A Stream of Lives

Historical biographies

Category: Birmingham

Tragic death of Caroline Arnold: effects of poverty in Victorian Birmingham

5 May 2025 / / 0 Comments

A late night by the fire

Caroline Arnold was just 12 when she burnt to death at home on May 11th, 1857, the whole event being witnessed by her elder sister, Ann. An intelligent girl of 14, Ann was a key witness at the inquest. She gave the Birmingham coroner, Dr John Birt Davies, a clear description of the terrible event.

The girls’ mother, who had recently given birth, had gone to bed early feeling unwell. Later, their father joined his wife upstairs, telling his daughters to bolt the door and follow him up. But Ann, concerned about her mother, decided to stay up in case she needed a cup of tea in the night. She persuaded Caroline to stay downstairs to keep her company.

The two girls settled down to sew by the fireside. The room was lit by a single candle placed on a chair. At about half past four in the morning, Ann felt unable to stay awake any longer. She put out the candle, laid her head on the chair and fell asleep. Meanwhile Caroline, still awake, crept closer to the dying embers of the fire to keep warm.

Half an hour later Ann was woken by screams. Caroline’s clothes were ablaze. Ann scrambled to douse the flames, but to no avail. Caroline, in a panic, rushed to get outside, causing the flames to burn stronger and in the process setting the curtains alight. Burning fragments covered her body. Their father, wakened by the girls’ screams, leapt out of bed, grabbing a sack to smother the flames. He then picked up Caroline and ran with her in his arms to the local hospital. She was immediately treated by a surgeon, but his efforts were in vain, and she died a few hours later.

Family by the Fireside, after Sir David Wilkie, RA, 1785-1841 [Wellcome Collection]

The coroner’s recommendation

Since his election as Birmingham’s borough coroner in 1839, Birt Davies had been very concerned about the high rate of child deaths. Meticulous in his record-keeping, he looked for patterns in the deaths he had investigated to identify causes and preventive strategies. In his first year in office, more than one-third of the cases involved deaths from severe burns. His analysis showed that these deaths occurred most often in families where the main breadwinner was employed in a ‘humble’ or artisan job, so death by burning was closely linked to poverty.  Almost all the deaths occurred when no adult was present. The household fire was often the origin of the blaze but burns caused by candles were also common. But he noticed another significant fact – girls were more likely to die from burns than boys.

A typical back-to-back house had one fireplace in the small living room, where most activities took place. Clothes dried by the fire, and valuables were placed on the mantelpiece. Children were particularly vulnerable when reaching for an article, risking their clothes igniting. The coroner noticed that more often than not the offending garment was the pinafore or apron that many girls wore over their dresses.

In his annual report to the borough council, Birt Davies recommended taking measures to mitigate the risks faced by girls. He suggested the council should subsidise the cost of less flammable woollen materials to make safer pinafores accessible for low-income families. A year later, he reiterated this recommendation, expressing his dissatisfaction that no action had yet been taken to address this tragic, preventable loss of life.

Birt Davies served as coroner for 36 years, overseeing 30,000 inquests. He advocated for Birmingham’s poor and fearlessly confronted injustices during the whole of his long career, often challenging bureaucracy. This earned him some enemies among the wealthy and powerful, but he also gained many admirers.  

The Perils of Pseudo-Science in 19th Century Medicine

1 April 2025 / / 0 Comments

Medical science had not advanced very far by the early nineteenth century. However, doctors had begun to organise themselves into self-regulating professional groups. These groups claimed their formal learning was superior. They dismissed the many alternative practitioners who made a living peddling unorthodox cures. Lack of affordable treatments often drove desperate patients into the arms of these ‘quacks’, occasionally with disastrous results.   

There was no shortage of self-appointed health gurus promoting pseudo-scientific ideas about disease causation and treatment. One such was Albert Isaiah Coffin. He was an American herbalist who came to Britain in 1832. There, he published his popular Botanic Guide to Health. This book, and the Medical Botanic Society that he founded, appealed to many Birmingham residents. Their hopes were raised by his encouragement to practise self-help instead of relying on orthodox practitioners. He also promoted his patent medicine made from lobelia and cayenne, claiming it would cure almost any disease.

