Rides on Railways Part 15

The pa.s.sion which the mechanics of Birmingham have for investing in land has rendered land near that town dearer than in parallel situations near London.

THE BLACK COUNTRY.

WALSALL, DUDLEY, WEDNESBURY, DARLASTON.

The first diverging railway after leaving Handsworth, on the road to the north, is what, for want of a better name, is called the South Staffordshire, which connects Birmingham with Dudley, Walsall, Lichfield, and Tamworth, thus uniting the most purely agricultural with the most thoroughly manufacturing districts, and especially with that part of the great coal-field which is locally known as the "Black Country." In this Black Country, including West Bromwich, Wednesbury, Dudley, and Darlaston, Bilston, Wolverhampton, and several minor villages, a perpetual twilight reigns during the day, and during the night fires on all sides light up the dark landscape with a fiery glow. The pleasant green of pastures is almost unknown, the streams, in which no fishes swim, are black and unwholesome; the natural dead flat is often broken by huge hills of cinders and spoil from the mines; the few trees are stunted and blasted; no birds are to be seen, except a few smoky sparrows; and for miles on miles a black waste spreads around, where furnaces continually smoke, steam-engines thud and hiss, and long chains clank, while blind gin-horses walk their doleful round. From time to time you pa.s.s a cl.u.s.ter of deserted roofless cottages of dingiest brick, half-swallowed up in sinking pits or inclining to every point of the compa.s.s, while the timbers point up like the ribs of a half-decayed corpse. The majority of the natives of this Tartarian region are in full keeping with the scenery--savages, without the grace of savages, coa.r.s.ely clad in filthy garments, with no change on week-days and Sundays, they converse in a language belarded with fearful and disgusting oaths, which can scarcely be recognized as the same as that of civilized England.

On working days few men are to be seen, they are in the pits or the ironworks, but women are met on the high-road clad in men's once white linsey-woolsey coats and felt hats, driving and cursing strings of donkeys laden with coals or iron rods for the use of the nailers.

On certain rare holidays these people wash their faces, clothe themselves in decent garments, and, since the opening of the South Staffordshire Railway, take advantage of cheap excursion trains, go down to Birmingham to amuse themselves and make purchases. It would be a useful lesson for any one who is particularly well satisfied with the moral, educational, and religious state of his countrymen, to make a little journey through this Black Country.

He will find that the amiable enthusiasts who meet every May at Exeter Hall to consider on the best means of converting certain aboriginal tribes in Africa, India, and the Islands of the Pacific, need not go so far to find human beings more barbarous and yet much more easily reclaimed.

The people of this district are engaged in coal-mining, in ironworks, in making nails, and many other articles, or parts of articles, for the Birmingham trade. Their wages are, for the most part, good; fuel is cheap; well supplied markets, and means of obtaining the best clothing are close at hand. But, within sixty years a vast dense population has been collected together in districts which were but thinly inhabited as long as the value lay on the surface, instead of in the bowels of the earth. The people gathered together and found neither churches, nor schools, nor laws, nor customs, nor means for cleanliness at first, nor even an effective police to keep order. And thus they became one of the most ignorant, brutal, depraved, drunken, unhealthy populations in the kingdom, unless it be a set of people in the same occupations in the neighbourhood of Manchester.

We shall never forget, some five-and-twenty years ago, pa.s.sing near Bilston on a summer's holiday, and seeing a great red, pied bull foaming, and roaring, and marching round a ring in which he was chained, while a crowd of men, each with a demoniacal-looking bulldog in his arms, and a number of ragged women, with their hair about their ears, some of them also carrying bull-dog pups, yelled about the baited bull. It gave us an awful fright, and haunted our childish dreams for years after.

The first change forced upon the governing cla.s.ses, by feelings of self- protection was an organized police, and the "Black" people are now more disgusting than dangerous. The cholera of 1832, which decimated Bilston and Wednesbury, did something toward calling attention to the grievous social and sanitary wants of this district. In that pestilence several clergymen and medical men died, like heroes, in the discharge of their duties. Some churches were built, some schools established; but an immense work remains to be done. Bull-baiting has been put down, but no rational amus.e.m.e.nts have been subst.i.tuted for that brutal and exciting sport.

