Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
THE BLACK COUNTRY, black by day and red by night, cannot be matched, for vast and varied production, any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe. It is a section of Titanic industry, kept in murky perspiration by a sturdy set of Tubal Cains and Vulcans, week in week out, and often seven days to the week. Indeed the Sunday evening halo it wears when the church bells are ringing to service on winter nights, glows "redder than the moon," or like the moon dissolved at its full on the clouds above the roaring furnaces. It is a little dual world of itself, only to be gauged perpendicularly. The better half, it may be, faces the sun; but the richer half, averted thence, looks by gaslight towards the central fires. If that subterranean half could be for an hour inverted to the sun; if its inky vaults and tortuous pathways, and all its black-roofed chambers could be but once laid open to the light of day, the spectacle would be a world's wonder, especially if it were uncovered when all the thousands of the subterranean road-makers, or the begrimed armies of pickmen, were bending to their work. What a neighing of the pit-horses would come up out of those deep coal-craters at the sight and sense of the sunlight! What black and dripping forests of timber would be disclosed, brought from all the wild, wooded lands of Norway. Sweden, and Canada, to prop up the rough vaults and sustain the excavated acres undermined by the pick! Such an unroofing of the smoky, palpitating region would show how soon the subterranean detachments of miners and counter-miners must meet, and make a clean sweep of the lower half of that mineral world. For a century or more they have been working to this end; and although the end has not come yet, one cannot but think that it must be reached ere long. Never was the cellar of a district of equal size stored with richer or more varied treasures. Never a gold-field on the face of the earth, of ten miles radius, produced such vast values as these subterranean acres have done. To be sure, the nuggets they have yielded to the pick have been black and rough, and blackened and rough men have sent them to the surface And when they were landed by the noisy and uncouth machinery of the well and windlass, they made no sensation in the men who emptied the tubs, any more than if they were baskets of potatoes. But they yielded gold as bright and rich as ever was mined in Australia or California.
Nature did for the ironmasters of the Black Country all she could; indeed, everything except literally building the furnaces themselves. She brought together all that was needed to set and keep them in blast. The iron ore, coal, and lime—the very lining of the furnaces—were all deposited close at hand for the operation. Had either two of these elements been dissevered, as they are in some countries, the district would have lost much of its mineral wealth in its utilization. It is not a figure of speech but a geological fact, that in some, if not all, parts of this remarkable region, the coal and lime are packed together in alternate layers in almost the very proportion for the furnace requisite to give the proper flux to the melted iron. Thus Nature has not only put the requisite raw materials side by side, but she has actually mixed them in right proportions for use, and even supplied mechanical suggestions for going to work to coin these deposits into a currency better than gold alone to the country.
There are no statistics attainable to show the yearly produce of this section, or the wealth it has created. One would be inclined to believe, on seeing the black forest of chimneys smoking over large towns and villages as well as the flayed spaces between, that all the coal and iron mined in the district must be used in it. The furnaces, foundries, and manufactories seem almost countless; and the vastness and variety of their production infinite. Still, like an ever-flowing river, running through a sandy region that drinks in but part of its waters, there is a stream of raw mineral wealth flowing without bar or break through the absorbing district that produces it, and watering distant counties of England. By night and day, year in year out, century in and century out, runs that stream with unabated flow. Narrow canals filled with water as black as the long sharp boats it floats, crossing each other here and there in the thick of the furnaces, twist out into the green lands in different directions, laden with coal for distant cities and villages. The railways, crossing the canals and their creeping locomotion, dash off with vast loads to London and other great centres of consumption. Tons unnumbered of iron for distant manufactures go from the district in the same way. And all the while, the furnaces roar and glow by night and day, and the great steam hammers thunder, and hammers from an ounce in weight to a ton, and every kind of machinery invented by man, are ringing, clicking, and whizzing as if tasked to intercept all this raw material of the mines and impress upon it all the labour and skill which human hands could give to it.
Within this arrondissement of the industries and ingenuities of nature and man, may be found in remarkable juxtaposition the best that either has produced. Coal, iron, salt, lime, fire-brick, and pottery clay are the raw materials that Nature has put into the works as her share of the capital. And man has brought his best working science, skill, and labour to make the most and best of this capital. If the district could be gauged, like a hogshead of sugar, from east to west, or by some implement that would bring out and disclose to view a sample of each mile's production, the variety would be a marvel of ingenuity and labour. That is, if you gauged frame and all; for The Black Country is beautifully framed by a Green Border-Land; and that border is rich and redolent with two beautiful wealths—the sweet life of Nature's happiest springs and summers, and the hive and romance of England's happiest industries. Plant, in imagination, one foot of your compass at the Town Hall in Birmingham, and with the other sweep a circle of twenty miles radius, and you will have "The Black Country," with all its industries, in a green velvet binding inwrought or tapestried with historical scenes and early playgrounds of brilliant imagination and poetical fiction. Just pass the gauging-rod of mechanical enterprise through the volume from Coventry to Kidderminster, and see what specimens of handicraft it will bring out and show, like a string of beads of infinite variety of tinting and texture. See what wares intervene between the two opposite extremities—between the ribbons of Coventry and the carpets of Kidderminster; or between the salt bars of Droitwich and the iron bars of Wolverhampton. Then let the history-miner run his rod through and see what gems he will bring out between Lichfield Cathedral and Baxter's Church at Kidderminster, or between Stratford-on-Avon and Kenilworth or Warwick Castle. Let him notice what manner of men have lived within this circuit, and what manner of mark their lives and thoughts made upon it and upon the wide circumference of the world. Then let him travel from rim to rim of the district, and study its physical conformation and its natural sceneries, and he will recognize their symmetry with the histories and industries with which it teems. Walking and looking in these different directions, with an eye upon these different facts and features. I hope to see and note something which shall enable readers who are not familiarly acquainted with the district to get a better idea of its character than they had before acquired.