Historiography of the Black Country

Lying to the West of Birmingham (see Figure 1), the Black Country has always been politically separate, but rarely cohesive. It embraces the highly productive South Staffordshire and North Worcestershire coalfields, without crossing the border into Birmingham. It has been a centre of production for coal, iron, steel, bricks, glass and engineering but most recently – since devastating closures in the late 1970s and early 1980s – has been a byword for post-industrial decline.Footnote ⁴ Its post-war historiography is less substantial than that for previous centuries. Where an earlier generation of social historians made the Black Country a key locality for the study of social disorder and urban politics, twentieth-century research has been particular rather than comprehensive.Footnote ⁵ Some subjects have been covered in depth: innovations in town planning, for instance, and the complexities and controversies of race relations in the region.Footnote ⁶ Several important, but unpublished, theses aside, and despite David Kynaston's assertion that it formed the ‘hub…not only of a nation but of a universe’, there have been few attempts to investigate in depth the everyday lives, motivations and practices of ordinary Black Country people in this period.Footnote ⁷

Figure 1.

Map of the Black Country (© Black Country Living Museum)

In fact, this was a period of increasing working-class prosperity and industrial strength, during which localized urban identities played a much stronger role than a putative regional identity. The expression ‘Black Country’ has existed since at least the 1840s, and a distinctive manufacturing district here for much longer, but it had always been a term of convenience, not political geography. By 1945, it constituted a patchwork of 22 county boroughs, non-county boroughs and urban districts, from Wolverhampton at 215,000 inhabitants, to Amblecote, the smallest urban district in the country, with fewer than 3,000. Each has a distinctive history, particularly noticeable in the industrial specificity developed during the nineteenth century: Darlaston made nuts and bolts, West Bromwich springs, Walsall leather, and so on. Between the wars, formerly separate towns began to meet: overcrowded Smethwick spilled into Oldbury, West Bromwich almost touched Wednesbury. Reconstruction plans frequently discussed amalgamations or mergers, though it was not until 1966 that significant changes took place, and until 1974 that the modern boundaries – the metropolitan boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton – were formalized.Footnote ⁸ Nearly every interviewee recorded for BCLM's current research considered themselves Dudley folk, Wolverhampton folk, Wednesbury folk during this period – not Black Country folk. Understanding this perspective is key to understanding today's Black Country. Not only did industries differ, so too did dialect, geology, demography. Commonwealth immigration, for example, occurred in large numbers in Wolverhampton and Smethwick, hardly at all in Stourbridge or Gornal, and somewhere in between everywhere else. As modern politicians embrace the idea of a distinctive and diverse Black Country as a form of place promotion, it is important to recognize this urban differentiation in the creation of a popular memory of the region.Footnote ⁹

An industrial museum for the Black Country

BCLM's story began during a prosperous period, but one characterized by the decline of traditional industries. Collecting for a Black Country museum began in earnest in 1967, placing it firmly within the disruptive social history museum movement of the 1960s, drawing on a nostalgia and affection for past lifestyles and technologies, presented ‘from below’.Footnote ¹⁰ Formally opened in 1978, it now receives over 330,000 visitors per year to a 26-acre site which ranges from the early industrial era to World War II. BCLM: Forging Ahead is the Museum's development plan to construct a post-war town centre and industrial area on its site, moving that distinctive story forward using recreated and translocated (moved brick-by-brick) buildings set in the period 1945–68, and interpreted by costumed demonstrators and collections rather than traditional text panels. The project maintains the Museum's ‘Real Lives, Real Stories’ ethos, in which the buildings tell their authentic individual stories rather than notional or typical histories.

