From Gas Street to the Ganges E-Book

Simon Wilcox

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 390

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

If ever there was a regional UK city with the credentials to host the 2022 Commonwealth Games, Birmingham was always it. One in ten people in the city were born in an overseas Commonwealth country, and even more have family in member nations such as India, Jamaica and Pakistan. Many of these are descendants of the generation who arrived after the Second World War to find work during the city's manufacturing boom years. But, as Simon Wilcox discovers, the links go much further back than that. In fact, the connections started with the canal-building zeal of Birmingham's industrial pioneers in the eighteenth century who built a canal network that spanned out from the Gas Street Basin. It was this network that opened up a new world of trade for the city – a world which revolved around metal, chocolate and weekly shipments of Ceylon tea. Industry and craftmanship, music and food, nostalgia and the future: From Gas Street to the Ganges is an exploration and celebration of the city of a thousand trades, which became the city of Balti and Bhangra.

Leseprobe

FROM

GAS

STREET

TO THE

GANGES

FROM

GAS

STREET

TO THE

GANGES

EXPLORING BIRMINGHAM’SHISTORICAL LINKS WITHTHE COMMONWEALTH

SIMON WILCOX

For Fiona

First published 2021

The History Press

97 St George’s Place,

Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire,

GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Simon Wilcox, 2021

The right of Simon Wilcox to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9334 0

Typesetting and origination by Typo•glyphix, Burton-on-Trent

Printed and bound by TJ International Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

ABOUT THEAUTHOR

After growing up in Birmingham in the 1960s and ’70s, Simon Wilcox graduated from the University of Liverpool with a BA Honours in Modern History. Afterwards, he moved down to London and worked as a journalist on magazines and newspapers before moving to the business pages of a national newspaper in Singapore. On returning to Britain he worked as a reporter for BBC local radio and as a website editor for an NGO in London. More recently, he has written a travel book, Mudlark River – the story of a trip he made along the River Thames in 2013.

CONTENTS

Preamble: Canal Town

Chapter One: Gibraltar

Chapter Two: Sri Lanka

Chapter Three: The Indian Subcontinent

i. Early Contacts

ii. Travellers and Visionaries

iii. New Arrivals

Chapter Four: The Caribbean

i. ‘Am I Not a Sister?’

ii. Bournville

iii. Windrush

Chapter Five: South Africa

Chapter Six: West Africa

Chapter Seven: To Australia and Back

Chapter Eight: The Commonwealth

Postscript

Countries and Territories of the Commonwealth

PREAMBLE:CANAL TOWN

Funnily enough, I had always wanted to go back to Birmingham. Often derided as a city of dreary post-war ring roads and industrial warehouses, not to mention a strange local accent, the city had often been dismissed by the many who had never visited it as an ugly sort of place. Yet it was the place where I was born, and where I grew up. It had just been a matter of time really before I returned.

So, in the dying embers of 2017, the week before Christmas to be more precise, I caught a train to New Street Station to have a look around again. It was the first of a couple of days wandering around town, ambling here and there, for old times’ sake.

An escalator took me up from the platform and into Birmingham’s iconic Grand Central shopping centre. Opened to great fanfare in 2015, I had never seen it before; and now here I was, looking up at a vaulted glass ceiling held up by swooping columns of white steelwork. All around the concourse were hundreds of shoppers. Young Muslim women from Sparkbrook chatting together in Punjabi; men of Jamaican descent from Sutton Coldfield whose grandparents had been part of the Windrush generation; an elderly Chinese couple who had arrived from Hong Kong fifty years ago emerging from John Lewis: just a small microcosm of a modern multicultural city where many communities have made their home.

Asians and Caribbeans from the Commonwealth, formerly the British Empire, started arriving in the city in the 1950s to work in the metalworking factories and put cars together in the boom years of the Midlands automobile industry. The Chinese community began to emerge during the First World War, the Welsh in the inter-war years; while Irish, Italian and Jewish families can trace their origins in the city further back still.1

The one thing that the city could always offer these émigrés was work. No trip to Birmingham, it has to be said, can be undertaken without taking account of its commercial heritage. After leaving Grand Central, therefore, I headed off to where it all began – the Jewellery Quarter in Hockley, where goldsmiths and silversmiths have been plying their trade for more than 200 years.

These craftspeople began to congregate in small workshops in this area just north of the city centre from 1760 onwards. Birmingham had always made small metal trinkets such as buckles and buttons. From there it was a short hop into precious metalworking.

In fact, slit it, roll it; whatever you could do with a sheet of metal by the eighteenth century, Birmingham did it. Foundries were sprouting up all over the city. Most famous of all was the Soho factory in Handsworth, which was the world’s first purpose-built factory for making metal goods when it was set up in 1762 by industrialist Matthew Boulton. Over the next few decades, all manner of carriage fittings, candlesticks and teapot spouts clattered out of its doors.

