PLATE XCVIII.
Birmingham has long been celebrated, though in a less degree than Sheffield , for works in Britanniametal, German silver, albata, and other materials, imitating, and in appearance nearly resembling, silver. Thelatter metal is also extensively used in the local manufacture of pencil-cases, thimbles, and other small articles,as well as in plating spoons, forks, salvers, &c., of copper and white metal. For the latter purpose, 15,000ounces of silver were used in Birmingham in the year 1846. In the establishments of Messrs. Collis,Elkington and Co., Hardman, Gough, and some others, silver plate is constantly produced. There are in allmore than fifty silversmiths in the town; and the total quantity of silver annually used in different branchesof art and manufacture exceeds 150,000 ounces; one manufacturer having melted 34,000 oz. for his ownconsumption, in trinkets, &c., in one year.
That Mr. Gough is well qualified to do justice to the beauty of the precious metals, both in reference todesign and execution, is sufficiently testified by the objects we now engrave. Engaged also in the electro-platemanufacture, that gentleman employs upwards of seventy skilled artizans, himself designing and modelling,with much taste and feeling for the proprieties of his art, most of the objects produced in his establishment.
As we shall again have occasion to advert to the manufactures of Birmingham , we propose in the presentand future articles to give a brief resume of the early history and commercial progress of the town, together witha few descriptive illustrations of its most important and characteristic productions.*
The quaint and sagacious historian of the place, William Hutton , unable to trace by any authentic recordthe existence of the present trade of the locality prior to the sixteenth century, indulges in an amusing seriesof conjectures : surmising that even the aboriginal inhabitants of Britain may have defended themselves againstthe Roman conquerors with the aid of weapons forged at Birmingham . It is true that the neighbouring ironmines of Staffordshire were worked at a very early period, and that the local and geological characteristicsof its site peculiarly adapted Birmingham for smelting the ore ; but even the enthusiasm and ingenuity ofHutton must fail to establish all his suppositions, in the absence of written testimony, either in our copiousnational records or other sources. All we know is that the place described as “ Bermengeham” in the“ Domesday Survey, ” is not at all specially distinguished in that venerable compilation; that, from the time ofthe Heptarchy to the reign of Henry VIII. , the manor belonged to the family of De Bermingham ; that theprivilege of a weekly market was conferred upon the town before the Norman Conquest ; and that, as earlyas the twelfth century, it had acquired some celebrity in the tanning of leather, a trade for which itcontinued subsequently famous, though it has now been long extinct as characteristic of the place.
Perhaps the first indication of the practice of metal-work is that afforded by the accounts of the church-wardens of Birmingham for the year 1498, containing as they do the entry of a payment “ for repeyhng(repairing) the organs, to the organ-maker at Bromicham an orthography, by the bye, which partiallyprevailed, and even governed the popular pronunciation, till the beginning of the last century.
* In doing so we shall avail ourselves of a carefully-written notice of the subject in the second volume of the “Journal of Design.