Occasionally, London and Liverpool houses in the Brazilian or Cuban trade have ordered suits of chains, intended for the use of slave-ships. These are cheap, coarse, painted black, and horrid looking. Among the orders on the books of a manufacturer, were several dozen pair of hand-cuffs for ladies.
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THE EDGE TOOL MANUFACTURE, which is increasing in Birmingham, probably in consequence of the repeated strikes at Sheffield, added to the superior position of Birmingham as regards coal, and the markets of London, Liverpool, and Bristol, is often carried on in conjunction with that of steel toys. There are forty-five different kinds of axes; fourteen for the American market, twelve adzes, twenty-six bills and bill-hooks, and upwards of seventy hoes for different foreign countries—Spain, Portugal, South America, the United States, and Australia, which will soon consume as much hardware as America did fifty years ago.
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LIGHT STEEL TOYS.—These include chatelains, watch chains, keys, seals, purses, slides, beads, waist buckles, dress swords, steel buttons for court dresses, bodkins, spectacle frames, knitting and netting implements, and steel snuffers. Shoe and knee buckles, which were once universally worn, alone employed five thousand persons in their manufacture, when it was the staple trade of the town. The expense and inconvenience of shoe buckles sent them out of fashion. Dragoons hung in the stirrup, and cricketers tore the nails of their fingers in picking up cricket balls, from the inconvenient buckle.
The trade is extremely fluctuating, and depends very much on inventive taste in which we are manifestly inferior to the French. Some articles we can make better than they can, but they are always bringing out something new and pretty. In small beads they undersell us enormously, while in beads of 1/6th of an inch in diameter, and upwards, we can undersell them.
A visit to a manufactory of light steel toys will afford a great deal of amusement and instruction.
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MEDALLING.—DIE SINKING.—Here again are trades by which Birmingham keeps up its communication with all the civilised, and part of the uncivilised world. The first great improvements in coining the current money of the realm originated at Soho, near Birmingham, at the manufactories of two men whose memory Englishmen can never hold in sufficient respect—Matthew Boulton and James Watt. They were the inventors of the machinery now in use in the Royal Mint; for a long period they coined the copper money, as also some silver money for the United Kingdom, as well as money of all denominations for many foreign countries, tokens, and medals innumerable. They made coins for the French Convention.
During the war, when money was scarce and small notes were in circulation, many tradesmen, and several public establishments issued “tokens,” which were, in fact, metal promissory notes, as they were seldom of the intrinsic value stamped on them. By this expedient retailers advertised themselves, and temporarily increased their capital. Some successful speculators made fortunes, others were ruined by the presentation of all their metal notes of hand at periods of panic.