Today, as the children had the
day off from school, Leah said let’s go and do something fun, and suggested a
visit to a National Trust site located right in town – one to which even she
had never been. ‘An atmospheric glimpse into the lives
of the ordinary people who helped make Birmingham an extraordinary city. On a
fascinating guided tour, step back in time at Birmingham's last surviving court
of back to backs anywhere in the West Midlands – examples of the thousands of
similar houses built literally back-to-back around a communal courtyard, for
the rapidly emerging populations of emigrants to Britain's expanding industrial
towns. Moving from the 1840s through to the
1970s, discover the lives of some of the former residents who crammed into
these small houses to live and work. With fires alight in the grates, and
sounds and smells (aka, kerosene lamps – our first impression was that we
smelled gas!) from the past, experience an evocative and intimate insight into
life at the Back to Backs.’ Sound interesting?
Oh, just you wait – more to come!
Other families had a similar idea of taking advantage
of the free day, so Leah had agreed to teach piano lessons first thing. The
plan was to pick me up around 8:30 to sit with the kids – Martin gone for his
regularly scheduled day of school, but this time for prep, so no students. (A
similar scenario took place at the opposite end of the day – Martin still at
school, for an Open Night where parents had the chance to visit their
children’s school – when once again Honey Me was called into action. As Leah
was driving me back home later that evening, I noted that it had been twelve hours
since she’d first collected me earlier this morning.)
We rode the train to town – now old hat for me, by
this point – and started off our adventure by doing a little shopping. (Leah
began apologizing that as they were in need of a couple things, would it be
alright if we got that out of the way first – hoping that would be okay. ‘Leah,’
I said, ‘are you kidding me? You must not really know me yet!’ Me, shopping?
Oh, please – we’re talkin’ Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch thing here – do we
HAVE to?!) The Briar Patch – ‘er, I mean the Bullring and other shopping areas around
town – was full of other families and people out and about to make the best of
a good weather day (7°C). There was a perfect nippiness to the air to herald in
the pre-season atmosphere, and you could see your breath, though it was not
excessively chilly. Katya and Oliver, and I! got new knit hats to mark the
occasion (see below).
One of the special joys of walking around today
was to explore the German Market, the stalls of which were spread up and down
several pedestrianized city streets – all out of doors, of course. I had been
anticipating this event for months, ever since Leah had first intrigued me with
tales of this once-a-year, seasonal treat. Craftsmen from all over Germany (Skilled
tradesmen marketing their wares – see the connection below?) had come to town just
before the holidays to sell to their adoring public. Pretty fun – food, goods, crafts - and then, of
course, there’s the wobbly pops. Leah says that this evening, marking the opening
night of the celebration, there will be plenty of this stuff going down. (The
closest thing it brings to my mind is the drinking stations set up out of doors
in downtown Salt Lake when the Olympics came to town.)
My main interest in the German Market started back when I mentioned to Leah that I was in sore need of a new pair of house shoes, to replace the holey suede moccasins I had insisted upon bringing over from home. (Turned out they were no more necessary than probably one third of what I brought, thinking I HAD to have them! Of course - and I should have known - you can buy everything you need at a charity shop.) She’d said, ‘Oh, that’s exactly the kind of thing they have there – leatherworks! Just you wait – they’re wonderful!’ I suppose we both were anticipating that after all this wait I would purchase them then and there. (However, she had also given the caveat: they’re not cheap!) Well, she was right – on all accounts. When we finally found them, among the many stalls, they were gorgeous – finely made from buckskin, with no tacky plastic bumps or soles on the bottom. Sadly, I didn’t get them. Ah, too bad – the money thing, you know.
My main interest in the German Market started back when I mentioned to Leah that I was in sore need of a new pair of house shoes, to replace the holey suede moccasins I had insisted upon bringing over from home. (Turned out they were no more necessary than probably one third of what I brought, thinking I HAD to have them! Of course - and I should have known - you can buy everything you need at a charity shop.) She’d said, ‘Oh, that’s exactly the kind of thing they have there – leatherworks! Just you wait – they’re wonderful!’ I suppose we both were anticipating that after all this wait I would purchase them then and there. (However, she had also given the caveat: they’re not cheap!) Well, she was right – on all accounts. When we finally found them, among the many stalls, they were gorgeous – finely made from buckskin, with no tacky plastic bumps or soles on the bottom. Sadly, I didn’t get them. Ah, too bad – the money thing, you know.
