Dennis Williams
Gone but not forgotten
Re: Some great men of Birmingham..
And what about probably THE greatest Brummie ever lived. I mean started from nothing, made a few bob, then passed it on and founded great businesses and a few other important civic legacies...like an Orphanage, a University, a Hospital, a Medical School....etc... of course I'm talking about Sir Josiah Mason.
Sir Josiah Mason
Birmingham has never been deficient in men being born in humble circumstances that used their innate skills to establish themselves, often becoming very wealthy in the process, and who then became generous patrons of the culture and education denied them in their straitened youth.
A hundred years ago just such a man, a self-made Birmingham manufacturer, put the finishing touches to a building project which had taken him nine years to complete and cost £60,000. Twelve years later he died and was buried in a mausoleum in the grounds. Today you search in vain for that building, and the manufacturer himself was disinterred eighty years after his death, cremated, and his ashes scattered in the Garden of Rest at Perry Barr Crematorium. Consumed with him in his belated cremation were the remains of his wife and of fifty-three of their children; not natural children, but their adopted boys and girls who died in the building that is no more.
For the manufacturer was Sir Josiah Mason, and the building the orphanage he founded on the Erdington ridge which dominates Birmingham's lowest depression - the Tame Valley below Castle Bromwich. But though he and his orphanage are gone, Sir Josiah is remembered on the island at the junction of Chester Road and Orphanage Road by a bronze bust on a plinth, cast from a seated marble statue which stood in Chamberlain Place from 1885 until 195I. Before its demolition in 1964 Sir Josiah Mason's Orphanage was liberally decorated with mermaids, even on its prefects' badges. They are sisters to the mermaid on the coat-of-arms of the University of Birmingham, which began life in Edmund Street as the Mason Science College, so called after its founder, Sir Josiah, on whose 85th birthday, 23 February 1880, it was opened. It did not long survive the orphanage in the cataclysmic bulldozing of the 1960s. As a boy in Kidderminster Josiah Mason was said to have been fascinated by a mermaid in a stained-glass window, so when with growing fame and fortune he became an armiger, and he incorporated the mermaid in his coat-of-arms.
Josiah Mason was born in 1795 in Mill Street, Kidderminster, the third generation of Josiahs. His paternal grandfather, a bombazine weaver, was also a mechanic, mending looms and other machinery. His father, a carpet weaver, became a clerk to John Broom, carpet manufacturer, and married Elizabeth Griffiths, the daughter of a Dudley workman. Our Josiah was their second son. His original education was in a dame's school, but it ended at the age of 8 when he began selling cakes from door to door. 'Joe's Cakes', which he bought at sixteen to the dozen, becoming quite popular, but the young tradesman sought other outlets, and moved on to selling fruit and vegetables from panniers slung across a donkey. At 15 he took up shoe-making in order to stay at home with an invalid brother. Working with top quality leather, his charges did not match up to his· painstaking craftsmanship. "I found I couldn't make it pay, and must soon become bankrupt," he explained. "So I gave it up." He then learned to write and began writing other people's letters for cash, which he spent on books. Meanwhile he tried, and rejected, shop keeping, baking, carpentry, and blacksmith's work before taking up carpet weaving, but the pay was at most £1 a week, and Josiah's thoughts turned northward to Birmingham and its opportunities. So at the age of 21 he paid a Christmas visit to his uncle, Richard Griffiths, in Birmingham. It was his moment of destiny. He married his cousin, Anne, at Aston Church, and took charge of his uncle's imitation jewellery business so successfully that he hoped for a share in it. So when his uncle sold out over his head, although the buyer offered him the manager's post, Josiah declined it.
It was 1822, he was 27 and unemployed. One day a steel-toy manufacturer named Heeley, a stranger to Josiah, stopped him in the street. "You are Josiah Mason, and out of work," said Heeley. "Meet me tomorrow at Mr. Harrison's in Lancaster Street." Next morning Heeley told Harrison, a manufacturer of split rings and pens, "Here is just the young man you want." Harrison was unconvinced. "I've had many young men here," he said, "and they were afraid to get their fingers dirty." Josiah Mason looked down at his own outspread fingers and said quietly, "Are you ashamed of dirtying yourselves to get a living?"
