Joseph Chamberlain

In the late autumn of 1854 an eighteen-year-old Londoner got off the train in Birmingham. He had been sent to keep an eye on his father’s money. His biographer J. L. Garvin, writing in 1932 from the family papers, says the father settled the matter in four words: “We will send Joe.”

Joseph Chamberlain would become the most famous name in Birmingham’s history. Before he was a mayor, a minister or anybody’s hero or villain, he spent twenty years selling screws. That is where his money, his methods and his reputation were made.

A screw that made its own hole

Chamberlain was born in Camberwell on 8 July 1836, the son of a London shoe manufacturer, also Joseph. He was educated at University College School from 1850 to 1852 and then put to work in the family business.

His uncle by marriage, John Sutton Nettlefold, was a London ironmonger who also made wood screws, and had a works off Broad Street in Birmingham. Screws in those days had blunt ends. You bored a hole with a gimlet first, then drove the screw in. An American patent offered something better: a pointed screw that made its own hole, cut, headed and threaded by self-acting machines fed with wire.

In 1854 Nettlefold bought the British rights. The whole venture needed about £30,000, more than he could raise. His brother-in-law, Chamberlain’s father, put in £10,000 as an equal partner. A new factory went up at Heath Street, Smethwick, by the canal and the railway on the edge of Birmingham. The younger Chamberlain came to watch over the stake.

The man who made the trade

The division of labour was simple. His cousin Joseph Henry Nettlefold, a gifted engineer, ran the works. Chamberlain ran the office in Broad Street and the selling. As Garvin put it: “One made the screws; the other made the trade.”

The first years were hard. The patent covered only the United Kingdom; rivals held the rights abroad, and the machines were costly to buy and run. Chamberlain went after customers himself. Garvin describes him quoting French buyers in their own decimal measures and packing screws the French way, in neat single-size packets wrapped in blue paper. He travelled to Ireland to open accounts. He produced the firm’s first price list for every size of screw and, it was said, knew it by heart.

It worked. The firm turned the corner while he was still in his early twenties. According to Garvin, by 1865 Birmingham was making about 130,000 gross of screws a week, and Nettlefold & Chamberlain made 90,000 of them.

Chamberlain was also at Smethwick often, mixing with the workforce. Garvin credits him with a Working Men’s Institute, a debating club and a benefit club for sickness, with Chamberlain as treasurer. These accounts come from an admiring official biography and should be read as such, but they fit a man who was already practising for public life.

Partner, and monopolist

Garvin and the Victoria County History agree that Chamberlain was formally made a partner only in 1869. Then he went on the attack. In 1869 the firm bought the Imperial Mills across Cranford Street from the Heath Street Works and turned them over to nuts, bolts, wire and nails. Chamberlain negotiated the takeover of rivals one by one until, in Garvin’s words, “almost the whole of the screw trade of Birmingham and its neighbourhood passed into the hands of his firm.” Opponents called him a merciless monopolist. That charge followed him for decades.

His private life in these years was marked by grief. He married Harriet Kenrick in 1861. She died in 1863, shortly after the birth of their son Austen. In 1868 he married her cousin Florence Kenrick. She died in childbirth in 1875.

Walking away

By then Chamberlain had found a bigger stage. He helped lead the National Education League from 1869, chaired the Birmingham School Board and was elected Mayor of Birmingham in 1873. In the spring of 1874, shortly after his father’s death, he decided to sell out of the business altogether. Grace’s Guide dates his departure to June 1874. He was thirty-seven. Garvin says he retired “on terms making him a rich man for that time, though by no means the magnifico popularly supposed”.

Without the screw fortune there would have been no full-time politician. As mayor he brought gas and clean water into public hands and began clearing the worst slums. He entered Parliament for Birmingham in 1876 and sat for the city until his death. He went on to serve as President of the Board of Trade and, from 1895 to 1903, as Colonial Secretary, a champion of empire whose record is still argued over. From 1900 he was also Chancellor of the new University of Birmingham.

Highbury

In 1878 Chamberlain bought land at Moor Green, south of the town. The Birmingham architect John Henry Chamberlain, no relation, designed him a red-brick Venetian Gothic house, dated 1879, and Edward Milner laid out the grounds. Chamberlain named it Highbury, after the north London suburb where he had grown up, and lived there from 1880 until his death. Its glasshouses held his famous orchids; there were twenty-five of them by 1903.

A stroke in 1906 ended his active career. He died in London on 2 July 1914. His family turned down a burial in Westminster Abbey and took him home to Key Hill Cemetery in Birmingham, to lie with his first two wives.