Embedded Files
Just click on the image to play the video.
There are two connected ideas how the name, Black Country, came about historically: either from the land, atmosphere and buildings having a blackened appearance due to the blackening of the soil and streams from rain washing coal dust from outcrops and spoilheaps combined with the soot and black smoke from the many furnaces, foundries and forges in the area or that the name came from a Charles Dicken's quote who, when he visited Dudley, looked towards Netherton, Old Hill and Cradley Heath covered in a pall of smoke and said 'God help those poor people in that black country'. This idea is not as fanciful as it may seem in that Charles Dickens had an association with the Black Country: his grandmother Elizabeth Ball came from near Wolverhampton and Dickens visited the Black Country and Birmingham on a number of occasions.
The poet Wystan Auden had a rather better view of the Black Country with a letter to Lord Byron recalling a childhood train journey when he wrote:
Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on. The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton. Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery, That was, ans still is, my ideal scenery. This was not entirely serious as Auden was perhaps having a dig at Byron's romantic poetry but Auden who was brought up in nearby Solihull and whose father's family came from Rowley Regis had a lifelong fascination with the foundries and pits which turned the area black.
Samuel Sidney had a somewhat different view from Auden when on a train journey through the Black Country in his 1851 reported in his guidebook to the London and Northwestern Railways (1) he gives this description -
In this Black Country, including West Bromwich, Dudley, Darlaston, Bilston, Wolverhampton and several minor villages, a perpetual twilight reigns during the day, and during the night fires on all sides light up the dark landscape with a fiery glow. The pleasant green of pastures is almost unknown, the streams, in which no fishes swim, are black and unwholesome; the natural dead flat is often broken by high hills of cinders and spoil from the mines; the few trees are stunted and blasted; no birds are to be seen, except a few smoky sparrows; and for miles on miles a black waste spreads around, where furnaces continually smoke, steam engines thud and hiss, and long chains clank, while blind gin horses walk their doleful round. From time to time you pass a cluster of deserted roofless cottages of dingiest brick, half swallowed up in sinking pits or inclining to every point of the compass, while the timbers point up like the ribs of a half-decayed corpse. The majority of the natives of this Tartarian region are in full keeping with the scenery – savages, without the grace of savages, coarsely clad in filthy garments, with no change on weekends or Sundays, they converse in a language belarded with fearful and disgusting oaths, which can scarcely be recognised as the same as that of civilized England.
None of this is very complimentary to your possible ancestors I am afraid, and Samuel Sidney came from nearby Birmingham so was familiar with grim living conditions. |Perhaps this quote suffers from a little literary license but from it gives you some idea of the conditions under which Black Country working people lived in Victorian times. Videos of Haden Hill House (2) and a history of the Bassano family (3) who lived at Haden Hill looking down on the smoke of Old Hill allows you to compare the living conditions of the owners and workers in the coal mines and factories i.e. Samuel Sidney's "savages without the grace of savages". A similar view of the Black Country, particularly of the nail making trade and coal mining can be found in the sobering book (4) by James Greenwood published in 1874 .
Black Country fans of JRR Tolkien and Lord of the Rings may like to reflect that Tolkien, who was born near Birmingham, probably based his depiction of Mordor on the Black Country (5) so perhaps we should say "Orcs" rather than "savages without the grace of savages" - take your pick.
The American industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, inspite of financing industrial grime of Pittsburgh in the 1800s was equally scathing: calling the Black Country a "smoke stained slab of unlovely England" (6) with "dirty care worn children, hard driven men and squalid women" Inspite of that he built Carnegie Libraries in Cradley Heath, Blackheath andTipton and contributed to libraries in many other Black Country towns.
Queen Victoria was said to have had the blinds on the royal train drawn as she passed through, on her way to Scotland, to blank out the scene.
Horovitz in a scholarly and detailed article in the Journal of the English Place-Name Society (7) gives a further reason for the name: that it may be due to the perceived barbrous and unchristian ways of the population which were in need of teachings of the gospel.
Edwin Butler Baylis, Tapping a Furnace, Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage.
The Black Country Flag
The Black Country flag shown here is rather a later addition to the Black Country story: it was only adopted in 2012 when the Black Country Living Museum (8) launched a competition to design a flag for the Black Country in response to the Parliamentary Flags & Heraldry Committee which was encouraging communities to develop their own flags to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee (9). Its colours are based on the description of the area by Elihu Burritt, the American Consul in Birmingham in 1862, as being “black by day and red by night” – a result of the furnaces giving out smoke during the day and glowing by night.
The chains represent a major product manufactured in the area in the past and the white central section the glass cone, a symbol of glassmaking in the Stourbridge area. You can read more about the flag here (8). In July 2020 the West Midlands Fire Service banned the flying of the flag on their stations "until they had established what the chains represented because they were concerned over possible slavery connotation". This caused something of a storm locally: perhaps they should have simply looked at the Wikipedia entry (8) or the post (10) by Simon Briercliffe beforehand to avoid their embarrassment.
References
References
(1) Sidney, Samuel. Rides on Railways: Descriptive of Modern Travel and Old Coaching Days. London: 1851
(2) "Haden Hill House". YouTube. By TheGobbledygook1. Published 10 July 2018. Accessed 7 July 2025. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpCUb9UDMhg
(3) "The Bassano family of Old Hill". YouTube. By TheGobbledygook1. Published 6 May 2024. Accessed 7 July 2025. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYzgbAVus9w
(4) "In Strange Company: In the Black Country" by James Greenwood Published in 1874
(6) Carnegie, Andrew An American Four-in-Hand in Britain. Publisher Charles Scribner's Sons New York 1886
(7) Horovitz, David. "The Black Country". Journal of the English Place-Name Society, vol. 43, 2011, pp. 25–34.
(8) "Flag of the Black Country". Wikipedia. Last modified 15 January 2025. Accessed 7 July 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Black_Country
(9) "Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II". Wikipedia. Accessed 7 July 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Jubilee_of_Elizabeth_I
(10) Briercliffe, Simon. "The Black Country flag and the uses of history (again) – Simon Briercliffe". Simon Briercliffe’s blog. Published 16 July 2017. Accessed 7 July 2025. https://simonbriercliffe.com/2017/07/16/the-black-country-flag-and-the-uses-of-history-again/
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse