Talk:History of Birmingham

Name
From the article

The name 'Birmingham' came from Anglo-Saxon Beornmundinga hām = "the home of the sons or people of Beornmund"; he was probably a local Saxon tribal leader.

Where did that information come from exactly. G-Man 21:27, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * It comes from Eilert Ekwall . The Oxford Names Companion states:


 * "...it seems likely that it was originally Beornmundingahām" Metabaronic (talk) 07:19, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

From Birmingham military history
Here is the raw material from Birmingham military history, which now redirects to this article. Andy Mabbett 23:03, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC) jhvkj.hl./;j@{ Superscript textundefined


 * If editors wish to incorporate the military history of Birmingham, please use the up-to-date material from the article. The aforementioned subpage is now deleted as redundant content. --Iamunknown 22:38, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Name roots
I found this info about where Birmingham's name came from:

"In the Saxon 6th Century Birmingham was just one small settlement in thick forest - the home (ham) of the tribe (ing) of a leader called Birm or Beorma." this is from

Badly merged bit
Somebody dumped the following here, apparently it was from Birmingham transport history. It had been dumped on this page without any attempt to merge it properly, so I am dumping it here for now until I can work out what to do with it. G-Man * 18:06, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

History of transport
Birmingham's earliest roots of transport manufacture lie in the Industrial Revolution with Lunar Society members like Matthew Boulton who was proprietor of the Soho engineering works and James Watt who made the steam engine into the power plant of the Industrial Revolution, the term "horsepower" was first coined by Watt in the city. In 1770 the screw propeller was first connected to an engine by Watt in Brum. 1785 saw the invention of the oscillating cylinder by William Murdoch. Watt and Boulton, furnished engines (in 1807) for the first regular steam packet in America with James Watt, jun., making the first steam voyage on the sea (October 14, 1817), crossing the English Channel in the Caledonia ship, and taking that vessel up the Rhine.

Frederick William Lanchester joined the Forward Gas Engine Company of Birmingham in 1889, he patented disc brakes in 1902 (even though his innovation was only widely adopted over half a century later). In 1893 he set up his own workshop. In 1895 he and his brother built the first petrol driven four-wheeled car in Britain although the engine was underpowered compared to the weight of the six seater body. Lanchester also experimented with the wick carburetor, fuel injection, turbochargers and invented the accelerator pedal as well as the Pendulum Governor which was used to control the speed of an engine. In 1893 Lanchester designed and built his first engine (a vertical single cylinder) which was fitted to a flat bottomed boat designed by his brothers. The boat was launched at Salter's slipway in Oxford in 1894 and was the first all British powerboat.

Herbert Austin worked for the Wolseley Motors in Birmingham and in 1905 he resigned, taking a bicycle ride around the city he ended up at an old print works in Longbridge where he decided to start the Austin car company.

In 1921, the first British patent for windscreen wipers was registered by Mills Munitions of Birmingham.

Prominent Birmingham motor manufacturers of days gone include:


 * Lanchester Motor Company
 * Daimler - from 1910
 * Tyseley Car Company
 * British Leyland
 * EG Wrigley and Company Ltd.
 * Perry Motor Company Ltd.
 * Excelsior Motor Company Ltd. - (Bayliss-Thomas)
 * The General Electric Company
 * Calthorpe Motor Company Ltd.
 * GW Hands Motor Company
 * Gerald Cyclecar Company
 * Ralph Gilbert & Son
 * BSA
 * Norton
 * Ariel
 * Velocette
 * Wolseley
 * Morris
 * Austin
 * Tyseley Locomotive Works
 * Fort Dunlop - (first large scale factory by Dunlop Tyre Company
 * Midland Red Bus Company
 * Hercules Cycle & Motor Co. Ltd
 * Patrick Motors Ltd

Present day motor manufacturers include: LDV vans, Lucas Industries plc, Jaguar, and a UK branch of Alstom trains. The National Exhibition Centre hosts two innovative UK specialist small car manufacturer exhibitions annually. In the First and Second World Wars, the Longbridge car plant built ammunition, tank suspensions, steel helmets, Jerricans, Hawker Hurricanes, Fairey Battle fighters, Horsa gliders, mines and depth charges, with the mammoth Avro Lancaster bomber coming into production towards the end of WWII. The Spitfire fighter aircraft was mass produced for the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, at Castle Bromwich.

Longbridge once played a major role in Birmingham and the wider conurbation's employment.