To go back to precious metalworking, though, if there was one particular craft that would write the city into the history books over the nineteenth century it was pen-making. In 1790 local entrepreneur Samuel Harrison came up with a handmade steel writing tool. By the 1830s, a number of pen manufacturers had moved into Hockley, among them Hinks, Wells & Co. and Brandauer. At its height, three-quarters of everything written down in the world was written with a Birmingham pen.2

This calligraphic alchemy was conjured up in typical red-brick buildings such as the Albert Works on Frederick Street, which is now home to the Pen Museum. A red door underneath an archway of alternating blue and terracotta brick invited me in on a cold December day, and ushered me into a long, dark workshop illuminated half-heartedly by a row of arched windows.

In the fragile light, I could make out several glass display cases. They were filled with pens of all shapes and sizes – gold ones, wooden ones, even glass ones. Either side of them, and in between them, were clusters of notebooks, diaries, almanacs, all illustrating in one way or another the pens’ handiwork.

At the far end of the room, meanwhile, there was a willowy man sitting at a desk filled with old stamping presses and ink stands, inspecting nibs. He would take one out of a tin box, inspect it with a magnifying glass and then, after being satisfied by something or other, he would place it in another box. He seemed deep in his work. He looked up and smiled as I came in, but thereafter barely seemed to notice me.

As soon as I stepped out of the workshop and into the adjoining gift shop, however, he was there behind the counter. We got talking. He had been working at the Pen Museum for nine years, along with other volunteers. He loved it.

‘It’s like being part of one big happy family, all of us,’ he said in that syrupy Brummie accent I knew so well, slightly curdled at the edges, yet still bubbling up into melodic high points as he told me his life story.

It told me about something else too, I realised as I stood listening to him.

Glutinous and treacly, his accent spoke to me about my roots, my childhood and the great commercial city where I grew up.

But how did Birmingham make the step from a handful of workshops making trinkets to being a fledgling industrial powerhouse? The answer lay in my next destination.

My route now took me past the duck-egg blue of the Ramgarhia Sikh Temple and down Newhall Street towards Birmingham city centre. Christmas lights were flickering into life on a few buildings; the African-Caribbean pupils of the City Academy were spilling out onto the street; and a group of men were smoking on the pavement underneath the ruddy chimney stacks of the Queen’s Arms.

Where the street dips down before rising again for its final ascent into the centre, there was a plaque commemorating the Elkington Works, where the process of electroplating on a large scale was pioneered. However, it was the sight next door to it that I had come to see. A stepladder of lock gates leading uphill towards Gas Street Basin – a key feature of the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, built in 1789.

Canals – or ‘cuts’ as they were known locally – drove the early days of Birmingham’s industrial expansion, as a small band of Midland visionaries embraced the new mode of transport. Matthew Boulton, along with pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood and others such as doctor and poet Erasmus Darwin, all played a part in setting up the new inland waterways, while engineer James Watt built the steam contraptions that would line their banks.

It was a diverse group of men, but they were all good friends, all members of a famous club. Every so often, on or near the night of a full moon to be precise, they used to meet at each other’s houses to drink and laugh and swap ideas. In short, they were the self-proclaimed ‘Lunaticks’ and ‘conjurers’ of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. And whether or not the strange forces of the moon ever had a hand in what they did next, one thing is certain: between them they set in motion the wheels of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.3

Insofar as coal and steam were the main drivers of that revolution, then the partnership between Boulton and Watt was pivotal. Restless entrepreneur as he was, Boulton encouraged the young Scottish engineer in 1774 to move down to the Midlands and develop the experimental steam engine he had patented north of the border. Within a few years, there were Watt engines at work in local blast furnaces, on the canals and at Boulton’s Soho factory.

But other Lunaticks were hard at work too – Josiah Wedgewood calculating the ideal furnace temperature for firing clays and glazes, James Keir building a pioneering chemical works in Tipton in the Black Country, and Joseph Priestley discovering the chemical element of oxygen.4

And making it all possible were the canals. With the unveiling of a small stretch of canal linking the Black Country coalfields to Paradise Street in 1769, a local poet called John Freeth wrote an ode called ‘Inland Navigation’ on how it would open up a world of trade.

‘From the Tagus to the Ganges’, should the demand for a variety of goods arise, ‘in what kingdom, on what shore, lies the place that can supply?’ he asked.5

The answer was, of course, Birmingham.

Nor was his gushing optimism, in the long run, unfounded. The barges started shuffling into the sooty wharves of Birmingham laden with rough metals from the Pennines and elsewhere: and here in the smoke-belching factories that nestled up against the jetties these raw materials would be turned into something else: brass fittings, perhaps, or buttons or guns. Soon, Birmingham was being called the ‘city of a thousand trades’.

