Presidential Address delivered by Sir David Cannadine at The Birmingham and Midland Institute on 16 July 2022.

It is a huge honour and pleasure, both to serve as your 168th President of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, and as a result to have the opportunity to deliver my presidential address on this hot and sunny afternoon – surely one of the warmest days on which any president has ever been obliged to speak. I am, therefore, deeply grateful to so many of you who have turned out and turned up, despite these extraordinarily high temperatures; and I hope you will not come to feel, in the light of what I have to say, and the remarks I have to make, that your heroic efforts in defying the heat to get here, were mistaken and misguided.

With so many illustrious presidential names behind me, it is daunting to find myself in their direct line of succession, and as an historian, it’s impossible to resist the temptation to try to discern some patterns in the lists of those many men, but not many women, who have gone before me.  Two prime ministers (Lord Rosebery and Clement Attlee), a string of major politicians (among them Curzon, Birkenhead, Grey, Zetland and Amery), four American ambassadors to Britain, one-time prime ministers of Canada and Australia, several local landowners (including Dartmouth Leigh, Harrowby and lots and lots of Lytteltons), composers and musicians, lawyers and judges, scientists and engineers, bishops and archbishops, novelists and writers.  There is much to be learned about the political, cultural, social and economic histories of Birmingham in particular and, indeed, of Britain more generally, by contemplating these names, although it does strike me as slightly surprising that in such a distinguished list, there is only one Chamberlain and only one Cadbury, but no Nettlefold or Kenrick. Why?

When it comes to my illustrious predecessors as historians, the picture is particularly interesting.  During the 1880s and 1890s, they were frequently to be found: J.A.Froude, Sir John Seeley, W.H.Lecky, E.A.Freeman and Frederic Harrison.  I wonder why there was such a concentration of presidential historians during those two fin-de-siècle decades, and I wonder if it is coincidence that they were also years that witnessed, among other things, the creation of the Survey of London, the Victoria Histories of the Counties of England, and the National Trust?  There was, to be sure, a great deal of structured retrospection during the 1880s and 1890s, which was further encouraged by the Golden and Diamond Jubilees of the Queen-Empress herself, and this may help explain why historians were so popular as presidents at that time.  But then they vanish completely for almost a century, only reappearing in 1992, with the appointment of Rachel Waterhouse, herself, of course, and among many other things, the historian of this Institute.  She, in turn, has been followed by Carl Chinn (twice: in 1997 and again in 2020), by Jenny Uglow (in 2007), and by Roger Ward (in 2017), and now by myself.  So: historians are back, but not yet in the same profusion and abundance they were during the 1880s and 1890s.

The exact occupational descriptions assigned to each of us in the Wikipedia entry on our Institute are revealing. For Waterhouse: ‘local historian and activist’.  For Chinn and Uglow: ‘historian’. For Ward: ‘political historian’.  And for me: ‘author and historian’.  Make of that what you will.  To be sure, not all authors are historians, and not all historians are authors, but all my recent predecessors as presidents and historians have been accomplished and in two cases prolific authors. So: I wonder why I have been singled out for that double-barreled description, but not them? I have no idea. May I offer one final reflection on the full list of my presidential predecessors.  The second of them, serving in 1855, was the fourth Lord Calthorpe, who owned most of Edgbaston: the ‘Belgravia of Birmingham’, which was the subject of my Oxford doctoral dissertation and my first book, Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the Towns.  But as I was undertaking those researches, it never occurred to me, even in my wildest dreams and most extravagant imaginings, that I would one day follow the fourth Lord Calthorpe – not, alas, as the owner of Edgbaston, but as the President of this Institute.  I remain deeply touched by the honour that you have conferred upon me, and by your eagerness that I should continue for at least one more year.