Historic population
I have put a detailed table on the main Birmingham article. Should this be merged with this article with amendments to it from the already existing one or should I put the table from this article on to the Birmingham article. Plus, should I create a graph showing the change in population over the years? - Erebus555 11:42, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Birmingham expansion
This is basically a datadump from Youngs. it needs turning into prose - and the existing section replacing as it it is somewhat wrong

borough incorporated 1838. covered
 * part of Aston ancient parish
 * Birmingham parish
 * Edgbaston parish

in 1891, we see added
 * area of Harborne urban sanitary district, within Harborne parish (Staff)
 * area of Balsall Heath USD added, within Kings Norton parish (Worcs)
 * further part of Aston ancient parish, the Saltley USD added

in 1894
 * Aston parish split up such that bits Aston Manor parish, and parish of Aston itself entirely Birmingham
 * Balsall Heath parish created from part of Kings Norton within Birmingham
 * part of Harborne parish not in Birminghan becomes part of Smethwick parish

in 1909:


 * Quinton added (Worcester)

in 1911:


 * Aston Manor added (Warwick)
 * Erdington added (Warwick)
 * Handsworth added (Stafford)
 * [[Yardley added (Worcester)
 * part of King's Norton added (Worcester)
 * part of Northfield added (Worcester)

in 1912:


 * all the Birmingham parishes unite to form the single Birmingham parish coterminus with the county borough. this also includes all of the King's Norton and Northfield parishes

in 1928:


 * adds Perry Barr

Timeline of the history of Birmingham
I made a request for a timeline of the history of Birmingham and I thought it may be better to begin creating one myself on a user subpage. Click here to go to the timeline being produced. I would like it if you could add information to this. For example, the 1900s and 2000s need dates. Thanks. - Erebus555 18:30, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

For the record, see Timeline of Birmingham history --PBS (talk) 17:56, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

June 2007 edits
My edits were mainly adding references to statements and some small expansion work to information. I hoped to add a lot more information, especially on the 20th century section, but I can see that being too much work and requiring a lot more time. - Erebus555 17:47, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Decisive contribution to 2nd World War?
“Man sagt, dass Großbritannien ohne die industrielle Kapazität von Birmingham den Krieg wohl verloren hätte.“ It is said that without the industrial capacity of Birmingham Britain would have lost the war. I found the German text in German Wikipedia, here Below the text is my translation. I don’t know if the German text is accurate or not. Therefore I wrote “perhaps decisively”Barbara Shack (talk) 17:24, 19 January 2008 (UTC)


 * The statement on the German Wikipedia is not referenced. The German Wikipedia is an unsuitable reference for this statement as it is part of the Wikimedia organisation, which also operates the English language Wikipedia. - Erebus555 (talk) 17:33, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Article improvement
I'm going to try and have a blitz on this article, which is grossly inadequate considering its importance. In particular:


 * There is an extensive scholarly literature on the subject, which has been the focus of study by some of the most notable historians of the twentieth century (eg Asa Briggs, David Cannadine, Margaret Gelling) but the article currently seems to rest mainly on references to personal homepages, pages on the city council website, chance mentions in books on other subjects and minor works of local history about individual suburbs.
 * The article has a very parochial focus, emphasising the internal development of the city rather than placing it in a wider historical context (eg Birmingham's pivotal role in the passage of the Great Reform Act is brushed over with the observation that "due to its growing size and importance, Birmingham was granted Parliamentary representation by the Reform Act of 1832.")
 * The article is divided up by century - an essentially arbitrary and meaningless organisation explicitly discouraged by WP:UKCITIES
 * There are some strange inclusions and exclusions. For example, during the interwar era Birmingham went through the Great Depression and General Strike, and supplied the country with a Prime Minister and a Chancellor of the Exchequer, but the only thing judged worthy of inclusion in the article is the building of a random office block on New Street.
 * Overall the article lacks a narrative or analytical structure, a feature of which the absence of a Lead mentioned at the top is just the most obvious symptom.

Anyone care to join in?

JimmyGuano (talk) 15:34, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I think some content needs to be shifted from the main Birmingham article as it is now of a size where it needs to be broken up. On the early history front there isn't much to pin down the foundation of the settlement in Anglo-Saxon times. The best source is quoted on the main Birmingham article page ("Anglo-Saxon Birmingham", Midland History, Dr Stephen Bassett 2002) but this still fails to pin down exactly when Birmingham was founded (before the late seventh century) or exactly where the core buildings were located (possibly near St Philips' Cathedral, probably not at the fording of the River Rea). The other principal source for this is Mike Hodder, the City Archaeologist, who in theory leeps the city's website accurate. This has resulted in inconsistencies in dating on child articles e.g. Digbeth

