A City’s Toys: Theatre in Birmingham 1914–1918

Abstract

The military historian Stephen Badsey has argued that as the first mass global war of the industrialized age, the Great War was the direct result of the long-term impact of the Industrial Revolution.¹ In Britain, outside London, where the exploitation of ample resources of water, coal, iron and other minerals had launched the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century and nurtured unprecedented regional economic growth, cities had to grapple with the challenge to supply both the technological capacity and the essential labour to wage total war. In Birmingham, the focus of this chapter, the city’s industrial strength was based on the processing of a variety of metals. By 1910, ‘the city of a thousand trades’² was already dominated by manufacturing priorities linked to the collective presence of Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA) amalgamated with the Daimler Company; the Kynoch armaments firm and the Lanchester Motor Company.³ The result during the war was the production of ambulances, staff cars, armoured cars, bicycles and motor bikes used by despatch riders and eventually aeroplanes. Vast quantities of cartridges, shell cases and detonators were produced along with, as Martin Killeen has put it, ‘three of the iconic weapons used throughout the conflict by the British armies in the trenches of northern France: the “Mills Bomb” hand grenade developed by William Mills, the Lee Enfield rifle and the Lewis Air-Cooled Automatic Machine Gun.