BRUSHMAKING BRUMMIES
Emma Willis’ 3x great grandfather worked in this dirty trade
James Gretton began his working life as a brushmaker, probably making clothes and hair brushes using animal horn and horses’ hair. The horn was worked into the brush stock, after which holes were bored in it with a hand lathe, while the bristles would be dressed. These were bundled and pan seared in hot tar before they were passed through the holes and bound together with glue or wire. The knots were covered by another piece of horn at the back of the stock after the bristles were trimmed down.
A small gaffer in 1858, James described himself as a ‘horn and hair merchant and dealer in English and foreign sizing’ and three years later as a ‘horn and glue merchant’. ‘Size’ was a semi-solid substance like glue and it was prepared from similar materials. Among other things, it was used to mix with colours and to dress cloth or paper. It was a smelly, obnoxious trade as was gluemaking, for which the raw materials were animal remains such as ears, tails, scrapings from the fleshy sides of hides, tendons, bones and feet – all of which were probably bought from hide, skin and fat brokers.
The hides and other scraps of flesh were washed to remove the dirt, then soaked to soften them. This stock was passed through water baths in which more and more lime was added to make the hides and skins swell and break down. The hides were rinsed and the stock was cooked by boiling at the correct temperature and length of time so as to break down the collagen and convert it into glue. This ‘glue liquor’ was extracted and heated to thicken the glue so that it was more solid. To remove the impurities and make the glue clearer, chemicals like alum were added.
By 1862, James was also listed as a factor in animal hair, supplying plasterers in the building trade. Tons of hair was dried and scorched in the work space behind his home, a rare large dwelling in the poor area of Lower Trinity Street, Deritend. These processes resulted in offensive odours, ammoniacal fumes, and putrefying animal matter. Once prepared, the hair was sold to be added to lime plasters to give the mix more stretchable strength, while it also acted as a natural reinforcement. Animal hair was important for lime plastering onto laths, the long, thin and flat strips of wood put up to support plastering on walls, especially of housing like back-to-backs. Lime plaster did not stick well to the laths and needed more hair than plaster applied to solid wall.
At a time when leading figures such as Edwin Chadwick had forced the issue of health into both the public and political domain, glue makers and horn and hair factors caused increasing concern because of the belief that diseases were spread by miasma, the noxious vapour arising from organic matter such as decomposing animal refuse. Anthrax was another danger as this life-threatening bacterial disease can be passed on to humans through contact with infected animals or animal products. Occupations that were at risk included glue and size makers and factors of animal hair.
However, compared with other boroughs Birmingham was tardy and unenthusiastic in its response to improving public health. With a population of 234,000 in 1851, this major industrial town had only that year introduced a Public Health Department, but it employed merely an inspector of nuisances and a medical analyst, Dr Alfred Hill. Their duties were manifold but also covered offensive trades, nuisances, and infectious diseases. In 1862, their attention turned to James. He was charged with carrying on his business so “as to create a nuisance and be injurious to health”. Thereafter his life changed drastically.
and under which a fire could be lit once it had been filled with water. Dirty clothes were then boiled up and cleaned. Then there were the privies shared between several families; what Brummies called the ‘miskins’, the rubbish heap; and a well.
Poor accommodation
In a report for the Morning Chronicle in 1851, Charles Mackay described the dreadful conditions and particularly the vile water supply in Myrtle Row in the centre of Birmingham, close to the Town Hall. Between 300 and 400 people lived there and the water pumped up from the one well for all of them was “of a greenish colour, and smelling strongly of gas as if a gas-pipe had burst, and were emitting a stream through it”. A woman explained that it was filthy stuff and there was not enough of it to wash the house. For drinking she had to buy water at a ha’penny a can.
The house she lived in was small, as were all back-to-backs. Those with two-storeys had two bedrooms above one room downstairs. This room was for cooking, eating, sitting, working, washing and sleeping. Three storey back-to-backs were slightly bigger as they had an attic above one bedroom and a multi-functional room downstairs.
With neither a back door nor back windows, there was no through ventilation. Cramped, unhealthy and lacking in privacy, back-to-backs drew condemnation early on. In 1840, the Select Committee on the Health of Towns, headed by the MP for Shrewsbury, Robert Slaney, called for them to be banned. However the bill fell before the self-interest of a Parliament dominated by property owners who resented any suggestion that their rights should be infringed. Thus the rights and health of the poor were sacrificed for the motive of quick profits from bad housing. Recognising both the need for better quality homes for the working class and the fact that builders would not provide them unless enjoined to do so, Manchester banned the building of back-to-backs in 1844. Its example was later followed by Liverpool, but in Birmingham their construction was not prohibited until 1876. Despite this, at the turn of the 20th century there were still around 44,000 of them in Birmingham. About 200,000 people lived in them, a figure that was just under half of the city’s population, and as late as 1960 there remained over 20,000 back-to-backs with about 90,000 people living in them. That was almost one in ten Brummies. The problems of bad housing and insanitary conditions were exacerbated by a polluted environment, for the poor lived hard and fast by factories and innumerable workshops. Enshrouded in a gloomy setting, blackened as it was by smoke and smog, their health was also assailed by harmful smells. Glue making in particular was associated with poisonous emissions and rotting waste, whilst those who worked with animal hair and horns also presented public health problems. Emma Willis’ 3x great grandfather, James Gretton, was involved in all these trades.