Category: 101 Things Brum Gave The World

From the team behind hit Birmingham miscellany, Paradise Circus, comes the definitive guide to the 101 things that made the world what it is today – and all of them were made in Birmingham.

Read how Birmingham gave the world the wonders of tennis, nuclear war, the Beatles, ‘that smell of eggs’ and many more… 97 more.

“101 Things Birmingham Gave The World, is not a Birmingham of the memory. It is a living breathing thing, wrestling with the city’s contradictions, press-ganging the typically arch and understated humour of the Brummie, and an army of little-known facts, both trivial and monumental, into reshaping its confusing reputation.”
Stewart Lee

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 31: Whistleblowing

If there’s one thing you learn at school, and if the current Education secretary gets his way it many be soon the only thing, it’s this: no one likes a tell tale tit.

Watching The Sweeney, you may have picked up this: nobody likes a grass.

In fact the only positive cultural representation of an informer that is easy to find is Starsky and Hutch’s Huggy Bear: and you can bet that he had to run the gauntlet of hate from the other boss pimps in the area.

So, given that we don’t like people what ‘tell’ how do we make sure that those in the know can reveal terrible problems in institutions without undue opprobrium? Back in the early ‘70s US civic activist Ralph Nader coined the phrase “whistleblower” to avoid the negative whistleblower charges and also negative connotations found in other words such as “snitches”, “grasses” and “bastards”. He took his cue from the practice of giving a healthy toot on a whistle when there was a problem—be that a referee spotting a running back smacking a quarterback blind-side, offside, in the bastardisation of rugby that the yanks play or the lookout on the Titanic seeing (all too late) a metric shittonne of ice.

Those metallic tooting machines—they came from Birmingham. The whistles on the Titanic were the famous Acme Thunderer, designed by Joseph Hudson’s company who also supply refereeing aids worldwide. Hudson was a farm worker from Derbyshire who moved to the city like so many during the Industrial Revolution, and trained as a toolmaker.

He converted the wash house at the side of his end of back to back home in St Marks Street into a workshop where he made many things to help increase his family’s income. The company are still making a racket to this day—in Hockley.

Photo CC Alison Clarke

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 30: An Inferiority Complex

Sometimes we all feel like we’re just not worthy of attention: even though we are perfectly fine women, men, and cities. We share the experience of being unable to reach a subconscious, fictional final goal of subjective security and success to compensate for the inferiority feelings. If we’re not careful we may exhibit an inferiority complex.

Stemming from the psychoanalytic branch of psychology the concept of the inferiority complex is one of Sigmund Freud’s. Alfred Adler, founder of classical adlerian psychology, held that many neurotic symptoms could be traced to overcompensation for this feeling—like building big bed-spring style libraries when there is already a perfectly good one for example. Or shovelling visitors between antiseptic hotel and featureless conference centre without letting them see the real city, or stuffing shuttlecocks down our collective pants. But who are we comparing ourselves to? Surely a city as well appointed and industrious should be confident in its place in the world, size may not be everything but we’re carrying a pretty package.

Further analysis reveals the source of all anxiety: in 1890 a professor of physics at Mason Science College (now the University of Birmingham) called John Henry Poynting calculated the mass of the Earth and forever made us all feel small and insignificant.

Perhaps before that date, Brummies were as annoying overconfident and gobby as cockneys and those from Greater Manchester.

But now we have a lovely line in self depreciation—like good people everywhere—thank Birmingham and Prof Poynting, and thank heaven and earth, for that.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 29: Slapstick Comedy

A number of years ago, during the stag party celebrations for a good friend of mine, I went along to play paintballing. Upon arrival at the centre we discovered that our opponents for the day were a group of men who had evidently been paintballing on several occasions before; they had the correct footwear, warrior-like nicknames for each other, and most worryingly of all: their own guns. They were likely to be more than a match for our disorganised and hungover group of musicians, liberals and wimps. And so it proved.