Metabaronic (talk) 00:02, 12 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure that the history section of Birmingham is too big - it's about the same size as the history sections of Bath, Somerset and Sheffield, and much smaller than that of Manchester, and they are all featured articles. The trouble with Birmingham's foundation date is that the only evidence for it is the place-name, which can only give an extremely approximate date, and inevitably leaves lots of room for speculation. I've used Margaret Gelling as the source for this article, as she was simultaneously the leading UK authority on English place-names, and one of the leading authorities on the Anglo-Saxon Midlands (she's reverentially quoted by Bassett, for example), so seemed the most reliable of the available sources. She also explained how she reached her conclusion, which means the article can qualify its claim and give some indication of its uncertainty (though that level of detail would probably be inappropriate for most other related articles). JimmyGuano (talk) 09:13, 13 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, size-wise I meant the whole page, not just the history bit. Regarding the dating of Birmingham's foundation, you can actually use Bede to narrow it down (assuming Bede's dating is taken to be accurate, which most articles about the period do). The most accurate date for the foundation is probably "between 550 and 700AD", ie. after the arrival of the Mercians and before the region's Christianisation. That can be further narrowed down to "between 584 and 679AD", ie. after the reign of Creoda, the first Mercian King, began and before the Diocese of Worcester was established It can be narrowed down further, but assumptions start creeping in. The biggest assumption, for example, is that Birmingham was strategically important, being settled on a narrow area of land between the thickly wooded Forest of Arden to the north and west, and the boundaries of the Hwicce kingdom to the south and east. That creates a 25 year window of probability (603-628AD) between the time the Hwicce kingdom was founded and the time it effectively became a Mercian sub-kingdom. This places it firmly in the early seventh century, but sadly smacks of original research. Metabaronic (talk) 23:48, 13 August 2009 (UTC)


 * That's all interesting stuff. If you've got any reliable sources linking those events specifically to the establishment of Birmingham it would be good to include them in the article. (Arden is largely to the south and east of Birmingham though surely - north and west is the beginnings of the south Staffs heathlands?) JimmyGuano (talk) 19:24, 16 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm cautious about extrapolating too much from reliable sources, because the focus of the works I've looked at was not upon establishing the date that Birmingham was founded. For example, the strategic importance of Birmingham to the Hwicce boundary is implicit, but not explicit in Bassett.


 * What I can do with some certainty is cross-reference archaeological and topographical evidence with Bede to give clear boundary dates of between 584-679AD thus: Della Hooke’s Mercia, Landscape and Environment establishes that the settlement’s boundary was within the northernmost reach of the Forest of Arden, which stretched into the Tame valley north and west of the city centre, and that it was on the very fringe of early Mercian territory.


 * Steven Bassett’s Birmingham before the Bull Ring tells us that most of the early roads topographically conform to the boundaries of Harborne, Edgbaston, Birmingham, Lichfield and Tamworth, that there was a through route from Wolverhampton to the Rea crossing at Digbeth, that the land to the north and west of this (also north and west of Rykneld street) was not used for agricultural purposes until the late medieval period, and that most of Birmingham’s woodland was focused here and was probably continuous with Harborne’s woodland to the west.


 * Basset’s Anglo-Saxon Birmingham goes on to establish that the settlement of Birmingham precedes the establishment of the ecclesiastical dioceses, but that its boundaries conformed with them.


 * Metabaronic (talk) 20:05, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

I've had a crack at putting together an introductory section which I've based on the History of Manchester one, which does seem to make some spurious claims I've chosen not to replicate. Like the argument for second city, the Manchester article seems to be laying claim to as much as it can. In contrast I've tried to stick to the facts, although the tone may still be a tad "enthusiastic". Metabaronic (talk) 18:52, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Foundation
A Carl Chinn article relating to the foundation of Birmingham has appeared on Cllr Phil Bateman's blog, for use here and at the Beormingas article. In terms of attribution I'd say the blog is reliable at quoting Chinn, and I'm personally happy that these are his words, but I thought I'd post under discussion first to cover it off before putting anything from it into the main article.

The article suggests that the Beormingas arrived in the 500s (6th Century) as part of the first wave of Anglo-Saxon settlers, probably occupying a wider area. It also suggests that the -ings (Anglian tribal areas) would have been established before falling under the administration of the Mierce.

This is, to my knowledge, the only assertion about the 6th century date that makes sense, and it relates to the areas around Birmingham that would have been occupied by Beorma's tribe rather than being the date for the founding of Birmingham itself, which would have been later, at a time when the Beormings were consolidated and Penda firmly in charge.Metabaronic (talk) 11:38, 29 May 2010 (UTC)


 * What were you going to add to the article from that Blog post? The fact that it's quoting Chinn means that it isn't inherently unreliable and inadmissable as a source IMO, but it obviously carries less weight than a serious scholarly study of the subject (eg Gelling's, Wager's, Bassett's) so I don't think it should over-ride them. That said, I'm not sure what the article adds other than a bit of window dressing around the only two bits of evidence that exist for the Beormingas: the etymological evidence of Birmingham's placename, and the evidence of pre-Norman linkages between parishes surrounding Birmingham that suggest they were formed from a larger, earlier land unit. JimmyGuano (talk) 19:15, 1 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Well you may call it window dressing, but its more than that. It doesn't contradict Bassett or Gelling, but it does say that the Beormingas settled in the area in the 6th century. This compliments Bassett's view that the Beormingas settled in the area first, and that Birmingham as a ham at the centre came later.Metabaronic (talk) 19:42, 1 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure he is saying that though - isn't he just saying that the area occupied by the Beormingas was *larger* than the Norman manor and parish of Birmingham. It's a geographical distinction, not a sequential one, and one which follows directly from Wager and Bassett's "pre-Norman linkages between later parishes" evidence.