In the northern coal fields, near Newcastle-on-Tyne especially, we have noticed that when the miner ascends from the pit in the evening, his first care is to wash himself from head to foot, and then to put on a clean suit of white flannel. As you pa.s.s along the one street of a pitman's village, you will see the father reading a Chambers' Journal or a cheap religious magazine at the door of his cottage while smoking a pipe, and nursing a child or two on his knee; and through the open door, a neat four-post bed and an oak or mahogany chest of drawers bear witness to his frugality.

In Wednesbury, Bilston, and all that district, when work is over you find the men drinking in their dirty clothes and with grimy faces at the beer-shop of the "b.u.t.tey," that is to say, the contractor or middleman under whom they work, according to the system of the country, and the women hanging about the doors of their dingy dwellings, gossiping or quarreling,--the old furies and the young slatterns.

In the face of such savagery, so evidently the result of defective education, two opposite and extreme parties in the State, the anti-church Mialls and the pro-church Anthony Denisons, combine to oppose the multiplication of education that teaches decency if it teaches nothing else.

One great step has been made by the Health of Town's Act, which is about to be applied to some of these coal towns; and railways have rendered the whole district so accessible that no foul spot can long remain unknown or unnoticed.

WALSALL, eight miles from Birmingham, the first town in our way, which may be reached directly by following the South Staffordshire, or by an omnibus, travelling half-a-mile from Bescot Bridge, lies among green fields, out of the bounds of the mining country, although upon the edge of the Warwickshire and Staffordshire coalfield,--indeed the parliamentary borough includes part of the rough population just described. It is very clean, without antiquities or picturesque beauties, and contains nothing to attract visitors except its manufactures, of which the best known is cheap saddlery for the American, West Indian, and Australian markets. They make the leather and wooden parts, as well as stirrups and bridles; also gunlocks, bits, spurs, spades, hinges, screws, files, edge tools, and there is one steel-pen manufactory, besides many articles connected with the Birmingham trade, either finished or unfinished, the number of which is constantly increasing.

Walsall is celebrated for its pig-market, a celebrity which railroads have not destroyed, as was expected, but rather increased. Special arrangements for comfortably disembarking these, the most interesting strangers who visit Walsall, have been made at the railway station.

The princ.i.p.al church, with a handsome spire, stands upon a hill, and forms a landmark to the surrounding country. The ascent to it, by a number of steps, has, according to popular prejudice, produced an effect upon the legs of the inhabitants more strengthening than elegant, which has originated the provincial phrase of "Walsall-legged." But this is, no doubt, a libel on the understandings of the independent borough.

The houses are chiefly built of brick, but it seems as if some years ago the inhabitants had been seized with an architectural disease, which has left its marks in the shape of an eruption of stucco porticoes, and one or two pretensious mansions, externally resembling jails or infirmaries, internally boasting halls which bear the same proportion to the living rooms as Falstaff's gallon of sack to his halfpennyworth of bread. No doubt there are persons whom this style of house exactly suits, the portico represents their pride, the parlour their economy. What was intended for the Walsall public library consists of a thin closet behind a gigantic Ionic portico, now tottering to its fall; and in like manner a perfectly dungeon-like effect has been given to the princ.i.p.al hotel by another portico, which affords a much better idea of the charges than of the accommodation to be found within.

As a general rule in travelling, we pa.s.s by all hotels with porticoes to take refuge in more modest Green Dragons or Blue Boars.

Walsall has a munic.i.p.al corporation of six aldermen and eighteen councillors.

The Reform Bill, to increase the troubles of this innocent borough, placed it in schedule B, and gave it the privilege of making one M.P.

Fierce contests at every general election have been the result, in which some blood, much money, and more beer, have been expended. But neither party has thought it worth while to make the education of the savages of the Black Country a piece of politics, and, if any one did, he would only be torn to pieces between Church and Dissenters.

DUDLEY in Worcestershire, about six miles from Walsall by the South Staffordshire Railway, has a castle and more than one legend for the antiquarian, a cave, and limestone pits full of fossils for the geologist, and especial interest for the historical economist, being the centre of the district where the first successful attempts were made to smelt iron by coal,--a process which has contributed, almost as much as our success in textile manufactures, to give this small island a wealth and power which a merely agricultural non-exporting community could never have attained.