Grabbing a bite of lunch at Gregg’s – the Home of
Fresh Baking (nothing similar exactly to compare it to back home – kind of like
the fast food aisle at 7-11 or something along those lines: sandwiches, pastry
stuffs like pasties and sausage rolls, individual-sized pizzas, sides of pastas
and salads, drinks, savory snacks and desserts, etc., all right there for you
to grab and eat on the run. With an little extra time before our guided tour at
the Trust site, the Wards took a little breather in the central library while I
took the opportunity to pop into the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, conveniently located
just across the square from the library, for a look at the ‘Love and Death’ visiting
exhibition from the Tate Gallery of Victorian paintings that I’d been dying to
see. Wow, now THERE is a beautiful stone edifice! Built in 1885, the
collections cover fine art and applied arts, archaeology and ethnography,
natural history, social history. One special claim of fame is that it houses
the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite works in the world. Of course, my
visit this day was nothing if not cursory – with a promise to myself to return
again with adequate time in front of me. If that guard stationed at the front entrance
had known how long I WASN’T going to spend there today, he probably would have
turned me about face and said, ‘Skedaddle, girl - come back next time, when you
have yourself some more time!’
Wild roses in Victoria paintings represent love, in
particular its intermingled pleasure and pain. The most famous of all the visiting
works on display is the Lady of Shalott, from a Victorian ballad by the same
name, by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. ‘I am half sick of shadows,’ reads
the subheading. In the scenario, the Lady of Shallot condemned by a sorcerer is
to live in a tower works unceasingly at her loom, unable to leave or even to
look out her window, but instead can merely sense the world indirectly thru the
reflections of her looking glass. Sitting wearily, she is compelled endlessly
to weave a tapestry of the scenes of life going on outside her window, experienced
only as ‘shadows’ in her mirror. Another painting I really liked was Saint Eulalia,
also by Waterhouse. It involves the story of a 13-year-old Roman Christian
virgin who suffered martyrdom by
torture in Barcelona during the Roman persecution
of Christians during the reign of the emperor Diocletian.
As mentioned, our primary goal in coming to town
had been to visit the back to backs – a historical site to preserve in time a
type of housing that sprang up just prior to the time of the Industrial
Revolution. What it comes down to basically is some residential developer’s
dream who maybe had a great idea on paper but that turned out to be a BAD idea
in practice – to cram as many people as possible into a very small space. But who knows, maybe he was one of the
earliest proponents of affordable housing (somehow, though, I doubt he was the
first – it’s been going on ad infinitum, right?!) He was either that or a
get-rich-quick artist: throw them up, sell them fast, then get the heck out of
town! – taking advantage of the needs of the common labourer.
By the early 1800s, England was still a rural nation
with 80% of its populace living in the countryside. Most people were farmers or
spun wool or cotton to be woven into cloth. Soon new machines were invented
that could do these jobs in a fraction of the time – the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution, when England changed from a rural society to an urban
one. This left many out of work, who in turn flocked to the towns in search of
jobs in the new industries. By the middle of the nineteenth century, over 50%
of the population now lived in towns and cities. As people began moving en mass
from their prior rural existences, the need for more places to live for the
growing citizenry resulted from this massive influx.
Back to backs, a form of terraced house in which the backs of the houses were
joined to another set that had their fronts on the opposite side, were one such
housing arrangement. This type of tall, compact 2 to 3-story dwellings with
narrow stairways and paper thin walls only existed in the industrialized north,
we learned, never making it as far south as London. Usually of low quality and high density, because three of the
four walls of the house were shared with other buildings and therefore,
contained no doors or windows, they were notoriously ill-lit and poorly
ventilated with sanitation of a very low standard. Infant mortality was
extremely high. Often there was no internal staircase and access to the upper
bedroom was by the way of a 'fixed' wall ladder leading through an aperture in
the ceiling.
Identified by a number over the
entryway, each complex was grouped into a unit known as a court, due to the
communal courtyard in the center of the project, where the one privy was
located. If you lived on the front of the court, you had to exit your house and
walk around till you got to the entryway to the courtyard. The particular block
of houses we visited today is known as Court 15, as numbered on the small
plaque over the door to the courtyard.