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I have called my address ‘The View from the Top of Clent Hill’, and I owe you an explanation as to what I am going to be talking about during the substance of my remarks.  There will be a further element of autobiography, but be reassured that is merely the springboard to some wider considerations and reflections.  First, then, the autobiography.  I was born in Birmingham in 1950, and until I went away from home to university, I grew up in a semi-detached house on Hagley Road West in Quinton Birmingham 32, a lower-middle class suburb largely created during the inter-war years.  One of my family’s favourite Saturday afternoon walks was to take what was then a Midland Red bus along the A456, getting off at Hagley Wood Lane, and then walking up that narrow and winding road, turning right, and heading onwards and upwards to the top of Clent Hill.   From that summit, there opens out to the west an extraordinary panorama and unforgettable landscape, the greater part of which was well described by the local novelist Francis Brett Young [of whom more later]:

Even today [he wrote to Stanley Baldwin, of whom also more later] I doubt if I could ever wholly overcome the awe of that prospect, for it is one of the widest and fairest in all England: the dreamy, green expanse of the Severn plain; the level line of the Cotswolds – pale blue as the Chalk Hill butterfly; Bredon (beloved hill!), a half-strung bow; Malvern, peaked and fantastic, like scenery on a stage; Abberley with its tower; two waves of Clee; and beyond it all, a tangle of unnamed hills.

But that was not the only vista that the young David Cannadine surveyed from the top of Clent Hill, for there were two other, very contrasted views, in different directions: to the north, there was what was then known as the Black Country (that knot of industrial towns, among them Halesowen, Dudley, Tipton, Wednesbury and Wolverhampton), its heavy industry just still hanging on in the 1950s and 1960s; and to the north-east there was the great metropolis of Birmingham itself, no longer quite the city of a thousand trades it had once been, but vividly embodied in the massive bulk of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, and the soaring tower of the faux-Italian campanile of Birmingham University.  In those days when I was growing up, it was still easy for outsiders to lump the Black Country and Birmingham together, and many people did. But that was a mistake, for they were two very different places, both economically and socially as well (the local accents, for one thing, being very different).  I came to realize these differences at an early age, because my mother’s father was a Black Country carpenter, who worked for the local council; while my father’s father had worked for the Birmingham-based form of W.T.George, which made ships lamps, but which went into liquidation in 1983.

The view from the top of Clent hill was, then, of an extraordinarily varied topography and landscape: by turns rural and urban, agricultural and industrial, beautiful and bracing, placid and energized.  And this was true, not only of the landscape, the geography and the topography, but also of the culture which these three very different, but closely conjoined, localities produced, going all the way back to William Langland’s Piers Plowman, written in the late fourteenth century, which opens with a dream sequence set in the Malvern Hills.  It is far beyond my capacity, and surely beyond your patience, for me to traverse the six hundred years between Langland’s Piers Plowman and Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club, although there might be much to be learned from those two very different evocations of two very different parts of the West Midlands at two very different times. And I shall briefly return to Jonathan Coe, another of my presidential predecessors, a little later in this lecture.

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But as befits an historian of modern Britain, I shall confine myself to modern times, and I shall begin my tour d’horizon with the westward view from the top of Clent, beginning with Shropshire, and (how could it be otherwise?) with A.E.Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896, just before Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and which began with the lighting of a beacon on the top of Clee Hill to mark her Golden Jubilee ten years earlier. But A Shropshire Lad only became highly popular in the years before and during the First World War, perhaps unsurprisingly, given its preoccupation with youth, idealism, male adolescence and the transience of love, all geographically defined and inflected by those ‘blue remembered hills’ in the ‘land of lost content.’  In fact, Housman wrote A Shropshire Lad in London, and later noted that he had been ‘born in Worcestershire not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time’, and he admitted that ‘my topographical details…are sometimes quite wrong,’ many of them being derived from Murray’s Handbook for Shropshire, Cheshire and Lancashire, first published in 1870.  But despite these limitations, A Shropshire Lad soon became the byword for rural nostalgia, a reputation further reinforced by the settings of some of its poems by Ralph Vaughan Williams in On Wenlock Edge, which he composed in 1909.

It might seem rather a stretch to move from Houseman’s Shropshire Lad to the writings of another author who evoked that eponymous county with great affection and probably with greater knowledge, namely P.G.Wodehouse. His Blanding Castle novels were all set in Shropshire, a county where he had spent much of his youth, and one of the favourite games of Wodehouse devotees is to work out, from the clues provided in the novels, the exact location of Blandings Castle and the precise times of the trains between Market Blandings and Paddington.  The Blandings books are peopled with dotty aristocrats, impossible aunts, annoying younger sons, wicket baronets, a slew of impostors, imperturbable butlers, and prize-winning pigs, but they are all dominated by Blandings Castle itself, which as Mark Girouard once observed, ‘was mellow, dignified, creeper clad, and bathed in perpetual sunshine.’  Appropriately enough, the first novel in what became a long-running sequence, entitled Something Fresh, was published in 1915, and it was a doubly nostalgic work: harking back to the golden summers of Edwardian England, while at the same time helping launch the cult of the country house, which would become such a significant theme in twentieth-century fiction, from Evelyn Waugh to Vita Sackville-West and beyond.

