‘Half-naked men hurry to and fro, like imps attendant on slumbering demons’
July 14 is Black Country Day, so what better time to take a look into the origins of a quote which came to define our part of the world. MATTHEW STALLARD has been digging ...
BLACK by day and red by night – seven short words from the opening sentence of Elihu Burritt’s 1868 Walks in the Black Country and Its Green Borderland that have become nothing short of a maxim of Black Country identity.
Their place in our collective consciousness has probably never been stronger. As the inspiration behind the colours of the Black Country flag, the quote is now enshrined in glorious technicolour and waving outside public buildings, businesses and shops, sports clubs, social clubs and pubs, houses and canal barges, not to mention the window and bumper stickers, t-shirts, mugs, badges, pins, and social media profile pictures.
Like all good mottos, it delivers a lot with very little. Those first three words: black by day. It’s almost familiar but, instead, unexpected. That counter-intuitiveness immediately catches the reader’s interest. It speaks so clearly not only to the uniqueness of the Black Country’s industrial landscape but also its unsettling qualities. It sounds so unnatural, suggesting that the expected order of things is upside down in this place. The corresponding “red by night”, piles up more unearthly quality. The heavens ablaze with reflected fire was a truly awesome, and often ominous sight for nineteenth century observers, unmatched anywhere in the world on that scale.
Discovery
Scouring through the earliest printed references to the region’s name in recent months, one fascinating discovery I made was that Burritt was by no means the first person to use the black and red image. Indeed, tracing the history of the quote tells us a great deal about the development of the idea of the Black Country.
In the first ever book to include the region’s name in its title, Colton Green, a Tale of the Black Country (1846), we get a sense early on of the uniqueness of the sight of the “very remarkable country, especially to those who have never before visited it. It presents features quite peculiar, quite different from those of any other district”.
The first passage describing the landscape tells us that “[t] he whole country is blackened with smoke by day, and glowing with fires by night. Overspread with the refuse of coal and coke, and swarming with a dense population, scattered in mean dingy houses over the region round”.
Novel
Reasonably well-circulated, reviewed, and advertised, the book played a major role in popularising the region’s name in the national consciousness. It’s a weird read for a presentday audience, however. It begins as a novel about an Oxford student and his family’s stay with friends in the Black Country and slowly develops into a point-by-point instruction book on how bright, patriotic, wholesome, and educated young men can lift the moral and religious life of the poor benighted working classes through church-building and religious instruction.
It was written by Rev. William Gresley, an Anglican theologian and prolific author with, doubtlessly, noble intentions in trying to rebuild the Church of England’s relationship with the new industrial working classes, cast by poverty out of their traditional parishes and into new industrial settings lacking in social support and educational infrastructure.
Violence
To really get this point across, however, he juxtaposes the descriptions of the arresting Black Country environment with those of local folk living up to negative stereotypes of alcoholism, profligate spending, and impromptu violence – all just in need of a little good Christian guidance from their Oxbridge betters to reform. A decade later we find another much-publicised description of the region which again draws on the black/red image, this time in a November 1857 lecture given by Baptist preacher Rev. Arthur Mursell at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall which asked: “What makes this country that I speak of black by day and blazing red by night? What makes the heavens look down upon it as if with a flushed and bloody scowl? Fire! Fire! Fire!”
Drawing on generations of depictions of industry, particularly metal founding, as akin to Dante’s Inferno or Milton’s Pandaemonium, here we have black by day, red by night traduced into a full-blown vision of hell itself: “black enough it is ... Scores upon scores of half naked men, as black as Cerberus himself, are hurrying to and fro, and look like imps attendant on the slumbering demons ... But only to see it by night!
“The perspiration has set in in awful force. The snoring demons pour from their seething throats, and nostrils, and tongues of lurid flame”.
The overall intention was to use our region as an exemplar to Manchester’s labouring classes of the moral issues that apparently blighted the Black Country and threatened their own city with social breakdown.
Mursell was a firebrand whose emotive and sensational exhortations were meant to both shock, entertain, and engage his working class crowd. The speech was reprinted throughout the country, becoming the first of over 100 Sunday lectures between 1857 and 1865 which drew crowds in their thousands and were printed as pamphlets with wide circulation.
That he chose the Black Country as the lurid example on which to base his very first lecture, which he hoped to generate maximum shock and impact, indicates how significant the region and its reputation had become in the national consciousness. Mursell’s huge celebrity and Burritt’s extensive Manchester connections and frequent visits suggest that the latter was very likely aware of the (in)famous lecture.
Let’s compare these depictions to Burritt’s: “The Black Country, black by day and red by night, cannot be matched, for vast and varied production, by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe”.
Hellish
For Burritt the scene is awesome, rather than hellish. As a life-long anti-war campaigner it is fascinating that he describes the landscape as a battle scene: “Peace has her battle-fields as well as war, and this was her Waterloo”.
And in this first chapter’s battle, the two colours are evoked repeatedly: “Nature has the under-hand, and from the crown of her head to the sole of her foot she is scourged with cat-o’-nine-tails of red-hot wire, and marred and scarred and fretted, and smoked half to death day and night, year and year, even on Sundays. Almost every square inch of her form is reddened, blackened, and distorted by the terrible tractoration of a hot blister”.
Environment
Living in the era of climate emergency as a result of the global spread of the fossil economy which the Black Country pioneered, Burritt’s description of war on the environment particularly resonates for present day readers.
But rather than moralising to and castigating the working classes, he pays attention to the technology, techniques, labour, and labourers that produced the region’s wide array of products – his attitude a reflection of his own humble tradesman origins in Connecticut, where his prodigious talents earned his nickname as the “Learned Blacksmith”.
While he may not have been its originator, his literary sensibilities took the red and black image and boiled it down to the succinct seven-word aphorism we know so well. Making him even more worthy of note, though, is his belief in progress and international prosperity through interdependence and commerce, typified by his focus on products and ingenuity, which offered a positive correction to the stereotyping that most other writers peddled.