This impressed Harrison. He told Mason to move into the premises with his wife and furniture. A year later, on Harrison's retirement, Mason bought the business for £500. It was 1824, he was 28 and his own master in a prospering trade. In Josiah Mason inventive genius was allied to commercial flair. Inventing machinery for bevelling hoop-rings, he made a profit of £1,000 in its first year's use. Then came the slit pen and the jackpot. In 1825 the pen nib-plain 'pen' to the trade was first made commercially by James Perry of Manchester, later London. He was quickly followed by the Birmingham pen makers Mitchell and Gillott. Harrison had made barrel pens For Dr. Priestley in 1780, and Josiah Mason continued making some pens at the Lancaster Street works.
Walking down Bull Street in 1829 Mason saw in Peart's bookshop window a card advertising nine pens for 35. 6d. He bought one Peart was using for 6d, went home, made three better pens, and sent the best to the address on that he had bought - Perry, Red Lion Square, London. At 8 a.m. three days later James Perry was in Lancaster Street appointing Mason his maker of Persian and Steel B pens. Mason's improvement on Perry's own pens was to slit them with a press and die instead of cracking them with a hammer after hardening. In November 1830, with twelve workers using one hundredweight of steel a week, Mason supplied Perry with his first order of one hundred gross. By 1875, when Mason sold his works to a company formed as Perry and Co. Ltd., there were 1,000 workers using three tons of steel each week.
Having moved house from his works, Mason had been living at Woodbroke, a residence in Northfield. He was selling this house in 1840 when the buyer sought his co-operation in the electro-plating process he was developing. Thus began Mason's partnership with George Richards Elkington and his brother, Henry, a risky capital investment initially, as the trade and workers resented the new method, and no one would take out a licence to use the process. So the Elkingtons themselves became manufacturers, and it has been written: "What Boulton was to Watt in an earlier period of the history of Birmingham inventions, so Mason became to Elkington."
As in his Perry associations, Josiah first intended remaining anonymous, but "the great and incessant call for money in the business needed my personal care". He planned Elkington's showrooms in Newhall Street, now the Science Museum, to display the electro-plated spoons, forks, and other items made in their Brearley Street factory. The Great Exhibition in 1851 fmally clinched the new method over the old hand-plating, and Elkington's went from strength to strength. Mason's partnership with Elkington was dissolved in 1856, and in 1875 he sold his Lancaster Street pen and split-ring premises to Perry and Co. Averse to the public eye, he shunned public office with the exception of a directorship in the Birmingham Banking Company, formed after a failure in 1866, and when, after the opening of his orphanage, Birmingham Town Council wanted to put a statue of him in the Art Gallery his reluctance killed the project.
On 19th September 1860, without any ceremony, he laid the foundation stone of his great orphanage after many troubles with a committee of clergymen because he wanted it to remain unsectarian. On 31st July 1869 Josiah Mason formally opened the
orphanage for 200 children. It reached a peak of 350 in 1889, the number steadily declining until its final demolition in 1964, when the proud and graceful tower fell on 16th June, the anniversary of the· founder's death. Mason is said to have known all his 'children' by name. His instruction to the staff was inscribed on the glass of his mausoleum:
They will be what you will make them,
Make them wise and make them good,
Make them strong for time of trial;
Teach them temperance, self-denial,
Patience, kindness, fortitude.
Sir Josiah Mason was granted his knighthood in 1872, and though the court presentation was dispensed with because of his age and ill-health, his greatest work was still to come. Having conveyed property to the value of £100,000 to trustees, on 23rd February 1875, his 80th birthday, he laid the foundation stone of the Science College in Edmund Street, which was to blossom into the University of Birmingham. Sir Josiah died at Norwood House, Erdington, on 16th June 1881, aged 86. His personal motto was "Do Deeds of Love", and well he had lived up to it.