The trend continued with the coming of the railways. By that time, Birmingham companies were exporting all over the world. Osler chandeliers glittered in Indian palaces; Metro Cammell railway carriages slipped out of the Saltley works near the Grand Union Canal on their way to Jamaica; Cadbury’s began to send chocolate bars to Australia.

And even though the canals were steadily eclipsed by the railways as a way of transporting goods, they still had a significant role to play. For a while, the canal network linking London and other English ports with Birmingham was the network taking a weekly shipment of tea chests from Sri Lanka to the Bordesley Street depot of Typhoo.

The Gas Street Basin lies at the heart of a canal network that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries opened up a world of trade for Birmingham. (Photograph by Madrugada Verde, Shutterstock.com)

However much the railways were gaining the upper hand, the canals weaving around Birmingham – from the Bird’s custard factory in Digbeth to the Edwardian gables of Bournville Village – still lay at the heart of a manufacturing powerhouse extending its reach across the globe.

At the centre of this network was Gas Street Basin. In the icy stranglehold of a midwinter’s day, this was where I was heading next. The path alongside the stepladder of locks was pointing the way.

It was dark when I arrived at the Basin. Strings of lights belonging to barges moored up alongside the bankside shone out in the night, tethered securely, and yet also floating in an incandescence of soft illumination, mixing with lamps on the crumbling warehouse walls on the opposite side of the water, jostling with the bright smudge of Broad Street up on the bridge.

Two hundred years ago, this whole area would have been slung with chains and cables, and clanking with the noise of cargoes being loaded and unloaded at the wharves. I could just make out the shape of one of these old warehouses in the darkness. Up there on the jetty, there would have been a strong reek of smoke and slime, and also perhaps an earthy hint of tea.

And was there a whiff of sadness about the long lost years of my youth in the air? I couldn’t tell. Strolling on, I spotted a gap in the brick wall next to the canal path. A few moments later, I was up on Gas Street.

If you know a little bit about the history of Birmingham, then to visit its city centre without encountering a sense of Joseph Chamberlain would be like visiting Stratford-upon-Avon without realising that William Shakespeare had anything to do with the place.

This charismatic businessman became mayor of the town in 1873, determined to carry out the late Victorian gospel of civic duty: the idea that through grand municipal works you could improve the lot of the people, and build ‘a new Jerusalem’ on earth. Once in office, he immediately set about taking back control of the local gas and water supplies from private firms. The results were dramatic, with thousands of new street lamps being erected in a few years. Moreover, large profits had now been released for the local authority to plough into slum clearance in the central districts. This last scheme also involved the building of a ‘great street’ up to Old Square.

Corporation Street, or ‘Rue Chamberlain’, as the Birmingham politician’s detractors dubbed it, was my first port of call on my second day walking around Birmingham. Despite the fact that some of the properties had been destroyed in the German bombings of the Second World War, most of the sturdy Victorian buildings were still there, as gabled, gilded and confident as any Paris boulevard.

‘High Victorian Birmingham really did bear some resemblance to a promised land, a holy city,’ wrote local historian Victor Skipp and this was the thing,6 I suppose, about the Midlands city in the nineteenth century: it really did exemplify the Protestant doctrine of ‘Progress’. It was no coincidence that it was in this era when the city adopted a new motto for its coat of arms that said it all. The motto was: ‘Forward’.

And forward Birmingham went.

Everything went forward, as a matter of fact. Soon the car factory at Longbridge was launching the four-seater Austin Seven; and then the war came along and the Luftwaffe were dropping bombs in the black night, and my mother was picking her way to King Edward’s School for Girls between the uprooted tramlines.

Afterwards, city engineer Herbert Manzoni was rebuilding the flattened Victorian metropolis as a city of high rise and ring road; and Abdul Aziz was opening up Birmingham’s first curry house, the Darjeeling, on Steelhouse Lane.

Around the same time, my father arrived in town as the industrial correspondent of the Birmingham Gazette. He didn’t know it yet, but before long he would be meeting my mother at the local Liberal Club, and in a year or so they would be married. A first child would come along, a girl; and then a second, a boy.

And then, in 1973, the boy was sitting with his father in a shadowy cove of crushed burgundy wallpaper and piped Raga music. It was a new restaurant up the road called the Bengal Garden. Barely 11 years old, it was the first Indian restaurant the boy had ever been to. There he was, at a table lit up only by candlelight and a pervasive sense of mystery, with his father, who always smelt of pipe smoke and Pears soap, wondering what was going to happen next.

What happened next was a rickety food trolley laden with large crisp wafers they called papadums and various silver dishes of chicken and mutton marinated in brown pungent gravy. Whatever Bengal was, the boy was instantly smitten.