Industrial heritage for a de-industrialized region

Following the de-industrialization of the 1980s, the Black Country's social and industrial heritage has been redirected from urban to regional. A demand for industrial heritage – once worthless back-to-back houses, or small factories, for instance – to define a wider ‘community’ is generated when older, employment-based identities appear to begin to fail, and in the Black Country's case this has been spatial as well as cultural.Footnote ¹¹ This newly regional identity is situated less within an empirical, remembered past than within the heritage with which the region has chosen to mediate that past: in Doreen Massey's famous formulation it is ‘that particular articulation of social relations which we are at the moment naming as’ the Black Country.Footnote ¹²

The Museum has a role to play in this. Shops originally from Wolverhampton, Oldbury or Dudley nestle next to one another, blurring distinctions between the towns; and although the static exhibition stresses this geographical specificity, industry can sometimes be blurred in favour of a generic Black Country type.Footnote ¹³ The chain industry – once focused on Cradley Heath – is a case in point. Chainmaking demonstrations, exhibition displays and the town's Worker's Institute, built with the proceeds of the 1910 women chainmakers’ strike, all attest to its importance. The accompanying interpretation stresses the hardships and exploitative labour practices that characterized the industry, and Black Country people are typically proud of the hard work and fortitude of their forebears.Footnote ¹⁴ But evidence that chainmaking has come to represent the wider Black Country can be seen in the wide acceptance of the Black Country flag: chains against stylized glass cones (a Stourbridge industry), in colours recalling the famous description of the region as ‘black by day, red by night’.Footnote ¹⁵ This over-simplification risks becoming a ‘selective canonization’ of heritage: where one industry, with all its specificities, comes to stand for the whole. Debates around the flag have remained live since its introduction: historians and politicians, particularly of African-Caribbean heritage, have criticized the chain iconography, sparking a heated local defence of the memory of the chainmakers and their work. Industrial heritage inevitably has wider implications than just local; the history of chainmaking sits within histories of empires, economies and trade, as well as locality.Footnote ¹⁶

It is important therefore to recognize the political impulses of nostalgia. As the introductory quotes demonstrate, nostalgia can be for busy towns and full employment, or for a more personal past before later social and demographic changes. Nostalgia is always rooted in present-day experience. Robert Hewison famously suggested that ‘collectively, nostalgia supplies the deep links that identify a particular generation; nationally, it is the source of binding social myths’.Footnote ¹⁷ Hewison's pessimistic view of the heritage industry has since been challenged and nostalgia shown to have not only regressive, but also progressive and sympathetic tendencies.Footnote ¹⁸ Heritage attractions like BCLM have an important role in challenging regressive nostalgia, but also in encouraging and complicating progressive and sympathetic nostalgia which may over-simplify geographical, social and cultural variations in history.

BCLM: Forging Ahead

In key ways, therefore, BCLM: Forging Ahead is an attempt to unsettle these nostalgias by depicting the Black Country in a prosperous and culturally diverse era. The project timeline covers 1945–68, a trajectory of austerity to prosperity in the region, with the associated demographic shifts brought about by suburbanization and immigration.Footnote ¹⁹ It creates a town centre (see Figure 2) and industrial area which depict the move to more nucleic urban forms in which prosperous town centres coalesced, and housing and industry were pushed to the suburbs.Footnote ²⁰

Figure 2.

Birds-eye artist's impression of the BCLM: Forging Ahead town centre (© Black Country Living Museum)

Addressing this period is the logical next step from BCLM's previous 1930s development; however, it comes with its own challenges. Setting the story within the ‘brief life of social democracy’ encompasses an era whose architecture, politics and economics have long been out of favour.Footnote ²¹ BCLM: Forging Ahead skirts some of these issues by setting its buildings mostly prior to the wholesale redevelopment of many town centres, and replicating older buildings in a post-war setting. But the intangible heritage of an interventionist state is evident in a number of the recreated buildings, several of which demonstrate the depth with which the state was embedded in local, urban and political self-identity, providing a stark contrast to the post-social democratic world from which visitors enter the site. They invoke both the spatial spread of municipal authority that Geoffrey Tyack describes, and the clustering of municipal functions in the small urban units of the Black Country: while the library and infant welfare centre included here were suburban amenities, the gas showroom was translocated from a central site, adjacent to other municipal functions in West Bromwich.Footnote ²²