Albert Isaiah Coffin, mezzotint by H. B. Hall after Charpentier [Wellcome Collection]

On 1st April 1848, a canal worker by the name of Flowers returned home. He found Hannah, his wife, ill and suffering from paralysis on the right side of her body. This occurred following an injury to her face. A devoted member of the Medical Botanic Society, Flowers sought the help of one of his colleagues. Together, they prepared some herbal remedies using recipes in Coffin’s book. Hannah seemed to rally briefly but then collapsed into a much worse state. Her husband did not call a doctor. He was confident the herbal medicine – a combination of capsicum and lobelia – would work. He wanted to give it time to do so, but sadly, her condition deteriorated rapidly and she died.

Dr Birt Davies, the Birmingham coroner, was asked to hold an inquest into Hannah’s death. He ordered an autopsy. This concluded she had contracted lockjaw (tetanus) due to her injury. The failure to treat it properly led to her death from apoplexy (stroke). The herbal remedy she had been given was entirely inappropriate for her condition.

Birt Davies severely reprimanded Flowers for experimenting on his wife and for failing to call in qualified medical help. He publicly warned Coffin and his followers that they must face the consequences if any other deaths ensued.

Tragically this was not the last occasion on which Birt Davies came across deaths resulting from reliance on Coffin’s remedies. Two years later he had to oversee inquests into two such cases in a single month, both involving babies. In both cases, the baby’s parents had administered the useless remedies, so had to take the blame. But Birt Davies believed the quacks who had promoted these remedies held the criminal responsibility. This conclusion was deeply frustrating for him because there was little he could do legally to hold them to account.

The Sick Child, chromolithograph after Joseph Clark, 1875 [Wellcome Collection]

The Coroner’s Roll

20 March 2025 / / 0 Comments

Recently I was delighted to receive an invitation to give a talk at Birmingham’s Central Library about the city’s first coroner, Dr John Birt Davies, the subject of my recent biography. As an extra inducement the organisers had arranged to bring his Coroner’s Roll out of storage. Usually locked away in the archives, the historic document was laid on a table, allowing all of us there to pore over it.

Extract from a coroner's roll
Dr John Birt Davies’s Coroner’s Roll [Birmingham Library archives]

Measuring 100 yards in total, the roll details every one of the 30,000 inquests he presided over in his thirty-six-year tenure as Birmingham’s borough coroner from 1839 to 1875. It lists the names, ages and addresses of the deceased, their occupations, the place of death, location of the inquest (usually a pub in the same district where the person died), the cause of death, the verdict of the inquest jury, any fines levied on those held responsible, and the costs incurred (room hire, jurors’ fees, fees for the coroner’s clerk, etc).

Many of the records hint at tragic circumstances. For example, the list of inquests carried out in 1839 records the death of four-year-old Sarah McNalla, daughter of a labourer, who died in the workhouse from ‘starvation and the inclement mercy of the weather’. And John Britshott, a pocket-book manufacturer from Foredraught Street, was found to have hung himself while in a state of temporary insanity. And then there’s William Kite of Yardley, a labourer, whose death from ‘effusion of blood in the head’ was apparently the result of wilful murder by ‘some person or persons unknown’.

The office of coroner has a long history in England, dating back to the 12th century. Appointed by the crown, they were originally royal tax collectors who gathered death duties, but by the Victorian period the role had evolved into a judicial officer responsible for investigating sudden and unexplained deaths.

Coroners worked hard to ensure that sudden deaths were investigated thoroughly. The first task was to recruit a jury of at least twelve local men – women could be witnesses but not jurors. The jury’s first task was to examine the body in the presence of the coroner, enabling the death to be certified prior to burial. This had to be organised very speedily – there were no morgues or refrigerators in those days.   

The most diligent coroners made sure the relevant authorities were alerted to means of preventing future deaths. Birt Davies was particularly concerned about the high rate of child deaths in Birmingham, many of which were caused by severe burns. He noticed that girls were more likely to die from this cause than boys, and he put this down to their aprons or loose pinafores that could easily be ignited by sparks from the family’s fire. He was disappointed when his proposed solution – subsidising the cost of less flammable materials – was not immediately adopted by the borough council.