‘What is Bengal?’ I finally asked my father.

‘It’s a place,’ he said. ‘It’s where the River Ganges flows into the sea.’

However, things weren’t going well for Birmingham in the 1970s. By now, it was showing all the signs of a city that had fallen on hard times. There were the dwindling fortunes of its bellwether car industry, there were the bitter industrial disputes, there was the football hooliganism.

As I walked on now, taking a circular route off Corporation Street, up Bull Street and onto Colmore Row, I recollected those times. I remembered cowering in the corner of the bus station as opposing groups of football fans, some carrying knives, clashed on its concourse. I saw a boy fall to the ground.

I remembered being tugged by my mother around the dismal Bull Ring Shopping Centre, with its thin veneer of 1960s sparkle, and I recalled my fears about being out in town after that November night in 1974 when IRA bombs killed twenty-one people in two city centre pubs.

By this time, too, my father was retreating into poor health, and retreating further still into his memories of being in the RAF in Ghana during the war. He had a large album of all the photographs he took there. It was wedged inside a wooden bookcase next to all my mother’s books. A compilation of essays by Francis Bacon, A Passage to India, Rebecca – she always loved reading.

Things weren’t right. I just wanted to leave. Had I been born in another age, I suppose, I might have felt differently; but, for me, Birmingham was never the promised land, still less a holy city. For me, as young person with a typical yearning for adventure, it was just a sweep of dreary ring roads and industrial units, not to mention the strange local accent – all piled up on a bleak plateau in the Midlands.

In contrast, I craved jumbles of irregularity: jagged rooftops and narrow alleyways; white Regency porticos and cafes open all night; and a big rolling brown river. After an interlude at Liverpool University studying and then graduating in Modern History, there was only one answer: London.

Later on, after years of working in London in editorial jobs, I took to travel and kept a diary, following the advice laid down in Francis Bacon’s essay, Of Travel. Go searching for ‘havens and harbours, antiquities and ruins’,7 the Renaissance writer, statesman and philosopher had urged, and this is, more or less, what I did. What followed, in fact, was years of intermittent working and travelling in Asia, taking it all in.

I ate cuttlefish curry in Singapore when I was working there as a journalist on its main daily newspaper, saw the last vestiges of evening sunlight on the Jama Masjid mosque in Delhi while travelling around northern India, and caught a train weaving its way through deep gorges and high tunnels up to the tea plantations of Sri Lanka. Eventually, I even went to Bengal and found its garden: legions of fluttering palm trees spilling out of Kolkata and down to the Ganges delta.

As far as I was concerned, that was that. I had drawn a line around it. Birmingham was a distant memory.

But now I was back home. Near the end of my second day tramping around, I found myself in Chamberlain Square, just outside the museum and art gallery, famous for its paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and one of their leading lights, Edward Burne-Jones, who had always been my mother’s favourite artist.

The city was in a Christmas mood. The annual German market was in town, and I could hear the sounds of it nearby: the fizzle and spit of sausages on hot grills, the discordant notes of a barrel organ, the chatter and laughter of people in a beer tent. Although an amber winter sun was already hanging low, the square was alive with noise and smells.

Bars in the city centre would be starting to fill up now; and across town, the central mosque would be preparing for evening prayer, a band might be rehearsing in a basement somewhere in downtown Handsworth, and the Balti curry houses on Stoney Lane and Ladypool Road would be opening up their doors to their first customers of the night. Birmingham was a town where South Asian and Caribbean energies – Commonwealth energies, you could say – mingled actively with those once seen as traditionally from the Midlands.

This was also still Joseph Chamberlain’s town. It still thought big. It was a place of constant reinvention. In the 1990s, it had broken the stranglehold of the inner ring road and thrown a pedestrian bridge over Paradise Circus to Centenary Square, where it would build a new Symphony Hall for the city’s increasingly famous orchestra under the conductorship of Simon Rattle. It had also revamped the canal network and the Jewellery Quarter, and a little later on, for good measure, built a new library that looked like a collection of party hat boxes stacked up on top of one another.

In the past month, furthermore, the council had been targeting Asian investors at an international property summit. The pitch was that Birmingham was a dynamic proposition: not least because of its youthful population.8

Like the canals that once opened up so many rivulets of global trade, Birmingham was reaching out again. Moving forward.

And the city was about to make another giant leap. Down the road from Chamberlain Square, in New Street, I bought a Birmingham Mail. The front page ‘splash story’ was a tragic one about a local taxi driver who had died in a road accident in the city centre.9 Such was the poignancy of the story and the photographs of the father of six that it was difficult to take notice of anything else. Nevertheless, if you looked closely enough, there it was in tiny letters above the masthead, telling us that the newspaper was an official backer of the bid.