Iron was manufactured with charcoal in England from the time of the Romans till the middle of the eighteenth century, when the timber of many counties had been entirely exhausted by the process. In 1558, in the reign of Elizabeth, it was enacted that "no timber of the breadth of one foot square at the stub, and growing within fourteen miles of the sea, or any part of the river Thames or Severn, or any other river, creek, or stream, by the which carriage is commonly used by boat or other vessel, to any part of the sea, shall be converted to coal, or fuel for making iron;" {125a} and, in 1581, a further Act was pa.s.sed to prevent the destruction of timber. "For remedy whereof it was enacted that no new iron works should be erected within twenty-two miles of London nor within fourteen miles of the river Thames, nor in the several parts of Suss.e.x near the sea therein named. This Act not to extend to the woods of Christopher Durrell, in the parish of Newdigate, within the weald of Surrey, which woods have been coppiced by him for the use of his iron works in those parts."

At the same period, we find from a letter in the Stradling Correspondence, {125b} that, while iron was made in Surrey, Suss.e.x, and Kent, where not a pound is now manufactured, in Glamorganshire, at present a great seat of iron manufacture, iron was so scarce that an anvil was leased out at the rent of 3s. 4d. a year, {126} a rent at which, taking the then value of money, a very tolerable anvil could now be purchased.

When the woods of the kingdom began to be exhausted, attention was turned to pit coal, which had long been in use for fuel in the counties where it was plentifully found. A curious account of the first successful experiments is to be found, told in very quaint language, in the Metallum Martis of Dudley Dudley, son of Lord Edward Dudley (an ancestor of the late Earl Dudley and Ward, and of the present Lord Ward, who now enjoys the very estates referred to, and derives a princely income from the mineral treasures, the true value of which was discovered by his unfortunate ancestor), published in the reign of Charles II.

This Mr. Dudley was an early victim of the patent laws, which, to this day, have proved to be for the benefit of lawyers and officials, and the tantalization of true inventors and discoverers. The following extracts contain his story, and enable us to compare the present with the then state of iron manufacture:--

"Having former knowledge and delight in ironworks of my father's when I was but a youth, afterwards, at twenty years old, was I fetched from Oxford, then of Baliol College, anno 1619, to look after and manage three ironworks of my father's, one furnace and two forges in the chace of Pensnel, in Worcestershire; but wood and charcoal growing very scanty, and pit-coals in great quant.i.ties abounding near the furnace, did induce me to alter my furnace and to attempt by my new invention, the making of iron with pit-coal, and found at my trial or blast, facere est addere inventioni. After I had proved by a second blast and trial, the feasibility of making iron with pit- coal and sea-coal, I found by my new invention the quality good and profitable, but the quant.i.ty did not exceed above three tons a week."

After this, the inventor obtained a patent from King James I., for thirty-one years in the nineteenth year of his reign. "But the year following the grant there was so great a flood of rain,--to this day called the great May-day flood,--that it ruined the author's ironworks and inventions, and at a market town called Sturbridge, in comitatu Wigorniae, one resolute man was carried from the bridge in the day time." "As soon as the author had repaired his works, he was commanded to send all sorts of bar iron up to the Tower of London, fit for making of muskets and carbines, {127} and the iron being so tried by artists and smiths, that the ironmasters and ironmongers who had complained that the author's iron was not merchantable, were silenced until the twenty-first of King James." "At the then parliament all monopolies were made null, and divers of the ironmeasters endeavoured to bring the invention of making iron with pit-coal within the compa.s.s of a monopoly; but the Lord Dudley and the author did prevail, yet the patent was limited to continue but fourteen years."

This exception in the Statute of Monopolies, which incontestably proves the claim of the Dudley family to the honour of having invented the art of smelting iron with coal, runs in the following terms:--"Provided also that this Act shall not extend to, or be prejudicial to, a graunt or priviledge for the melting of iron ewer, and of maling the same into sea coals or pit coals, by His Majesties letters Patent under the Great Seale of England, made or graunted to Edward Lord Dudley."