Old man and woman by a fireside in Victorian times
Family by the fireside, after Sir David Wilkie [Wellcome Collection]

John Birt Davies and the Fever Hospital Controversy

18 October 2024 / / 0 Comments

How John Birt Davies’s plan to open a fever hospital in Birmingham faced opposition from his fellow doctors.

Infectious diseases could spread rapidly in the poorer parts of town

Infections

Infectious diseases were a major public health challenge up until the twentieth century. Conditions such as smallpox, typhus, yellow fever, dysentery, scarlet fever and measles were widespread, especially in the poorest parts of rapidly growing industrial towns like Birmingham.

When John Birt Davies arrived in Birmingham in 1822, he noticed a significant lack of facilities for people suffering from infectious diseases. Birmingham’s General Hospital wouldn’t accept these patients because of the risk of cross-infection and the Workhouse Infirmary only admitted those with ‘pauper’ status. This excluded people in work, especially domestic servants, whose employers wanted them out of the home to protect others’ health.  

Several manufacturing towns had established stand-alone fever hospitals and Birt Davies felt a similar facility was needed in Birmingham. He formed a committee and embarked on a fundraising campaign. Despite friends’ warnings of potential opposition, he threw himself into the task undeterred.

Opposition

However, his determination was met with resistance. He was aghast when doctors from Birmingham General Hospital published a letter in a local newspaper publicly opposing the planned fever hospital, declaring it ‘altogether uncalled for’. Birt Davies responded fiercely to this ‘manifestly unprovoked’ and ‘contemptible’ attack from colleagues, some of whom he had counted as personal friends. The debate raged in the press for several weeks.

Alarmed by the public arguments, committee members decided to proceed with the hospital only after a cooling-off period to allow passions to subside. Eventually, in April 1828, when suitable premises had been found and sufficient funds raised, the fever hospital – or Birmingham House of Recovery as it was named – opened with John Birt Davies as its senior physician.

But the battle was far from over. Just five months after the fever hospital opened, the General Hospital announced plans to open four fever wards and to admit patients on any day of the week, not just Fridays as previously. Furious, Birt Davies fired off another angry letter to the press, decrying ‘so foul a piece of oppression and so gross an appropriation’.

But the damage was done. The House of Recovery functioned under Birt Davies’s leadership for about six years but was eventually forced to close, unable to compete with the greater resources of the General Hospital. Birt Davies was left to simmer with rage at the duplicity of his colleagues:

‘It would scarcely have occurred to the uninitiated that those men who denied that one Fever Hospital was requisite, would have had the folly or the audacity to select this juncture for the purpose of giving birth to a second.’  

For more on this story, see Probing Deaths, Saving Lives, a biography of Birmingham’s Victorian doctor-coroner.

Redfern Davies and Sister Dora

20 December 2023 / / 0 Comments

Redfern Davies

Born in Birmingham in 1834, John Redfern Davies was the eldest son of John Birt Davies, the Birmingham coroner. A doctor, like his father, Redfern Davies was viewed by his contemporaries as one of the brightest and most able young British surgeons. After training in Birmingham, London and Paris he was keen to devote his skills to helping the poor. He accepted a post as resident surgeon at the Birmingham workhouse infirmary.

One day in December 1860 he was thrown from his horse while on his way home from the workhouse, suffering concussion and serious injuries to his head and spine. After about six weeks his condition seemed to improve and he felt able to return to work, but he was still suffering intense neuralgic pain. He worked on for another year, but eventually decided to take an extended break in an attempt to regain his former state of health.

He travelled to the United States where he volunteered his services as surgeon to the Federal forces engaged in the American Civil War. He spent four months working at a hospital in the city of Frederick, Maryland, where he treated soldiers wounded in the bloody civil war battles of South Mountain and Antietam. There he gained a great deal of experience in the treatment of gunshot wounds, publishing papers in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal.

In 1863, he returned home and volunteered his services to Walsall Cottage Hospital. Walsall was a rough, dirty industrial town in the centre of the Black Country, about nine miles north of Birmingham. The small voluntary hospital specialised in treating workers in the hazardous heavy industries that had developed around the town. It was staffed by local doctors and resident nurses.  The nurses came from an Anglican order in north-east England. They had received little in the way of formal training, relying mainly on practical experience gained in a convalescent home.