The news came through a couple of days later. It was confirmed. Birmingham would be hosting the 2022 Commonwealth Games.

There was one more place I wanted to visit. Why I should really want to return was anyone’s guess, but as I turned into Gate Lane in Birmingham’s north-easterly suburb of Sutton Coldfield and saw the warm glow of its lamps peering out behind its louvred blinds, I felt glad that I had. Moments later, I had stepped over the threshold, and into the crushed burgundy of the Bengal Garden.

The restaurant hadn’t changed all that much. The wallpaper wasn’t quite so crushed, so flock, as it had been in the 1970s, and the piped music was more Lionel Ritchie than Raga; but beyond that there was still that pervasive sense of Oriental mystery, and in the accents of the families and couples sitting at nearby tables a prevailing sense of familiarity.

I was here. I had returned home. This was a phenomenon that had exercised poets throughout the centuries – from Homer right through to T.S. Eliot. In Four Quartets, Eliot had written that at the end of all life’s wanderings we would arrive where we began and ‘know the place for the first time’.10 And I must admit that I had half an idea that by returning home, I would shed some light on my memories of it.

Frankly, though, I wasn’t sure that I really had.

But in the Bengal Garden’s flickering light, there was something. In fact, the more the warm spices of my curry – the turmeric, the cumin, the garam masala – took hold, the more a new realisation began to spring into existence: the realisation that however hard I had tried, I had never really escaped Birmingham. It had always been there with me.

First and foremost, there was the influence of my parents: it was my mother’s bookcase that first got me reading, got me into novels and poetry and histories; and it was my father’s scrapbook of newspaper cuttings that he often showed to me that pushed me towards a career in journalism when I went down to London.

In addition, there was the influence of the city itself. This was where people of varying faiths from all over the Commonwealth and the world – Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist – had made their home, their communities taking root in places like Handsworth and Sparkhill. This was where my love of curry was born, and my curiosity awoken. Many years later, I went travelling and working overseas, finding gurdwaras and mosques, different ways of life and different manners, and, incidentally, some very good curry. I even made it to Bengal.

This was it. Like the moon that had held a strange fascination for the men of the Lunar Society in the eighteenth century, so too had Birmingham held sway over my life. Like the moon that pushes a tide up the beach.

In the late eighteenth century, members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham used to meet on nights of a full moon to drink and laugh and swap ideas. (Illustration from Les Marveilles de la Science published 1870, Alamy Stock Photo)

At the same time, the city had continued to change. It had come a long way from the rain-spattered desolation of my youth, and since then more new settlers had arrived, making the city more diverse, and more global than ever. Now it was going to stage the Commonwealth Games.

And in that very fact, I could feel Birmingham beginning to wield its influence again as I sat in the cosy environs of the Bengal Garden. As one of the waiters arrived to clear my dishes, the picture was becoming clearer. The city was about to send me on another journey. I could sense it.

Not to London this time, though, or even to Bengal; but into libraries and dusty archive rooms to find out more about my home town’s links with the Commonwealth – past and present. During the city’s bid for the Games, some statistics had been quoted by a local newspaper. One in ten people in the city had been born in an overseas Commonwealth country, and many more had family in member nations such as India, Jamaica, Pakistan, Australia, Canada and Nigeria.11 With those sort of numbers, I knew the connections had to be strong.

The simple fact was that I wanted to know. Given that Birmingham was going to host teams from seventy-one Commonwealth countries and overseas territories at a major sporting event, how far did its connections with these places go back?12 How deep were its relationships with places like Pakistan, India or Jamaica, given that many residents of Birmingham can trace their roots back to these places?

Furthermore, what was the nature of Birmingham’s dealings with the Commonwealth? With the growth of Birmingham as an industrial powerhouse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dealings early on were clearly all about trade; but did they span out in subsequent years into something more, spilling out perhaps into the political and cultural spheres?

And perhaps most important of all, what were the individual stories behind these networks? Who went where, when, and why? What were the impressions of John Sumner, the founder of Typhoo Tea, when he first travelled to Ceylon in 1909 to speak to tea growers? By the same token, what were the experiences of Jamaicans arriving in Birmingham in the 1950s to seek work in the booming car town?

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to know.

‘Would you like a coffee, sir?’ the waiter was asking.

I said I would. Then I sat back in my chair, and peered through one of the restaurant windows at the night sky outside: dark, but illuminated in part by a full moon.

The moon was there. It was in place. It was just a matter of time now for the city of my youth to cast its spell once more.

But like a wave in the moonlight, approaching a distant shore, the question was: where exactly would I wash up?

NOTES

1 The story of Birmingham’s early settlers is covered by Chris Upton in A History of Birmingham (Stroud: Phillimore & Co./The History Press, 2011), pp.100–06.