The tour leads you through different time periods in adjoining flats (1840s, 1870s, 1930s, and 1970s), each of the four adjoining flats is decorated and furnished to represent a different era. Our tour guide was great and had a lot of fascinating information to share – but then I like history a lot – kids, unfortunately, got WAY bored, naturally! A couple examples are that in the 1840s, the average person spent 60% of his income on food, while we by comparison spend 11%! Also we saw how the mattress and pillows at the head of the bed during the earliest times were set so that a person slept more upright than we are used to doing. Supposedly it was believed that if the devil saw you sleeping flat he might think you were dead and take your soul away!
The first to own and inhabit the
back to backs were craftsman who came from the country to market their goods in
an expanding urban atmosphere. These included skilled trades persons who lived in the homes with their families, often including
their form of home/cottage industry. Prior to the time of the big factories,
these included such areas as button making, glasswork, woodwork, leatherwork,
tailoring, also skilled craftsmen in the jewellery and small metal trades (for
instance, one of the homes showed the compact work space of a clock hand maker
who sold his product to the nearby jewellery quarter). Most worked in a small
workshop in a bedroom or in the courtyard: on our tour we saw small workshops
in whichever room they could find a little spare space – for locksmiths and bellhangers, a pearl button
driller and a glass eye maker (mostly for taxidermy but some for human use,
also).
By the
1900s, the ground floors had been converted into shops. Services offered from
the homes we visited involved a cycle maker, a hairdresser, a ticket writer, a
fruiterer and a furniture dealer. (I have to mention several times that
amazingly these dwellings, though terribly inadequate, housed families up until
the 70s – the 1970s!)
All rooms
were extremely small, especially the bedrooms – you can well imagine, as they
were not considered to be the most important rooms in the house – and the
stairways leading to the upper stories were ridiculously narrow and twisted.
The female children slept in the same room as their parents, while the boys had
their own little room, where they slept top to tail, up to five in a bed. As if
this weren’t crowded enough for a single family, people often had boards as
well, to bring in a little extra cash.
For instance, we witnessed in one bedroom, where 5 male children slept
top to tail in a single bed, that a cloth curtain had been drawn across a corner
where a duo of lodgers slept. Walls were one brick
thick, and there were no locks. You can imagine that EVERYBODY knew everybody
else’s business. In Court 15 over 60 persons inhabited 11
houses. People had large families, and children married early – as young as 15
– at which time they moved in with one family or the other, until they got on
their feet, and, with approximately a baby a year, the process began all over
again, multiplying
as it went.
Speaking of privacy, imagine the one little
privy out in the courtyard – bedpans were used at night. There was basically no
sanitation - an open drain running the length of the brick paved yard was the extent of it (while the ‘night
soil man’ made his rounds while people slept, to take excrement away)!
Epidemics of cholera and typhoid were rife. Twenty-three was the average life
expectancy, even in this fairly modern age. No one was able to figure out why
the infant mortality rate was so high (at one point it was blamed on the condition
of the air – industrial age pollution and all). (The court may originally have
had a water pump, and by the 1880s, a single tap had been installed. Sometime in the 1930s, two washhouses and
outbuildings were added to the courtyard.
As the male population
earned the right to vote in England in 1867, social change began to take place,
with both reformatory education and health acts passed. Demands for clean water
became a major issue all across the country. Public baths and parks for
recreation were established and through the influence of Joseph Chamberlain (British politician and statesman, who began both his
professional and political career in Birmingham, and unlike most major politicians
of the time, was a self-made businessman and had attended neither Oxford or
Cambridge universities; Winston Churchill is said to have written that he was
the man "who made the weather") the first instances of piping clean
water over from Wales began.
In the
1930s, following the end of WWI and the eventual economic downturn, ‘make do
and mend’ became the government’s motto. (In America the similar core motto for frugal living was {and still is!} ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without’ – heard it from grandpa many a time!) Our guide
used a fun phrase I had never heard: ‘on your uppers,’ meaning when you’re low
on money – in other words, hard up. He
also told us that nobody paid upfront for items at the grocers, bakers,
butchers) etc. but rather settled with them at the end of the week after they’d
gotten paid. (Speaking of money, it came up in the tour that Lloyds, my British
banking institution of choice, started life in Birmingham. Side note to that:
can you believe that when I go to deposit funds from my American account, the
teller at the bank has to fill out a two-page long, four- page carbon copied thick
form – BY HAND, of all things. I just stand there in amazement each time: ‘come
on,’ I think, but don’t say – ‘in today’s electronic environment, you’re still
doing this?!’ Kind of like them still stamping the due date in my book at the library.)