And what about probably THE greatest Brummie ever lived. I mean started from nothing, made a few bob, then passed it on and founded great businesses and a few other important civic legacies...like an Orphanage, a University, a Hospital, a Medical School....etc... of course I'm talking about Sir Josiah Mason.
Sir Josiah Mason
Birmingham has never been deficient in men being born in humble circumstances that used their innate skills to establish themselves, often becoming very wealthy in the process, and who then became generous patrons of the culture and education denied them in their straitened youth.
A hundred years ago just such a man, a self-made Birmingham manufacturer, put the finishing touches to a building project which had taken him nine years to complete and cost £60,000. Twelve years later he died and was buried in a mausoleum in the grounds. Today you search in vain for that building, and the manufacturer himself was disinterred eighty years after his death, cremated, and his ashes scattered in the Garden of Rest at Perry Barr Crematorium. Consumed with him in his belated cremation were the remains of his wife and of fifty-three of their children; not natural children, but their adopted boys and girls who died in the building that is no more.
For the manufacturer was Sir Josiah Mason, and the building the orphanage he founded on the Erdington ridge which dominates Birmingham's lowest depression - the Tame Valley below Castle Bromwich. But though he and his orphanage are gone, Sir Josiah is remembered on the island at the junction of Chester Road and Orphanage Road by a bronze bust on a plinth, cast from a seated marble statue which stood in Chamberlain Place from 1885 until 195I. Before its demolition in 1964 Sir Josiah Mason's Orphanage was liberally decorated with mermaids, even on its prefects' badges. They are sisters to the mermaid on the coat-of-arms of the University of Birmingham, which began life in Edmund Street as the Mason Science College, so called after its founder, Sir Josiah, on whose 85th birthday, 23 February 1880, it was opened. It did not long survive the orphanage in the cataclysmic bulldozing of the 1960s. As a boy in Kidderminster Josiah Mason was said to have been fascinated by a mermaid in a stained-glass window, so when with growing fame and fortune he became an armiger, and he incorporated the mermaid in his coat-of-arms.
Josiah Mason was born in 1795 in Mill Street, Kidderminster, the third generation of Josiahs. His paternal grandfather, a bombazine weaver, was also a mechanic, mending looms and other machinery. His father, a carpet weaver, became a clerk to John Broom, carpet manufacturer, and married Elizabeth Griffiths, the daughter of a Dudley workman. Our Josiah was their second son. His original education was in a dame's school, but it ended at the age of 8 when he began selling cakes from door to door. 'Joe's Cakes', which he bought at sixteen to the dozen, becoming quite popular, but the young tradesman sought other outlets, and moved on to selling fruit and vegetables from panniers slung across a donkey. At 15 he took up shoe-making in order to stay at home with an invalid brother. Working with top quality leather, his charges did not match up to his· painstaking craftsmanship. "I found I couldn't make it pay, and must soon become bankrupt," he explained. "So I gave it up." He then learned to write and began writing other people's letters for cash, which he spent on books. Meanwhile he tried, and rejected, shop keeping, baking, carpentry, and blacksmith's work before taking up carpet weaving, but the pay was at most £1 a week, and Josiah's thoughts turned northward to Birmingham and its opportunities. So at the age of 21 he paid a Christmas visit to his uncle, Richard Griffiths, in Birmingham. It was his moment of destiny. He married his cousin, Anne, at Aston Church, and took charge of his uncle's imitation jewellery business so successfully that he hoped for a share in it. So when his uncle sold out over his head, although the buyer offered him the manager's post, Josiah declined it.
It was 1822, he was 27 and unemployed. One day a steel-toy manufacturer named Heeley, a stranger to Josiah, stopped him in the street. "You are Josiah Mason, and out of work," said Heeley. "Meet me tomorrow at Mr. Harrison's in Lancaster Street." Next morning Heeley told Harrison, a manufacturer of split rings and pens, "Here is just the young man you want." Harrison was unconvinced. "I've had many young men here," he said, "and they were afraid to get their fingers dirty." Josiah Mason looked down at his own outspread fingers and said quietly, "Are you ashamed of dirtying yourselves to get a living?"