The project addresses shifting urban cultures too. Through industries like brickmaking and foundry work, the labour of women and minorities will be foregrounded. Through the bowling green, pub and shops, the gendered nature of leisure in post-war Britain will be evident. A building society branch highlights home-ownership, a hairdresser and a clothes shop changes in fashion, a Co-operative shop changing retail trends. Many of these intentionally jar with the cosier nostalgia of the Victorian and Edwardian village and the social memory associated with, for instance, hard work as masculine, or local history as white history. The research outlined here feeds not only into the physical urban space but also into the project's key interpretative tool, costumed first-person demonstration. These choices of interpretative space and method should disrupt some of the more comfortable nostalgic tendencies of both living museums and historical re-enactment: the social, economic and cultural diversity of the urban setting ensures that cosy nostalgia would not be sufficient.Footnote ²³

Case-studies

This article uses case-studies of three buildings from BCLM: Forging Ahead to demonstrate how such sites provide a small, tangible focus for larger stories. The selection criteria for the project were multi-stranded, with an emphasis on saving buildings or stories that were at risk of being lost. The decision was made early to make cultural diversity a central theme, without shoehorning these stories in. This means allowing stories to emerge organically from buildings chosen to represent as wide a range of stories, locations and themes as possible. In my experience as a historian brought in to help guide the process, there has been none of the subtle avoidance of conflict that Tony Bennett found at Beamish, for example, and a significant embrace of new forms of diverse community outreach on the Museum's part – the intervening years appear to have given living museums confidence to approach difficult histories boldly. The challenges are mostly those of local historical practice: existing amateur research often reflects those who have the time and resources to engage fully, which often limits, for example, BAME groups from further participation. The largest historiographical theme yet to emerge from the research is LGBTQ history, and this may itself be an urban issue – as a subject much better documented in larger cities than industrial regions like the Black Country, perhaps it awaits further community outreach before BCLM is able to document this authentically.Footnote ²⁴ The intention of this wide-ranging project is, of course, still to provide an attractive family day out, but this does not preclude challenging and provoking, and disrupting pervasive narratives of ‘the good old days’ or the imagined community cohesion of austerity-era Britain. It provides a body of research into an under-studied region and urban form, and also presents studies of architectural and material culture as important explorations of urban history in their own right.

Dudley Central Civic Restaurant

An essential practical inclusion for a Museum of this size is an increased catering offer, and here the Civic Restaurant will take centre stage. This building is a recreation of a restaurant opened in Dudley in 1948 and demonstrates through food and design the interplay between austerity and modernism in the immediate post-war era. Civic Restaurants were the evolution of wartime British Restaurants which served thousands of meals a day in the Black Country, where works canteens were scarce.Footnote ²⁵ Most historiography of British Restaurants traces this effectiveness within wartime food provision, rather than their continuation into the post-war austerity era.Footnote ²⁶ The 1947 Civic Restaurants Act enabled profitable British Restaurants to convert to continue trading under local authority control. James Vernon credits the London Council of Social Service's F. Le Gros Clark with the utopian imperative behind the continuation. He suggested in 1943 that British Restaurants were ‘a new social form’ preceding sweeping post-war social change, and described how a new generation of community restaurants could enhance productivity and community.Footnote ²⁷ In 1945, he presented plans for ‘new model’ restaurants which could serve 500–650 main courses in two hours, in modern, efficient buildings (see Figure 3). Everything from table size to coat hooks was considered, and in particular a ‘free view of the kitchen’ was maintained. ‘Social education’ was an understated but evident factor in Clark's thinking: a modern, hygienic kitchen could educate working-class patrons as well as feed them.Footnote ²⁸

Figure 3.