After the pa.s.sing of the Act, it seems that Dudley Dudley made "great store of iron and sold it at 12 pounds a ton, and also cast-iron wares, as brewing cisterns, pots, mortars;" but, being ousted of his works, he again set up a furnace at "Himley, in the county of Stafford." Himley Hall is the present residence of Lord Ward, the representative of the Dudley family. From that time forward, the life of the unfortunate inventor was but one series of misfortunes. Under Charles I. he got into law-suits, was the victim of riots set on by the charcoal ironmasters, and was eventually lodged in prison in the Compter. Then came the Great Rebellion, during which he had the disadvantage of being a Royalist as well as an inventor, and of having "Cromwell, with Major Wildman and many of his officers, as opponents in rival experiments tried in the Forest of Dean, where they employed an ingenious gla.s.smaster, Edward Dagney, an Italian then living in Bristow," but they failed. And so he was utterly ruined. On the accession of Charles II., he pet.i.tioned, and eventually sent in the statement from which the preceding extracts have been made, but apparently without any success. The king was too busy making dukes and melting the louis d'ors of his French pension, to think of anything so common as iron or so tiresome as grat.i.tude.

The iron manufacture, for want of the art of smelting by coal, and of a supply of wood, which the march of agriculture daily diminished, dwindled away, until, in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was revived at Colebrook Dale by the Darbys. In the intermediate period, we were dependent on Russia, Spain, and Sweden for the chief part of the iron used in manufactures.

But one of the most curious pa.s.sages in Dudley's Metallum Martis, is the following picture of the Dudley coal-field:--"Now let me show some reasons that induced me to undertake these inventions. Well knowing that within ten miles of Dudley Castle, there be near 20,000 smiths of all sorts, and many ironworks within that circle decayed for want of wood (yet formerly a mighty woodland country); secondly, Lord Dudley's woods and works decayed, but pit- coal and iron stone or mines abounding upon his lands, but of little use; thirdly, because most of the coal mines in these parts are coals ten, eleven, and twelve yards thick; fourthly, under this great thickness of coal are very many sorts of ironstone mines; fifthly, that one-third part of the coals gotten under the ground are small, when the colliers are forced to sink pits for getting of ten yards thick, and are of little use in an inland country, unless it might be made use of by making iron therewith; sixthly, these colliers must cast these coals and slack out of their ways, which, becoming moist, heat naturally, and kindle in the middle of these great heaps, often sets the coal works on fire and flaming out of the pits, and continue burning like AEtna in Sicily or Hecla in the Indies." (sic.)

At present, for more than ten miles round Dudley Castle, iron works of one kind or another are constantly at work; no remains of mighty woodland are to be found. The value of the ten yard coal is fully appreciated, but the available quant.i.ty is far from having been worked out. The untouched mineral wealth of Lord Ward in this district was valued, ten years ago, at a million sterling. The small coal is no longer wasted, but carefully raised from the pits and conveyed by the numerous ca.n.a.ls, tram-roads, and railroads, to iron works, gla.s.s works, and chemical works. But still heaps of waste, moistened by rain, do smoke by day, and flaming by night in conjunction with hundreds of fiery furnaces and natural gases blazing, do produce, on a night's journey from Dudley to Wolverhampton, not the effect of one AEtna or Hecla, but of a broad "inferno," from which even Dante might have gathered some burning notions.

The political croakers who are constantly predicting that the last inevitable change, whether it be a Munic.i.p.al Corporation Reform, a t.i.the Commutation, or a Corn Tax Repeal, will prove the ruin of England, should study the geographical march of our manufactures, and mark how, on the whole population, the rise of a new staple in one district, or the invention of a new art, constantly creates a new demand for labour. The exhaustion of our forests, instead of destroying, founded one great element of our world-wide commercial influence.

We make no apology for this digression, knowing that, to many minds, facts connected with the rise of the iron trade will have as much interest as notes on the scene of a battle or the birthplace of a second-rate poet, besides, as we omit to say what we do not know, it is necessary we should say what we do.

Besides mining and smelting iron ore, a considerable population in and around Dudley is engaged in the manufacture of gla.s.s and of nails; the latter being a domestic manufacture, at which men, women, and children all work at home.

The castle dates from a Saxon prince, Dodo, A.D. 700; but, like the bird of the same name, the original building is extinct. But very interesting ruins of a Norman gateway, tower, and keep, are in existence; and form, with the caves, a show-place leased by the South Staffordshire as an attraction to their excursion trains. The caves are lighted up on special occasions, and were honoured by a visit from the geologists of the British a.s.sociation when last they met at Birmingham. A fossil, called the Dudley locust, is found in great quant.i.ties and varieties in the limestone quarries, which form part of the mineral wealth of the neighbourhood.