This impressed Harrison. He told Mason to move into the premises with his wife and furniture. A year later, on Harrison's retirement, Mason bought the business for £500. It was 1824, he was 28 and his own master in a prospering trade. In Josiah Mason inventive genius was allied to commercial flair. Inventing machinery for bevelling hoop-rings, he made a profit of £1,000 in its first year's use. Then came the slit pen and the jackpot. In 1825 the pen nib-plain 'pen' to the trade was first made commercially by James Perry of Manchester, later London. He was quickly followed by the Birmingham pen makers Mitchell and Gillott. Harrison had made barrel pens For Dr. Priestley in 1780, and Josiah Mason continued making some pens at the Lancaster Street works.
Walking down Bull Street in 1829 Mason saw in Peart's bookshop window a card advertising nine pens for 35. 6d. He bought one Peart was using for 6d, went home, made three better pens, and sent the best to the address on that he had bought - Perry, Red Lion Square, London. At 8 a.m. three days later James Perry was in Lancaster Street appointing Mason his maker of Persian and Steel B pens. Mason's improvement on Perry's own pens was to slit them with a press and die instead of cracking them with a hammer after hardening. In November 1830, with twelve workers using one hundredweight of steel a week, Mason supplied Perry with his first order of one hundred gross. By 1875, when Mason sold his works to a company formed as Perry and Co. Ltd., there were 1,000 workers using three tons of steel each week.
Having moved house from his works, Mason had been living at Woodbroke, a residence in Northfield. He was selling this house in 1840 when the buyer sought his co-operation in the electro-plating process he was developing. Thus began Mason's partnership with George Richards Elkington and his brother, Henry, a risky capital investment initially, as the trade and workers resented the new method, and no one would take out a licence to use the process. So the Elkingtons themselves became manufacturers, and it has been written: "What Boulton was to Watt in an earlier period of the history of Birmingham inventions, so Mason became to Elkington."
As in his Perry associations, Josiah first intended remaining anonymous, but "the great and incessant call for money in the business needed my personal care". He planned Elkington's showrooms in Newhall Street, now the Science Museum, to display the electro-plated spoons, forks, and other items made in their Brearley Street factory. The Great Exhibition in 1851 fmally clinched the new method over the old hand-plating, and Elkington's went from strength to strength. Mason's partnership with Elkington was dissolved in 1856, and in 1875 he sold his Lancaster Street pen and split-ring premises to Perry and Co. Averse to the public eye, he shunned public office with the exception of a directorship in the Birmingham Banking Company, formed after a failure in 1866, and when, after the opening of his orphanage, Birmingham Town Council wanted to put a statue of him in the Art Gallery his reluctance killed the project.
On 19th September 1860, without any ceremony, he laid the foundation stone of his great orphanage after many troubles with a committee of clergymen because he wanted it to remain unsectarian. On 31st July 1869 Josiah Mason formally opened the
orphanage for 200 children. It reached a peak of 350 in 1889, the number steadily declining until its final demolition in 1964, when the proud and graceful tower fell on 16th June, the anniversary of the· founder's death. Mason is said to have known all his 'children' by name. His instruction to the staff was inscribed on the glass of his mausoleum:
They will be what you will make them,
Make them wise and make them good,
Make them strong for time of trial;
Teach them temperance, self-denial,
Patience, kindness, fortitude.
Sir Josiah Mason was granted his knighthood in 1872, and though the court presentation was dispensed with because of his age and ill-health, his greatest work was still to come. Having conveyed property to the value of £100,000 to trustees, on 23rd February 1875, his 80th birthday, he laid the foundation stone of the Science College in Edmund Street, which was to blossom into the University of Birmingham. Sir Josiah died at Norwood House, Erdington, on 16th June 1881, aged 86. His personal motto was "Do Deeds of Love", and well he had lived up to it.