Category: 101 Things Brum Gave The World

From the team behind hit Birmingham miscellany, Paradise Circus, comes the definitive guide to the 101 things that made the world what it is today – and all of them were made in Birmingham.

Read how Birmingham gave the world the wonders of tennis, nuclear war, the Beatles, ‘that smell of eggs’ and many more… 97 more.

“101 Things Birmingham Gave The World, is not a Birmingham of the memory. It is a living breathing thing, wrestling with the city’s contradictions, press-ganging the typically arch and understated humour of the Brummie, and an army of little-known facts, both trivial and monumental, into reshaping its confusing reputation.”
Stewart Lee

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 52: The United States of America

Oh, America. Hamburgers, Hot Rods, hanging out at the mall, Rock & Roll, Fox News, an out-of-control culture of gun violence. You’ve come a long way since you were a just another undiscovered continent of perfectly happy indigenous tribes.

Your star may now be on the wane, but you won’t find many people who will disagree with the notion that the 1900s were very much the American century. It was then you grew so strong, so big, and so quickly, that your power was undeniable. Culturally, economically, militarily – there was no-one to touch you. You even reached for the stars and lassoed the moon. Well done, America.

There are some who may argue that your rampant success was built on the foundations of your early life as a colony of Britain. After all, it was the British who gave you your language, your ingenuity, and your pioneer spirit. But to claim this stellar rise to success was the result of British intervention would be tenuous, to say the least. No, in truth, it wasn’t until you struck out on your own and decided to make a fist of it that you truly realised your potential.

So, how did you do it?

How did you take those first steps? And, once on that road to freedom, what informed the creation of your culture? What enabled you to become the dominant nation of the world?

Well, America, your history books may not tell you this but it was, as it happens, the city of Birmingham.

Two of your founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, got their revolutionary ideas and zeal from their involvement with Birmingham’s Lunar Society, the ad hoc collection of political, economic, mechanical and cultural minds that formed in the city in 1765 and which managed, through a process of free-thinking, a spirit of open-mindedness, and a middle finger firmly raised in the direction of the status quo, to pretty much invent the modern world that you eventually dominated.

From their visits to Birmingham in the 1700s, Jefferson and Franklin took this free-wheeling spirit and a belief in the right to free assembly back home with them. To defend this right, they wrote into your constitution the right to bear arms. There would be no arms to bear if not for us, for it was here, in Birmingham, that the guns, and the hand grenades, and the nuclear missiles that are variously used (or not used) in the defence of freedom, initially came into being.
Your first great export to the world was cinema (impossible without Birmingham), through which you invented the teenage rebel who shocked square society. The rebels rode motorbikes (a Brummie innovation) in the 50s, and rode them still as they evolved into the counter-cultural hippies of the late ’60s (channelling that Lunar Society vibe once more). Far out, bab.

Those hippies then cut their hair and started working in the banks (another Brummie invention) that became economic powerhouses, whilst your manufacturing processes took the (Brummie) innovations of the Industrial Revolution to hitherto unseen levels of growth and efficiency, which in turn created the disposable income that your brands, such as the carbonated (yes, that’s right) Coca Cola, successfully fought over on their way to conquering the world.

By the early 1980s, it was all over – there was truly no-one to touch you. And it is surely no coincidence, either, this at around this time you took (Birmingham’s) Duran Duran to your hearts in a way that we never could, and thus the baton was passed and the process of your Brum-inspired rise to global prominence was complete.

If you’ve ever wondered why you instinctively treat Ozzy Osbourne like royalty, now you know: It’s in the genes.

So, America, on 4th July next year, raise a glass to your hometown, and don’t forget the high foive.

Want more of this sort of stuff, as a book? Then why not pledge and buy 101 Things Birmingham Gave The World: The Book now.

Stars and stripes photo CC Crystal Hess

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 51: The Beatles

The Beatles, when they started, were not much more than a bunch of pretty boys with guitars. And guitars were going out of fashion. They got popular, but may well have slunk out of cultural history in the same way as, for example, The Applejacks – if it wasn’t for Sgt Pepper. Routinely named as the greatest album of all time in every list known to man the real glue that holds this album together is not George, Ringo, John and Paul’s playing, writing or vivid imagination but the Brummie legend that is the Mellotron.

Made by Bradmatic Ltd of Aston, Birmingham, The Mellotron was an odd looking contraption that chimed with Brum’s long held unofficial title of ‘A city of a thousand trades’ by being the first instrument of ‘18 sounds’ greatly expanding the possibilities of musical hippies, svengalis and The Moody Blues, the world over.