2 More information can be found in Tales from the Pen Room: an account of the pen-making process by Robert Stanyard – an interesting little pamphlet available to buy in the Pen Museum in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter.

3 The story of the Lunar Society of Birmingham is told by Jenny Uglow in The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future (London: Faber & Faber, 2002).

4 The Black Country is the area to the north and west of the city of Birmingham, which earned its name due to the acrid smoke that billowed from the thousands of ironworking foundries and forges in the area during the nineteenth century as well as from the dust produced by the local coal mines. Centred around Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton, the area played a major part in the Midlands’ Industrial Revolution, and thus the story of Birmingham itself.

5 John Freeth, ‘Inland Navigation: An Ode’, p.5, in The Political Songster, or A Touch on the times, on various subjects, and adapted to common tunes. The sixth edition, with additions (Birmingham: The Author, 1790).

6 Victor Skipp, The Making of Victorian Birmingham (Studley, Warwickshire: Brewin Books, 1996), p.187.

7 Richard Wilson (ed.), Essays and other writings of Francis Bacon (Letchworth: The Temple Press, 1943), p.69.

8 Birmingham City Council news release [Online], Birmingham looks to Asia for post-Brexit investment, 29 November 2017. www.birmingham.gov.uk/news The council claims that the city is the youngest in Europe, with under-25s accounting for nearly 40 per cent of the population. www.birmingham.gov.uk

9 Front page story: ‘Last Call Home’, Birmingham Mail, Various reporters, Tuesday, 19 December 2017.

10 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963). Quote from ‘Little Gidding’, p.222 (1974 edition).

11 Neil Elkes, ‘One in ten Brummies was born in an overseas Commonwealth country – the 2022 Games will be made welcome here: Census reveals that Birmingham truly is a Commonwealth city and will give games a warm welcome’, Birmingham Mail, 12 July 2017.

12 There will now be seventy-two teams after the readmission of the Maldives into the Commonwealth in February 2020, bringing the total number of nations in the global organisation to fifty-four. The Maldives had quit ‘the club’ in 2016 after being threatened with suspension over its human rights record. An election in the Indian Ocean archipelago in 2018 returned a new reformist government, which swiftly committed itself to re-joining the Commonwealth.

CHAPTER ONE

GIBRALTAR

Stand at one of Gibraltar’s highest viewing points – the eighth-century Moorish castle on Willis’s Road that winds up eventually to the lofty peak of this famous Rock clinging to the edge of Spain – and you are rewarded with one of the world’s great views. A town of tenement blocks and sturdy stone houses sporting brightly coloured Genoese-style window shutters – scarlet reds, insouciant greens, fierce yellows – all built on terraced rows spilling down to the waterfront. Just below you is a synagogue and below that, Main Street, the city’s principal thoroughfare. To your right, you can see the marina and cruise terminal; and to your left, the palms and hibiscus trees of the Botanic Garden; and then, beyond all that, the azure blue waters of the Strait of Gibraltar, sparkling in the Iberian Peninsula’s almost ever-present sunshine. Such a tranquil and serene view would be hard to come by almost anywhere else in the world.

But appearances can be deceptive. The Strait of Gibraltar is, in fact, a very choppy waterway. The intermingling of the Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea here makes for a turbulent channel. As water flows in and out of the Mediterranean, two currents are formed, amounting to an upper layer of Atlantic water heading eastward into the European sea, flowing over a lower layer of saltier and heavier water flooding out into the ocean. A sudden rise in the sea floor at this point also serves to complicate matters, causing the two currents to clash against each other, generating rough, rolling waves.

Add to that a number of counter-tides, particularly near the African side of the Strait, often whipped up by strong winds, and shipping can be difficult, especially when the weather truly turns and the sedate palms of Gibraltar’s Botanic Gardens are sent snapping and flailing in the lashing rain.

Yet it is shipping that has been the lifeblood for this precarious British enclave hanging onto the side of Europe ever since Admiral Sir George Rooke occupied it in 1704 during the War of Spanish Succession and it was ceded by Spain to Britain in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The safe passage of vessels in and out of Gibraltar – when it was a British crown colony, and now as a British Overseas Territory in the Commonwealth – has always been of paramount importance, and this is where, in the nineteenth century, a Birmingham engineering firm played a crucial role.

Almost as soon as Spain ceded ‘the Rock’ to Britain in 1713, it set about winning it back again, bombarding it during three conflicts in the eighteenth century, culminating in the Great Siege of 1779 to 1783 when its forces, with the help of the French, tried to sever all links the British military base had with the outside world. A Spanish army also gathered at the line of fortifications that it had built half a century before – called the Spanish Lines – effectively blockading the British garrison town by land.

British troops held out until a major naval relief force arrived in 1783 and the siege was called off; but the whole affair highlighted how dependent Gibraltar was on the safe passage of food and supplies by sea.