Design for model Civic Restaurant produced by L.H. Bucknell and Ruth Ellis Architects, 1945, taken from F. Le Gros Clark, Community Restaurants in Design (London, 1945) (BCMTL 2017/331/001)

Dudley was one of only a few purpose-built post-war Civic Restaurants. The pre-cast concrete building was designed by borough architect R.J. Blackman, with a cafeteria seating 130, a restaurant for 120 and a lounge for 48 – ‘experience suggests that a coffee room will convey to the restaurant itself some flavour of the “club” atmosphere that is often appreciated by its habitués’.Footnote ²⁹ Careful thought was again given to layout and provision – it was noted for instance that Black Country diners did not care much for soup.Footnote ³⁰ Menus were in fact simple, the aim being to provide a cheap, nutritious hot meal: in 1948, a three-course luncheon could be had for 2s 3d. Prices had risen since the war – in 1942, Walsall's British Restaurant served three courses and tea for 10d.Footnote ³¹ Even for visiting dignitaries, the menu was little changed. When a British Council-sponsored tour by four Tanganyikan chiefs in 1954 was hosted, the same soup and roast combination was simply supplemented by exotic dishes like grapefruit maraschino and fresh salmon.Footnote ³² Chief Amri Dodo's report glossed over the food: amid an itinerary including Dudley Zoo and a Wolverhampton Wanderers match, mushroom patties were perhaps not a highlight.Footnote ³³ Ministry of Food regulations stipulated that Civic Restaurants must remain profitable; increased consumer choice and disposable income in the 1950s led to Dudley closing its doors for the final time on 29 September 1956.Footnote ³⁴

The interpretation of this building raises its own questions, including practical ones: will customers still happily pay for their food at the ‘Automaticket’ machine before seeing what is on offer? How to recreate a mural designed by Dudley College students when no photographs of it exist? Can the thin pre-cast concrete be reproduced to modern building regulations? The Civic Restaurant is one of few pieces of post-war architecture in the scheme and its modernist design and concrete will stand in stark contrast to the reclaimed bricks of the inter-war gas showroom and Victorian library next to it – how will the public, accustomed to the more traditional settings of the rest of the Museum, respond? Each building in the scheme is the subject of its own oral history project, and it is hoped that many details will be provided by customers who remember the building when we publicize it in 2019. To date, recollections of the Civic Restaurant have been passing, but sometimes unfavourable: it is remembered as ‘drab’ or ‘austere’ compared to memories of the town centre as ‘remarkable’.Footnote ³⁵ The building's story is appealing to historians as representing a civic response to austerity and social democracy, but it could be that we are recreating a restaurant that lasted such a short time precisely because of its unpopularity.

This is an example of where community memory is vital in recreating the building, but also where BCLM has a role in shaping popular memory of an individual building and a wider politics.Footnote ³⁶ It gets to the heart of the Black Country as an urban region too. British and Civic Restaurants were popular across the Black Country, but were municipal enterprises. They highlight that many memories of the Black Country during this period are really memories of specific buildings, authorities and towns. So although BCLM necessarily draws upon stories with a regional, and national, resonance, focusing on individual buildings like this actually bypasses some of these more recent constructions of identity and gets to the root of individuals’ own experiences of the post-war period in an industrial region. It also fills a gap in the historiography of the post-war town – the dream of the Civic Restaurant died swiftly but left an impression that has been too little recognized by historians.

Stanton's music shop

One particular oral history demonstrates the close-knit nature of urban life in post-war Dudley. Dan Quinn was a young Dudley man who married into the family of Laurie Thomas, a Tividale barber whose shop also features within BCLM: Forging Ahead. Quinn's friends lived in the cast-iron council houses already at the Museum, and he attended wedding receptions at the Civic Restaurant. He bought his first records in another shop that forms part of BCLM: Forging Ahead – Stanton's music shop.Footnote ³⁷ Musical instrument and record shops were an essential part of the changing consumption patterns of youth culture in post-war Britain.Footnote ³⁸ The Black Country was not immune to these changes. Contemporaries were concerned about the impact that high-waged, low-skilled jobs were having on Dudley's youth, and common rock ’n’ roll moral panics recurred. The ‘jive-crazy youths’ who caused havoc during ‘Rock Around the Clock’ in 1956 graduated into the ‘teddy boys’ arrested for a weekend of sustained violence directed towards Dudley's black and Asian community in 1962.Footnote ³⁹ Stanton's was one of the key new sites of consumption and shared experience for this new urban youth culture.

