Mount Misery

Life in Birmingham was tough for many in the early years of the nineteenth century. This was the age of Industrial Revolution and life was changing at a pace.  A town of great innovation and opportunity it was also subject as much as any other to the vagaries of fluctuating economic fortunes and depressions.   There was a workhouse in Birmingham, but in the early nineteenth century it was more usual to give those in need ‘out relief’, a very small amount of money and/or basic food stuff, funded through a locally collected rate which was managed by the Overseers of the Poor Law. There was much moralising over ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, and the town authorities would often utilise men claiming out relief in unpaid labour for improving the infrastructure of the town.  This piece fom Showell’s Dictionary of Birmingham also identifies a punishing ‘labour test’ in return for poor relief. Pushing men, especially young men, into such backbreaking work would also have been intended as a way of preventing violent unrest at a time of great deprivation.

“Mount Misery.– At the close of the great war, which culminated at Waterloo, it was long before the blessings of peace brought comfort to the homes of the poor. The first effects of the sheathing of the sword was a collapse in prices of all kinds, and a general stagnation of trade, of which Birmingham made prosperous through the demands for its guns, &c., felt the full force. Bad trade was followed by bad harvests, and the commercial history of the next dozen years is but one huge chronicle of disaster, shops and mills closing fast, and poverty following faster. How to employ hundreds of able-bodied men dependent on the rates, was a continual puzzle to the Overseers, until someone, wise in his generation, hit upon the plan of paying the unfortunates to wheel sand from the bank then in front of Key Hill House up to the canal side, a distance of 1 1/2 miles, the payment being at the rate of one penny per barrow load. This fearful ‘labour test’ was continued for a long time, and when we reckon that each man would have to wheel his barrow backwards and forwards for nearly 20 miles to earn a shilling, moving more than a ton of sand in the process, we cannot wonder at the place receiving such a woeful name as Mount Misery.”

Showell’s Dictionary of Birmingham was published by the Cornish Brothers in Birmingham in 1885. It is widely available to view online free of charge – for example here: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL22092763M/Showell’s_dictionary_of_Birmingham.