History West Midlands On Air

In this programme, Andrew explains how the Dissolution of the monastaries at the hands of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell had a profound impact on the religious life of the city and the welfare of its residents and led directly to the foundation of the Kings School. He talks to the publisher of History West Midlands, Mike Gibbs.

Keywords: Worcester, Dissolution, River Severn, Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, Andrew Reekes

In this second of two podcasts on the voyage to America made in 1874 by Birmingham’s lost philosopher, Professor Ewan Fernie, Director of the ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project, and the project’s American Lead, Professor Katherine Scheil, continue their discussion with the Publisher of History West Midlands, Mike Gibbs.  In this episode,  they discuss how Dawson and Shakespeare reached the American frontier.  They bring out the wider impact of Birmingham’s nineteenth-century culture on the developing cultural identity of the United States.  They unfold a range of intimate relationships between American Shakespeareans and Dawson.  And they discuss how Dawson’s quiet right-hand man, the industrialist and bibliophile, Samuel Timmins, was also a major influence on American Shakespeareans. 

Overall, this programme evokes an energetic transatlantic scholarly community reaching from Birmingham across America, an international Shakespearean fellowship who were working out a new culture for new times.  The podcast ends by dwelling on the implications of an exciting discovery recently made by Scheil and Fernie of some 300 letters by Samuel Timmins to the American Shakespearean, J. Parker Norris, in the Folger Shakespeare Library, now the greatest Shakespeare Library in the world.  As Scheil and Fernie explain, this is just one of the historic connections between Birmingham’s great Shakespeare Library and America’s, and it confirms a lost Shakespearean axis which links Birmingham to the cultural history of the United States.

The ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project is a major lottery-funded collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Birmingham City Council.  Dawson founded the world’s first great Shakespeare Library in the city in 1864 and the project aims to unlock that pioneering public resource for all the citizens of contemporary Birmingham and to recover the ‘everything to everybody’ ethos it embodies.  To get involved and for more podcasts, articles, films, Please see the project website: https://everythingtoeverybody.bham.ac.uk/.  Follow us on Twitter @E2EShakespeare.

Keywords: George Dawson, Everything to Everybody, Professor Ewan Fernie, Joseph Chamberlain, Birmingham

In 1874, Birmingham’s most famous politician, Joseph Chamberlain sent George Dawson across the Atlantic as ‘Birmingham’s Ambassador to America’ – almost as if Birmingham were a cultural power in its own right.  Dawson went down a storm in America, and his trip was enthusiastically reported back home.  But Dawson’s  embassy to America has since been almost entirely forgotten in Birmingham and in the United States.

Now the ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project has started to uncover the traces.  In this the first of two History West Midlands podcasts, the Director of the ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project, Professor Ewan Fernie, and the project’s American champion, Professor Katherine Scheil of the University of Minnesota, piece the story together for the Publisher of History West Midlands, Mike Gibbs.  They talk about where Dawson went, who he spoke to, what he talked about, what he thought of America and Americans, and what they thought of him.

It is a story which begins to unlock a forgotten and special relationship between Birmingham and America at a time when each was working out its own distinctive relationship  to ‘establishment’ British culture.

The ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project is a major lottery-funded collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Birmingham City Council.  Dawson founded the world’s first great Shakespeare Library in the city in 1864 and the project aims to unlock that pioneering public resource for all the citizens of contemporary Birmingham and to recover the ‘everything to everybody’ ethos it embodies.  To get involved and for more podcasts, articles, films, please see the project website: https://everythingtoeverybody.bham.ac.uk/.  Follow us on Twitter @E2EShakespeare. 

Keywords: George Dawson, Everything to Everybody, Professor Ewan Fernie, Joseph Chamberlain, Birmingham

Historians have extensively studied the achievements of the Scottish engineer James Watt Jr, seen by many as the father of the steam engines that powered the Industrial Revolution.

However, despite their efforts Watt the man often remains a mysterious figure. Now researcher Eleanor Beestin has explored Watt’s personal notebooks and correspondence, preserved in the Wolfson Centre for archival research at the Library of Birmingham, to reveal Watt’s state of mind, his relationships with family and friends and his unspoken fears.

She talked to History West Midlands publisher Mike Gibbs.

Keywords: James Watt, Eleanor Beestin, Industrial Revolution, Library of Birmingham

Groups of young evacuees, standing on railway stations with gas masks and cardboard suitcases have become an iconic image of wartime Britain, but their histories have eclipsed those of women whose domestic lives were affected.

In her new book, “Women and Evacuation in the Second World War”, University of Worcester Historian and Author, Professor Maggie Andrews, explores the effects of this unparalleled interference in the lives of women, looking at the impact on their everyday experience, and on ideas of femininity and domesticity. She shows that evacuation changed views of motherhood forever.

In this programme, Professor Andrews tells History West Midlands Publisher, Mike Gibbs, the stories of some of these women.

In other programmes in this series, Professor Andrews reveals the experiences of mothers who waved goodbye to their children as they were evacuated; those who left their homes and families to travel with their young children; and of the women who became foster mothers, sometimes for years.

Professor Maggie Andrews book “Women and Evacuation in the Second World War”, published by Bloomsbury Academic, is available in bookshops and from Amazon.

