For a thousand years Saltley was the home of a scattered rural community who farmed the western slope of a ridge which runs down to the River Rea, which was separated the community from anything that could be described as Birmingham by a troublesome ford. Here were the open strip fields of this sub-manor of Aston. At the top of the hill was the hamlet of Over Saltley probably situated around the current junction of Alum Rock Road and Bowyer Road. Excavations of the remains of an 18th-century dairy also showed tentative evidence that it may have stood on one side of a village green. At the bottom of the hill was also a small village focus at lower Saltley east of the Rea ford. The open fields were enclosed late here. The High Field enclosed in 1817 was the last to be enclosed in Birmingham. Corn grown in these fields was ground at the manorial watermill on the River Rea near what is now Crawford Street. This was first recorded in 1526 when it belonged to Thomas Holte of Duddeston. By 1690, in common with many Birmingham mills, it had converted to blade grinding and by 1760 was rolling steel, powered of course by water.
Just up the hill a windmill stood where Ralph Road is today near Alum Rock Road. This is shown on Beighton’s map of 1725 but seems to have gone by 1760. This may have been built to grind corn when the watermill turned to metal working and may then have been abandoned when nearby Duddeston Mill turned back to corn grinding. The Old Gate Inn probably predated the turnpike Castle Bromwich road (1759) by a hundred years, and presented a resting place for travellers from Birmingham after they had waded through the ford.
On the turnpike at Washwood Heath stood a gibbet until the beginning of the 19th century. Its exact location is unknown but was probably on Washwood Heath Road at Aston Church Road, that being the highest point. The policy at the time was to try the accused at Warwick Assizes but then hang the guilty in public near to where they lived, and their bodies left in chains as a warning to all. The last public hanging here was of eight men in 1802, 4 coiners and 4 burglars. This is recorded as having attracted 40,000 spectators (some accounts say more) with tents and picnics, at a time when the population of the whole of Birmingham was estimated at only 80,000.
In the 1840s, the character of the area began to change. The catalyst was the building of the Birmingham & Derby Junction Railway, which was laid in 1842 along the valleys of the Rea and Tame, and the opening of Saltley Station twelve years later. The Garrison Canal arm was built at the same time to cut congestion for canal traffic between the junctions at Aston, Salford and Bordesley. Joseph Wright, a stagecoach owner and coach-builder set up his Saltley Carriage Works in 1844 off Saltley High Street on the present site of Saltley Trading Estate. He shrewdly capitalised on the railway boom and by 1860 over a thousand workers were employed at his Metropolitan Carriage & Wagon Company (later Metro-Cammell) producing rolling stock for home and for export. The last trains rolled off the assembly line here in 2004.
By 1860, four of the nine sons of Charles Crutchley, Wheelwright of Market Drayton managed to maintain their family wheelwright trade in rural Shropshire/Staffordshire outside of Market Drayton. One moved to London and became a plumber. But four of them, James, Joseph, Charles and George, had moved to Aston/Saltley in search of regular work found at the new Carriage Works.
At the same time for 25 years the Ingram family had been soap/candle makers at the British Alkali Co in Stoke Prior near Bromsgrove, but by 1851 this company was in dire financial trouble. By 1862 John Ingram, his wife Elizabeth (nee Hardman, a teacher from Hereford/Ludlow) and their 4 children had moved to Garrison St, Aston where their 5th and last child Annie Kate was born. John Ingram continued to be a Soap/candle Maker, probably at the newly opened Kynoch’s Lion Works (later ICI Metals and then IMI) recently built in the then pretty and rural hamlet of Witton. Again here on the north eastern edges of Birmingham there was a troublesome ford this time over the River Tame that separated Witton from the rapidly growing town of Birmingham. In 1730 there had been a recorded 20 farms in Witton and by 1848 the population was only 157. Kynoch’s main product was gunpowder and ammunition, and the countryside was deemed to be a safer place for such a factory after the catastrophic explosion in 1859 in Whittall St, Central Birmingham that killed 19 of its 70 employees. Explosions and fatalities continued in Witton into the 1870s. Is it a coincidence that Birmingham City Cemetery was opened here in Witton in 1860? Despite this the area remained largely rural until the opening of the GEC factory in 1901 which spurred the development of working-class housing around Deakin Road.