Dorothy Pattison (Sister Dora)

Redfern Davies joined the Walsall hospital at about the same time as vicar’s daughter, Dorothy Pattison, arrived there to take up her first proper nursing post. Dorothy, her nine sisters and two brothers had suffered unhappy childhoods at the hands of an excessively controlling father and timid mother. Her brothers had managed to escape the oppressive family home, but the girls had to put up with their father’s black moods and his strange determination that they should never marry. By time Dorothy was twenty-nine years old, she had known little of life beyond the gloomy rectory.

She had a long-held ambition to become a nurse. The only way she could see to achieving this was to join a religious order, so she left her home to sign up as a novice at the Anglican Sisterhood of the Good Samaritan based at Coatham, near Redcar. There she underwent rudimentary training and gained some practical nursing experience.

In 1865, still only a novice in the sisterhood, Dorothy was sent to Walsall Cottage Hospital to replace a nursing sister who had fallen ill. She immediately threw herself into the role heart and soul, impressing everyone with her energy and commitment. Local people had been suspicious of the sisters, questioning their motives for coming to Walsall, but Dorothy’s evident commitment to their health and welfare won them over. Known to everyone in Walsall as Sister Dora, she soon took charge of the hospital, working all hours to care for the patients and improve the nursing standards.

Statue of Sister Dora in Walsall town centre

Novices in the religious order did not have to take vows of celibacy and were free to marry. When Dorothy and Redfern Davies met, they were immediately attracted to each other. She was fascinated by his accounts of travels in Europe and America, and he taught her a great deal about diagnosis, treatments, surgical procedures and techniques. Both were independent, highly intelligent, idealistic and deeply committed to their patients. Both also possessed gifts of charm and persuasiveness. Eventually they agreed to marry.

However, they disagreed on religion. She retained a deep religious faith, but he was a humanist, a follower of Darwin and Huxley, who did not share her faith. Dorothy dreaded the thought of giving up her nursing career, as she would have to when she married. Reluctantly, after much introspection, she decided to break off the engagement. Redfern Davies’s reaction to this decision is not recorded, but on 15th October 1866 he resigned from the Walsall Cottage Hospital and returned to Birmingham. They were never to meet again.

Redfern Davies died on 3rd March 1867. His death was attributed to complications of the earlier riding accident, leading to an aneurysm. The Lancet said of him that ‘very few surgeons have displayed in the early years a more thorough appreciation of scientific surgery’. He was remembered fondly in Walsall too. The local press reported that he had performed his duties at the hospital with credit, referring to ‘his kindly disposition and gentlemanly manner’ which had won him many friends among his colleagues and his patients.

Meanwhile Dorothy remained resolutely single, continuing to deliver outstanding nursing care in Walsall until her death from breast cancer in 1878. She had achieved virtual cult status in the town and is still revered as a local heroine.  Admired by Florence Nightingale and George Eliot, a friend of her brother, some believe she was the model for Dorothea Brooke, heroine of Eliot’s Middlemarch. She is commemorated in a statue in Walsall town centre – the first ever statue of a non-Royal female erected in England.

The spinster and the orphan

16 April 2023 / / 0 Comments

Adoption

Life could be tough for single women in the Victorian era, but Jane Kerr Davies was exceptionally self-assured. Eldest daughter of John Birt Davies, Jane never married, living at home with her parents until she was middle-aged. When her father died in 1878 she and her mother, Sarah, moved to a smaller house in Edgbaston. They lived there together until Sarah’s death four years later. She then took the remarkable step, for a single woman, of adopting a daughter.

Adoption was an informal business in those days. There were no legal requirements and abandoned or orphaned children were either looked after by relatives or fostered in baby farms, orphanages, charities or the workhouse.  Some of these children suffered neglect or worse. Philanthropists and social reformers took up the cause, setting up many charities whose mission was to help orphans.

