Booth’s Farm and William Booth

On 16 March 1812 ten special constables and seven dragoons went out to Booth’s Farm at Perry Barr. On the way they had stopped at the Boar’s Head. They had come for William Booth.

A tenant of the Goughs

Booth was born in 1776 at Hall End Farm near Beaudesert, in Warwickshire. In 1799 he and his brother John took a 21-year lease of the farm from John Gough of Perry Hall; the account of his trial puts it at 200 acres. It was not his first time in court. In 1808 he had been tried at the Lent Assizes for the murder of his brother, and acquitted.

Forger

Forging Bank of England notes was a hanging offence in 1812, and it stayed one until 1832. Booth was tried at the Stafford Summer Assizes at the end of July 1812 and sentenced to death. Evidence of his trade turned up long afterwards: the Stone Collection at the Library of Birmingham holds a photograph, dated 1900, of a metal plate, a forged note and coins found at Booth’s Farm.

Two hours on the scaffold

He was hanged on Saturday 15 August 1812, and even that went wrong. A broadside printed that year tells it. The rope slipped, and he fell eight or ten feet onto the platform. At the second attempt the drop failed to fall. At the third, he died. From first to last it had taken nearly two hours.

A recent book quotes the burial register of St Mary’s, Handsworth, for 17 August, and he was very probably buried there. Local lore sums him up as “twice tried, twice hung, twice buried”. The record bears out the first two: the murder trial of 1808 and the forgery trial of 1812; the drop that failed and the one that did not. The third is explained by accounts printed in 1914 and 1923: his body was moved when a neighbouring vault was enlarged. The rhyme itself is probably much later than 1812.

The farm after Booth

The Gough estate had the farm valued for crops and dilapidations after the Booths, and bought bricks for repairs, between 1817 and 1820. New tenants followed: John Clarke in 1850 and 1858, Josiah Cooke in 1875. At Lord Calthorpe’s Perry Hall estate sale of 1921 Booth’s Farm was offered at 246 acres, let at £465, and withdrawn at £7,750.

Under its fields lay sand and gravel. The farm was sold in 1926, and in 1932 the Court of Appeal decided Waring v Foden, heard with Waring v Booth Crushed Gravel Co., holding that sand and gravel were not “minerals”. It became a leading case in English law. The Booth Crushed Gravel Company is recorded here through the 1930s, and the pits that followed are now the Queslett Nature Reserve.

Footings in the grass

The farmhouse outlived Booth by more than 160 years. The council’s information board describes it as mostly late 17th century, built around an earlier timber-framed house. Other records call it 18th-century, “circa 1780”, or 16th-century, and only the excavation report will settle it. Archaeologists here also found pottery going back to the 13th century: people were on this spot in the Middle Ages, long before any Booth.

The house was demolished in 1974. Its footings were consolidated in 2012 and still lie in the grass near Booths Lane, where the site is recorded in the Birmingham Historic Environment Record as number 3933. The M6 now runs along the valley about half a kilometre to the south.

Booths Lane and Booths Farm Road keep the farm’s name. Stand by the footings and you are where William Booth’s forging came to an end, on a March day in 1812.