Black Country

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The Black Country is a loosely-defined area of conurbation to the north and west of Birmingham, and to the south and east of Wolverhampton in the English West Midlands, around the South Staffordshire coalfield. It has a combined population of around one million.

The Black Country is also known for its West Midlands accent.

Contents

1 Scope
2 History
3 The Black Country today
4 Black Country dialect
5 See also
6 External links
7 Further reading

Scope

The "capital" of the Black Country is generally considered to be Dudley. The bounds of the Black Country, however, are controversial, and the whole of Wolverhampton is included by some and none at all by others. Despite the 1974 local government boundary, the northern border with Cannock Chase is also rather blurred. Birmingham is most definitely not in the Black Country. One definition of the Black Country, adopted today for certain local government purposes is the four metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley Sandwell, Walsall and the City of Wolverhampton.

An older one defines it by the extent of the coalfield, as bounded by the eastern and western boundary faults and on the north by the Bentley fault (which divides the south Staffordshire coalfield from the adjoining Cannock Chase coalfield. Near Halesowen and Stourbridge, the coal seams outcropped, providing a southern boundary. On this basis parts of Wolverhampton and Stourbridge are not part of the Black Country.

A useful guide for outsiders is to regard the M5 motorway as the eastern boundary, but this is only approximate correct, as Smethwick is to the east of it, and Walsall lies north of the junction with M6 motorway. However, this definition definitely places Birmingham east of the Black Country.

The Black Country has coalesced into a single conurbation, but is unusual in that it has not single centre, having grown up from a number of historic market towns and industrial villages that have coalesced during the 20th century. It remains essentially polyfocal with many of the towns and villages remaining recognisable communities and in some cases resenting having been subsumned into a metropolitan borough whose centre is elsewhere.

The Black Country lies wholly within the West Midlands County, but was formerly divided between the ancient counties of Staffordshire and Worcestershire. Curiously, the ancient parish (and pre-1965 municipal borough) of Dudley was once a detached part of Worcestershire within Staffordshire and some still consider Dudley to be Dudley, Worcs. Even more strangely until 1845 much of the parish of Halesowen, including Oldbury and Warley Salop (but not Cradley or Warley Wigorn) was a detached part of Shropshire.

Places which comprise the Black Country include parts of the city of Wolverhampton, and the towns of:

History

Industrialisation in the Black Country goes far back. It was already an area where metal working was important as far back as the 16th century, due to the presence of iron ore and of coal in a seam 30 feet (about 9 metres) thick, the thickest seam in Great Britain, which outcropped in various places. Many people had an agricultural smallholding and supplemented their income by working as nailers or smiths, an example of a phenomenon known to economic hisotrians as proto-industrialisation.

By the 19th century or early 20th century, many villages had their characteristic manufacture, but earlier occupations were less concentrated. Some of these concentrations are less ancient than sometimes supposed. For example, chain making in Cradley Heath seems only to have begun in about the 1820s, and the Lye holloware industry is even more recent.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, coal and limestone were worked only on a modest scale for local consumption, but during the Industrial Revolution by the opening of canals, such as the Birmingham Canal Navigations, Stourbridge Canal and the Dudley Canal (the Dudley Canal Line No 1 and the Dudley Tunnel) opened up the mineral wealth of the area to exploitation. Advances in the use of coke for the production in iron enabled iron production (hitherto limited by the supply of charcoal to expand rapidly.

By Victorian times, the Black Country was one of the most heavily industrialised areas in Britain, and it became known for its pollution, particularly from iron and coal industries and their many associated smaller businesses.

The area soon gained notoriety. Charles Dickens's novel The Old Curiosity Shop, written in 1841, described how the area's local factory chimneys "Poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air". In 1862, Elihu Burritt, the American Consul to Birmingham, described the region as "black by day and red by night", because of the smoke and grime generated by the intense manufacturing activity.

The area is popularly said to have got its name because of pollution from these heavy industries, which covered the area in black soot and led to the name of The Black Country. There is a famous but dubious anecdote about Queen Victoria ordering the blinds lowered on her carriage as the royal train passed through the area. However, historians have suggested that it is more likely that the name was given earlier, arising from above-ground outcroppings of black coal seams that scarred the early heathland. Also, the coal seam just below the surface meant the soil in the area was very black.

It is said that J.R.R. Tolkien based the grim region of Mordor on the heavily industrailised Black Country area in his famed novel The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, in the Elvish Sindarin language, Mor-Dor means Dark (or Black) Land, and is sometimes even referred to within the novel as "The Black Country".

The Black Country today

The heavy industry which once dominated the Black Country has now largely gone. Mining ceased in the area in the late 1960s, and clean air legislation has meant that the Black Country is no longer black. The area still maintains some manufacturing, but on a much smaller scale than historically.

Much but not all of the area now suffers from high unemployment and is amongst the most economically deprived communities in the UK; this is particularly true in Sandwell, and to a lesser extent Wolverhampton. As with many urban areas in England, there is also a significant ethnic minority population in parts; resistance to mass immigration in the 1960s and 1970s led to the slogan "Keep the Black Country white!".

The "Black Country Living Museum" (see below), in Dudley, re-creates life in the Black Country in the early 20th century, and is a popular tourist attraction.

Black Country dialect

The traditional Black Country dialect is very old, and can be very confusing for outsiders. The language is said to be a throw back to Middle English and still contains words such as Thee, Thy and Thou. "'Ow B'ist", meaning "How beist thou?" is a common greeting, with the typical answering being "'Bay too bah", meaning "I bayn't be too bad". "I haven't seen her" becomes "I ay sid 'er". Black Country dialect often substitutes the word "ar" for "yes".

Inhabitants are proud to be known as Black Country "folk" and resist hints at any relationship to people living in Birmingham, calling Birmingham "Brum-a-jum" (Birmingham's colloquial name is Brummagem, a corruption of its older name of Bromwicham - and hence West Bromwich). Residents of Birmingham (Brummies) meanwhile often refer to their Black Country neighbours as "Yam Yams", a reference to the use of "Yow am" instead of "You are".

The thick Black Country dialect is less commonly heard today than in the past.

The following information and Dialect Dictionary is from the Ancient Manor of Sedgley website at [link]

The dialect of the Black Country area remains perhaps one of the last examples of early English still spoken today.

The word endings with 'en' are still noticeable in conversation as in 'gooen' (going), callen (calling) and the vowel 'A' is pronounced as 'O' as in sond (sand), hond (hand) and mon (man) also rot (rat).Other pronunciations are 'winder' for window, 'fer' for far, and 'loff' for laugh - exactly as Chaucer's English was spoken. This "dictionary" is Black Country in general and not particularly Sedgley in origin.

Local dialect was (and probably still is to a lesser degree) quite distinctive between the different towns and villages of the Black Country. See [Black Country Dialect Dictionary]

External links

[The Black Country] 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article
[BBC Black Country] BBC website for Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton
[Black Country Living Museum]
[Black Country Society] - publishers of the quarterly "Blackcountryman" magazine
[Black Country Pages]

Raybould, T.J. (1973). The Economic Emergence of the Black Country: A Study of the Dudley Estate. Newton Abbot: David & Charles.
Rowlands, M. B. (1975). Masters and Men in the West Midlands metalware trades before the industrial revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gale, W. K. V. (1966). The Black Country Iron Industry: a technical history London: The Iron and Steel Institute.
Higgs, L. A Description of Grammatical Features and Their Variation in the Black Country Dialect Schwabe Verlag Basel, 2004.

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