In August and September 1883, two sons of George and Mary Crutchley – Rowland (who worked for the Railways) and George (a carriagemaker) married two of the daughters of John and Eliza Ingram – Alice and Annie Kate (who ended her days in the Kings Norton Asylum in 1907).
Meanwhile the Barnes family had been resident in Birmingham from the 1820’s having moved their trade as Joiners from around Hednesford and Lichfield. In 1849 Samuel Barnes married Sarah Bray (from Abdon in Shropshire) in Aston Juxta. In 1851 they lived in Fazeley Street and in the Census that year Samuel is described as a Coachbuilder but by 1861 he and his family had moved out to Aston to continue his trade presumably in the Saltley Carriage Works.
Around 1880 two things happened of note. Firstly, the site of Saltley Mill became part of a gasworks producing gas from coal. This was initially a council enterprise which grew and expanded eventually to cover hundreds of acres along the River Rea between Saltley and Nechells. At their height these were the largest gasworks in Europe whose powerful sights and smells dominated the district for another 100 years. An explosion of 10 October 1904 was allegedly caused by a worker lighting a cigarette. It is said that the explosion broke windows within a half mile radius and that the ground was felt to shake in Coleshill 8 miles away. Secondly Samuel and Sarah’s daughter Lizzie married William Cork, a Corkscrew maker at the time living in Irving St in the City Centre. A Corkscrew was one of several steel “toys” (buckles, buttons, watch chains and stay-hooks, sugar-tongs and boxes) made in numerous workshops across the region. William’s father John had been a steel toy maker before him, having moved from Wolverhampton to Highgate following the death of his first wife in the mid-1840s. William Cork however tired of the living provided by this trade, and aged 53 in 1911 is shown in the census as having opened a Tripe Shop in Great Lister Street where he lived till his death in 1927.
By 1880 in Witton the Kynoch Works were the second largest ammunition factory in Great Britain on a site of 24 acres where daily cartridge capacity was now 400,000 with 800 employees. Kynochs also owned a brass rolling mill elsewhere in Birmingham, a patent lamp business, and a printing office. The firm went on to be one of the major suppliers of ammunition during the First World War and was visited by the King and major politicians.
The railway industry needed a very wide range of equipment and by 1870 there were five large factories in Saltley employing over three thousand people to produce everything for railways home and abroad from rolling stock and all its internal furnishings, railway lines and signalling equipment, and everything needed on the station, signs, lamps and waiting-room fires. In Arden Road the Britannia Works also produced railway rolling stock on a site north of the Birmingham-London railway, and in Common Lane the Midland Works was built close to the Derby line.
The development of the railway and gas industries led to the construction of hundreds of good-quality working-class homes and by 1888 housing and industry was continuous from Birmingham to Duddeston and Nechells to Lower Saltley. In 1891 Saltley voters opted to leave Aston manor to amalgamate with Birmingham. By the turn of the century the slopes of Saltley were covered in long terraces of straight streets at what was then the eastern limit of Birmingham. However, farmland still stretched beyond Highfield Road. Alum Rock Road grew into a linear shopping street from Highfield Road down to Saltley.
By 1858 Joseph Wright had set up a school on Saltley High Street for the children of his carriage workers. It probably continued until the opening on Alum Rock Road of St Saviour’s Church School. As the population increased Highfield Road Board School was opened in 1878 and Arden Road Board School twenty years later (renamed The Adderley Primary School in 1954). Today both schools are much altered but retain their original buildings.
Saltley Viaduct was built in 1895 to replace the level crossing over the Derby railway line and the canal. A tollgate used to stand at the junction of the High Street with Washwood Heath Road with the keeper’s cottage alongside. The tollgate was known as Saltley (or Halfpenny) Gate. The road was disturnpiked in 1877 and Saltley Gate dismantled. The Old Gate Inn was replaced in 1879 by a new Gate Inn, which stood on the site of the slip-road from Saltley High Street to Washwood Heath Road, but this was demolished c1980. The junction is still known as Saltley Gate (thanks now in large part to the sculpture placed in the middle of the roundabout).
William and Lizzie Cork had 3 sons and 4 daughters between 1881 and 1894 all of whom either worked as or married into families that worked as coach-builders or for the railways in the area. The youngest son Len married Nellie Crutchley – the third of 4 daughters of George and Annie – in 1912. Len and Nellie had three children, Leonard (Len – 1913), Reginald (Reg – 1918) and Edith (1921).
But Came They All to Birmingham 