Sir Josiah Mason

In about 1829 a split-ring maker stopped outside Mr Peart’s bookshop in Bull Street, Birmingham. In the window were nine steel pens on a card, priced at three shillings and sixpence. Peart was writing with one of them and called it “a regular pin”. Josiah Mason bought that one for sixpence, went home and made three better pens that evening. He posted the best to the name stamped on the steel: Perry, Red Lion Square, London. By Mason’s own account, James Perry was at his door in Lancaster Street two days later, by eight o’clock in the morning.

That was how one of Victorian Birmingham’s great fortunes began. Much of it ended up in Erdington.

A weaver’s boy

Josiah Mason was born in Mill Street, Kidderminster, on 23 February 1795, the second son of a carpet weaver. He had almost no schooling. At eight he was selling cakes in the street, then fruit and vegetables from a donkey. He taught himself shoemaking and writing, and earned a little writing letters for neighbours who could not. He tried carpentry, smithing and house-painting, and from 1814 he wove carpets. A pound a week, he decided, was not enough.

At about 21 he came to Birmingham for a Christmas visit to his uncle, Richard Griffiths, and never went back. In August 1817 he married his cousin, Anne Griffiths, at Aston parish church. For about five years he ran his uncle’s gilt-toy business in Legge Street, making cheap jewellery, on the promise of a share. When it was sold over his head he walked out, turning down £300 a year from the new owner to stay.

Split rings in Lancaster Street

In 1822 a steel-toy maker named Heeley introduced him to Samuel Harrison, an elderly split-ring maker in Lancaster Street. Harrison had adapted the stamping press to make a key ring at a single blow and, Mason later said, had made steel pens for Joseph Priestley around 1780. Within a year he sold Mason the business for £500, to be paid out of profits. According to Mason’s biographer, J. T. Bunce, the last £100 was paid in May 1824. Mason added a bevelling machine of his own and in 1828 bought the premises, 36 Lancaster Street.

Perry’s pens, Mason’s hands

Mason was already making barrel pens. What he offered Perry was a better slip pen, the kind fitted into a holder. Steel pens then were filed into shape by hand, and their slits were cracked with a hammer. Mason cut the slit in a press, with dies and punches he made himself. He kept the slitting presses in a locked room, worked by two or three women. Even the machinist who built them never saw them fitted up.

Perry wanted all of it. He would sell, Mason alone would make, and the pens would carry Perry’s name. Mason agreed. His first order of 100 gross left for London on 20 November 1830. In 1831 he sent Perry pens worth £1,421.

So one of Birmingham’s biggest pen makers was almost invisible. Millions wrote with “Perryian” pens without knowing they came from Lancaster Street. Joseph Gillott once stopped Mason in the street and proposed a partnership: “Let us join, and not another man shall make a pen besides us.” Mason said no, though he sold Gillott penholders.

By the mid-1870s the works employed about 1,000 people, four-fifths of them women, and turned out more than 32,000 gross of pens a week. A government report of 1864 praised its ventilation. Its inspector also met Charles Walters, aged ten, hardening pens from seven in the morning until eight at night, and Mary Saunders, who had polished steel on a wheel for nine years and told him: “Feel stuffed up in the chest, and have a cough.” At the end of 1875 Mason sold the business to a new company, Perry & Co. Ltd.

The Elkington years

In 1842 Mason staked his money on something newer still. George Richards Elkington and his cousin Henry held the key electroplating patents, but the old platers resisted them and the business needed capital. The two men met when Elkington tried to buy Mason’s country house, Woodbrooke at Northfield. Their partnership deed was signed on 29 March 1842, and the firm became Elkington, Mason & Co. “My connection with Mr. Elkington alarmed my dear and best friends,” Mason wrote, “as they thought certain ruin would be the result of such untried speculation.”

It was not ruin. Mason found the money as the Newhall Street works grew, and Bunce, his friend and admirer, credits him with planning the works and showrooms. With Elkington he built copper-smelting works at Pembrey in South Wales, using Alexander Parkes’s process, with cottages and schools for the workers’ children. The Dictionary of National Biography says he smelted nickel too. The partnership was dissolved by 1862.

Erdington

Mason had no children. In 1858 he built almshouses for old women and a home for orphan girls in Erdington village, on the corner of the Sutton road and what is now Station Road. He explained why himself. Tired of being cheated by beggars, “I first thought of almshouses for aged women … Then I thought of the orphans … ‘Surely it must be some of each’.”

It was soon too small. On 19 September 1860 he privately laid the foundation stone of a far larger orphanage in Bell Lane, now Orphanage Road. Designed by J. R. Botham and finished to Mason’s own plans, it had a central tower about 200 feet high, steam cooking, hot-water heating and a covered playground whose columns were placed, a newspaper report of 1869 noted, with hide-and-seek in mind. It cost about £60,000. Mason endowed it with land worth £200,000, including Tyburn Farm, Walmley Ash Farm and his own home, Norwood House, so that, as one newspaper put it, he became a tenant of his own orphans. It could hold 300 girls, 150 boys and 50 infants. Places went to children whose parents were both dead, with “no restriction whatever as to locality, nationality, or religious persuasion.”

In 1872 he was knighted.

A college for science

His last and biggest gift was in the city centre. On his 80th birthday, 23 February 1875, Mason laid the first stone of his science college in Edmund Street. The foundation deed excluded “mere literary education and instruction” and all theology: this was to be science for the manufactures of the Midlands. The DNB puts its cost at £180,000. Mason College opened on 1 October 1880, with T. H. Huxley giving the address. It became Mason University College in 1898, and on 24 March 1900 the University of Birmingham received its royal charter.

Mason died at Norwood House on 16 June 1881, aged 86. He was buried, as he had asked, in the vault beneath the mausoleum he had built for his wife in the orphanage grounds. About 350 of the older orphans joined the procession.

What Birmingham kept

Very little. The orphanage closed around 1960 and was demolished in 1964; its trustees judged it out of date and too costly to maintain. Before it went, the Trust records, Mason’s remains, his wife’s and those of 53 children who had died there were disinterred, cremated and scattered in the Garden of Rest at Perry Barr Crematorium. Mason College was demolished the same year to make way for the new Central Library. The marble statue unveiled opposite it in 1885 had already gone, removed in 1951 in a poor state of repair.