Birmingham with The Pearl Button Girl and Annie Murray

Submitted: 8th February 2025

A Journey back to 1850s Birmingham…

A wonderful treat instore today for we have the marvellous Annie Murray, bonnet in hand, standing in front of us, picnic basket at the ready, all set for an adventure into 1850s Birmingham.

Pony and trap are waiting, do you have your button collection to hand? We have to make money at the market later…

Location map of The Pearl Button Girl

I have written many stories set in Birmingham, set mainly in the twentieth century. All that shoe leather worn down over many miles. I have interviewed people, fascinated by their memories of the city which was different in many ways from the place where I went to live in the early ‘80s.

Because Birmingham changes. Probably more than any other city in England it has kept re-inventing itself. Poems through the ages lament that the city ‘ain’t’ what it used to be.’

However, this city was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. A seething cauldron of invention and creativity. So I decided to travel further back. The Pearl Button Girl is the first of a series entitled Children of Birmingham. It begins in 1851.

Location map of The Pearl Button Girl

The Great Exhibition assembled what had already been a century of innovation. The crystal palace was 1851 yards of iron and glass, all made in the Black Country, west of Birmingham. An astonishing array of wares and inventions came from the wider world. But many were from this country – especially from Birmingham.

The Birmingham Canals:

Location map of The Pearl Button Girl

Research for this book became a different kind of travelling. There’s no one alive to ask for a first-hand account. Pounding pavements offers traces between growth of the ever more modern. The ‘cut’ or canal system was built in the late 1770s. There are landmarks like St. Martin’s 12th century Church in the Bull Ring. But 1850s Birmingham was in many respects very different even from how it would be fifty years later. In Victoria’s reign.

One can begin to access it via a few written accounts, engravings, photographs where they exist, old cemeteries and churches and maps. This one has been invaluable:

Map (c) Annie Murray

The dramatic terracotta law courts did not appear until the 1880s:

Location map of The Pearl Button Girl

The main police station and prison were elsewhere. A new cluster of institutions of control – the new workhouse, prison, Dudley Road hospital and All Saints Asylum – were only just being built. Not to mention the lack of sewerage and lighting.

Dudley Road hospital:

Location map of The Pearl Button Girl

It’s hard to imagine now how much the place must have stunk. As well as the sewage issue – the place ponged like a midden – there was the coal smoke, the chemical smells of industry. The city created its own weather. The stench of leather tanneries. Of yards spread with gristly bones to be dried for processing.

And which aspect of it to write about? The choice was overwhelming. If you can name it, it was probably being made in Birmingham. This energetic city was a warren of workshops and factories, many in just on one room. They supplied the world with everything from vast machines to pen nibs and hair clips.

And, on a grand scale, buttons.

buttons (c) Wikpedia

Location map of The Pearl Button Girl

Workshops large and small were turning out buttons from those gristly bones. Also from mother of pearl. It was a trade that could be started with just a few tools to begin the series of processes involved in making buttons.

My stories are never just about one industry or subject . However, for this book, I was inspired by The Birmingham Pearlies, a history of George Hook & Company and the pearl shell industry. There is a romance to the sacks of shells that would arrive from oceans across the world: snail, trochus, abalone, oyster and black Tahiti… The processes of sawing them, cutting blanks and fashioning them on lathes is also fascinating. And mother of pearl was made into cutlery handles, inlay for wooden boxes and jewellery.

Pearl buttons (c) Annie Murray

Location map of The Pearl Button Girl

Many women and children worked in the pearl button manufacturing and still more women ‘carded,’ sewing buttons on to cards at home for the shops.

The younger George Hook is still a sole trader, working in the city – but by and large there is little remaining of the trade now. Like so much in Birmingham’s past, travel there involves a jigsaw puzzle of discovery and listening to echoes of an intense, industrial past.