The Birmingham Post recently published, with a certain degree of excitement, a piece about the discovery of a menu dating back to 1894 which had been discovered at Moor Hall in Sutton Coldfield. The excitement derived from the conclusion reached by the newspaper article’s writer that it revealed a lot about eating fashions of the nineteenth century. This is of course an example of journalistic hype since it is not particularly hard to track down vintage or antique menus (see Blog 15 where I present the details of one dating back to 1896 and pertaining to a banquet held at The Grand Hotel) and late Victorian restaurant critics such as Colonel Nathaniel Newnham-Davis (Blogs 146 and 151) gave detailed descriptions of the meals they consumed in the course of performing the work they were paid to do, though to be fair, N-D never described a meal eaten in Birmingham.
In response to the article the author Stephen Roberts wrote a letter, to the newspaper’s editor who, when publishing it, chose to headline it with the title, “City’s tastes were not a load of tripe”. Roberts is the author of Recollections of Victorian Birmingham which is a collection of short reminiscences by Birmingham residents, often of elevated social standing, who lived in the city during the Victorian period.
In his letter, Roberts remarks that, “…that the eating habits of those who lived in Birmingham and its environs in the 19th century were not - as Londoners claimed - mostly confined to tripe” and he goes on to identify some Birmingham dining establishments where the Victorian Foodie, not to mention a 19th century equivalent of the Michelin inspector, might be found nosing around. He mentions the Hen and Chickens, part of the hotel of the same name, in New Street “with its celebrated grill”, and the Continental restaurant “which offered French and German cuisine, with conversation in both languages”.
He notes that, “the Acorn Hotel in Temple Street boasted of its grill room - and its free lavatories!” and he identifies Pope’s restaurant in Cannon Street as the place to dine on fish, “it was the place to go for boiled turbot in lobster sauce and fried eels”. Roberts identifies that Bryant’s confectionery shop in Congreve Passage was the place to go for snacks though he deems it as being expensive to eat there with a cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter costing a crushing 7d.
Tripe and Birmingham.
Roberts’ reference to Birmingham being perceived as a town of tripe eaters (especially by jellied eel and liquor-eating Cockneys) is a little obtuse and unexplained but given the necessity for brevity in any ‘letter to the editor’ can hardly be complained about.
Tripe. Oh yes, I remember it from my 1950s childhood and 1960s youth. Butchers’ shops were not then just confined to comfortably off, middle England county towns but were almost as numerous as pubs and the suburban housewife did not have to walk very far to visit one. My grandparents did not have a fridge then (just a walk-in ‘pantry’ containing a large cold stone shelf) and meat was generally bought fresh for consumption on the day of purchase so I became a seasoned visitor to our local butcher’s at a very young age as I accompanied my grandmother on her daily shopping mission. How well I remember being quite fascinated and somewhat repulsed by the sawing and hacking of animal body parts that went on amid the sawdust and bloodiness ruled over by the butcher, dressed in his uniform of white with a blue striped apron and a straw hat with a ribbon around its rim. And there on view was tripe, different from everything else in the shop, a snowy white fleece-like entity made up of stomach lining, a fascinating oddity in the midst of all the redness.
There must have been something about tripe that was wrong because, though in this postwar era, my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles were quite happy to consume various forms of offal (my father liked brawn which looked more disgusting to me than the white stuff), tripe was never brought into any of the family’s homes. It was positively rejected. And so I never got to try any. And still have not. The family’s generation above me when asked about it were convinced of its unpleasantness and I never questioned their gastronomic sensibilities on the issue.
Which begs the question of why, when in Victorian times, tripe was loved by so many Brummies that whole restaurants were devoted to it, it fell out of favour to such a degree that it eventually completely disappeared from butchers’ shops and never found its way into the meat cabinets of modern supermarkets and why, though modern chefs often like to inflict the cheapest of meat cuts and fish species on their fine dining customers, none of them in any of my experience seemed to have allowed tripe off their pass and on to the dining table.
One might jump to two easy answers, which could be right, to respond these questions. Firstly, less comfortably off Victorians ate tripe because it was cheap but that seems to ignore the fact that well-off middle class citizens were not averse to a trip to a tripe restaurant.
In a previous Blog I mentioned that Mrs Ann Allday, wife of the prominent city councillor Joseph Allday, ran a “celebrated” tripe restaurant and tripe shop in Union Street from 1849 to 1859 and city councillors often met up there doubtless to chew over civic matters while they chewed on their tripe.
In Stephen Roberts’ ‘Recollections of Victorian Birmingham’ one reminiscence by a man identified as ‘An Old Architect’ (published in the Birmingham Daily Gazette on 10 January 1908) mentions tripe consumption in the town, “When my chums heard that [he was moving to Birmingham from London he made] … a feebly expressed assertion that Birmingham was an important and even celebrated place they unanimously agreed that it was chiefly famed for the excellence and large consumption of tripe”. He added that “ …as I was passing away from Curzon Street station …. I saw fixed at the back of one the adjacent houses a rough board rudely inscribed with the words ‘tripe and cow heel’”. He was “startled by the noise of the town crier’s bell, followed by an announcement that ‘tripe and cow heel of excellent quality will be ready at Joseph Avery’s at seven o’clock”.
The piece goes on, “A few days after, one of my first acquaintances in Birmingham took me to a tripe supper at the Bull’s Head in The Minories, where I was initiated into the mysteries of ‘heels’ and ‘shoe’ and other analogous delicacies. I was much interested in the old-world aspect of the room in which they were served. It was large but low-ceilinged, with bare boarded floor, fireplace wide, with a high chimney shelf on which were iron racks of long clay pipes and a brass tobacco box, pipe lights and a few candlesticks. A number of small round deal tables, Windsor chairs and triangular spittoons completed the furniture of the room. Beer was served in old-fashioned stoneware jugs and drunk from tall slender glasses. The atmosphere was laden with the ‘mild mellow’ odour so much approved by Trotty Veck (a character in Dicken’s The Chimes) and about a dozen elderly men were either feeding or smoking. They were, I afterwards found out, wealthy and important personages of the town”.
