Impressions of the Black Country No.1

Impressions of The Black Country No.1 “Blue skies change to a reeking canopy of black and grey smoke. The earth is one vast unsightly heap of dead ashes and dingy refuse. Canals of diluted coal dust teach how filthy water may be and yet retain fluidity. Tumbledown houses, tumbledown works, tottering black chimneys, fire belching furnaces, squalid and blackened people.” The Birmingham Mail Aug. 1884 (Quoted in DM Palliser, The Staffordshire Landscape, p.197) Impressions of The Black Country No. 2 “The Black Country, black by day and red by night, cannot be matched, for vast and varied production, by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe…Never was the cellar of a district of equal size stored with richer or more varied treasures. Never a goldfield on the face of the earth, of ten miles radius, produced such vast values as these subterranean acres have done… Nature did for the ironmasters of the Black Country all she could; indeed, everything except literally building the furnaces themselves. She brought together all that was needed to set and keep them in blast. The iron ore, coal and lime - the very lining of the furnaces - were all deposited close at hand for the operation... “One would be inclined to believe, on seeing the black forest of chimneys, smoking over large towns and villages as well as the flayed spaces between, that all the coal and iron mined in the district must be used in it. The furnaces, foundries and manufactories seem almost countless; and the vastness and variety of their production infinite. Still, like an ever-flowing river, running through a sandy region that drinks in but part of its waters, there is a stream of raw mineral wealth flowing without bar or break through the absorbing district that produces it, and watering the distant counties of England. By night and day, year in year out, century in and century out, runs that stream with unabated flow. Narrow canals filled with water that is as black as the long sharp boats it floats, crossing each other here and there in the thick of the furnaces, twist out into the green lands in different directions, laden with coal for distant cities and villages. The railways, crossing the canals and their creeping locomotion, dash off with vast loads to London and other great centres of consumption. Tons unnumbered of iron for distant manufactures go from the district in the same way. “And all the while, the furnaces roar and glow by night and day, and the great steam hammers thunder, and hammers from an ounce in weight to a ton, and every kind of machinery invented by man, are ringing, clicking, and whizzing as if tasked to intercept all this raw material of the mines and impress upon it all the labour and skill which human hands could give to it.” From “Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-land” by Elihu Burritt (1869) Impressions of the Black Country No.3 “About Wolverhampton trees, grass and every trace of verdure disappear. As far as the eye can see, all is black, with coal mines and ironworks, and from this gloomy desert rise countless slender pyramidical chimneys whose flames illumine the earth, while their smoke darkens the heavens; the whole is exceedingly striking…” Friedrich von Raumer, 1835 (Quoted in Trinder 1982, p.187) Impressions of the Black Country No.4 “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 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 pass a cluster of deserted roofless cottages of dingiest brick, half-swallowed up in sinking pits, or inclining to every point of the compass, while the timbers point up like the ribs of a half-decayed corpse…” Samuel Sidney 1851 (quoted in Trinder 1982 p.186/7) Impressions of the Black Country No 5: [Description of the Moxley Ironworks, Darlaston, in 1873] “This is a most unique and valuable property, for Mr David Rose of Moxley, digs his own coal, sand and fire clay, makes his own pigs and fire- bricks, puddles his own iron, makes and galvanizes his own sheet iron, and, we believe, raises a large portion of the ironstone to make the pigs. We can safely say there are no other works in England, or the world, which can boast of the same products and advantages on one and the same spot…” Griffith`s Guide to the Iron Trade, 1873, p.165 Impressions of the Black Country no.6 “The traveller never appears to get out of an interminable village, composed of cottages and very ordinary houses. In some directions he may travel for miles and never be out of sight of numerous two- storeyed houses; so that the area covered by bricks and mortar must be immense. These houses for the most part are not arranged in continuous streets but are interspersed with blazing furnaces, heaps of burning coal in process of coking, piles of ironstone calcining, forges, pit-banks, and engine chimneys; the country being besides intersected with canals, crossing each other at different levels; and the small remaining patches of the surface soil occupied with irregular fields of grass or corn intermingled with heaps of the refuse of mines or of slag from the blast furnaces…The whole country might be compared to a vast rabbit warren. It is a matter of every day occurrence for houses to fall down, or a row of buildings inhabited by numerous families to assume a very irregular outline...caused by the sinking of the ground into old workings.” Thomas Tancred, Report of the Midland Mining Commission, (1843). Quoted in Birmingham and Its Regional Setting (1950), RHKinvig et al., p.241 Impressions of the Black Country No.7 [The view from Castle Hill, Dudley] “There was the Black Country unrolled before you like a smouldering carpet. You looked into an immense hollow of smoke and blurred buildings and factory chimneys. There seemed to be no end to it… I descended into the vast smoky hollow and watched it turn itself into so many workshops, grimy rows of houses, pubs and picture theatres, yards filled with rusted metal, and great patches of wasted ground. There was a cynical abundance of these patches of waste ground which were as shocking as raw sores and open wounds…drunken storm troops have passed this way; there are signs of atrocities everywhere; the earth has been left gaping and bleeding; and what were once bright fields have been rummaged and raped into these dreadful patches of waste ground... The places I saw had names, but these names were merely so much alliteration: Wolverhampton, Wednesbury, Wednesfield, Willenhall and Walsall. You could call them all wilderness and have done with it.” JB Priestley, English Journey, 1934, pp109-110. .

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