I was ‘killed’ within 30 seconds of the first game starting, taking a pellet direct to the facemask. My colleagues fared no better. With a mouth full of yellow paint I watched as my buddies died face down in the mud. War is hell.

After three or four games during which we had our arses repeatedly handed to us the safety official accompanying us around the course became exasperated. “Have any of you ever done this before?”, he asked. A single arm was raised, belonging to Richard Loach. Rich was immediately given the job of captain, which he accepted with some reluctance. He began tentatively, dividing the team into attack and defence squads and muttering something or other about tactics. Soon, however, he began warming to the task and eventually grew visibly before our eyes when he started shouting motivational phrases in a highly animated manner, evoking the spirit of Ron Saunders himself. It was stirring stuff, believe me.

As Rich’s speech neared its Henry V climax, and at the very point that we started to believe in ourselves, he shot himself in the foot. Literally.

A split second later the hooter honked for the beginning of the next game and the enemy came over the brow of a hill—finding us collapsed in a heap of weeping laughter. They fired at will.

This moment of pure slapstick will live with me forever and a day, and it just so happens that Richard was merely carrying on what is a long Brummie tradition. Without Birmingham, folks, there would be no slapstick comedy.
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101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 28: Calls being monitored for training purposes

The last time you had a right row with someone at your bank—like you’d changed address with them but they hadn’t updated the one on your credit card—or you had to sit on hold to an ISP (because they hadn’t properly cancelled the account you had before you moved, and they wouldn’t talk to you as you hadn’t phoned from the number they’d cut off), thank the the city of Birmingham. For without the second city you’d have had to pop into a office to do it.

In 1965 the Birmingham Post and Mail installed the GEC PABX 4 ACD which is the earliest example of a call centre in the UK—probably to deal with a huge influx of members to the Chipper Club. So, Birmingham gave the World: hold music, pressing ‘2’ to speak to the billing department, recording calls for training purposes (but not so they can remember what they’ve told you) and labyrinthine telephonic ‘customer service’. Thank you, Birmingham.

Continue reading “101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 28: Calls being monitored for training purposes”

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 27: Not Admitting Your Mistakes

Inventor of fizzy pop Joseph Priestley made other contributions to our society too. On April 15, 1770—not ten years before he would move to Brum—he recorded his discovery of Indian gum’s ability to erase lead pencil marks. He wrote, “I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead pencil.” And did so in ink, which pissed him off when he discovered he’d made a cock-up.

Priestley called them ‘rubbers’, and they made their way into the pencil cases of schoolkids: amusing classmates of people called Jon for years to come. It also gave PR people, politicians, capitalists, and other liars a sense that it was okay simply to pretend that you’d done nothing wrong. We love that.

Viva Joey P, and viva his home town (1780-91) of Birmingham.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 26: Local Radio

It comes into it’s own in a crisis, you know. It’s how people know that roads are slippery or schools closed because it snowed, other than that the ground is covered in snow. And despite attempts by both ‘market forces’ and ‘stupid government pandering BBC Director Generals obsessed with nothing more than their jobs and the bottom line’ it’s still going.

It’s the place for the gentle discussion, followed by great tunes from M People. Or on commercial local radio: an advert for a local loan shark, followed by an advert for the best cash advance app around, then M People and the Lighthouse Family, broadcast from an industrial estate in Greater London. But what would we do without it, eh? Especially in minicabs.

And, of course, what would we do without Birmingham? “Witton calling” were the first words on Radio 5IT, a station based on Electric Avenue Witton in 1922 and it was the first BBC radio broadcast outside London. A commitment that the national broadcaster hasn’t really kept up. Local radio—another export we’ve given to prop up Manchester.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 25: A nice cup of tea and a sit down

A cup of tea and a nice sit down — Image CC Ant McNeil

There is a very simple principle to the making of tea and it’s this – to get the proper flavour of tea, the water has to be boiling (not boiled) when it hits the tea leaves. If it’s merely hot then the tea will be insipid.

