Until 1775 Bristol had dominated the brass industry in England. The City was both close to the raw materials – calamine from the Mendips and copper from Cornwall – and there was a sufficient water supply to provide power. And Bristol was a major port, where its prominent role in the slave trade gave it a market – wares known as “guinea kettles” were taken to West Africa as part of the goods used for barter by slave traders. But within 50 years, by the time that Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the slave trade in England was abolished and Birmingham had replaced Bristol as the city of brass.
The main factors behind Birmingham’s rise were an entrepreneurial leadership, a flexible and skilled workforce, and an increasing demand, all of which was capable of being provided in Birmingham, from where the finished products could now be supplied worldwide through the new canal system and improved roads. As early as 1740 Turner’s Brass House on Coleshill Street in Birmingham centre had been established. In 1767 the first Birmingham patent was granted to William Chapman for refining copper and manufacturing brass and brass wire and by 1769 the newly patented process of producing brass articles by means of stamp and die had been adopted by Richard Ford in his Birmingham factory. Until 1780 most “raw” brass was still purchased from Bristol but between 1772 and 1780 the price being charged by the Bristol manufacturers rose from £72 to £84 per ton and the Birmingham Brass founders, possibly encouraged by Matthew Boulton, took control. They formed The Birmingham Metal Company in 1781 and built a new Brass House by the new canal on Broad Street as their headquarters and it was an immediate success.
The Birmingham Commercial Committee was formed in 1783 with Samuel Garbett as its first chairman, counting its membership across merchants and manufacturers across the City. It had a rather stormy existence and had to suffer suspension and re-birth on several occasions, gaining permanence only in 1842 when it became the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, a name first used in 1813.
The Brass House
The Committee were against taxation of manufactured goods and in favour of the taxation of real property; they were ‘for’ raw material imports to be free of duty and ‘against’ excise laws which threatened trade; they were ‘for’ control of tool exports and ‘for’ a government that would do all it could to encourage manufacturers. They considered foreign treaties and the prices of copper and brass, they opposed usury laws and the revival of apprenticeship regulations, they equivocated on combinations, on free trade in general, and on factory laws. After 1842, when free trade was accepted, they discussed currency, partnerships and limited liability, the iniquities of the railways, and trade marks. Matthew Boulton himself kept rather aloof most of the time, so the leading men on these committees in the early days were the greatest figures in the town. The 1813 committee included the Attwoods, William Chance, Richard Cadbury, the Galtons, the Rylands, Richard Spooner, Joshua Scholefield, the Lloyds, and Thomas Osler.
Until mechanisation took over later in the nineteenth century the brass trade had remained very labour intensive and small scale. Even by 1870 very few concerns across Birmingham employed more than 500 staff and those in brass remained trading mainly from small workshops. Brass founders would cast by pouring molten copper alloys into moulds; Fettlers would remove the stem from the mould when cooled and Inge Filers would file the moulds smooth. The production of an eagle for a church lectern required a mould made up of 25 separate pieces. Elsewhere Braziers produced goods by hand from sheet brass and would weave intricate patterns on many of the goods they produced. The bright yellow of brass articles was achieved by pickling it in acid. This turned the items a dull frosted yellow which was deepened by ‘burnishing’ followed by the final process of ‘lacquering’ which covered the finished articles with a transparent varnish. The tools of the trade and the manpower to use them were inexpensive and easy to obtain – a lathe, a vice and a few hand tools were the basis of many small workshops, and the whole family could get involved, men, women and children. And crucially the lack of Guilds in the town meant instantly transferable hands if another task presented itself.
Across the City increasing mechanisation and scientific developments eventually reached even the Brass trade. Before 1850 far more patents were issued in Birmingham than in any other place outside London. In truth most of the patents granted to Birmingham men were in respect of comparatively small mechanical improvements in the manufacture of trinkets and buttons, in machine tools, metal compositions and scientific instruments. But in some cases the inventions laid the foundation for a whole new industry and one of the most important fresh developments was the introduction of electro-plating into the silverware trade that followed Wright and Elkingtons’ patent in 1840.
The production of nickel silver is an example of the new technology of metal refining. Nickel was required as the principal constituent for ‘German silver’, the material from which small articles like cutlery were cast even before electro-plating increased the possibilities. The commercial refinement of nickel by means of an acid solution was perfected by a Birmingham veterinary surgeon, Charles Askin, who had come from Cheadle in Staffordshire. He developed the process into a large-scale undertaking in partnership with Brooke Evans, the son of a draper, who had already had some experience of the iron industry in Poland with two of his brothers. Evans and Askin became the chief suppliers to Elkington’s, who silvered the articles, but other firms soon followed in their footsteps. Eventually, all production of German Silver was merged into the firm of Henry Wiggin.
Henry Wiggin was also born in Cheadle in 1826, and was initially apprenticed to a firm of woollen drapers in Birmingham. He joined Evans and Askin in 1842. He became a partner in 1848 and, after Evans’s death, sole proprietor. The business moved to a new site on Birmingham Heath, at Wiggins Lane in Ladywood, a site on a crossroads in the Birmingham Main Line canal. The business owed much of its later success to the fact that it gave facilities to the Mond family when they began their experiments in England.
In 1870 Henry Wiggin incorporated as a new concept, a limited company, manufacturers of nickel alloys. In 1877 the firm recruited a German chemist Gustav Boeddiker who over the next 30 years kept the company at the forefront of metallurgical developments and is remembered for almost single-handedly proving the value of ‘the appliance of science’ in the metal trades in Birmingham. In 1880 Henry Wiggin passed the management of the company to Alfred Smeaton Johnstone. Henry Wiggin died in 1905 but by then, William West had set up on his own. Henry Wiggin & Co Ltd was bought by Mond Nickel Company in 1922. Mond Nickel Company were an international company with contacts across the developing World. They had been formed in 1900 and by 1922 had freehold interests in nickel and copper mines in Ontario, Canada, and a refining plant in Swansea.
But Came They All to Birmingham 