Facebook post #048 (Dec 2020)
In London, this was the first Christmas we might have taken a draught of Fuller’s ale. We might too have purchased a few of Tom Smith’s Christmas sweets, twist-wrapped in the French ‘bon bon’ style, with motto included. But this year, we would have experienced a little ‘bang of expectation’ – courtesy of Brock’s fireworks! And, thanks to Eliza Acton, we might for the first time have referred to “Christmas Pudding”. (To be fair, it had been two years since Tiny Tim had been treated to a brandy-infused plum pudding of Mrs Cratchet’s devising, holly and all. Christmas pudding had evolved – with a bit of help from Empire produce – from longstanding ways of preserving meat, and from spicy fruit porridge.)
On Portsea Island, it was this Christmas – for it was 1845 – that David Meaden remarried (post 45). His five-year old daughter Eliza was destined to be brought up by her new stepmother inside a prison run on military lines. I can’t imagine what social life Eliza and her (nine in a row!) step-sisters may have had… However, when she was 26, she married the boy next door – the son of the chaplain of the asylum next door, the same Charles Edward Brittain who had become a commercial clerk rather than taking the cloth (post 46).
By the time my gt-grandmother Alice (Gertie) was born in 1870, Charles was manager of the Vesta Glassworks, near the prison and asylum. By 1891, the family were living in Trinity Road, Aston Manor. One side of the road was the Jacobean Aston Hall, already 200 years old (photo: Tony Hisgett). The other side was Villa Park, the home of Aston Villa Football Club, which was less than 20 years old (0-0 with Sunderland on the Boxing Day match, if you were wondering). (The photo is by my friend Ell.)
Just down the road, Edwin Samson Moore’s colossal Vinegar Works, where Villa’s first Captain worked, was the same age. Fish and chips were catching on! With the pickles Moore had started making, and with his neighbouring supplier, Ansells Brewery, he helped create an exploding demand for glass in Birmingham. The canal network was now well-established and could bring in the sand and other materials needed. Stourbridge’s centuries’ old grip on the glass trade was broken.
Eight years later, Moore bought the rights to HP Sauce from a small grocer, and started making this taste of empire available in industrial quantities. Charles must have passed by the Works every day but there is a tantalising family story of a closer connection (more on the blog).
By this time, Charles was a glassmaker in his own right. Until 1892, he was in partnership running the Belmont Works, one of the top five Birmingham glass houses of the era. By chance, I photo’d the derelict remaining building – the old Eccles Cycle and Rubber Works, later used for pianos, bedsteads and knickers while waiting at the traffic lights on the A47.
Digging a bit more, I found an archaeological assessment that allowed me to plot the precise location alongside the Digbeth Canal (my map below), and to confirm that the works matched a local and contemporary negative I found online (pic). Specialist forums told me that the works were a pioneer of pressed [i.e. moulded] domestic glassware, and that output site varied from plain to ‘flint’ crystal glass and from complex early, partially pressed designs, to cheap mass-produced stuff. I found a Belmont pickle jar online (pic)! After the partnership was dissolved, Charles carried on making glass at a works in Aston Village.
Glass Christmas tree decorations had apparently been invented in Germany mid-century by a glass blower who couldn’t afford real apples. Queen Victoria and her German husband, Albert, took a fancy to these ‘baubels’, and made them trendy, so it’s tempting to imagine them in Charles and Eliza’s drawing room. The Americans were quick to take up the idea, and a certain Frank Woolworth was apparently making $25m a year from mass-produced versions…
Eliza died in 1907. Charles remarried, thus disinheriting his family. “She [Catherine] wouldn’t even give the family one piece of glass from the factory.” The last vestiges of the Belmont site were cleared in 2019 in preparation for the erection of a 37-storey tower in the new mixed use ‘Eastwood Locks’ development. The derelict factory is being restored, apparently to be incorporated in another development called ‘Glasswater Locks’.