The Infant Orphan Asylum at Wanstead was one of these charities. Queen Victoria was its patron and it gained the support of many eminent folk. Admissions were reserved for children of ‘respectable’ families. Unusual among Victorian orphanages, this establishment admitted babies as well as older children. There were always more candidates than places available. This painting by George Elgar Hicks shows relatives desperate to get places for children in a London orphanage when family bereavements left them caring for more children than they could cope with.  

An Infant Orphan Election at the London Tavern ‘Polling’ by George Elgar Hicks, 1865 [Museum of London]

Adoptee

One such child was Charlotte Rose Grabham, born on 22nd September 1882 and orphaned when she was just sixteen months old. Her parents, John Grabham, a professional singer, and his wife Louisa had been married for about eighteen years and had six living children at the time of Charlotte’s birth, but by January 1884 both parents were dead. There was no one who could look after the children so Charlotte and her elder sister, Adelaide, were admitted to the Wanstead orphanage.

How and why Jane Davies came to adopt this orphaned baby girl remains a mystery.  By 1884 she was living alone, having recently lost both her parents, three of her brothers and her youngest sister. She had inherited considerable wealth following these bereavements and may have wanted to put it to good use. No doubt she had given up any hope of marriage and maybe she was seeking companionship.

At any rate, Charlotte was taken into the comfortable surroundings of Jane’s Edgbaston home. It must have been a strange transition for the middle-aged spinster – Jane was about fifty at the time – to take on responsibility for a toddler. However, the arrangement seems to have worked well. Charlotte remained living with Jane into her mid-twenties when she married Jane’s nephew, Birt, son of Clement Davies.

Jane died on 17th September 1908, just seven months before Charlotte and Birt’s wedding. She left instructions that her body should be cremated at the Birmingham Crematorium without any religious ceremony and the ashes scattered in her garden. The bulk of her large estate was bequeathed to Charlotte, with the remainder to her nephews and nieces and to Birmingham University. Her will made it clear that if any one of her legatees became a Catholic or dabbled in ‘psychical purposes’, they would be dispossessed.

Pioneering athletes in Birmingham

8 August 2022 / / 0 Comments

Birmingham Athletic Club

Most spectators at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham would have been unaware of the city’s lengthy role in promoting athletics competitions. The Birmingham Athletic Club (BAC), one of the first British multi-sport clubs, was established in 1866. And 155 years ago, just one year after its launch, the BAC hosted the National Olympian Games in Birmingham, a precursor of the international Olympic games.  

The German Gymnasium, London, 1866

The club’s success was due in large part to the energetic efforts of two outstanding local athletes, Clement Davies and Joseph Hubbard.  Clement Davies was the son of John Birt Davies, professor of forensic medicine at Queen’s College and the first coroner of Birmingham. Educated at King Edward’s grammar school and Cambridge university where he developed his athletic skills, Clement excelled at jumping. At a sports day organised by the Birmingham Rifle Volunteers in May 1865, Clement, aged 23, won first prizes for the highest standing jump, longest running jump, vaulting the bar, and the sack race. He was also a keen boxer.

At another military sports display a few months later, participants were astonished to see a muscular young man push through the crowd of spectators into the arena. Uninvited, he proceeded to perform a series of elegant exercises on the horizontal bar, the like of which no one had seen before. The crowd, hugely impressed, demanded to know who the interloper was. His name was Joseph Hubbard, an employee of a local manufacturing firm, who had taught himself to perform astonishing athletic feats. Members of the BAC committee were so impressed that they sent him off to the German Gymnasium in London for training.

These two young men took the lead in getting the nascent athletics society off the ground. With Clement Davies as honorary secretary and Joseph Hubbard as chief trainer, or ‘professor’, the BAC organised its first gymnastics display in July 1866, drawing on advice from Ernst Ravenstein of the German Gymnastics Society.

Held at their makeshift gymnasium at Bingley Hall, the performances included running, leaping, vaulting and sack races, and exercises on the parallel bars. The club leased premises at Portland Road and the Kent Street baths, and other sports were added to their repertoire, including boxing, swimming and foxhunting. They recruited 250 members in their first year, as well as organising private classes for women and special sessions for schoolchildren.

