Success not to be sniffed at
Scotsman James Smellie became a leading Black Country manufacturer and politician
IN THE past each Black Country town was often synonymous with a particular kind of industry – Willenhall was famous for locks, Cradley Heath for chain and Wednesbury for tubes.
Then there were those towns, like Wolverhampton, West Bromwich and Dudley, that manufactured a wide range of goods. Today, some of those specialities have been forgotten – who still remembers that Dudley was once the centre of the fender-making industry?
The 1921 edition of Kelly’s Directory of Worcestershire lists 21 fender and fire grate makers in the town, and the similarity of the names and their close proximity shows how many of them were inter-related:
Thomas Adshead and Sons, Angel Street; Adshead Willetts Ltd., Falcon Works, King Street Passage; George Butler, King Street; Thomas P. Cook and Co., Cromwell Street; Co-operative Wholesale Society Ltd., Charlotte Street; B.S. and F. Davies, Tetnall Street; Davies, Hughes and Co., Tetnall Street; John Charles Hadley, King Street; Helliwell’s Ltd., Fountain Street; W. Madeley and Sons, Oakeywell Street; Newey and Homer Ltd., London Fields; J. and C. Piggott, Maughan Street; Robinson and Sons, High Street; James Smellie Ltd., Oxford Street; Herman Smith, King Street; Lee Thompson, Dock Lane; James King Timmins, Edmund Street;
H. Townsend, Salop Street; S.F. Turner Ltd., Dock Lane; Walker and Barnsley, St John’s Street; and Whittingham Brothers Ltd., Wolverhampton Street.
The biggest of these manufactures was James Smellie Limited, and we have a reminder of that firm in the form of a letterhead from the company dating from 1911. The bill was for supplying cabinet makers H. Britcliffe and Sons of Accrington.
James Smellie was a Scotsman, born in 1861. He was apprenticed into the ironmongery trade in Dumfries and then worked in London and Penrith before becoming a travelling salesman for a Birmingham firm in the late 1880s.
In 1893 he went into partnership with Benjamin Willetts Adshead,a scion of the Dudley family of ironfounders. With James Smellie acting as the salesman, building up contacts and signing contracts across the country, and B.W. Adshead in charge of the foundry, making the fenders and other goods, the business quickly grew to become the largest manufacturers of hearth suites in the country.
In 1903 James Smellie bought out his partner and continued in the business alone. Smellie established two brands – Ivanhoe, for fenders and grates, and Cellini, for artistic ironwork pieces.
After supplying Ivanhoe fenders for Balmoral Castle, Smellie was able to win contracts for many historic houses and castles, as well as some of the largest hotels across the country. His decorative goods also found several high-profile customers, and he supplied all the brass railing for the grave of Sultan Yusef ben Hassan of Morocco, who died in 1927.
Smellie became a prominent figure in his adopted town, serving as a councillor from 1903, and then alderman from 1924, for the St Thomas’s Ward – although he lived at Comberton House in Kidderminster. Alderman Smellie served two terms as Mayor of Dudley, 1924-26 (see pages 2-3 for his contribution to Dudley Museum and Art Gallery). It was as Mayor of Dudley that Smellie wrote to the author and poet Thomas Hardy, asking him to contribute lines to the town’s war memorial.
James Smellie married Annie Grace Farrer, who died during her husband’s time as mayor. They had four children, inlcuding James Mcclure Smellie, who served with the RAMC in both world wars and was later professor of paediatrics and child health at Birmingham University.