Turner, Winfield, and 200 years of Birmingham brass

In the centre of Birmingham, on Coleshill Street, there is now a Tesco. There used to be a brass house. It belonged to a man called Thomas Turner. It was the first of its kind in the town. From it, Birmingham became a brass city — and stayed a brass city for the next two hundred years.

This is the short version of that story. It is the story our company is named for.

Before 1740: a town with no brass

Birmingham in the early eighteenth century was a manufacturing town with a peculiar gap in its supply chain. The town's metalworkers — and there were already many of them, working in iron, in copper, in pewter, in steel — could not make brass. The technique was known; the raw materials (copper, calamine, coal) were available within a day's reach. But brass-founding required a specific kind of furnace, a specific kind of capital outlay, and a specific kind of patience that no Birmingham concern had yet supplied.

So Birmingham bought its brass in. Some came from Bristol, where the great Quaker copper-and-brass-founders William Champion and his brother Nehemiah had built up the trade in the 1720s. Some came from the Cheadle works in Cheshire. Some came from further afield. None of it came cheap, and none of it came on schedule. For an ambitious metalworking town, this was not sustainable.

1740: Thomas Turner builds a brass house

Thomas Turner — about whom we know less than we would like, except that he was a brass-founder of considerable nerve and some capital — built his brass house on Coleshill Street, near where the present-day Bull Ring sits, in about 1740. The contemporary descriptions of the building come to us through trade observers visiting the town in the years following.

A Swedish ironmaster called Reinhold Angerstein, travelling through Birmingham in 1754, has left us the clearest record of what Turner had built. The Turner brass house, Angerstein notes, consisted of nine furnaces, arranged three to a building across three separate buildings. Each furnace was fed with mineral coal — fifteen tons per furnace per melt. A single melt took ten hours.

Inside each furnace stood nine cementation pots. Each pot was charged with forty-one pounds of copper and fifty pounds of calamine, mixed with charcoal. The mixture was packed in carefully, then the pot was sealed, then the furnace was fired. Casting took place twice in every twenty-four hours. Six workers ran the nine furnaces.

This was, in the brass-founding terms of 1754, a serious operation. It produced enough raw brass to supply not only the Turners' own work but a growing population of independent brass-finishers — buckle-makers, candlestick-makers, lock-makers, button-makers, and the first generation of Birmingham cabinet-hardware specialists. For Birmingham, it changed everything.

The trade Turner started

Within a generation of Turner's furnaces firing, Birmingham was unrecognisable. By 1760, the town had more than two hundred brassworkers. By 1780, it had nearer to a thousand. By 1800, the brass trade and its dependents — the polishers, platers, gilders, lacquerers, finishers and tool-makers who all worked downstream of the foundries — accounted for a sizeable fraction of the town's adult workforce.

What was being made? Almost everything. Door furniture. Window catches. Bell-pulls. Lamp brackets. Curtain finials. Bedstead frames. Cabinet handles. Buttons by the million. Buckles by the hundred-thousand. Spurs, gun-fittings, ship's fittings, candlesticks, picture-rails, fire-irons, drawer pulls, escutcheons, pew-numbers, coffin-plates, name-plates, harness brasses.

The trade had a name in the language of the period: Birmingham toys. The word toys then meant small metal goods, not playthings — and the Birmingham toys were exported across Europe and across the Atlantic in steady, profitable quantities. A 1762 commentator called Birmingham the toyshop of Europe. The phrase stuck.

By the time the Turner family's direct involvement ended in the 1780s — the last trade-directory entry for William Turner, brass-founder, Coleshill Street appears in 1783 — Birmingham was no longer a town that needed its brass imported. It was the town that exported it.

1820: a second wave, on Cambridge Street

The trade Turner started reached its industrial peak forty years after his family's exit, in the works of a man called Robert Walter Winfield.

Winfield was born in Birmingham in 1799. He opened his own brass works on Cambridge Street — half a mile west of Turner's original house, on the edge of the developing Jewellery Quarter — in 1820. He was twenty-one years old.

Like Turner, Winfield had nerve. Unlike Turner, he had the benefit of forty years of accumulated Birmingham trade knowledge, the new generation of steam-powered foundry equipment, and an emerging Victorian middle-class market that wanted brass beds, brass curtain rods, brass gas fittings and brass cabinet hardware in quantities Turner's nine furnaces could never have supplied.

The R.W. Winfield works grew quickly. By 1835, the firm employed about one hundred people. By 1860, it employed eight hundred. By the 1880s, contemporary trade journals were describing the Cambridge Street works as the largest factory premises in the hardware trade in the United Kingdom, and possibly in the world.

The figures are worth pausing on. The Cambridge Street site covered four acres. It had its own canal, branching off the Birmingham Canal Navigations, to bring in coal and copper and to take out finished goods. It had a two-hundred-horsepower steam engine, in an age when most small foundries ran on water-wheels or hand-cranks. It had a casting shop, large rolling mills, a tube-drawing department, a stamping shop, and a mahogany-clad showroom.

In 1861, Winfield patented two of the firm's most successful inventions: an improvement in the manufacture of curtain pulleys, and an improvement in ornamenting metallic bedsteads and other articles of metallic furniture. The second patent — number 2724 of 1861 — covered, among other things, the decorative finials and corner-pieces that made the Winfield brass bedstead the defining bedstead of the Victorian middle class.

The Winfield brass bed went everywhere. It was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace, where the firm's brass-and-Morocco-leather rocking chair was singled out by the catalogue. It was sold in every major English city, and shipped to every part of the British Empire.

The end of the Winfield works

Robert Walter Winfield died in 1869. The business was continued by his sons, becoming R.W. Winfield and Son in 1862 and R.W. Winfield & Co by 1882. The firm absorbed Skidmore's Art Manufactures and Constructive Iron Company in 1879. The last Winfield family involvement in the works ended in the 1890s. In 1897, the works was reorganised as Winfield's Rolling Mills and the brass-bedstead operation was wound down. The Cambridge Street site has since become the Library of Birmingham.

And after

The Winfield works closed, but Birmingham's brass trade did not. By 1914, the city's jewellery and metal trades together — including brass-founding, plating, finishing, polishing, and the small specialist workshops that fed them — employed fifty thousand people, most of them in the Jewellery Quarter.

That number declined steadily through the twentieth century, as it did in every other British industrial city. Some workshops closed. Others amalgamated. The big nineteenth-century foundries — Winfield, Phipson, Hutton, Yates, Tonks, Best & Lloyd — disappeared one by one. But the trade did not vanish. It contracted, specialised, and continued. There are still active brass-founders in the Jewellery Quarter today. There are still hand-finishers and lathe-turners and platers in Birmingham who learned their craft from people who learned it from people who learned it from the generation that had worked at Winfield.

Why the names

We took the names Turner and Winfield in tribute. We do not claim direct descent from either family. We claim something we believe is more honest: the city, the craft, and the responsibility to continue them.

The Founders Collection is named for the Turners, who founded Birmingham brass. The Forge Collection is named for the Winfields, who built it to scale. The pieces themselves are drawn from the cabinet vocabularies that those two periods produced — the Georgian fluted melon knob with the four-pointed backplate, the Regency reeded beehive knob with the stepped round backplate — and made in Birmingham, in solid brass, by hand.

This is the work. We hope it lasts.