Author: Jon Bounds

Jon was voted the ‘14th Most Influential Person in the West Midlands’ in 2008. Subsequently he has not been placed. He’s been a football referee, venetian blind maker, cellar man, and a losing Labour council candidate: “No, no chance. A complete no-hoper” said a spoilt ballot. Jon wrote and directed the first ever piece of drama performed on Twitter when he persuaded a cast including MPs and journalists to give over their timelines to perform Twitpanto. But all that is behind him.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 50: Panhandling

If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Despite the protests of anyone who’s ever wanted to make it from one end of New Street to the other, asking people for money is profitable and it will continue. Birmingham has some world class panhandling: the girl with the odd voice and dreads who needs 65p to get home to Bearwood, the squaddie who’s missed his train back to base, Vernon the Big Issue seller who made a Christmas single, and not to forget the historical local begging on a global stage that bought us the ICC with all that European money.

So would you be surprised to see that the city invented a certain type of begging? Of course not, but it happened some way before there was a city to beg in.

In the Domesday Book, Birmingham is recorded as one homestead: worth about two goats. But in 1166 the Lord of the Manor Peter de Birmingham obtained a royal charter from Henry II permitting him to hold a weekly market “at his castle at Birmingham” and crucially to charge tolls on the market’s traffic. Money, in effect, for just passing up New St.

This was one of the earliest of these charters that would be granted in England, and definitely the cheekiest: imagine charging people to come into a rough area to look at some stalls of turnips and mead. Not only did Lord de Birmingham invent panhandling, it seems like he started the first farmers’ market.

Come to Birmingham, it’s yer money we’re after, baby.
Continue reading “101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 50: Panhandling”

Satirical Cartoon: HS2 funding

A sleek modern train is standing on a platform, it gleams. A sign above it says ‘London HS2 Terminus’. On the information screens the departure is at 12:00pm and the arrival time is 12:45pm at ‘Birmingham Digbeth Curzon St’.

In the background streams of city gent types are getting off the train laden with boxes, cheap Christmas decorations, toys, plastic stuff spilling over.

Two more bowler hatted gents are about to get on, they are carrying briefcases that say ‘Dept of Transport’ on.

Says one to the other: “A few more trips up to Latif’s and we’ll have clawed back that £150M investment.”

Satirical Cartoon: RIP Bob Jones

The back room of a pub, it’s packed to bursting with people in smart suits and dresses. They aren’t sad but the room is somber. A sign on the door says “Bob Jones’s Wake”, a discarded newspaper has the headline “Bob Jones Police Commissioner Dies”.

One chap nearest us is saying: “where were all these lot on election day?”

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 49: England’s 1966 World Cup Triumph

48 years of hurst and counting. On that glorious summer afternoon, 30th July 1966, the sun shone on the British Empire for perhaps the last time. Kenneth Wolstenholme, Alf Garnett, future Birmingham City Manager Alf Ramsey and Jimmy Greaves were all at the apex of their happiness and together they ushered in an age of self-referential Aquarius. But would they have done it without the city of Birmingham?

Of course not.

It wasn’t Sir Alf’s premonition of managing the blues that did it, nor was it Villa park hosting West Germany’s group games and the players possibly drinking too much at the Reservoir Ballroom in Ladywood. It wasn’t even that the whistles blown were Birmingham made.

We won because of the nation’s belief that it was really possible. We won because Mr Ramsey said we would. Mr Ramsey said we would, not because he really needed to to audition for the top job at St Andrews, but because he believed anything was possible.

And anything was possible because of one black a white collie: Pickles who found the Jules Rimet trophy after it had been stolen before the tournament. And was that perky collie from Birmingham? No.

But it couldn’t have been found if it hadn’t of been taken. And it couldn’t have been taken if it wasn’t at Westminster Central Hall (not in Birmingham) for the Stanley Gibbons (not from Birmingham) Company’s Stampex exhibition. Thieves bypassed the millions of pounds worth of stamps, which were being heavily guarded, to half-inch the trophy, which wasn’t. They wouldn’t have had the idea for the heist had Brummies not been there first — pinching the original F A Cup from William Shillcock the jewellers in Newtown Row. But we can’t claim that, that’s way too tenuous.

You see, there isn’t a stamp exhibition if there aren’t stamps to exhibit. And there would be no stamps at all if it wasn’t for Birmingham.

