19th century Birmingham
Dr Carl Chinn, an advisor on Emma Willis’s episode, tells the story of the ‘city of a thousand trades’ where her family toiled
Nineteenth-century Birmingham reverberated to the clamour of manufacturing, as evoked in a brief but telling depiction by Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers (1836-7). As Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller arrived in the heart of the turmoil of the great working town, their senses were struck forcibly by the sights and sounds of earnest occupation. Every house resounded with the hum of labour, while “lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attic storeys, and the whirl of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls”. Fierce fires blazed up in the great works and factories of the town and “the din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead heavy clanking of engines, was the harsh music which arose from every quarter”.
The profound impact made on visitors by the clanging and clashing of the making of things locally was longstanding. In 1586, the noted antiquarian and historian William Camden declared that “Bremicham” was “full of inhabitants and resounding with hammers and anvils, for the most of them are smiths”. And from the 18th century another feature distinguished Birmingham: its diversity of trades. In 1784, the French traveller Barthelemy Faujas de Saint-Fond pronounced that it was one of the most curious towns in England because of its numerous and varied industries, which “all combined in contributing to the arts of utility, of pleasure, and of luxury”.
‘City of a thousand trades’
Unlike many places that were dominated by one industry, Birmingham gained renown as ‘the city of a thousand trades’; indeed in 1866 Samuel Timmins included over a thousand of them in in his book acclaiming the town’s manufacturing prowess. Among the chief of them, most of which embraced numerous sub-sections, were the production of buttons, coins, guns, pins, brass ware, steel pens, silver plate, jewellery, railway rolling stock, bellows, bedsteads, optical instruments, fire irons, roasting jacks, rope, pewter, tin plate, hydraulic machinery, nails, measuring rules, iron screws, wrought-iron hinges, pianos and stained glass as well as wire working, wire drawing and refining.
Thanks to Birmingham’s central position in England, connected to its global market via canals to the ports of England, most of these goods were light. Moreover, as Asa Briggs made clear in Victorian Cities ( 1963), many of them were carried on in workshops and not in large factories as in Manchester. This resulted in a big number of ‘small gaffers’, often employing relatives and only a
Cramped, unhealthy and lacking in privacy, back-to-backs drew condemnation early on
few other workers, many of whom were women. Indeed so important were the town’s female workers that in 1857 one observer claimed that Birmingham’s industries would be “annihilated” if their labour were suspended.
The variety of trades was associated with a sub-division of labour, whereby in most cases no individual made the whole product. There were also a large number of semi-skilled and skilled workers, many of whom were able to adapt to new trades. Yet there were also large numbers of unskilled workers who lived precarious lives and were forced to stay in badly-built and insanitary houses packed close together. As in much of the Midlands and the North of England, like Liverpool and Sheffield, these were back-to-backs.
Streets in working-class Birmingham were lined with terraces of them, separated by a shared wall just one brick thick. The back houses were approached through an entry, either side of which were two or three dwellings facing into a court, known by Brummies as a ‘yard’. Usually within it, and running at right angles to the street, was another terrace with the houses at its back fronting the adjoining court.
Each yard had communal facilities. These included the brewhouse and wash house. A brick-built structure, it had a copper ( boiler)