In a complex operation that could only have been conceived by the genius minds of Brummies exposed to the daily intake of the fumes of the HP Sauce factory across the road, The Mellotron allowed musicians to have 18 ‘instruments’ at the touch of their fingertips. Their right fingertips, on the right keyboard had lead ‘instruments’ like strings, flutes and brass and the left fingertips, on the left keyboard had pre-recorded musical rhythm tracks in various styles.
Continue reading “101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 51: The Beatles”

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”

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.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 48: Startup Culture

Help yourself to some stock

When Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and William Murdoch stood at the bottom of Broad Street and stuck some post-its on the wall to plan their first sprint, little did they know they would set in motion a revolution that would see the word “silicon” put in front of every inanimate object known to man. Continue reading “101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 48: Startup Culture”

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.

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

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 45: Shit shoes

If you’ve seen any coverage of the Oscar ceremony, or any Oscar ceremony, you’ll know it’s all about the clothes. The women’s clothes. The women’s bodies, the ladies’ bras. Male attendees get to dig out evening dress and pass without comment. It’s an everyday sexist world, but let’s turn the male gaze on its head. Or feet rather.

Posh men’s shoes are always shiny, and that’s hard to keep up. Unless you have a basic military training, polishing leather is boring hard and messy. Luckily for the servants of the rich and famous, there is an alternative. An for that alternative the maids in Manhattan have to thank: Birmingham.

Back in 1793 a chap called Hand, in Birmingham of course, obtained a patent for preparing flexible leather having a glaze and polish that renders it impervious to water and need only be wiped with a sponge to restore it to its original luster. This is patent leather, and it’s been responsible for awful shiny shoes all the way from Bacons to Freeman Hardy and Willis, to Hollywood (which we invented too).

Birmingham: it scrubs up well. Or wipes up with a sponge easily. Or something.

Photo CC by: Dave Gates

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 44: Musical differences

All bands eventually get back together, except for the only two that you might actually want to see again: Slade and The Smiths. They all get back together because they all split up and then find they need the money, and the reason they split up is called ‘musical differences’. The ‘differences’ being ‘the difference between the cash they each pocket in royalties’ and the ‘musical’ being Oliver! on VHS on the tour bus.

Oasis ran out of ideas, yes, but the creative bankruptcy just made it all the more galling for Liam that it his brother was earning in the region of seven times what he was: because Noel wrote the big hit songs.

Readers of Morrissey’s autobiography (and hi readers, these spaces in between groups of sentences are paragraphs) will know that El Moz and Johnny Marr got 40 per cent each while the other two Smiths got 10. And they’ll know all about the recriminations afterwards. And what the judge in the court case had for breakfast. When these bands split, like so much from Up North, it’s bitter rather than mild.

But they wouldn’t have split if it wasn’t for Birmingham.

Because back in 1914 as the World geared up for War, Birmingham invented musical differences—there just wasn’t enough real conflict around.

Continue reading “101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 44: Musical differences”

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 43: Class conflict in popular culture

In 1908 26 men lost their lives just on the edge of Birmingham, but also on the edge of our understanding of the earth itself. Opened in 1876 Hamstead Colliery was at that point the deepest mine in the World—2000 feet down beneath the surface. Not too far from where the Aldi is now.

At this point Birmingham led the globe in the technology of digging holes in the ground, the heroic deeds of those that went down them created stories and songs and flooded popular cognition: along with fishermen, miners were the working class cultural heroes that built a nation. These miners would be the foundation of the celebration of the differences between the rich and the poor—which is the central tension in all great Great British culture.

The high point—celebrating but diametrically opposite to the deep seam miners—is 1962’s Hole in the Ground by Bernard Cribbins, which peaked at number 9 in the charts. The numerologists amongst you will have spotted that there’s a 9 in 1908, and also that 1+0+8=9 (much like how 1962’s 1+6+2=9)—that’s no co-incidence. 54 years later (54/9=6, turn that around much like the miners and Cribbins were opposite terraneally, and they were both opposed to the ruling class and you get—a 9) Cribbins punished the capitalists, puncturing them with the sharp end of his spade. He dug it round when they wanted it square, he dug it where he wanted it to be: but most of all he dug it towards those class martyrs of Hamstead in Birmingham.

Noël Coward chose the record as one of his Desert Island Discs, probably unaware of the implied class genocide in the last verse. Hole in the Ground is one piece of popular culture where the working man comes out on top—literally—and that’s a tribute the those that we lost. It’s a tribute to the courage—and digging skills—of the men of Birmingham. Together they produced a message to the capitalists—and that’s that.