After inventing the post, in Birmingham, Sir Rowland Hill was working out how to make sure people could use it — in May 1840 he came up with the Penny Black, the first adhesive postage stamp. Invention, exhibition, theft, dog, happiness, triumph, ennui — it’s the way we can trail our history and identity, and Birmingham is the lickable, stickable, basis for it all.

Satirical Cartoon: Ukips in Birmingham by Matt of The Telegraph

A man in a jumper sits in a large armchair in a very traditionally decorated large semi-detached house. He’s reading the Evening Mail, he has it open on his lap and we can read the headline ‘Poor Ukip performance in Birmingham’.

His wife is carrying one cup of tea — in a cup and saucer — towards him.

He says: “it seems Birmingham decided it already had enough fruitcakes and loonies on the council.”

Then everyone retweets it as it “nails it”.

You simply must: be mindful that conversations can be overheard

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A series of things you must do when visiting Birmingham.

No. 7: In the Council House smoking area.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 47: Infographics

photo-5

When we were a city of a thousand trades, we had men to produce thousands of words to tell the story. One such was Joseph Priestley who essentially didn’t ever shut up, producing hundreds of pamphlets and books on philosophy, science, religion and even grammar. But that age of voluminous reason is long gone: our civic leaders now find it difficult to work out that people are unlikely to pony up £35 for having their grass cuttings taken away. They also are more likely to speak like internet cats.

Numbers and facts are hard, so it’s lucky that the power of a thousand words can now be delivered so easily by: pictures of toilet signs at different sizes, circles overlapping, and maps — all laid out like a pastel-coloured ‘30s variety bill poster.

In short, thank heaven for the infographic. Or, thank Birmingham rather.

For you see, Joseph Priestley was not just a writerly polymath but completely lithographically incontinent — and in 1769 he published A New Chart of History in which:

“the horizontal line conveys an idea of the duration of fame, influence, power and domination. A vertical reading conveys an impression of the contemporaneity of ideas, events and people. The number or density of entries . . . tells us about the vitality of any age.”

That’s a clear as it can be, without being in a skyscraper-format GIF and put on Facebook.

And that’s how Birmingham invented the infographic, saving the future communicators the bother of having to work out coherent sentences to put on the Internet. If only Birmingham had invented the Venn diagram too.

Or perhaps it did, stay tuned.

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A New Chart of History via Wikimedia , Venn diagram off of all of the Internet.

So farewell then, green waste collections

First they came for the paper recycling, and I did not speak out — Because it was about 6am and I was still in bed.
A week later they came for the glass and metal, and I did not speak out — Despite them waking me up with their reversing lorry.
Then they came for the landfill waste, and I did not speak out — Because they do it at the same time as the other collections.
They didn’t come for the garden waste — so I took it to the tip on Sunday.

E J Thribb, after Pastor Martin Niemöller

Satirical Cartoon: Tory Party Conference

A Tory fat cat who probably looks a lot like Cameron, in stockings and suspenders bends around a pole in a lap dancing club. In the crowd are Mike Whitby and Albert Bore, with conference-style name tags on so we know who they are. Mike is egging Albert on to slip a £1M note into the dancers suspenders, where there are already lots of them.

On the floor is an Evening Mail with the headline ‘Council £1.5M on Tory Conference‘, and something about a free pasty.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 46: Thomas the Tank Engine

Scariest little tank engine ever

Railway enthusiasts get a bad press. If it’s not the anoraks, glasses, and spots it’s the destruction of the Tory countryside in order to build train lines. Or it’s—in the words of Daniel Kitson—that they “aren’t paedophiles [they] just like the look”. The clergy get a bit of that too. For all their good works, you might keep your nippers away from Catholic ones.

Luckily this particular tale of Brummie greatness features an Anglican cleric and ‘railway enthusiast’ who did something brilliant for kids: Wilbert Vere Awdry, better known as the Reverend W. Awdry who invented Thomas the Tank Engine.

In 1940 he became curate of St. Nicholas’ Church, Kings Norton, Birmingham and it was there in 1943 that he invented the characters that would make him famous—to amuse his son Christopher during a bout of measles.

The rest is Beatle-flecked history, which in some way exists in a combined Birmingham:based fictional universe. Sodor, Mordor—you can just see the orcs and stuff starting their epic journeys here can’t you:

King’s Norton station CC By: Benkid77