Hello. A very warm welcome to the award-winning Birmingham Back to Backs.
We have a very special behind the scenes treat for you today. We're going to be taking you on a time travel journey.
With us we have this set of special keys and each key opens a doorway
to a family and their story in a different date period.
Come along on this time travel journey.
The back to back houses were built in the turn of the industrial revolution
to house the mass number of workers. By 1901 there was over 500,000 workers
in and around Birmingham, and cheap housing needed to be developed, and fairly quickly.
We're currently now in the 1840s' house. The Levy family lived in this house. They were a Jewish family
originally from London, and Farringdon to be more precise. They moved to Birmingham
because you could work from home in Birmingham without having to pay a trade guild license.
And professionally Mr Levy made clock hands.
We're now loosely in the 1870s and the Oldfield family lived in this particular house.
And during the 1870s we had gas lighting in each of the houses.
Oil lamps still continued and the major things were oysters. Although it's an expensive
piece of food now, back in the Victorian times, or when the houses would have existed
it would have been one of the cheaper means of food.
Mr Oldfield made glass eyes for a living.
We're now in the 1930s, and in this particular house Mr Mitchell lived here and by trade he was a locksmith.
So during this particular date period electricity had arrived in the court, but also
we had water supply. And Mr Mitchell will have had a tap and a water supply into the house itself.
The Birmingham archive was saved thanks to a gentleman with the name of George Saunders,
originally from Saint Kitts in the Caribbean. He had a very long lease with Birmingham City Council
as a tailor. It had a front of house shop on Hurst Street and it was because of that lease
the place could not be knocked down.
I'm going to now pass you over to Charlotte who's going to
tell you more about George Saunders and his shop.
The clothes and items here tell us so much about fashion and taste in this time and place.
You know you can look at the pleats in a trouser and we've
heard people say it was so important to get it just right if you were going to a particular
dance or blues party. it was so important for the mods to look really sharp when they were
going out for the evening. We have that all captured here in George's collection.
Here's George talking about some of the adversity he faced and how he overcame it.
There was an advertisement for a tailor in the city of Birmingham and I decided to write an application for the job.
And a letter came back to me saying that I am just the man that they're looking for,
please come for an interview. I got myself nicely dressed up with a tie and everything like that,
and I went in to see the man. The man looked at me and said to me the vacancy is gone.
I was dumbstruck. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And he said to me, 'I told you the job is gone. Get out'.
So I walked away.
As a migrant to this country, George can really help us understand the adversity that he and people like him faced.
But George was very successful, very enterprising, and engineering.
And he soon set up his own business in the 1970s.
We've now moved upstairs into George's workshop. What you can see here is a recreation
of how George may have worked. And we've created this with George and with his family.
One thing to bear in mind is that originally George operated
from two or three of the buildings here on Hurst Street that are now part of the Back to Backs Museums.
So this would have all have been open and it would have been a whirring hive of activity with all the machines going.
From 1974 to 2001 we were very very busy. We didn't advertise.
This one person tells the other and it just built up like that. I had people coming for me
to make suits for them from London. In the latter years we made clothes for the Queen's Guards.
George's skill as a tailor has really been acknowledged
by his clientele and by his customers who've told us about just how wonderfully his clothes fit.
We're really really fortunate here at the Back to Backs. So few museums and heritage sites
have objects that relate to what we might call the Windrush generation.
So that generation of migrants who came to places like Birmingham from across the commonwealth. 0:05:23.874,1193:02:47.295 Thanks very much for joining us on this behind the scenes tour of the Back to Backs.
It's only thanks to your continued support that we can care for special places like this.