BCN &c
This is random thoughts:
This fascinating correspondence is a kind of cornucopia. I opine there are many photographs ‘out there’ and perhaps many who have them in their possession are not aware.
Prior to the advent of photography 1837 (coincidentally the year the Euston-Vauxhall railway line was inaugurated - taking the initial ride a diarist wrote that on entering Birmingham along the viaduct “….one can view the dwellings of the industrious artisans.” Kind of one step removed from “The Poet” who penned those whacko lines as to ecstatically rejoicing with gay abandon on the banks of the Avon at the advent of coal being conveyanced by canal to Birmingham so available at low cost to the “industrious artisans” and of course captains of industry [who built their manses the SW because the prevailing wind is SW so the fumes were blown away as SE (skirting Handsworth and Sutton Coldfield]. And how did they transit to Stratford upon Avon en masse?
In passing fleeting: it is difficult as in astonishing awkward that there is not at least one photograph of the teeming boat activity in the SuA pound. It must have proved an ongoing talk of the town and surely a spectacle for children and elderfolk retirees to behold.
Rod Birch located a photograph c. 1840 of The Golden Lion, High Street, Deritend [now standing in Canon Hill Park, apparently in a dilapidated condition] which is published on this site. [Bravo Rod: credit where it is due olden mate and delighted thou art back on your feet and kicking]
The Birmingham Sketch was always big on illustration. If it still exists there might be a wealth of such as sketches, engravings, early photographs in its vault. The public library only has editions. If it no longer exists then what happened to its archives?
You know the Illustrations Collection and specifically the local history component at the Central BPL is immense and that the material is rapidly deteriorating.
I suggested digitalizing employing students around the clock, or it will likely eventuate as a standard flat out at a snail’s pace project.
(The USA Library of Congress stock was irradiated in the 1980s: railway size cart loads. This is harmless to human beings and sanitizes in the sense of arresting and preventing decay. Even so there are many items which were so advanced of disintegration is so that they are also being digitalized.)
There is likely a non-borrowable illustrations component in that component of said collection.
Prior to photography then obviously sketches, watercolours, engravings.
Regarding the Romany: some at least of those people(s) are skilled tinsmiths.
Pots, kettles, pans, mugs. It might be they sold to the canal faring folk.
It is likely that some Romany (as gypsy, not to be confused with Tinkers: Irish dispossessed by Cromwell on one of his protracted rampages - incidentally: at his daughter’s wedding there was ale, cider, music, dancing) were indeed attracted to the quasi nomadic life of the float. Though not so random far flung as they were on a fixed path on a rigid timetable, it meant a steady income. Perhaps for a younger couple starting out. They would still have the family caravan base. Very physically tough and mentally alacritous -- some might say wily.
That is an astounding account of the man who delved squalor filth at the canal tavern in the barn. I often wondered as to personal hygiene. Perhaps rural stretches for personal immersion so scrub a dub dub. He chanced on two extremes who might well not have been so unusual. They worked either singly or as a family every day; mayhap to the consternation of The Lord’s Day Observance Society.
There is a musical The Water Gypsies with a few Gilbert and Sullivan types performing themselves. Apparently it was quite popular as light entertainment.
A bit like the tv show Wagon Train: all the women with clean white aprons, bonnets, men clean shaven…
When the body is unwashed for a long time and the person is active, noshing, the skin takes on a leathery texture. Remember the old night watchman with the pierced oil drum brewing his tea on the heap of coke (maybe laced with a drop of methalated spirits), perhaps roasting a chunk of meat on one of those three pronged extension jobs?
Those Knights of The Road often got by quite nicely that way in those days.
Of course industrialization involves brutalization.
In any industrialized society there is bound to be casualties: physical and mental and both.
The RSPCA was founded well before the SPCC. The same in New York City.
I wonder where did the canal boat people get fresh water? Surely they didn’t boil canal water? I suppose they knew, the early days, where wells were to be found and of course the influx from such as the reservoir yonder Edgbaston way to maintain levels.
Where did the water come from for that facility?
I was told the bulk of geology of Birmingham is shifting sandstone.
As was pointed out, excavating that railway tunnel SW must have been almost incomprehensible to us.
Snow Hill railway station was another altarpiece of Victoriana, smashed to smithereens by voraciously avaricious dolts. I think it was the GHQ of Great Western Railway.
I recall as a wee lad taking the train to London therefrom. Where did that tunnel open and what is its status today?
(Perhaps like the Japanese sleeping tubes it could be utilized as a hostel; suitably tarted up.) Another stupendous feat.
So all that done by hand, horse, pony, ass, block and tackle.
