Tales from the Alhambra and other Birmingham Tall Stories. Man not in Álora Yet.

                       Tales From the Alhambra and Other Birmingham Tall Stories.

                                                   Yossarian (Irving Washington)


With only a week to go before Mrs. Sanchez, Tommy and I join the swallows and head south, we spent a delightful day out with our good friend Tom in one of the many interesting  'Heritage Quarters' of Birmingham, The Jewellery Quarter.  Others include 'The Chinese Quarter', 'The Gay Quarter', the Glum Quarter and the Benefits Street Quarter.); the sum of the parts being greater than the whole.

After a slap up nosh at Anderson's in Mary Ann Street, St. Paul's Square (another Heritage Quarter in it's own right) we climbed up the hill to one of Brum's best kept secrets, The Pen Museum.

                                             The Birmingham Pen Museum

Unlike many modern museums The Pen Museum has shunned most of  the interactive gimmicks designed to relieve today's hyper intelligent inquisitive children of the difficult activity we used to call 'looking at things'. The museum is chock full of all kinds of pens, or more accurately, pen nibs . It would take days to look at all of them and,as we only had half an hour before closing time, Mrs. Sanchez made a pen nib (under the watchful eye of a nice young chap from Sutton Coldfield) while Tom and I exchanged witty reminiscences of our schooldays including  the pleasures of inkwells, ink monitors, blots, blotting paper, woollen pen wipers, flicking ink and making darts out of broken pen nibs etc.. We could tell that the young curator was more interested in our entertaining memories than working the nib machine as he kept reminding us how much  time we had left.

Did you know that Birmingham was 'the global centre of the steel pen nib industry'? Well it was. During the boom years 8,000 people were making steel pen nibs, 70% of them being women. All the 'presses' were 'manned' by women who turned out 18,000 pens a day for 7 shillings a week. (35p). (a lot of money in those days.)

                                        Mary Ann Cotterill 'slitting pen nibs'.

In the early 18th. century there was a massive global demand for pens, even though hardly anyone could read or write, including most of the workers in the pen factories.

                                                  Pens from the 'olden days'

As most people know, before steel pen nibs, people used to write with swan or goose feathers, (the word 'pen' comes from the name for a female swan), sticks, brushes, slate pencils and primitive wooden typewriters. The rise of steel pen making in Birmingham ruffled the feathers of the goose population who were branded 'Luddites' by the more enlightened and progressive Brummies when, forced into penury by lack of demand for their feathers,   they staged mass protests, goose stepping up and down the City Road . Fights between opposing gangs were common. The avian 'Beaky Blinders' were no match for the 'Nibbers' who  would attack the hissing geese with darts made from broken pen nibs. Pendemonium!

As we were shown the way out, my eye was caught by this poster:

I had no idea that this perennially popular story had been written by that great American Washington Irving (1783-1859),  let alone that he wrote it in Birmingham on the exact spot where The Pen Museum sits now! Why were we not informed about this? I sometimes think that Birmingham deliberately conceals its best treasures to avoid being swamped by tourists.

The man who is regarded as the first American Man of Letters lived  with his sister, Mrs. Van Wart and her husband Henry in the Jewellery Quarter from 1815 to 1824 where he also wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow which was later made into a film starring Jeff Goldblum. It was based on the Bracebridge family who lived in Aston Hall in those days, just up from the Villa Ground and which today is another of Birmingham's hidden treasures.

Irving had left America after a series of financial failures and lack of success as an author. He didn't really do his popularity any favours by never publishing anything under the same name twice. Here are some of his pseudonyms:

Geoffrey Crayon
William Wizard
Launcelot Wagstaff
Jonathon Oldstyle
Jeffrey Archer
Diedrich Knickerbocker  (There is a town in Texas named after him, not to mention Washington DC.)

After sponging off his brother-in-law for 5 years and following a disastrous dalliance with Mary Wolstencroft Shelly,  he was given the choice of getting work in a pen nib factory or going to Europe. Off he went to Andalucía where he he found free lodgings in the Alhambra in Granada. There he wrote Tales of the Alhambra  which is now world famous having been translated into 716 languages and 180 dialects including Argy-Pargy and Ego-Leygo.
Washington Irving is a legendary figure in Southern Spain. Many 'granadiers' have named their children after him. He was responsible for attracting millions of rich tourists from all over the world to Granada, but particularly from the USA. In those days Andalucia was a very poor area and still is.

 There is a Hotel Washington Irving in Granada, which is hoping to regain its 5 star status soon.

and a Ruta de Washington Irving for the more energetic tourist.

Washington Irving returned to America in 1832 but was sent back to Spain to be America's Minister for Spain . The last we heard of him he was played by Alan Arkin in the film version of Catch 22 where he applied his literary skills to the censoring of letters under another imaginative pseudonym, Irving Washington.

 Juanito Sanchez September 3rd. 2014