And so to Worcestershire and of course to Edward Elgar, a complex and endlessly fascinating figure, whom I can only mention briefly, since there are many aspects of his life and work that I don’t have time to go into here, and in any case, I have written about him elsewhere. But I must mention the Enigma Variations, composed between 1898-99.  For this was not only an extraordinarily original piece that launched Elgar to musical stardom, pomp and circumstance, hope and glory: it was also a unique display of what might be termed musical geography, compositional prosopography and performative sociology. In their mixture of biography and autobiography, the Variations explored and evoked his individual connections and local networks, spreading out from Elgar’s native Worcester to the surrounding countryside and the neighbouring counties beyond: among them William Meath Baker, a country squire resident at Hasfield Court near Gloucester; Arthur Troyte Griffith, a Malvern architect; Dr Sinclair, the organist at Hereford Cathedral; and Lady Mary Lygon, sister of Lord Beauchamp of Madresfield Court, the medieval moated manor house that provided the inspiration for Waugh’s Brideshead Re-Visited– a very different house from Castle Howard, which was used in the first television adaptation.

One of Elgar’s patrons was Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, descended from a line of Severn-side squires based at Highnam Court in Gloucestershire, where in the 1880s his forbears had owned slightly more than 2,000 acres worth slightly more than L4,000 a year (which would be a great deal of money in today’s values). Parry’s career was unusually varied for a composer: he worked in insurance, taught at the Royal College of Music, was a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, was made a baronet, and was on the list of those Liberals who would have been made peers in 1910 had it been necessary to force through the Parliament Act in the House of Lords  Parry also poured out music, including five symphonies and the setting of Jerusalem, he wrote many of the articles of the first edition of the Grove Dictionary, and he published a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach.  He inherited the Gloucestershire estates in 1896, and lived there until his death in 1918.  One of Parry’s students at the Royal College was Ralph Vaughan Williams, who had been born in the village vicarage at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire, the name he gave to his glorious setting of the hymn Come Down O Love Divine – surely the very quintessence of Edwardian Anglicanism.  Like Parry, Vaughan Williams was well born, but in a very different milieu, numbering Wedgwoods and Darwins among his relations. During the 1900s he collected English folk songs, edited The English Hymnal, and composed the Sea Symphony, and he went on to produce an extraordinary range of works across almost half a century. Like his friend and relative, the historian Gorge Macaulay Trevelyan, Vaughan Williams was deeply devoted to the English countryside, which in his case can undoubtedly be traced back to his Gloucestershire origins.

In many ways, these Severn-side shires were homely, domestic and closed-in, drawn together each year at the Three Choirs Festival, held by rotation in Worcester, Hereford and Gloucester, and of which Elgar and Vaughan Williams were lifelong devotees.  In many ways, it was a world sufficient unto itself.  But there was another product of this local landscape, and that was Stanley Baldwin, who was the dominant figure in national politics during the 1920s and 1930s.  And it was Baldwin who took the local, decent, Christian, consensual values of Worcestershire and Severn-side, and proclaimed them as those which all Englishmen might exemplify and to which they should all aspire. ‘To me’, Baldwin observed, in the course of one of his most famous speeches, ‘England is the country and the country is England’, and he kept on saying that throughout his years of power and fame, seeking to restore probity and dignity to public life after the traumas of the First World War and the febrile corruption of the Lloyd George Coalition.  He was also a fervent devotee of the novels of Mary Webb, and he was never happier than when speaking at the annual dinners of the Worcestershire Association in London, where he extolled the beauty of his native country, as glimpsed through the windows of his study at Astley Court. When he retired from the prime minister-ship, Punch paid him the signal honour of featuring a cartoon in which he was celebrated as the Worcestershire Lad.

