Black Country

• 1. Introduction

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  The Black Country sits in England's West Midlands, and in 1851 a railway guidebook described it in terms no one who read them could forget. A "perpetual twilight reigns during the day," it wrote, and at night "fires on all sides light up the dark landscape with a fiery glow." Streams carried no fish. Stunted trees bore no birds except, as the guidebook put it, "a few smoky sparrows." The few cottages stood half-swallowed by sinking pits, their timbers pointing up "like the ribs of a half decayed corpse."

  That image was not invented to shock. It was observed. The Black Country was a real place, forged by geology and labour over centuries, and for a brief period in the 19th century it was arguably the most intensively industrial patch of land on earth. The American diplomat Elihu Burritt, who walked it on foot in the 1860s, declared it could not "be matched, for vast and varied production, by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe."

  What made this corner of the English Midlands so uniquely combustible? How did a rural stretch of Staffordshire become the furnace of an empire? And what happened when the furnaces finally went cold? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. The Seam Beneath

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  A coal seam thirty feet thick, the thickest in all of Great Britain, lies beneath the Black Country and made almost everything else possible. Miners gave the individual layers names that read like a medieval bestiary: Broach Coal at the top, then the Thick Coal, the Heathen Coal, the Stinking Coal, the Bottom Coal, and finally the Singing Coal. Between those layers sat deposits of iron ore and fireclay, the raw material for the glass pots of Stourbridge.

  The coalfield is bounded to the north by the Bentley Fault, beyond which lies the separate Cannock Chase Coalfield. Around the exposed seams, geological faults conceal a second, deeper coalfield. A mine sunk between 1870 and 1874 in Smethwick reached coal at a depth of over 400 yards. Near the western boundary fault at Baggeridge, coal was found at around 600 yards below ground in the last decade of the 19th century.

  A broken ridge running north-westerly through Dudley, Wrens Nest and Sedgley divides the Black Country into two drainage basins. Streams to the north carry water to the River Tame and eventually to the North Sea; those to the south feed the Stour, which meets the Severn and empties into the Bristol Channel. At Dudley and Wrens Nest, limestone was mined from rock formed in the Silurian period. One creature fossilised in that limestone, the trilobite Calymene blumenbachii, turned up so often that local people called it the Dudley Bug, and it was incorporated into the coat-of-arms of the County Borough of Dudley.

• 3. Naming the Darkness

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  The name "Black Country" first appears in the historical record at a Reformers' meeting on the 24th of November 1841, when a Mr Simpson, town clerk to Lichfield, referred in a toast to the "black country" of Staffordshire. His words were published in the Staffordshire Advertiser.

  Five years later, in 1846, the Reverend William Gresley, a prebendary of Lichfield Cathedral, used it as the title of his novel Colton Green: A Tale of the Black Country. Gresley placed his opening village "on the border of the agricultural part of Staffordshire, just before you enter the dismal region of mines and forges, commonly called the 'Black Country'", that word "commonly" signalling the phrase was already current. He added that the region ran "about twenty miles in length and five in bredth reaching from north to south."

  By 1858, the geologist Joseph Jukes felt the name needed no explanation at all. He remarked that it was "commonly known in the neighbourhood as the 'Black Country', an epithet the appropriateness of which must be acknowledged by anyone who even passes through it on a railway." It was Elihu Burritt, however, who carried the phrase to a wider audience. Burritt had been appointed United States consul in Birmingham by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, and his 1868 book Walks in The Black Country and its Green Borderland became the definitive early account. He authored the phrase "black by day and red by night" and he swept a conceptual circle of twenty miles from Birmingham's Town Hall to define the region's extent, a circle wide enough to include Coventry, Kidderminster and Lichfield.

• 4. Forges, Nails, and Iron

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  Coal mining in the Black Country began in medieval times, but metalworking was already significant by the 16th century. In 1583, the building accounts for Henry VIII's Nonsuch Palace record nails supplied by Reynolde Warde of Dudley at eleven shillings and four pence per thousand. By the 1620s, a contemporary account recorded that within ten miles of Dudley Castle there were 20,000 smiths of all sorts.

  The slitting mill arrived in the Midlands in the early 17th century. Richard Foley, son of a Dudley nailer, built one near Kinver in 1628; the device let smiths produce nail rods from iron bar far more easily than before. Around the same time, Dud Dudley, a natural son of the Baron of Dudley, experimented with making iron using coal instead of charcoal. Two patents were granted: one in 1621 to Lord Dudley and one in 1638 to Dud Dudley and three others. In his 1665 work Metallum Martis, Dud Dudley claimed to have "made Iron to profit with Pit-cole," though later writers have cast doubt on that claim.

