The recent BBC series Peaky Blinders propelled the grime, violence and criminal activity of Birmingham during the early twentieth century to an avid television audience. With its vivid characters and evocative backgrounds it gave us a glimpse of what our working-class ancestors might have been part of if they lived in the Midlands during that time. Just the simple act of living was a test for those who dwelled within the city and its environs.
The impact of industry on the people of Birmingham was obvious from the earliest years of industrialisation. As the poet Robert Southey wrote in a letter dated 7 July 1807:
'My head aches with the multiplicity of infernal noises, and my eyes with the light of infernal fires, … my heart also, at the sight of so many human beings employed in infernal occupations, and looking as if they were never destined for anything better … the devil has certainly fixed upon this spot for his own nursery-garden and hot-house. I cannot pretend to say, what is the consumption here of the two-legged beasts of labour; commerce sends in no returns of its killed and wounded. Neither can I say that the people look sickly, having seen no other complexion in the place than what is composed of oil and dust smoke-dried.'
The population of Victorian Birmingham grew exponentially throughout the nineteenth century. In 1801 it was just under 74,000; by 1901 this had rocketed to nearly 750,000. Living conditions became increasingly dire if the death rate of its children is any indication. For example between 1851 and 1861, 34,517 infant deaths alone were recorded in Birmingham. However these deaths are hardly surprising. A series of articles, Scenes in Slumland were published before 1901 in the Birmingham Daily Gazette by J Cuming Walters. Walters described the appalling conditions in which thousands of people lived:
'The air is heavy with a sooty smoke and with acid vapours, and here it is that the poor live – and wither away and die. How do they live? Look at the houses, the alleys, the courts, the ill-lit, ill-paved, walled-in squares, with last night's rain still trickling down from the roofs and making pools in the ill-sluiced yards. Look at the begrimed windows, the broken glass, the apertures stopped with yellow paper or filthy rags; glance in at the rooms where large families eat and sleep every day and every night, amid rags and vermin, within dank and mildewed walls from which the blistered paper is drooping, or the bit of discoloration called "paint" is peeling away. Here you can veritably taste the pestilential air, stagnant and mephitic, which finds no outlet in the prison-like houses of the courts; and yet here, where there is breathing space for so few, the many are herded together, and overcrowding is the rule, not the exception. The poor have nowhere else to go.'
With the rise in population and the ever worsening conditions in the inner city is it any wonder that, for some, criminal activity became the norm? The Victorian era saw a sharp rise in the crime rate with offences going up from roughly 5,000 per year in 1800 to around 20,000 per year in 1840. Living in such dehumanising conditions it was hardly surprising that certain sections of the population lost their moral and social compass but Victorian society, as the nineteenth century progressed, viewed criminality in different ways.
At the beginning of Victoria's reign criminals were seen as individuals in the lowest sections of the working class who were reluctant to do an honest day's work and who preferred idleness, drink and an easy life. There were also concerns about 'the dangerous classes' who were thought to lurk in the slums waiting for the opportunity to commit acts of violence. In the eyes of the law-abiding Victorian, the problem was a moral one.
The middle of the century saw the rise of the ‘criminal classes.’ These people were at the very bottom of society and were seen almost as a particular group who were bred to a life of dissolution and dishonesty
By the end of the century, developments in psychiatry and the popularity of Darwin’s theory of evolution had led to the criminal being identified as an individual suffering from some form of behavioural abnormality that had been either inherited or nurtured by their feckless parents.
With appalling working and living conditions, acts of criminality, violence and ill health Birmingham truly deserves the epitaph ‘grim'.
Karen Evans is the author of 'A Grim Almanac of Birmingham'. Discover 366 gruesome tales from Birmingham’s past. With appalling accidents, frightful crimes and extraordinary deaths, there’s something to surprise even the most hardened reader. Featured here is the man who deliberately swallowed his wooden walking stick, a nineteenth-century horsemeat scandal, a drunken dispute that led to a man being stabbed in the eye with a table fork, and the lightning storm which hit a fog-signalling factory, setting off 43,000 explosions. True accounts of fires, catastrophes, murders, executions and a variety of nasty goings-on in the Birmingham of yesteryear await you within.