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Baldwin was undoubtedly genuine in his liking for the English countryside and in his love of Worcestershire.  But his family had made their money as local ironmasters, and this provides a convenient link to those two very different areas of the West Midlands that can be glimpsed from the top of Clent Hill, and it is to them that I must now turn.  Although there were – and are – significant differences between Birmingham and what used to be known as the Black Country, they were – and are – alike in being so very different from the settled rural domesticity of Shropshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire.   By the late eighteenth century, they were at the cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution: the Black Country on the basis of coal mining and iron making, Birmingham the place where men like Baskerville and Bolton and Murdoch and Watt, and later Gillott and Mason, were becoming household names thanks to their products, which sold not only in the United Kingdom but increasingly around the world.  Many of these men were members of the Lunar Society, Matthew Boulton was one of its guiding spirits, and its members frequently met at Soho House, Boulton’s residence in Handsworth, where political, social, scientific and cultural issues were vigorously debated and discussed.  It is fitting that the Lunar Society’s history has been brilliantly told by one of my presidential predecessors, Jenny Uglow; and that the society was subsequently revived by another, namely Dame Rachel Waterhouse – as she eventually became – who had already played a major part in founding the Victorian Society.

It’s easy to forget that for well over a century, Birmingham played host to the Triennial Music Festival, established in 1784 to raise funds for the local General Hospital – a felicitous and revealing conjunction of civic need and cultural endeavor.  From 1834 the performances took place in the newly-completed town hall, designed by Joseph Hansom – a building which, despite its name, was a concert venue rather than a municipal headquarters.  The Birmingham Triennial Music Festival was one of the great cultural institutions of the long nineteenth century, and among the works it commissioned and received their first performances there were Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Sullivan’s The Light of the World, Dvorak’s Requiem, and Elgar’s three oratorios, The Dream of Gerontius, The Apostles and The Kingdom.  Sullivan’s association with Birmingham, although not close, seems to have been entirely happy, for he also served as our president in 1888, and delivered one of the most significant presidential addresses. The same could not be said of Elgar:  the first performance of Gerontius was a famous disaster, while the lectures on music he gave at the recently-founded University of Birmingham in 1905-06 were badly delivered and even worse received. Not surprisingly, Birmingham was a city to which Elgar never really warmed.

But for all that, it was a city of culture, and self-consciously and deliberately so.  Indeed, Joseph Chamberlain and his relatives, colleagues and descendants, who would dominate the place from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Second World War, envisioned Birmingham as a latter-day Italian city-state — proud, free and independent, and although they could be fiercely partisan in their national politics, they sought to govern and beautify the city in the interests of all its inhabitants.  This meant that, among other things, there should be (in the words of John Thackeray Bunce) ‘public buildings, ample and stately and rich enough in their ornament to dignify the corporate life’ which would help promote ‘a municipal life nobler, fuller, richer than any the world has ever seen.’ Hence the construction of the Council House, the City Museum and Art Gallery, the General Hospital, Mason College, the Victoria Law Courts, Chamberlain Square and, of course, the Central Library and Birmingham and Midland Institute designed by John Henry Chamberlain in the early 1880s.  And hence, too, the original buildings of the University of Birmingham by Aston Webb, realizing Joseph Chamberlain’s wish to make Birmingham a great seat of higher learning.

When I was growing up in the Birmingham of the late 1950s, all those buildings still existed: indeed, if Joseph Chamberlain had miraculously reappeared in the city at that time, he would have found much of it very familiar.  And one of the reasons why I became an historian of the nineteenth century was that I grew up in what was still in many ways a nineteenth-century city.  But not for long, for by the 1960s, the talk was all of ‘the new Birmingham’, which meant tearing down some of the city’s most iconic Victorian buildings, including our own, as well as many of its slums and back to back houses, and creating a new city, all glass and concrete.  But at just the time when much of the built heritage of nineteenth- century Britain was being demolished, in Birmingham and far beyond, so the academic study of the nineteenth century took off, perhaps most memorably with the publication of Asa Briggs’s Victorian Cities, his brilliant, virtuoso evocation of nineteenth century urban life and politics and culture, in which Birmingham plays a starring role. Was this juxtaposition of physical destruction and scholarly efflorescence just coincidence?  I doubt it.  In any event, by the early 1970s, the face of Birmingham was much changed, and its economy, politics and society as later evoked by Jonathan Coe, in The Rotters’ Club (or by David Lodge in Nice Work) were very different from what they had been in the time of Joseph Chamberlain or of his sons Neville and Austen.