A watched pot never boils but an electrical kettle does, and so every properly nice cup of tea has poured from the over-flowing cup of wonders that is Birmingham. That’s right, the science behind the modern electric kettle – and a decent cuppa – comes from Brum: Arthur Large created an immersed heating element and the boffins at Bullpit & Sons added a cut off valve. Thus was born the nice cup of tea and a sit down, and with it the space to think and ponder, to reframe the problem that you can’t solve while you refresh your mind and body.

How many more great ideas and inventions stand on the shoulders of this giant? How many innovations would not have come to fruition but for a soothing cup of PG Tips?

Too many to count – and we’re only going up to 101.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 24: Vile Products of the Welfare System

Every tragedy has a beginning, and sadly one of the greatest tragedies of our time begins here, in fair Birmingham. For it was here, in the workshop of the world, that social housing was really born and with it was wrought death and ruin upon the land.

For decades sick-lefitsts have praised their liberal hero Joseph Chamberlain, for giving them the Lebensraum to live feckless lives, and for granting them the license they needed to beat the women they hate within the walls of homes paid for by hard-working Britons like YOU. Joe saw the slums and ramshackle utility production provided for the poor of Birmingham by private enterprise and his communist instincts kicked in. The Stalinist before Stalin’s Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act paved the way for huge slum clearances and building of ~~social housing~~ dole-dwellers mansions on our beautiful countryside. His work was the start of nearly one hundred years of pandering to those who just don’t want to work hard.

Thankfully we are beginning to turn a corner, and once the precariat are rightfully stripped of shelter, murder will once again be the rightful preserve of those who do the right thing: men of good social standing, the educated, and the hard working business owners who make Britain great.

If they want a 3D TV, they’ll have to pay for it out of their allotted fifty three pounds a week.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 23: The Post

Imagine a time before always-on instant communication with everybody. Imagine a world where you had to add your seal to a document in hot wax and have a messenger run it to its recipient. By the time they got there, no-one would care just how lovely the fucking cupcake you were eating was.

That’s why we needed the post, reliable, accessible communication that was open to all, across the country and for a reasonable price. And it was all but invented by a chap from a suburb of a city not all that far away from us now.

The phrases “special delivery” and “emptying sack” are also a godsend for smut merchants worldwide, and who do we have to thank? Sir Rowland Hill, a schoolteacher in Edgbaston and mates with Joseph Priestley and Tom Paine, wrote a pamphlet entitled “Post Office Reform its Importance and Practicability”. The report called for “low and uniform rates” according to weight, rather than distance and pre-payment by the sender.

The dude later went on to lower train fares, for that too we’d lick his reverse side.

Come back Sir Rowland, we need you.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 22: Text Speak

The SMS is twenty years old this year—and still no one has managed to come up with a past participle that sounds right when spoken. In a kind of way, the ‘shortness’ in the ‘short message service’ helped get us all ready for the brevity of Twitter, it’s great for passing notes in class, and texting is a fantastic way to send news to people you don’t really want to talk to right now.

But the ‘shortness’ was a problem, and wrestling with either ABC over the 2 key or Nokia’s Stalinist rewriting of intent that was T9 didn’t help. So luckily a group of lads from the West Midlands had invented a passable form of abbreviated written communications that was perfect.

In the early ’70s a gang of prescient glam rockers from Walsall and Wolverhampton released a string of hit singles, delighted glitter-covered brickies everywhere, and foreshadowed a linguistic revolution. Cuz I Love You, Look Wot You Dun—you can see the spelling that you started to use over the phone in the ’80s evolve across Top of The Pops. Nowadays, many people have a temporary phone number
which is essential in today’s world.

Yes, Slade invented text speak, and started its roll to becoming lots of crappy little books sold by the tills in Waterstones, the sort you buy people for Christmas when you don’t know them or like them very much.

And Walsall and Wolverhampton they may be from, but Slade were in the wider Brummie music scene and have stars on the Broad St Walk of Fame. So there.