Precarious as its early existence was, however, the British colony was now growing into a significant community with several waves of immigrants joining the British military forces cooped up in their garrison. First there were the seafarers of Genoese and Ligurian descent, then there were the Maltese and Portuguese labourers and shipwrights, then the Sephardic Jews who turned up from their long-term Moroccan exile from Spain to become shopkeepers and lawyers. And there were others too: Spanish merchants from the mainland; Moroccans; and last, but by no means least, Hindu merchants from Hyderabad in India who came to take advantage of opportunities at the other end of the British Empire.1

And what were these opportunities for these communities who still make up the population of Gibraltar today? Well, by the early nineteenth century, Great Britain was the world’s pre-eminent mercantile power, controlling half of the world’s trade; and after the loss of the American colonies in 1776, a lot of this trade was refocused on India and the East Indies (as Southeast Asia was known in those days).

The tales of the East Indies brought back originally by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sailors such as Sir Francis Drake, James Lancaster and William Keeling to the taverns of foggy London had now been rolled out like some great sail into colonial dominion over most of India, and a string of ports, starting with Gibraltar and Malta, threading their way towards it. Gibraltar was the first port of call along a route that took ships – before the opening of Suez Canal in 1869 – to Alexandra on the Egyptian coast, where passengers and cargo were offloaded for a rather rough trip across the desert to Suez, where another ship would be waiting to continue the journey on to Aden, Bombay and beyond. After the opening of the canal, the journey was made much easier, with the waterway linking Britain with its Asian dominions in one seamless, unbroken sea journey. As a result, tiny Gibraltar hanging onto the edge of Spain became increasingly a major trading port and, as steamships began to replace sailing vessels, a major coal refuelling station.

British cargo steamers stopped over in large numbers, carrying in their holds an eclectic mix of manufacturing: from stainless steel knives and forks from Sheffield, and sauces from Reading, to brass fittings from Birmingham. In addition, there was the mail boat of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O), chugging round the bay carrying its twice-monthly consignment of parcels to British Empire ports in Asia. On board too were people travelling out to these ports, carrying letters of employment in their pockets.2

But all this depended on safe navigation as these ships entered the narrow and treacherous strait between North Africa and the Spanish peninsula, passing the African port of Tangier on their right before falling under the shadow of the African mountain Jebel Musa, one of the fabled Pillars of Hercules squaring up to the other on the opposite side of the water – the Rock of Gibraltar.

Seafarers had traditionally relied on a paltry light being emitted from an oil lamp at the top of a Roman Catholic chapel called the Shrine of our Lady of Europe, sitting on a flat promontory at the end of the Rock. But as the volume of traffic rose rapidly in the nineteenth century the authorities decided that what Gibraltar needed was a lighthouse to guide ships safely into port, or through the straits if they were continuing their journey.

So, eventually, it got one.

The Europa Point lighthouse, built on the same promontory as the Shrine of our Lady of Europe and containing a single-wick lamp far more powerful than the shrine could ever muster, was inaugurated on 1 August 1841. In 1843, the lighting was upgraded to improve visibility from Sandy Bay on the eastern Mediterranean coast of Gibraltar, and by 1854 the lighthouse was visible within a span of about 16 miles.

Whether or not the passengers of the P&O mail steamers on their way to far-flung corners of the Empire fully appreciated the work Europa Point was doing to keep them safe is a matter of debate, but many of them certainly waxed lyrical about their arrival in the crown colony of Gibraltar. ‘We skirted along the dark, savage mountains of the African coast, and came to the Rock just before gunfire,’ novelist William Makepeace Thackeray wrote during a journey out to Cairo around 1846. ‘It is the very image of an enormous lion, crouched between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and set there to guard the passage for its British mistress.’3

A decade or so later, another P&O passenger, a Mr F.R. Kendall, said of the experience: ‘As the ship was steaming into the bay we had a good view of the fortifications, dockyards etc, guns peeping out of all sorts of impossible places at a tremendous height. It reminded me altogether of a giant’s castle in a fairy tale.’4

The fairy tale was still in danger of being spoilt, however. About 6 miles away from the safety of the Gibraltar quaysides – on the western side of the entrance to Gibraltar Bay – was a dangerous clutch of stone stacks collectively known as ‘Pearl Rock’. On this reef, many a vessel had foundered. The arcs of light emanating from Europa Point did not penetrate this treacherous piece of water. This was a problem that needed to be solved.

Enter the Chance Brothers, a glassmaking company from Birmingham.