Although set in the early 1970s, Jonathan Coe published The Rotters’ Club in 2001, and during the intervening thirty years, the city changed again.  The demise of Longbridge car works took down with it many of the city’s iconic brands, as de-industrialization set in.  But at the same time that the city’s economy faltered, it became a much more multi-ethnic and multi-cultural place.  Let me give one example: when I attended King Edwards Five Ways School in the 1960s, there was, as I recall, only one pupil of colour, which is why I remember him.  When I returned to deliver a lecture at the school in 2008, at least one third of the pupils and students were people of colour.  This diversification means that once again, albeit for new reasons, Birmingham is in many ways a very different place with a very different culture from those sylvan shires of Severn-side, one indication of which has been the rise to global recognition and renown of the Birmingham Balti, which had greatly enriched the gastronomic range and repertoire of the city – a range and repertoire which, if memory serves me aright, were not that great when I was growing up here.  And how fitting it is that in just a few days’ time, this multi-cultural city of ours will be hosting the multi-cultural global sporting event of the Commonwealth games.  As an editorial in The Times recently put it, Birmingham ‘has a rich culture and history that it should be proud to share with the world.’  And I am very proud to try to play my part in that.

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It’s important to put these recent developments in a broader perspective, for in modern times, Birmingham has always been a city of immigrants: indeed, from John Baskerville and Joseph Gillott, via John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain, to Herbert Manzoni and Simon Rattle, many of its most distinguished citizens were not born here.  My own Cannadine forebears originated as agricultural labourers in Shropshire, and at the time of the industrial revolution, one of them headed to Birmingham in search of fame and fortune – neither of which, I hasten to add, any of his descendants have ever succeeded in acquiring.  But even as Birmingham has long been a place to attract outsiders – initially from its rural hinterland, subsequently from the former colonies of the British Empire – it has also been a place that people have sought to leave.   The Cadbury family, for example, initially lived cheek by jowl with their business in central Birmingham, then removed to Edgbaston, and their descendants spread out in rural Warwickshire and Worcestershire.  More recently, Judith Cutler, whose detective novels so vividly evoke many aspects of near-contemporary Birmingham, has left the city for the countryside.  So: while in some ways the culture of Severnside and the culture of Birmingham have been in some ways distinct and even antithetical, in other ways they have been closely connected – with immigrants from the country to the city, but also with those leaving the city for the country.

That is equally true of the relations between the Severn Valley and the Black Country, to which I now turn in my final section, and in so doing, I want to return to an author who was a best-seller in his day, and whose life and work exemplify some of these complex interconnections, namely Francis Brett Young. He was born in Halesowen in the Black Country in 1884, the son of a doctor.  The younger Brett Young followed in his father’s footsteps, studying medicine at the fledgling University of Birmingham (where his archive is now to be found), and many of the characters in his novels – indeed, too many– are themselves doctors. Much of his boyhood was spent cycling to the countryside of the Severn Valley, and after serving in the First World War, and living in the West Country, Italy and the Lake District, and as his novels became best sellers in the 1920s and 1930s, he eventually set himself up as a country gentleman at Craycombe House in Worcestershire, where he remained until the end of the Second World War, when he emigrated to South Africa, and where he died in 1954.

Brett Young’s knowledge of the West Midlands extended to, or was confined by, the splendid vista that could be gleaned from the top of Clent Hill, and one of the recurring scenes in his novels is when the hero, escaping from the industrial squalor of the Black Country, or the manufacturing grime of Birmingham, gets to the top of Clent Hill, or Walton Hill, and sees that great – and completely different – western vista opening before him.  One such is Abner Fellows, the hero of The Black Diamond (1921) who, fleeing the squalor of industry and poverty, finds himself on the top of Clent Hill:

From that high post [Brett Young writes] he gazed upon the pastoral heart of England, the most placid and homely of all her shires;
but the national schools had taught him nothing of these things and, as the mists ascended, showing the cliffs of Cotswold long and
level, Bredon, an island dome, May Hill and Malvern, Abberely, Clee, and all the nearer hills of Wales, he only knew that it was green
and big, and that it promised freedom.

