A brick in time

I must have been up and down The Birchills Locks at Walsall a thousand times over the years, but recently I noticed something of great significance for the first time on the pound near to the new housing conversion from the former old mill near to Wolverhampton Street.

An otherwise unremarkable old bridge built from the famous Staffordshire blue bricks, which probably served as a basin entrance to a former works site had a coping stone brick which caught my eye, and I do not know how I could possibly have missed it for all of these years!

This is the first brick I have ever seen produced by Samuel Barnett (and his sons). Obviously I have gone into great detail about the man /the myth and his dealings, and of course the rattlechain brickworks marl pit becoming what is now rattlechain lagoon. The infamous canal breach of 1899 is another story.

I put in the public domain a little lost gem of a piece concerning the blue brick enterprise which dates from 1911, when his sons were now on board and listed as a business. This article spoke of a production rate of  40,000 bricks per day at Rattlechain and at Stour Valley 70,000, which he also ran and lost an arm at in his formative years . I always wondered if they had been used locally in the canals around Tipton, but have never saw any hard evidence such as this.

This blue brick appears to be in remarkably good condition for its age, which must predate The Second World War. I wondered at first if  it had been restored, or was  a recreated forgery, but perhaps these items were made to endure the test of time? Obviously, from research, this must have come from either Rattlechain or The Stour Valley brickworks, but it is only identified as “Dudley Port Staffs”, so we do not know if this is a Rattlechain brick for sure.

There are three stamps upon it, and none visible on any of the others in the bridge structure, so perhaps this was a form of advertisement/crowning glory signature from those who were tasked with laying them?

 

There are the tell tale signs of rope marks on the top bricks, where horses would have pulled heavy loads by barge up and down the flight. The life for these animals must have been horrific, and there are certainly stories of them falling in and drowning after being unable to be pulled out.

The Barnett family relatives expanded into Walsall, and after this find I had a look at some other bridges along The Wyrley and Essington to find this at Brownhills Catshill Junction.

Another Barnett collaborated with Beddow at The Atlas brickworks in the same area.

I have now become a bit obsessed with locating other former brickworks stones in an Indiana Jones type of way.  😛 Not for “fortune and grory” but just for the fun of it.

It has to be said that I can remember seeing many of these type of coping stones around the canal network being deliberately removed by chisel wielding thieves, and a cursory glance at ebay reveals a rather suspicious volume of “reclaimed Victorian blue bricks” for sale.  😥

Here are a few more stamped bricks I noticed on my travels around the Birmingham Canal Navigations, (BCN), and round about, and it seems that The Barnett’s had a great deal of local competition based in the Oldbury/Tipton/West Bromwich triangle in particular. The Wood family  had many brickworks over generations and in other partnerships, including the nearby Pumphouse brickworks on what is now Sheepwash Nature Reserve.

Other variations of the same name indicate different owners or companies which operated at the same works over time- particularly with The Brades brickworks, which was immediately adjacent to the Gower brickworks, and what became Albright and Wilson’s Gower Tip in the left over clay pit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this one was my favourite, where I took a bit of sandpaper to it to reveal the place. My contribution to archaeology right there…. 😆

There must be hundreds of  thousands of bricks that over time have found their way into the canals themselves , disappearing out of sight under the cover of silt. These are survivors of another age, and there is an argument that they deserve to be preserved. Unfortunately this also got me thinking as to how many marl pits had been dug to create these, and how over the last 120+ years most have now been infilled with the most disgusting types of man made chemical waste, like at Rattlechain and The Gower Tips, and human rotting landfill laziness.  Then even more perversely,  some consider them to be suitable places to lay more bricks for new homes on top of that. I think perhaps the marl which made these bricks would have been better left in the ground after all.