The Chance family business had its roots in England’s housing boom in the early decades of the nineteenth century, which had created the need for glass windows to be produced on an industrial scale. Out went the old-fashioned craftsmanship of glass-making and in came bulk melting furnaces, casting tables, and grinding and polishing machinery. Riding the wave of this development was a London glass merchant called Lucas Chance, who, realising he needed a steady source of glassware products, looked to Birmingham to provide it, buying up a factory in Spon Lane in Smethwick, a warehouse in Snow Hill, and bringing in experts from all over the country to build his newly formed Midlands business into one of the market leaders in glass technology. What Josiah Wedgewood had done for pottery in Stoke-on-Trent, Lucas wanted to do for the world of glassware.

Joining him in this endeavour were his brothers William, who contributed much needed capital in the difficult years of the late 1820s, and George, who looked after the New York side of the business, finding a growing demand in the US for his company’s products.

But perhaps the most important figure in this family drama would be Lucas’s nephew, James Timmins Chance. Born in London in 1814, James studied Theology at Cambridge University before becoming an optical scientist. He was delivering lectures on light when the family company was just beginning to experiment with the manufacture of optical glass. His admission as a partner in the Chance Brothers business in 1840 became a perfect opportunity to apply science to a burgeoning business.

A journalist visiting the Spon Lane Works in 1862 waxed lyrical in the Illustrated Times about the Chance Bros factory in general, which now employed around 2,000 people, and James Chance in particular: ‘I am in a long spacious building, crowded with what seems an inextricable mass of machinery – wheels, shafts, bands, rubbers, “radial arms” – whirring, rolling, hissing, rumbling, vibrating – a very chaos of animated iron, and, as it were, a torture chamber of art,’ the excited reporter wrote. ‘For, bound upon great circular tables, whirred around with unerring and inevitable sweep, like the stroke of fate or the dreadful circle of condemned lovers in the Dantean Inferno, lie the zones of glass being slowly and surely ground into perfect accuracy of form and polished into perfect transparency of surface …’5

This excruciating hyperbole was then extended to James Chance. ‘I go on to the scientific obscurities of the “dark shed” or chamber, where Mr James Chance pores over the final adjustment of the optics of the finished lenses and prisms, ascertaining their optical quality, a delicate and most important duty.’

It was in this ‘dark shed’ presumably where the cerebral James drew up the technical plans for the company’s first lighthouse lens, to be exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, which itself was adorned with 950,000ft of rolled-plate glass produced and shipped by his company via canal to London.

In 1854, Trinity House, Britain’s general lighthouse authority, invited Chance Bros to tender for a contract for Bardsey Island off the north-western tip of Wales. The Birmingham firm was successful, and more lighthouse apparatus contracts soon followed, one for the lighthouse on Lundy Island, another for Whitby lighthouse, and then one further afield, in Vancouver, Canada.

Over the next few years, the company manufactured about sixty lenses for Trinity House and other lighthouse authorities spanning the globe, from Port of Spain in Trinidad to Trincomalee in Sri Lanka and Victoria in Australia.

By now, James was becoming a leading authority on optical technologies, and was receiving encouragement in his work from the famous scientist Michael Faraday. Chance’s work on lights that could account for a dip on the horizon, and also on the dioptric mirror, a lens that could not only throw out a spectrum of light rays but would also reflect light back into a desired direction, was bringing him scientific recognition.

This was only to be cemented by what happened next. In the early 1860s, a Trinity House contract to replace the existing light at Gibraltar’s Europa Point came the way of the Chance Bros. As we know, the original installation had been a single-wick oil lamp, which, although it was aided by mirrors and a fixed lens to refract the emanating light, was not sufficient to illuminate some particularly hazardous stretches of water such as the one around the infamous Pearl Rock. James Chance set to work.

The result was a wide-ranging solution. The Birmingham engineer replaced the single-wick lamp with a four-wick burner with a new lens and a red beam to be thrown over in an arc to Pearl Rock, while an additional 265-degree beam of white light was thrown over the coastline adjoining the point. The lantern that was erected in November 1864 also featured a complex array of vertical and horizontal prisms that further helped to illuminate the whole area, even in poor weather conditions.

Optical glass engineered by the Chance Brothers factory in the 1860s enabled the Europa Point lighthouse to illuminate a particularly hazardous stretch of water in the Gibraltar Strait for the first time. (iStock.com/Michael Rayment)

Chance explained his innovations in an 1867 paper for the Institute of Civil Engineers, and this know-how helped to secure his company a leading place in optical engineering. From then on, the Chance Bros firm was heavily involved in the design of the lighthouses now springing up all over the British Empire: from Burma and Borneo in the east to the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Jamaica in the west.

James retired in 1872 and bought himself a large house just north of Birmingham, in the area of Four Oaks in Sutton Coldfield, later to become a suburb of the city. He had a house in Kensington in London too, until he finally settled in Hove, near Brighton. He never quite forgot the city that had made his name, however, and in 1900 he endowed Birmingham University with £50,000 in order to establish an engineering school.