 * If so, it's already in the article, though hedged with an uncertainty reflecting the tentativeness with which it's asserted by the sources. JimmyGuano (talk) 20:01, 1 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I just offered it up as an extra reference because Chinn says "Whatever the case, Beorma’s folk would have arrived by the late 500s, at a time when there was no great kingdom in the region and when the political situation was in a state of flux," and that in doing so he was referring to the larger area, not Birmingham itself.Metabaronic (talk) 22:48, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Markets and merchants section
The last sentence states 'Trade through Birmingham diversified as a merchant class arose, however: mercers and purveyors are mentioned in early 13th century deeds,[55] and a legal dispute involving traders from Wednesbury in 1403 reveals that they were dealing in iron, linen, wool, brass and "calibe" (possibly fur) as well as cattle in the town.[55]'

Calibe is surely mediaeval Latin for steel, NOT fur.

Here is an extract from an article I found at http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/2305/

''Here for example is Bartholomaeus Anglicus in his Latin book “De proprietatibus rerum”, written in 1240 and quoted here as it was printed in 1483: “nec calibe, nec ferro, nec etiam ferra”, which translates as “not steel, not iron, not other ferrous material”. The book was one of the most popular and widely read books in late medieval Europe. The Latin is on the Net at Archive.org at (zoom at upperleft) archive.org/stream/deproprietatibu00anglgoog#page/n306/mode/1up/search/necferroy

Du Cange’s Glossary of Medieval Latin at ducange.enc.sorbonne.fr/CALIBEUS has an example of use of Latin “calibeus” = steel, dated 1361.

Here’s an example of the use of “calibe” meaning steel at an English abbey in 1368: “In reparacione et posicione 9 securium et 8 ponsons, cum calibe.” A “punson”—was also spelled “ponchon”—was a pointed punching tool (bit like a chisel), and “punsons cum calibe” means steel coated punching tools. The whole sentence translates as “for repairing and fitting 9 hatchets and 8 punches, with steel.” Here is a more inscrutable example from England, this dated 1400: “ij di. bar. calib. iij bar. wyspstrele.... Pro iij bar. sungm., xv wysp. calab.” There, the word “wysp” is English “wisp” and in context it appears to be some sort of a thin rod of steel. These examples are from the Middle English Dictionary, a huge and terrific dictionary of Middle English (1100-1500) that is free and searchable online at quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/''

08:37, 5 September 2013 (UTC)Travis Hiscock (talk)


 * You could well be right about this. The suggestion that "calibe" could be fur is in the source quoted in the article, but that is an authoritative source on the history of Birmingham, not on medieval uasge. I guess it would be over-ruled on this specific subject by sourcesg that provided a greater weight of evidence and authority on the matter at hand - which the Sorbonne link you've quoted in particular would seem to provide. It seems sufficiently clearcut to just replace the latin word entirely with the english word "steel" in the text, and add the Sorbonne as an additional ref on the end of the sentence, if you think this would make sense? JimmyGuano (talk) 18:49, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that makes sense to me. Go ahead and make the edits if you wish.Travis Hiscock (talk) 14:35, 6 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Changed now - well spotted. JimmyGuano (talk) 06:42, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

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Why did this happen? It's pretty big
"The collapse of Birmingham's industrial economy was sudden and catastrophic. As late as 1976 the West Midlands region – with Birmingham as its principal economic dynamo – still had the highest GDP of any in the UK outside the South East, but within five years it was lowest in England.[305] Birmingham itself lost 200,000 jobs between 1971 and 1981, with the losses concentrated in the manufacturing sector" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.236.139.238 (talk) 10:38, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

In re Bull Ring archeology.

 * and not a single piece of Anglo-Saxon material was found during the extensive archeological excavations that preceded the redevelopment of the Bull Ring in 2000.

Worked there during the reno. We were expressly told that there is no archeological interest and even if we find something not to call anyone because it's not an archeological site it's a building site. So even if we found intact bodies we would have just turned them back under, it wasn't our job to tell anyone. Idk if this is relevant but it does eat at me sometimes that we found pottery and artifacts but told no one. The profit margins were more important than their countries history. And we were just blue collar working class, no one would listen to us anyway. 2001:8003:2953:1900:201D:9C68:84CC:5E78 (talk) 17:42, 2 April 2024 (UTC)