It’s clear that tripe restaurants were indeed the Victorian Birmingham’s equivalent of modern-day burger joints or pizza restaurants. Whether or not Birmingham was the tripe capital of Victorian England I have no idea since I’m not sure how celebrated a dish it was in any of the other provincial conurbations but clearly Birmingham had ‘a bit of a reputation’ for tripe consumption. Those days have clearly long gone.
So the second answer to the question raised above - why is tripe completely out of favour now? may be simple - it’s just too unpleasant for modern tastes. I can’t say that I have tried it nor, in my living memory, have I been in a position to give it a try which might or might not be something for which I should be grateful. Or it may have nothing to do with its flavour or texture it may just be a matter of fashion or perhaps snobbery. Perhaps as the Birmingham population prospered as Joseph Chamberlain organised the city into a fine late Victorian metropolis with status and wealth, the population became increasingly levelled up and did not want to be seen being associated with the cheap food of a bygone era and eating tripe, once the people’s favourite, just withered on the vine.
Birmingham’s Victorian Fine dining? -
Returning to our ‘Old Architect’s’ piece, there’s another paragraph on Victorian Birmingham’s gastronomy worth recording here. “There were two or three places where we could get a decently served lunch or dinner other than the inns or hotels.I took my modest meal for some years at Benson’s, but occasionally at Mrs Meek’s in Church Street and later at Nock’s in Union Passage. There was a little room at the back of Bryant’s confectionery shop at tge corner of Congreve Street which a few prominent men of the town used to frequent, George Dawson among them. Good substantial dinners were provided at the Gough Arms by St Martin’s Church, the Acorn in Temple Street and the Coach and Horses in Congreve Street”.
Hen and Chickens hotel -
The three early illustrations of the hotel and dining spot featured here are interesting because they depict the hotel beside two completely different buildings. The first is the earlier version, clearly Georgian judging by the costumes of the figures in the picture. The inscription is “Lloyds New Hotel & Hen and Chickens Inn Birmingham”.
The earliest known mention of the establishment ‘The Hen and Chickens’ tavern is when it was visited by Dr Samuel Johnson in 1735 when it was kept by a J Attwood. Johnson described it as “an old hostelry with a good yard” and that it faced the Beast Market. He noted that it had been known previously as The Angel.
It is subsequently recorded in 1741 as being situated in High Street (presumably its location when Dr Johnson visited it) and 70 horses could be stabled there. By 1798 it is known to be owned by Mrs Sarah Lloyd who appreciated the need to increase hotel space availability in the town and therefore decided to sell the premises and move them to a larger building in New Street, hence the inscription on the illustration, Lloyd’s New Hotel, which should date the print to about 1800. Shortly after opening Lloyd’s Hotel with its accompanying Hen and Chickens Inn, Mrs Lloyd sold the establishment to a William Waddell.
In 1830 Waddell bought the building’s freehold and erected the portico which can be seen in the second and third illustrations. Eliezer Edwards, author of
The Taverns of Old Birmingham (1879), commented that within a “few months the whole place had been entirely remodelled and the frontage would not be recognised, being converted to a commodious restaurant”. The third print is dated 1835 and is titled
Hen & Chickens Family Hotel Birmingham. The date fits nicely with the illustration of the Hen and Chickens’ neighbouring building which is the magnificent then newly built
King Edward’s School designed by Charles Barry. This means that the second print must show the Hen and Chickens between the years 1830 and 1835 as the portico is in place but Barry’s King Edward’s School had not then been built.
As the Victorian age moved on, the inn became the place in Birmingham to be seen. Numerous notables are recorded as having visited the establishment including Prince Louis of Hesse, Charles Dickens, William Wordsworth, William McCready the actor, William Thackery and Daniel O’Connell, the Irish politician. Birmingham’s young bloods nicknamed the inn as
The Fowls and would meet in the office room for a
B and S or a glass of
Divy Shewwy. When the street below was crowded they would heat up half pennies on a shovel and scatter them from the upper windows on to the people below, finding it very amusing to observe the reactions of those who found the coins literally too hot to handle.
In December 1894 the local press broke the news that the Hen and Chickens “will close its doors after Christmas in order that the ground be cleared for the erection of King Edward’s High School for Girls … for a few years past it has occupied a very humble, and been a casual, corner of Birmingham life (it seems the glory days were over) but now it is about to disappear there are many who will regret the loss of such an important landmark in Birmingham’s history”.
But this was not the end. A new Hen and Chickens was built in New Street in 1898 and continued to operate under that name until 1939 when it became The Arden Hotel. In 1912 the proprietors were recorded as being Birmingham Coffee House Ltd. The building which housed the Hen and Chickens was finally demolished in 1972.
The illustration below shows the final manifestation of The Hen And Chickens in the 1960s when it was known as The Arden Hotel. This magnificent Victorian building was just one of many such Brummie glories which fell victim to Birmingham’s unending need to destroy the wonderful and the historic and it’s depressing to think that this beauty was replaced by yet another appallingly unmemorable glass and concrete construction and to think that one of the qualifications to be a Birmingham councillor is to be the sort of philistine who would have allowed this treasure to have been demolished. And there’s an irony that in the hotel’s final days there was a Wimpy Bar on the site where the early and mid-Victorian elite would have dined in the Hen and Chickens Grill.
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