my kitchen wall!

Varie Parker (April 2012)

I lodged at the Green Man and Still, Monday to Thursday, for about five months from October 1965 - God, 50 years ago - whilst working on an overhead transmission line project in Halesowen.  I was 22 years old and had left home (Leeds) for the first time to make my way in the world.  Upon finding lodgings there, I wrote to my mother to tell her where I was staying.  Two days later, I had her reply.  Imagine my amazement when she told me that was the very place where my mother and father had met.  I knew that she had come from Ireland to work in the munitions factory at Summerfield, Kidderminster and that, on the boat coming over she had befriended another girl headed for the same factory.  She was/became my Aunt Eileen, her brother was working in Coventry and he had travelled across to see her.  The rest, as they say, is history. I have two distinct memories of my time there;- a) the horrors of the soft fried egg presented to me every morning for my breakfast - I detested them and b) being woken one night by a copper brandishing a torch.  The landlord and landlady were partial to their own wares and often left the front door unlocked when they went to bed (and just as often locked me out, too, which meant I'd have to spend the night sleeping in my car).  Anyway, one night, PC Plod, having found the door unlocked, blundered into the pub in order to investigate - and the first thing he found was me at my slumbers. I never did go back to live at home again, eventually spending 40 years in the Middle East and Africa.

Tom King (November 2015)

I’m researching the fairly short life of a British composer, called Easthope Martin, who specialised in ballads, and was really very successful from the early 1900s onwards. My interest has to do with his playing the piano, organ and the player piano, which uses perforated music rolls to create the musical notes. If you are curious, try the site that I write, at www.pianola.org. But my reason for writing here is that Frederick John Easthope Martin (1880-1924) spent his childhood in the Green Man and Still, as it was called, since his grandmother, Esther Martin, and his father, Frederick Caleb Martin were during that time the licensees. The UK censuses are very useful, but they only tell you what was happening every ten years. In 1881 Esther Martin was in charge, and the name of the hostelry (it seems to have been a hotel as well as a pub) was still the Market Hall Vaults. But by 1891 Frederick Caleb had taken over, and the pub had changed its name to the Green Man and Still. Esther Martin died on Boxing Day 1894, and her son, Frederick Caleb, died in the summer of 1896, and the remaining family dispersed, so the pub trail goes cold at that point. It’s interesting that Frank Weaver mentioned that the pub in the 1970s was a place to meet musically motivated people, and I would guess that 80 or 90 years earlier Easthope Martin was set to work playing the resident piano before he was in his teens, so there might well have been a long musical tradition. That would certainly account for Easthope Martin's facility in composing ballads later on. I’m still re-writing his history on the (very long) page about ‘pianolists’ on pianola.org, but it should be uploaded in the next week or two.

Rex Lawson (July 2026)

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Name	Dates	Comments
Frank Weaver	1970-1977	It was a great place to meet up and meet musically motivated people. Also Colin & Bob did a great job behind the bar.
Shirley Watkins (nee Hiett)	1940s/1950s	My Aunty Lill used to run this pub with her mum,my cousins name was Norman,my mums name was Maud, We used to visit, as my mums father and Aunty Lils mum we’re brother and sister. Lost contact over the years. My family live in Cardiff.