The broad gauge line through Birmingham and Oxford will shortly afford Dudley a direct and rapid communication with London. To pa.s.sengers this will be a great convenience, but a mode of conveyance so unwieldy, clumsy, and costly, is singularly ill fitted for a mineral district, as experience among the narrow tram-ways of the north has amply proved.

Dudley returns one member to Parliament; whose politics must, it is supposed, be those of the holder of the Ward estate.

Returning from Dudley through Walsall to Bescot Bridge, the rail pursues its course through a mining country to Bilston and Wolverhampton. On the road we pa.s.s in sight of the Birmingham ca.n.a.l, one of the finest works of the kind in the kingdom. An enormous sum was spent in improving the navigation, in order to prove that any railway was unnecessary. The proprietors, under the influence of their officials, a snug family party, shut their eyes and spent their money in opposing the inevitable progress of locomotive power to the last possible moment. Even when the first London and Birmingham railway was nearly open, a scheme for a new ca.n.a.l was industriously hawked round the county; and, although there were not enough subscribers found to execute the work, a small percentage was sufficient to furnish a surveyor's new house very handsomely. Still, there is no probability of the ca.n.a.l ever ceasing to be an important aid to the coal trade in heavy freights.

WEDNESBURY, {130} p.r.o.nounced Wedgebury, and spelt Wednesberie in Domesday Book, stands in the very heart of the coal and iron district, and is as like Tipton, Darlaston, Bilston, and other towns where the inhabitants are similarly employed, as one sweep is like another. Birmingham factors depend largely on Wedgebury for various kinds of ironwork and "heavy steel toys."

The coal pits in the neighbourhood are of great value, and there is no better place in the kingdom to buy a thoroughbred bull dog that will "kill or die on it," but never turn tail. The name is supposed to incorporate that of the Saxon G.o.d Woden, whose worship consisted in getting drunk and fighting, and, to this day, that is the only kind of relaxation in which many of the inhabitants ever indulge. The church stands upon a hill, where Ethelfleda, Lady of Mercia, built a castle to resist the Danes, A.D. 914, about the time that she erected similar bulwarks at Tamworth and other towns in the Midland counties, but there are no antiquities worth the trouble of visiting.

Parties who take an interest in the progress of education in this kingdom among those cla.s.ses where it is most needed, that is to say, ma.s.ses of miners and mechanics residing in districts from which all the higher and most of the middle cla.s.ses have removed; where the clergy are few, hard worked, and ill paid; where the virtues of a thinly peopled agricultural district have been exchanged for the vices, without the refinements, of a crowded town population, should traverse this part of Staffordshire on foot. They will own that, in spite of the praiseworthy labours of both Church and Dissent,--in spite of the progress of Temperance Societies and Savings' Banks,--a crowd of children are daily growing up in a state of ignorance, dirt, and degradation fearful to contemplate. To active philanthropists, not to seekers of the picturesque, archaeologists, and antiquarians, do we address ourselves. Still we ought to add that, in the iron works and rolling mills, there are studies of half naked men in active motion at night, with effect of red firelight and dark shade, in which the power of painting flesh and muscular development might be more effectively displayed than in the perpetual repet.i.tion of model Eves and sprawling nymphs.

WOLVERHAMPTON formerly lay away from railroads, at a convenient omnibus distance; but compet.i.tion has doubly pierced it through and through. One line connects it with Shrewsbury; another, on the point of completion, will connect it with Dudley, Birmingham, and Oxford, and another with Worcester,--add to these means of communication the ca.n.a.ls existing before railroads commenced, extending to Hull, Liverpool, Chester, and London, and it will be seen that Wolverhampton is most fortunately placed.

The great railway battle of the gauges commenced at Wolverhampton, and has been carried on ever since at the cost of more than a million sterling in legal and parliamentary expenses, beside the waste of capital in constructing three railways where one would have been sufficient, and the extra cost of land traversed where a price was paid, 1st, for the land; 2nd, for the revenue; 3rd, for compulsion; 4th, for influence, and 5th, for vote, if the landowner were a member of either House of Parliament.

At the end of the battle, a competing line to London has been established, which will end shortly in a compromise; and, if one district has two railways, others, much needing, have none. The shareholders on both sides have lost their money, the engineers have reaped a harvest, and the lawyers have realized a fortune.