Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men | Page 3

and civility as he is
now. Mr. Page had just opened the shawl shop still carried on by his
widow. Near the Coach Yard was the shop of Mr. Hudson, the
bookseller, whose son still carries on the business established by his
father in 1821. In 1837, Mr. Hudson, Sen., was the publisher of a very
well conducted liberal paper called The Philanthropist. The paper only
existed some four or five years. It deserved a better fate. Next door to
Mr. Hudson's was the shop of the father of the present Messrs. Southall.
All these places have been materially altered, but the wine and spirit
stores of Mrs. Peters, at the corner of Temple Row, are to-day, I think,
exactly what they were forty years ago. The Brothers Cadbury--a name
now celebrated all over the world--were then, as will be seen by
reference to the frontispiece, shopkeepers in Bull Street, the one as a
silk mercer, the other as a tea dealer. The latter commenced in Crooked
Lane the manufacture of cocoa, in which business the name is still
eminent. The Borough Bank at that time occupied the premises nearly
opposite Union Passage, which are now used by Messrs. Smith as a
carpet shop. In all other respects--except where the houses near the
bottom are set back, and the widening of Temple Row--the street is
little altered, except that nearly every shop has been newly fronted.
High Street, from Bull Street to Carrs Lane, is a good deal altered. The
Tamworth Banking Company occupied a lofty building nearly opposite
the bottom of Bull Street, where for a very few years they carried on
business, and the premises afterwards were occupied by Mrs. Syson, as
a hosier's shop. The other buildings on both sides were small and
insignificant, and they were mostly pulled down when the Great
Western Railway Company tunneled under the street to make their line
to Snow Hill. "Taylor and Lloyd's" Bank was then in Dale End. The
passage running by the side of their premises is still called "Bank
Alley." Carrs Lane had a very narrow opening, and the Corn Exchange
was not built. Most of the courts and passages in High Street were then
filled with small dwelling houses, and the workshops of working
bookbinders. Messrs. Westley Richards and Co. had their gun factory

in one of them. The large pile of buildings built by Mr. Richards for
Laing and Co., and now occupied by Messrs. Manton, the Bodega
Company, and others, is the most important variation from the High
Street of forty years ago. The narrow footpaths and contracted roadway
were as inconveniently crowded as they are to-day. The house now
occupied by Innes, Smith, and Co. was then a grocer's shop, and the
inscription over the door was "Dakin and Ridgway," two names which
now, in London, are known to everybody as those of the most
important retail tea dealers in the metropolis. Mr. Ridgway established
the large concern in King William Street, and Mr. Dakin was the
founder of "No. 1, St. Paul's Churchyard."
New Street is greatly altered. At that time it was not much more lively
than Newhall Street is now. The Grammar School is just as it was; the
Theatre, externally, is not much altered; "The Hen and Chickens"
remains the same; the Town Hall, though not then finished, looked the
same from New Street; and the portico of the Society of Artists' rooms
stood over the pavement then. With these exceptions I only know one
more building that has not been pulled down, or so altered as to be
unrecognisable. The exemption is the excrescence called Christ Church,
which still disfigures the very finest site in the whole town.
Hyam and Co. had removed from the opposite side of the street, and
had just opened as a tailor's shop the queer old building known as the
"Pantechnetheca," and the ever-youthful Mr. Holliday was at "Warwick
House." The recollections of what the "House" was then makes me
smile as I write. It had originally been two private houses. The one
abutted upon the footway, and the other stood some thirty feet back, a
pretty garden being in the front. The latter had been occupied by Mr.
James Busby, who carried on the business of a wire-worker at the rear.
The ground floor frontages of both had been taken out. A roof had been
placed over the garden, two hideous small-framed bay windows fronted
New Street, and a third faced what is now "Warwick House Passage."
The whole place had a curious "pig-with-one-ear" kind of aspect, the
portion which had been the garden having no upper floors, while the
other was three storeys high. The premises had been "converted" by a
now long-forgotten association, called the "Drapery Company," and as

this had not