Unsurprisingly, Brett Young befriended Stanley Baldwin, to whom he dedicated one of his books, and in his celebration of rural life, and the manor houses and gentry of the Severn Valley, there is also something of the geography, the sociology and the prosopography of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, as exemplified by such fictional gentry families as the d’Abitots of ‘Stoke Prior’, the Abberleys of ‘Monks  Norton’, and the Ombersleys of ‘Chaddesborne’.

Brett Young’s depictions of the Severn Valley countryside owed something to Trollope and Hardy, and his evocations of the Black Country were indebted to Arnold Bennett’s novels set in the thinly-disguised ‘five towns’ of the Potteries in north Staffordshire. Like Bennett, Brett Young changed the names, so that, for example, Wolverhampton became ‘Wolverbury’, while the great metropolis of Birmingham was thinly disguised as ‘North Bromwich’.  When he wrote about the city’s nonconformist elite, Brett Young could not decide whether its members were high-minded civic leaders or money-grubbing ‘hardware princes’.  He was even more critical of the Black Country coal owners and iron masters: the Hingstons at ‘Wolverbury’, the Willises at ‘Mawne’, the Bulgins and Lorimers at ‘Halesby’, and the Tinsleys and Hacketts at ‘Hayseech’, whom he scorned as vulgar arrivistes, obsessed with status and social climbing.  Their mines and factories disfigured the landscape, they made colossal fortunes out of the carnage and destruction of the First World War, and the working conditions of their employees were terrible. Indeed, Brett Young was repeatedly outraged at the squalor and deprivation of their circumstances. As befitted an author who had dedicated another of his books to J.L. and Barbara Hammond, Brett Young did not take a favourable view of the industrial revolution.

Unlike Arnold Bennett in his novels, and Stanley Baldwin in his politics, Brett Young did not transcend the confines of the region in which he grew up and about which he wrote, he did not say anything of greater resonance or more general significance, which helps explain why his novels are not much read today.  But within these undeniable limitations and constraints, he did possess a real sense of the complex inter-connectedness of those three very different worlds that could be glimpsed from the top of Clent Hill. ‘Nothing’, he once wrote, ‘that has happened in my English books took place outside the limits of that superb vista’, and in the ‘Severn edition’ of his novels, published when he was at the height of his inter-war, best-seller fame, the endpapers provided maps of the fact-and-fictional landscape where his novels were set.

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I realize that this has been a somewhat breathless scamper across a wide territory of exceptional cultural richness, and there are many aspects of the cultural life of the Severn-Valley shires, the Black Country and Birmingham that I have not had time to cover. Where, for example, is Sir Barry Jackson, or J.R.R.Tolkein? The former one of the towering figures of the twentieth-century British theatre, who made the Birmingham Repertory Theatre one of the great forcing houses of British acting talent; the latter a no-less-significant cultural figure, who transmuted much of his experience as a Birmingham resident and West-Midlands walker into the Lord of the Rings Trilogy (and am I the only person to have noticed that the opening scene of the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, might have been filmed on Clent Hill?). But I hope I have at least conveyed some sense of the extraordinary cultural richness of the West Midlands, a cultural richness which the Birmingham and Midland Institute has done so much to recognize, appreciate and promote across well more than a century and a half.  And I hope I may also be allowed to say, yet again, how flattered and delighted I am, not only to serve as your president, but in so doing to renew and strengthen my connections with this, our great city: both yours and mine.

To that end, I should like to conclude, not by returning to the top of Clent Hill, notwithstanding its life-long and (literally) unfailingly uplifting allure, but by reminding you of two quotations, expressing very different views of Birmingham itself.  The first is by Jane Austen: or, more accurately, it is some words she puts into the mouth of one of her most memorably disagreeable characters, Mrs Elton, in Emma.    At one point in the story, Mrs Elton mentions ‘people of the name of Tupman’, whom she describes as ‘encumbered with many low connections, and how they got their fortune nobody knows.’ As if that were not bade enough, she goes on to note: ‘they came from Birmingham, which is not a place to promise much.  One has not great hopes for Birmingham.  I always say there is something direful in that sound.’  To set against this, let me remind you of some very different words, spoken by Austen Chamberlain, the last of my presidential predecessors whom I shall invoke today, on receiving the Freedom of our city in 1926: ‘I was born in Birmingham, I was bred in Birmingham, Birmingham is in my blood and in my bones; and wherever I go and wherever I am, I shall remain a Birmingham man.’  I hope it is clear which of these two quotations I prefer.