  John Wilkinson's ironworks at Bradley near Bilston marked a more firmly documented turning point. From 1757, Wilkinson produced iron there by coke-smelting rather than charcoal, and others followed quickly. James Brindley's canal, constructed between 1768 and 1772, connected the Black Country mines and forges to the rest of the country, running from Birmingham through the heart of the region to the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal. By 1863, the Black Country counted 200 blast furnaces, 110 of them in active blast. Two years after that, 2,116 puddling furnaces were recorded, converting pig-iron into wrought iron.

• 5. The 1913 Strike

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  On the 9th of May 1913, workers at the Old Patent tube works of John Russell and Co. Ltd. in Wednesbury walked out. They wanted a minimum weekly wage of 23 shillings for unskilled workers, bringing their pay level with that of Birmingham workers nearby. Within weeks, upwards of 40,000 workers across the Black Country had joined the dispute.

  The strike touched national nerves well beyond the region. The Asquith Government's armaments programme depended on Black Country production, specifically naval equipment, steel tubing, nuts, bolts and destroyer parts. The dispute ran alongside the Anglo-German naval arms race that would, the following year, tip into the First World War. Key figures in the labour movement arrived to support the strikers: Tom Mann, a leading proponent of Syndicalism, visited the area, as did Jack Beard and Julia Varley of the Workers' Union, who organised the action on the ground.

  The employers were represented by the Midlands Employers' Federation, a body founded by Dudley Docker. Settlement came on the 11th of July, following arbitration by government officials from the Board of Trade under Chief Industrial Commissioner Sir George Askwith, 1st Baron Askwith. The strike had lasting consequences beyond the wage gain itself: until that point, the Black Country workforce had largely avoided trade unionism, and the dispute produced a significant growth of organised labour across the region.

• 6. Deindustrialisation and After

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  Baggeridge Colliery near Sedgley, the last working pit in the region, closed on the 2nd of March 1968, marking the end of roughly three hundred years of mass coal mining. The broader decline of heavy industry followed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when global shocks and political change hit the region in rapid sequence. Between 1979 and 1982, Bilston Steel Works, Round Oak, Patent Shaft Steelworks, Rubery Owen and Birmid Industries all shut in quick succession.

  Unemployment in Brierley Hill peaked at more than 25 percent in the first half of the 1980s, roughly double the national average, after the closure of Round Oak Steel Works. The Merry Hill Shopping Centre and Waterfront complex were built on the Round Oak site and surrounding farmland between 1985 and 1990, reducing local unemployment significantly. The Patent Shaft site was redeveloped as an industrial estate. These areas were designated as Enterprise Zones in implicit acknowledgement of the social damage done.

  According to the Government's 2007 Index of Deprivation, Sandwell ranked as the 14th most deprived of the UK's 354 districts. Wolverhampton was the 28th most deprived nationally. Chainmaking survives in Cradley Heath on a modern industrial scale; the majority of chain supplied to the Ministry of Defence and the Admiralty fleet is made there today. The four boroughs submitted a joint bid in late 2015 to become a UNESCO Global Geopark, and that status was confirmed on the 10th of July 2020.

• 7. Language and Identity

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  The traditional Black Country dialect, known locally as "Black Country Spake," preserves features of Early Modern and even Middle English that have vanished from most of England. Thee, thy and thou remain in active use, a trait shared with parts of Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire.

  A lottery-funded project called "Where's our Spake Gone," running between 2014 and 2016, set out to preserve and document the dialect before it faded further. One participant in the project recalled a tale about being called rabbits by outsiders: Black Country speakers say "tah-ra a bit" (meaning goodbye for a little while), and to outside ears, it sounds enough like "tah rah rabbits" that the confusion stuck.

  The vocabulary is dense with transformed sounds. A sofa is a "sofie," a ghost is a "goost," a woman is a "wench" and a man is a "mon." Home is "wum," cold is "code," and food may be called "fittle" from the old word "vittles." An apple becomes an "opple." The greeting "'Ow bist gooin'" and the approving reply "bostin', ah kid" pack an entire social transaction into a handful of syllables that would baffle most British ears.

  The region's emblems took formal shape in recent decades. A Black Country tartan, designed by Philip Tibbetts from Halesowen, was registered in 2009. The Black Country flag was designed by Gracie Sheppard of Redhill School in Stourbridge and registered with the Flag Institute in July 2012. Its unveiling at the Black Country Living Museum on the 14th of July 2012 coincided with the 300th anniversary of the erection of the first Newcomen atmospheric engine, and that date was subsequently designated Black Country Day each year.