James Stanton started his piano-tuning business in nearby Tipton in 1870, moving into piano and harmonium sales. These were aspirational items for the better-off working classes, and the business was successful – so much so that Stanton opened a second shop in a converted Georgian townhouse on Dudley's Castle Street.Footnote ⁴⁰ The business passed eventually to Stanton's daughter-in-law Florence, who diversified the stock, employed a manager, Frederick ‘Jimmy’ Nash, and sold not just pianos but ‘gramophones, records, sheet music and everything musical’.Footnote ⁴¹ After World War II, with disposable income growing and technology advancing, Stanton's went from strength to strength. It sold record players, radios, televisions and a wide selection of sheet music, records and instruments, ran music lessons, repaired electronics and tuned pianos. Its listening booths are fondly recalled – customers chose a record sleeve and took it to the counter where an assistant played the record for them. Its popularity echoed its late Victorian foundations – with more disposable income, working-class customers could covet and buy a Dansette record player or an EKCO television in the same way as their ancestors had coveted and bought a piano. Stanton's soon came to reflect the modernizing era in a more fundamental way. As part of Dudley's town centre improvements, the building was demolished around 1960 to make way for a new flagship store, opened on the same site in 1961.Footnote ⁴²

Stanton's story is part of the rise of youth consumption in the 1950s and 1960s. Replicating the pre-demolition version allows the architecture to tell its own story – one of reuse, recycling and regeneration – but also to allow material culture the same privilege. If there is one consumer item that could summarize this period, it was certainly on sale in Stanton's: the Dansette record player. Dansettes were built by the Margolin company of London, but its distinctive automatic changer, allowing listeners to play several records in a row, was made by Birmingham Sound Reproducers (BSR) – despite the name, a small firm based in the Black Country town of Old Hill (see Figure 4). The partnership revolutionized BSR's production: they built vast factories at Old Hill and Stourbridge, and by their early 1970s peak were producing 250,000 changers per week, 87 per cent of the world market.Footnote ⁴³ The factories were major employers in these towns, particularly of women – few long-term residents of Stourbridge or Old Hill do not have a mom, an aunt or a nan who worked at ‘the BSR’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The completed record players were marketed back to affluent working-class areas like the Black Country, frequently with an emphasis on young women as cost-conscious consumers of music, style and the shared communities that these produce. A Dansette was not only an indicator of affluence but a gendered symbol of personal taste, from musical to aesthetic, serving to differentiate teenagers’ musical worlds from the more genteel tastes of their parents’ generation.Footnote ⁴⁵ It perhaps represents another, less palatable, perspective too: a Dansette would also have been the choice of those young consumers labelled teddy boys – the same responsible for racial violence witnessed in Dudley in the 1960s.

Figure 4.

1958 Dansette Major Deluxe record player, donated to Black Country Living Museum in February 2018 (BCMTL E2018/044)

Jimmy Nash had his hair cut by Quinn's father-in-law, whose shop featured a ‘blue spot’ radio – purchased at Stanton's.Footnote ⁴⁶ While in one sense Stanton's is simply a recreated shop, the objects that populate it speak to the full experience of working-class life, showing how perceptions of work and leisure, gender and race, were shaped by their historical moment and urban context. Material culture is an underemployed tool in recent urban history, but can provide helpful, wide-ranging analysis.Footnote ⁴⁷

