The Birth of the Birmingham's Glass industries

JSGT 1931 V15 227-231

In the Report on the Industrial History of the Midland Hardware District prepared by S. Timmins in 1866 for the British Association meeting, it was stated that no glass was made in Birmingham before 1785, but there was a statement in A. Hartshorne's “Old English Glass” which merited investigation, that a certain Meyer Oppenheim established at Petit Quevilly (Seine Inferieure) in 1783 a “manufacture de cristaux” which was exclusively devoted to English flint glass, which he had long studied “in the flint glass-houses of Birmingham.” A search through twenty years' files of old Aris’s Birmingham Gazettes leading to no discovery of any mention of these “flint-glass houses of Birmingham,” I was beginning to look upon the phrase as referring to the Birmingham district, that is, Stourbridge and Dudley, when at length I discovered the following reference relating to the year 1762: “Mayer Opnaim, at his glass-house on Snow Hill, Birmingham, being willing to leave off the foreign hardware trade or the inland glass manufactory; any person disposed to carry on either of the above trades, may, by allowing him a reasonable premium, be put in such a way as to clear five hundred pounds a year ... The above glass-house and dealing house to be let for a time as can be agreed upon.”

D. N. Sandilands