When Channel 4 adapted Anthony Powell’s series of 12 novels A Dance to the Music of Time in 1997, the High Tory satirist Auberon Waugh thought they had missed a trick: the dialogue should have been delivered in Brummie accents. ‘Bron’ was getting two barbs in here: one against the author, friend of his father Evelyn; and one against a city he despised even more. Its brutalist architecture, industrial patina and ‘vulgar’ accent were targets for unflattering quips and asides throughout his many columns.
Another satirist, every bit as biting, took the opposite view. Jonathan Meades loves Birmingham, its “aptitude for substance over cosmetic style”, its “self-deprecating, unboastful, and peculiarly ironic humour”, and, most of all, its accent: English as it was before the great vowel shift. It is the closest thing we have to Shakespeare’s English; the Bard knew the northern reaches of the Forest of Arden on which Birmingham was sited. Meades asks you to declaim Polonius’s “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” in Brummie. It makes perfect sense. An all-Brummie Hamlet would be quite the show.
Birmingham not only attracts satirists, it creates them. Christopher Spencer, aka ‘Cold War Steve’, has become the cold-eyed visual chronicler of Brexit Britain and its post-pandemic wasteland. His bleak, biting collages of two-bit celebrities, floundering mendacious politicians, and Harold Shipman, mark him out as the heir to Hogarth, to Rowlandson, to Gillray. He has tapped into the radical, non-conformist tradition of Birmingham.
Birmingham did not become a city until 1889, when it was already the dynamo of late Victorian Britain. It was a mere municipal borough when it became the “best run city in the world” under its charismatic mayor, Joseph Chamberlain — a self-made dandy, whose fortune derived from screws; a political liberal with a loathing for the aristocracy. In that, he was true Brummie.
Birmingham’s identity was forged, literally, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the centre of a trading and manufacturing network built on iron and coal from its hinterland — what would become known as the Black Country. It was strongly Protestant: a Brummie, John Rogers, compiled the first authorised edition of the Bible in English and was martyred for his sins in 1555 during the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary. It became an arsenal for the Parliamentary forces during the Civil Wars, attacked by the Royalist Prince Rupert in 1643 — an event satirised in the tract Prince Rupert’s burning love for England, discovered in Birmingham’s flames.
When Charles II was restored, Nonconformism came under fire. But the Act of Uniformity of 1662 — and the Five Mile Act that followed, banning dissenting ministers from within five miles of a borough — didn’t affect Birmingham, a thriving metropole but an unincorporated one. In fact, the repression worked in its favour, as it became a haven of dissent, nonconformist in every sense, welcoming those who were different. And then it changed the world.
If we can point to the Ur-moment of the Industrial Revolution, it is surely 1709, in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, where the Brummie Abraham Darby constructed the world’s first blast furnace using coke — abundant in the Black Country — to make cast iron. The nearby town of Ironbridge made his achievement tangible.
The Industrial Revolution in Birmingham and the Black Country was different to that in the North of England. There, it was about textile manufacturer on a grand scale, chewing and spitting out a low-paid, low-skilled workforce. In Birmingham and the Black Country, it was built on highly-skilled, highly-paid specialisms, incremental and adaptable. In the 100 years after 1750, Birmingham registered three times the patents of any other British settlement. Matthew Boulton’s Soho Manufactory, of which his Soho House residency remains in the city’s North-West, is where he teamed up with Scotsman James Watt to produce an improved steam engine, central to British manufacturing prowess at the time. No more would mankind be limited to the energies of hand, of water, of beast.
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