The BAC was affiliated to the National Olympian Association (NOA), enabling members to compete in national contests. When the association was looking for a venue to hold its second national games, they were delighted to receive an offer from Birmingham. Clement Davies was appointed secretary of the NOA alongside his role at the BAC, with responsibility for organising the national competition.  Held over three days in June 1867, the NOA’s festival of sport began with a procession and ended with a grand ball. Competitors came from London, Manchester, Norwich, Derby, Newcastle, Leeds and elsewhere.

Various prizes were on offer, including ‘tilting at the ring’, in which horse riders galloped towards a cross-bar on which hung two small rings that they had to carry away on the end of a pointed lance. There were also running and jumping contests, wrestling and boxing, athletics, cricket, gymnastics and swimming. The event was considered a huge success and Clement Davies was commended for his ‘indefatigable energy’ in directing the proceedings.

Joseph Hubbard’s long career as an athlete and ‘professor of muscular science’ was still going strong in 1888. On the horizontal bar, parallel bars, and on horseback he was said to be ‘wonderfully good and no professional trapeze performer has been able to teach him anything’, so said the Birmingham Mail.

Clement Davies, my great grandfather, was too busy running his hardware factory to continue competing at a high level, but he remained actively involved in the BAC, being elected its vice-president and then president, a post he held until 1886. His interests expanded to include more sedentary activities, such as the card game whist, on which he published a book, but his support for the athletics club continued. He was a familiar figure at the annual gymastics displays at Birmingham Town Hall until the end of his life in May 1911.

Civil Service athletics at Beaufort House 1869
An athletics competition

Birmingham heritage

11 February 2022 / / 0 Comments

Just back from a trip to Birmingham to do more research for my forthcoming biography of John Birt Davies, Birmingham’s first coroner. The Wolfson Centre archives at Birmingham Central Library yielded some fascinating material, including microfilms of the register kept by Davies of the 30,000 inquests he presided over from 1839-1875.

I hadn’t been to the new library before. It’s extraordinary on the outside with its grey and gold layers covered in metal filigree rings – not my taste I have to say – but inside it’s stunning, with a circular design spanning ten levels. And almost every study space in the huge library was occupied, mainly by students, so it’s obviously providing a really useful service for young Brummies.

Tracing the coroner’s footsteps was more difficult. He arrived in Birmingham in 1822 after completing his medical training at Edinburgh University. He set up his first medical practice at 19 New Street, but no trace of the original building remains in this central shopping street. After his marriage to Sarah Redfern, the family home and medical practice moved to 25 Newhall Street where they lived until his retirement. Disappointingly few buildings from that era remain. Their last home was at 280 Hagley Road, Edgbaston, but that building has gone too.

Birmingham suffered greatly from bombing during WW2, but much of the destruction has happened since the 1960s. Those responsible for the mid-twentieth century developments favoured motor cars over pedestrians, but there’s been a change of heart since. Redevelopments at New Street Station and the Bullring are more successful, and the pedestrianisation of Centenary Square will be a triumph if it’s ever finished.

Most museums and galleries were shut at the time of our visit (Feb 2022), including the main museum in Chamberlain Square that I had very much wanted to see. It was undergoing renovation and there were signs of frantic activity to get everything ready in time for the 2022 Commonwealth Games, due to open in Birmingham on July 28th.

In Victorian times coroner’s inquests were held in pubs, often with the dead body present. I had hoped to find some of the old pubs still standing, particularly the Grand Turk in Ludgate Hill where many inquests took place, but sadly most have disappeared. I found just one where Davies had presided – the George and Dragon on the corner of Albion Street and Carver Street, now lovingly restored and renamed the Pig and Tail.

Old George and Dragon, now Pig and Tail
Pub where inquests used to be held

Despite the wanton destruction of Birmingham’s heritage, I did make a few more exciting finds. The Davies family tomb in Edgbaston Old Church, with memorials to my great great grandfather, great grandfather and father is still there, as is the tomb of Clement and Ann Cotterill, my fourth great grandparents, in the graveyard of St Philip’s Cathedral.

And it was great to see once again the clocktower erected in honour of John Birt Davies still standing by the Five Ways roundabout. The clock had stopped, though, and it was in desperate need of a new coat of paint. Birmingham City Council – please wake up!

Victorian clock
Memorial to John Birt Davies at Five Ways, Birmingham

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