I viewed a detailed sketch of a huge swathe of railway cutting about Camden Town by Euston. The breadth is immense: men, horses, planks, navies, brick layers, cementers and so on.
Where was all the earth from canal and railway excavation deposited? Some it was quite rich.
A correspondent mentioned the sheer scale of human toil involved: relentless grinding six days a week dawn to dusk.
I saw a tv documentary which included footage of massive bridge construction the 1920s and 1930s: metal. (Incidentally, that beautiful span at Smethwick: another wonder: the big house up right. If that was a lock keeper’s abode then maybe he doubled as a toll collector. Or perhaps it was a tavern; or both? What a marvelous place to grow up! Of course it is obvious when you halt in your tracks to think: you would have to strap infants to the deck in dry weather. I mean the cabin roof. They certainly got abundant fresh air and sunshine. I’m surprised an enterprising kind didn’t develop a folding cot which could have been lashed firm and even draped over in rain.)
One thing surprising is that the men were dressed in heavy black leather boots, thick barathea (soft fabric with a kind of basket weave and a diapered pattern suits) [!], often shirt and tie, flat cap. In the case of this operation, a leather apron and elbow length leather gloves. I refer to riveting as red hot bolts way up on a metal beam (often girder).
The sight is tantamount to terrifying. One operative squats at a fire heating the bolts red hot and slings them with tongs to the installer who catches in his mitten and it one move drives them home walloping them with a big lump hammer. Not much difference between being 75’ above ground or 250’. One step out of place by an inch or catch on the sole on a bolt or nut and it’s almost certainly all over. Now that is something to behold contemplatively. For those in need it surely instills a sense of a modicum of humility. Essential for youngsters to grasp.
Each of the high fire blue engineering brick of the railway viaduct Bordesley to Moor Street Station and of course the anomalous Duddeston piece arches took an average four months to build. I wondered what is inside: is it layer after layer of brick?
Where were the bricks made? Are the blue prints extant? That would determine what is inside - as they are not hollow! - and if not then a core could be done by engineering students at Aston. Be a thrill and delight for them and a hands on historical immersion.
Cromwell posted splendid photographs he has either taken by himself or he has located them. His stuff is photogenic rather than just snapshots - which is what digital cameras for the most part result in producing (is it not astounding Ilford discontinued producing monochrome film recently! Remember HP4 etc.. 100 asa was ideal for architecture if you were steady stance wise or with tripod or set on such as a wall, barrel, boxes. One of the best range of b/w film ever made. I used like the pastel quality of the colour.).
The last cast iron canal bridge produced pictured by him at that intersection I have traversed hundreds if not thousands of times. More of that in due course.
Where were they made and how transported? Presumably two single span pieces with under panels? Curiously when you gaze beneath they appear one piece.
There’s one with a panel on it by where the section of Duddeston rail viaduct was destroyed by aerial bombard by Nazi madness. A hump back road item.
I think it reads 17-something.
Here’s an astonishing reveal:
When you stand on that bridge where the GU crosses the culverted Rea (an astounding feat of civil engineering as well - almost an understatement) the halt and gaze to.
There you have the story of the modern era as industrialization; viz.:
river [which was navigable, as I might have mentioned, so that them with dough could take vessel a Sunday to Vauxhall Gardens for a concert and genteel frolic: but where did they take boat from?] – old road – canal – all crossed by rail. And that is it almost within spitting distance. What an intersection. It might be unique.
There was an immense municipal garbage disposal plant alongside with a very high chimney. A marvellous piece of masonry. I once suggested BBC tv put a movable webcam atop: easy to lower in a rock climber from a balloon to install. Big news splash stimulate youngster imagination and generally fluff up everybody’s glands.
That was another amazing facility: cobblestones, masonically correct buildings, it was like a town within the city.
Cromwell, et al, did you ever sally forth that way?
The opposite side of the Rea was a huge railway freightage yard. Again cobble stones and all that entails. (Where did they come from? There must have been thousands of people hewing them: alone. The Bull ring and most streets about were cobble stones.
They were cut to the size of a horse shoe for traction. [What happened to the ones from the Bull Ring when that hideous thing was built? Conveniently vanished.
Just an aside: Birmingham in the 1960s was listed as of aprx. 1 million miles of streets - alleys and so on and so forth. All were illuminated by gas lighting, subsequently electricity. So more than a million miles of plumbing. Then cable for electricity.
Traversing the canal through city center there was a very big as huge municipal yard alongside packed with those lovely cast iron gas lamp posts. What happened to them?
No public accountability. But then given a generalized apathy anaesthetical it is tantamount to flogging a dead horse. Hence property speculators and assorted unscrupulous elements got away with what they did.]