Keywords: Maggie Andrews, Evacuees, University of Worcester, Women

Groups of young evacuees, standing on railway stations with gas masks and cardboard suitcases have become an iconic image of wartime Britain, but their histories have eclipsed those of women whose domestic lives were affected.

In her new book, “Women and Evacuation in the Second World War”, University of Worcester Historian and Author, Professor Maggie Andrews, explores the effects of this unparalleled interference in the lives of women, looking at the impact on their everyday experience, and on ideas of femininity and domesticity. She shows that evacuation changed views of motherhood forever.

In this programme, Professor Andrews tells History West Midlands Publisher, Mike Gibbs, the stories of some of these women.

In other programmes in this series, Professor Andrews reveals the experiences of mothers who waved goodbye to their children as they were evacuated; those who left their homes and families to travel with their young children; and of the women who became foster mothers, sometimes for years.

Professor Maggie Andrews book “Women and Evacuation in the Second World War”, published by Bloomsbury Academic, is available in bookshops and from Amazon.

Keywords: Maggie Andrews, Evacuees, University of Worcester, Women

Groups of young evacuees, standing on railway stations with gas masks and cardboard suitcases have become an iconic image of wartime Britain, but their histories have eclipsed those of women whose domestic lives were affected.

In her new book, “Women and Evacuation in the Second World War”, University of Worcester Historian and Author, Professor Maggie Andrews, explores the effects of this unparalleled interference in the lives of women, looking at the impact on their everyday experience, and on ideas of femininity and domesticity. She shows that evacuation changed views of motherhood forever.

In this programme, Professor Andrews tells History West Midlands Publisher, Mike Gibbs, the stories of some of these women.

In other programmes in this series, Professor Andrews reveals the experiences of mothers who waved goodbye to their children as they were evacuated; those who left their homes and families to travel with their young children; and of the women who became foster mothers, sometimes for years.

Professor Maggie Andrews book “Women and Evacuation in the Second World War”, published by Bloomsbury Academic, is available in bookshops and from Amazon.

Keywords: Maggie Andrews, Evacuees, University of Worcester, Women

Groups of young evacuees, standing on railway stations with gas masks and cardboard suitcases have become an iconic image of wartime Britain, but their histories have eclipsed those of women whose domestic lives were affected.

In her new book, “Women and Evacuation in the Second World War”, University of Worcester Historian and Author, Professor Maggie Andrews, explores the effects of this unparalleled interference in the lives of women, looking at the impact on their everyday experience, and on ideas of femininity and domesticity. She shows that evacuation changed views of motherhood forever.

In this programme, Professor Andrews tells History West Midlands Publisher, Mike Gibbs, the stories of some of these women.

In other programmes in this series, Professor Andrews reveals the experiences of mothers who waved goodbye to their children as they were evacuated; those who left their homes and families to travel with their young children; and of the women who became foster mothers, sometimes for years.

Professor Maggie Andrews book “Women and Evacuation in the Second World War”, published by Bloomsbury Academic, is available in bookshops and from Amazon.

Keywords: Maggie Andrews, Evacuees, University of Worcester, Women

In 1921, the brilliant and charismatic Trade Union leader Mary MacArthur died aged 40. In her short life, her activism and leadership had been responsible for raising the awareness of women’s poor working conditions, and encouraging them to speak out against injustice and inequality.

Mary MacArthur is perhaps best known for the prominent part she played in the women chainmaker’s strike in Cradley Heath Staffordshire in 1910. The dispute, which lasted two months, ended in success with the women receiving the country’s first minimum wage.

As the leader of the country’s first all-female general trade union, the National Federation of Women Workers, MacArthur travelled the length and breadth of the country, ensuring that women received better pay and working conditions, and the right to Union membership.

In this programme, the publisher of History West Midlands, Mike Gibbs, talks to Cathy Hunt, whose new biography of Mary MacArthur explores the life of this fascinating campaigner.

The songs in this programme were written by John KirkPatrick and are taken from Townsend Theatre Productions’ “Rouse Ye Women” by Neil Gore.

Keywords: Mary Macarthur, Trade Union, TUC, Women Chainmakers, Cathy Hunt

Joseph Chamberlain was one of the dominant figures of political life in Britain and its Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, famously described by a young Winston Churchill as ‘the man who made the political weather’.

But less attention has been given to Chamberlain’s  personal life which was scarred by tragedy when his first two wives died in childbirth.  Then, after more than a decade, Joe surprised everyone when  he met and proposed to the beautiful American Mary Endicott, the much younger daughter of a member of the US cabinet.

Mary became Joe’s third wife and the step mother of his children including Austen and Neville who would later become Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minster respectively.

At Chamberlain’s homes at Highbury in Birmingham and in London, Mary was a famous hostess who, for more than two decades, was at the very centre of the country’s political and social life.  Then after Joe suffered a stroke in 1906 she remained at his side until he died in 1914.

Intrigued by Mary, historian Justine Pick spent more than a year researching her voluminous correspondence to uncover the life this charismatic woman and her marriage to Chamberlain.  In this programme Justine talks to  History West Midlands publisher Mike Gibbs.

Keywords: Mary Endicott, Justine Pick, Joseph Chamberlain, Highbury, Birmingham

Picture courtesy of: CCO – Birmingham Museums Trust