Living in Birmingham

Henry Green

The novelist Henry Green was born Henry Yorke in Tewkesbury, 1905, and died in London, 1973. In 1926 Eton-educated Henry dropped out of Oxford University where he seems to have spent most of his time drinking and not getting on with his tutor C.S. Lewis. It was time to learn the family trade. When Vincent Yorke married Henry's mother Maud, his father was given the Birmingham foundry H. Pontifex & Sons based at Farringdon Works, Tyseley, in Birmingham. 

The site of Farringdon Works, 2009.

In January 1927 Henry moved to the city to work there initially as a stores labourer and then later as a pattern maker. During his two years at Farringdon Works, he lived in Stockfield Hall, a large Victorian boarding house located near Acocks Green on the Stockfield Road, seen below in 1941.

Henry Yorke, labourer, was already Henry Green, novelist, having written his first novel, 'Blindness' (1926), while still at Eton. His fellow workers in Birmingham assumed Henry was being punished by his father but Henry Green was observing and absorbing himself in the life of the factory. The result was his second novel, 'Living' (1929).

The site of Stockfield Hall, 2009.

Some footage of Birmingham in the 1920s:

Sprawling

Architect's impression of St Martin's Flats, Emily St, Highgate, 1938

Following the Great War, Birmingham Corporation began to address the issue of its massive population growth and overcrowded, decrepit housing. Returning soldiers had been promised 'Homes fit for heroes,' but, despite the Corporation's efforts, these homes had not been fully realised by the beginning of the next war.

During the inter-war years the city expanded outwards into the large areas which had been purchased by the Corporation. Private sector housing was proving too slow in meeting the needs of the people and these houses were beyond the means of most, and so, municipal housing, deemed too socialistic before WWI, became a reality.

The planned suburban sprawl was designed for skilled workers who could afford the rents, but the majority of back-to-back dwellers couldn't. Slum clearance had been in the minds of the Council for many years but real advance was not made until after the Second World War. However this did not stop a limited series of housing experiments conducted just outside of the inner ring road.

The pictures above and below show the Holme estate which consisted of the first municipal flats built - "in a Dutch style" - by Birmingham Corporation in 1927 on Garrison Lane, Bordesley. Although the first residents complained they were too small, the Mansions, as they were known by the residents, still exist today and are listed.

The second central area experiment didn't happen until about six years later when a row of maisonettes were constructed in Great Brook Street and became Moorcroft Place (below). Then the whole area along neighbouring Barrack Street was cleared to build the Ashcroft Estate, opened by the Prince of Wales in 1934.

St Martin's flats (below) in Highgate were the first concrete-only flats built in the city. During 1935 there had been much debate in the Council House about a return to flats as a solution to the housing problem of the inner city. It was decided that any further experimentation would have to be done using concrete instead of brick. This was simply due to the shortage of bricklayers. The design of the St Martin's flats reflected the research done by Council committees in the German cities of 1930. They were opened by the Queen in March 1939 and demolished in 1980.

1942

1980

After the financial crisis of 1931, the private sector began to catch up with local authorities, and by the outbreak of the Second World War over 50,000 municipal homes had been built and over 200,000 people had been re-housed in the expanded area of Birmingham.

Although living conditions were better, there were new problems. Long-established communities had been broken up and dispersed, new pressures on transport, distance to employment, and then there were those who were left behind. The scale of suburban construction had been enormous but it had left the issue of the worst housing near the city centre (within walking distance of the factories) unresolved, and that was still the case at the outbreak of WW2.

Leslie Halward

Leslie Halward (1905-1976)

786 Bristol Road

Leslie Halward was raised "over a pork butcher's shop in what was then known as the High Street, Selly Oak, Birmingham." The shop is now what you see above, and never a more non-descript shop could be seen. The picture below shows how it used to be.

Halward was one of the Birmingham Group of writers whose short stories were published by Edward J. O'Brien. In 1936 twenty-three of Halward's stories were collected in To Sea On Sunday.

Written with great economy, Halward's stories are often funny, sometimes sentimental, rounded into parable or enigmatically left hanging. All but one are of their time, concerning themselves with the lives of the working class or the new lower-middle class of the 1930s. This was the time when the suburbs were under consruction throughout the nation, and several of the stories are set in the half-built estates on the edge of Birmingham.

from Frost:

'On the outskirts of the town a new estate was being built. Several hundred houses were completed and already inhabited. These were built alternately in twos and fours, rough-cast, washed over in cream or white, with doors and window-frames painted green. The smooth tarmac roads were wide and straight, flanked by grass verges, newly mown. Electric lamp standards with graceful curved necks stood at regular intervals along the edges of the flagged pavements. Everything looked clean and fresh.'

The Dedication

According to a property website, the flats along Duchess Road offer the cheapest way of buying a little bit of Edgbaston. All of the properties on this road are the result of re-development; the Victorian houses have long gone. Without an old photograph of the area, it is hard to imagine the road as it was when Francesca M. Wilson lived there, at number 35.

Francesca M. Wilson

She was teaching at the Edgbaston Church of England School for Girls, but to call her a teacher would reflect only one part of who she was. Through the Society of Friends she spent much of her time helping refugees and the starving at times of war and their aftermath. Luckily for us she was also a writer who documented her experiences.

In 1944 she published 'In the Margins of Chaos', and dedicated it to Bachtin.

'In the Margins of Chaos'

It would be understandable to assume the Bachtin in question was the now famous philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, but it was actually his elder brother, Nikolai or Nicholas Bachtin, who was rescued from starvation in Paris by Francesca in 1928. Nicholas shared his brother's passion for language, and taught at the University of Birmingham via a bewildering route.

Nicholas Bachtin

For more information about Francesca M. Wilson and Bachtin, I recommend reading Sian Lliwen Roberts' thesis.