I chanced on it after being intercepted as a lad by a Transport Police detective in off white belted gabardine rain coat. I presented a Tow Path Permit which I obtained for 1/-6d from that big British Waterways yard off Broad Street [‘behind’ that monstrosity Alpha Tower: if you stand with your back to Birmingham Repertory Theatre gaze towards the big bronzy statues of Matthew Bolton James Watt affront the Registry Office, then off that sloping street. More cobble stones. The two elderfolk gents were astonished wry when I presented and made one out in copper plate script for All Four Regions. I collared my pal and insisted he got one. When I was a boy in those days you could walk all day and night and hardly ever see a soul, or a boat in action.
The way I came by a permit was when I first discovered on foot this marvellous world in a kind of suspended animation. I was enchanted. Of course I had seen canals as a younger child from the top deck of an omnibus. I had not led a sheltered existence.
Being a vigorous walker I was in an amazing voyage of discovery contemplatively padding along through city center. Near Gas Street at that big junction where the canal is N to Black Country (Dudley Tunnel etc.) there’s an island which now bears a sign post, well a wee way along going ‘back’ was the lock keeper’s abode: a tall white building which seemed in perpetual shade. He had a huge Alsatian hound with massive paws who got all the exercise such an animal could possibly want. This is how I came to get The Permit. My first venture I met him and the dog. A tall, large boned muscular man who might well have been a boater of yore. I got on ok with the animal as I in part grew up on a farm and handled a lot of dogs. I forget his name though he was a character. He told me recently the dog had gone bounding off towards where the Museum of Science and Industry was. He wondered what was so special and sauntered after the dog. He found him with a man pinned to the wall by the dog’s front legs (be remarkably acrobatic were the other way around). The guy must have been stuck there quite a long time with the dog slobbering. Apparently he was some sort of surveyor.
I smiled when he related this to me and in his austere way I think he was pleased I could appreciate the funny side. That’s how I came by The You Know What.
Well, the constable was mighty surprised to find a boy whipping out such a document, which he probably did not know existed. That intercept prompted my curiosity to know what was up and over that steep embankment. At that stage it was abandoned.
But there was still straw and you could smell horses. Actually there was all sorts of antiquarian stuff. If I had a hangar the size of Elmdon International Birmingham Airport I could easily have packed it with items I found. And made a fortune. (A friend of mine’s brother-in-law in Nechells worked for a bloke who exported - kindly brace thyself - one million [to round figures] upright pianos to the USA from, mostly Birmingham and District, which he got during the slum clearance and so on and so forth [many pubs dumped them].) It was an eerie, kind of poetic experience: that derelict, bleak, stark kind of majesty. Because I understood, which one cannot put into words unless coming across as a crank, the labour entailed, the investment, the precision of craft-engineering, the population activity. Eventually the facility was a roadway containerfreight depot, then a car park. Not to mince words there is stupidity as in dense thick.
This discovery of dilapidation prompted me to found Birmingham Canal Navigations Society. I had a hundred letterheads printed by a chap alongside St Martins in The Bull Ring and put it out. I did not have the resources to deal with all that, whatever it might amount to, and besides it would take an adult, not a boy. An ideal person would have been a school teacher used to telegrammatically addressing people making plentiful sense to keep them awake and of course with resource.
Dudley Canal Tunnel was another blood curdling rile. I guess BW had nailed railway sleepers to the entrance (is that Tipton side?) which a few of us stalwarts promptly removed and installed a butty. The approach hump back brick bridge was almost non existent. I managed to engage ITV (Alpha) and BBC tv and the Birmingham Evening Mail & Despatch (‘allo?) by lighting a fire under them. When I mentioned “protest cruise” they knee jerk reacted, “Is it CND?” I almost felt like saying, “I bloody well ask you, in the reign of a month of Sundays for crying out loud how bamboozled as punch drunk can you get. Whatdya want, a blood transfusion?” In all seriousness now.
The odds were fierce. Apathy was breathtaking.
What a lug that was.
Off Castle Mill Basin there is a working which is a generous crawl to enter (if still accessible). A not great distance in is a sump. There are three levels. The police divers used train there. I was told on presumably the bottom level that is where the first Watt steam pump is embalmed. The intelligent common sense solution is for the engineering depts.., @ Birmingham U and Aston to build one of those Titanic exploring mini subs to take a shufty reconnaissance - and be done with it.
Where is the canal link to the huge Wren’s Nest workings? I know there was one - obviously but I could never determine where.
There is another observation concerning mining and labour and a few brief questions to do with a few brief questions prompted by Cromwell’s marathon BCN hike recently.
However, for today, that’s quite enough of that.