Elephant & Castle public house

Architecture as material culture also permits another essential part of British post-war history to be explained as well. The Black Country is today one of the most culturally diverse regions in the UK.Footnote ⁴⁸ The busy wartime economy drew workers from around the world, from Eastern Europe to India and the Caribbean. Some towns saw a substantial influx. At Smethwick's Birmid Industries, for example, 20 per cent of the workforce was Indian by 1947, rising to 70 per cent by the end of the 1960s.Footnote ⁴⁹ Wolverhampton was certainly as diverse.Footnote ⁵⁰ Life was rarely simple for the migrant community. Work and domestic life were harsh, and prejudice common. West Bromwich faced a major bus strike when an Indian conductor was employed, Wolverhampton made national news when another Indian student was barred from the Scala nightclub, and violence directed at Dudley's small immigrant population was widely reported as ‘race riots’.Footnote ⁵¹ Most infamous were the targeted campaigns against Commonwealth immigrants in 1960s Smethwick, and the political exploitation of these fears, with another local MP keeping a careful eye on proceedings: minister for health and MP for South-West Wolverhampton, Enoch Powell. Powell's 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech drew on representations of Wolverhampton's population as fearful of their new neighbours, and ready for harsher controls.Footnote ⁵²

Telling this story is not straightforward. Selecting a building on the basis of a specific history – one of the region's makeshift gurdwaras, for instance – risks tokenism and a narrowing of an immigration history that is too often focused on individual communities.Footnote ⁵³ Instead, all buildings in BCLM: Forging Ahead were selected on the expectation that, given the scale and cultural impact of migration in the Black Country, appropriate stories would emerge organically – and so they have. A recreation of the Elephant and Castle, from Stafford Street in Wolverhampton, was selected as a second pub for BCLM on the basis of its prominent former site and its fine Arts and Crafts architectural ceramics (Figure 5). As a local landmark it was a well-photographed building with an archival record in building and licensing plans, and planning its exterior reconstruction was comparatively straightforward. But to set the interior we needed help from those who knew the pub, and oral histories soon began to reveal what traditional documentary sources could not.

Figure 5.

Wolverhampton Corporation trolleybuses turning at the Elephant & Castle, Wolverhampton, 1960s (© Express & Star)

The pub's location will be familiar to urban historians from Roger Swift's research into Victorian Irish immigration.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Irish in Britain – always the largest immigrant population in the UK – were swelled by up to 60,000 per year during the 1950s, and many passed through Wolverhampton.Footnote ⁵⁵ It soon became evident that though not documented, the majority of patrons at the Elephant & Castle were Irish. Other memories from drinkers, licensees and brewery workers corroborated this and recalled other patrons from South Asia and the Caribbean. Pubs are key locations in the development of immigrant culture: the merging of leisure cultures such as British and Caribbean traditions of domino-playing, or the feelings of fear, loss and solidarity recalled in Punjabi pub culture.Footnote ⁵⁶ The pub acted as an informal labour exchange, and a site of reminiscence, recollection and community. Other responses mentioned the pub's upstairs function room, used by clubs including the Student Union from the next-door Polytechnic (now University of Wolverhampton). More research will hopefully throw up other links: the Student Union were for example strongly anti-racist, and organized pub crawls alongside the local Indian Workers Association to test colour bars.Footnote ⁵⁷ The responses to racist rhetoric in the Black Country thus varied substantially from town to town – further evidence of an urban heterogeneity rather than a regional homogeneity.

Recreating this building contributes to the historiography of that essential node in the networks of urban life, the pub and its continuing importance within the informal urban economy. The recreation is evidence too that stories of diverse cultures need not be shoehorned in, but will naturally emerge in all their complexity. It means that, while not avoiding the better-recorded racism and hardships which make for so much of the historiography of post-war immigration, BCLM is able to stress kinship and solidarity experienced across communities in such a site. It also commits the Museum to a level of integrity if, for example, later research turns up a colour bar in another building.