A similar governmental campaign during this period of time
was the ‘Dig for Victory,’ in which the idea of ‘growing your own’ became the
fashion. The whole of Britain's home front
(rolled over to America, too – the church’s encouragement for everyone to have
some level of a home garden is an offshoot from this era) were encouraged to
transform their private gardens into mini-allotments. It was believed,
quite rightly, that this would not only provide essential crops for families
and neighbourhoods alike, but help the war effort by freeing up valuable space
for war materials on the merchant shipping convoys. Indeed, over just a
few months, Britain saw its green and pleasant land transformed with gardens,
flowerbeds and parkland dug up for the plantation of vegetables. (I’ve seen
evidence of the residual effects of this movement in every place I’ve lived –
this type of large communal garden is known as ‘the allotments.’)
Throughout the north, houses
of this type had become common in Victoria inner city areas – Birmingham, Bradford,
Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, and Nottingham. This style continued to be built
right up until 1940 when it was determined that houses should be of a higher
quality. The advent of low-income council housing after the First World War resulted in councils organising
programmes of slum clearances which were all part of post-war redevelopment.
These procedures saw the beginning of mass demolition of back-to-back houses in
the 1920s, which continued through the 1960s. Until razed, most existing
buildings remained in residential use up until the 1970s - with pretty much ALL of the families living here 'on their uppers' - when they were
declared as unfit, and by the 1970s the vast majority of back to backs had been
cleared. Occupants were rehoused in new council houses and flats, some in redeveloped inner-city areas,
while most were moved to new housing estates (subdivisions). Restored by the Birmingham Conservation Trust, Court 15
was spared the axe (aka, the bull-dozer) – not once, but TWICE!
[Sidenote: In one of the latest-in-time back to back
cottages we visited, the child’s bedroom had colorful cowboy wall-paper (it was
especially interesting to see how decor and facilities changed through the
decades) that instantly took me back in my own life. Looking just as I remember
it in my childhood, it exemplified my growing up years. The guide asked if
anyone knew who the cowboy on the print was? I said, Gene Autry? Nope, Roy
Rogers, on – and with – his horse, Trigger! (Then he threw out even more of a
challenge and asked if I knew his dog’s name. ‘No, not hardly – I was straining
to put my finger on his horse’s name!’ For you trivia buffs, it‘s Bullet, the
Wonder Dog. Gosh, I should have remembered that!) I guess cowboy and Indian
stuff REALLY caught on big over here in England (kind of like the Osmonds in
their day!) – every kid had a cap gun, and a cowboy hat and chaps. (I know I
did!). He told us that Roy Rogers and his wife Dale Evans came to the main entertainment
center in downtown Birmingham, the Hippodrome (practically within a stone’s
throw of where we now were standing), where they performed for two nights along
with the rest of their Wild West entourage. Like I said, that was BIG stuff
back in the day! * * Today when a man asked me where in America I was from, and I had answered, Utah, he said, 'oh you have caribou there, don't you?' I said, 'no, that would be Alaska - but we DO have elk and deer.' He said, 'no, cowboys!' 'Ooooh, cowboys. I get it.' Why didn't you SAY so?!]
Photos_ 1- avid Selfridges shoppers
2- new hats all around
3- ‘several times resurrected’ moccasins (even I’m convinced - time to hit the dust!)
4- German Market with avid shoppers (sorry, not the best shot to envision the stalls, but the promise of more to come in the future)
5-7 Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
most famous of the visiting Tate Gallery pieces, The Lady of Shalott, J. W. Waterhouse, 1888
also St Eulalia, J.W.W., 1885
8- plat of Court 15 – upper right hand corner of drawing, slash separates the unit from the next (comprising spaces 1-3, 50-53, 24-38)
9- the courtyard of Court 15, intersection Inge and Hurst Streets (as opposed to 10 Downey Street)
10-11 helping the war effort: ‘use it up, etc’ and ‘dig for victory
12- the wild and woolly west - not even REAL Indians - hah! (everything was in black&white then, you know!)
