Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham MenEdwards, Eliezer
History
Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men
Edwards, Eliezer
Birmingham (England)
The Post Office occupied the site now covered by Lilly and Addinsell's
shop. The New Street frontage was the dwelling house of Mr. Gottwaltz,
the post-master. A little way up Bennetts Hill was a semicircular
cove, or recess, in which two people might stand. Here was a slit,
into which letters were dropped, and an "inquiry" window; and this was
all. There were seven other receiving houses in the town, which were
as follows: Mr. Hewitt, Hagley Row; Mr. E. Gunn, 1, Kenion Street; Mr.
W. Drury, 30, Lancaster Street; Mr. Ash, Prospect Row; Mr. White,
235, Bristol Street; Miss Davis, Sand Pits; and Mrs. Wood, 172, High
Street, Deritend. Two deliveries took place daily--one at 8 a.m., the
other at 5 p.m. The postage of a "single" letter to London then was
ninepence; but a second piece of paper, however small, even the half
of a bank note, made it a "double" letter, the postage of which was
eighteenpence.
Between Needless Alley and the house now occupied by Messrs. Reece and
Harris, as offices, were three old-fashioned and rather dingy looking
shops, of which I can tell a curious story. Rather more than twenty
years ago, the late Mr. Samuel Haines acquired the lease of these
three houses, which had a few years to run. The freehold belonged
to the Grammar School. Mr. Haines proposed to Messrs. Whateley, the
solicitors for the school, that the old lease should be cancelled;
that they should grant him a fresh one at a greatly increased rental;
and that he should pull down the old places and erect good and
substantial houses on the site. This was agreed to; but when the
details came to be settled, some dispute arose, and the negotiations
were near going off. Mr. Haines, however, one day happened to go
over the original lease--nearly a hundred years old--to see what the
covenants were, and he found that he was bound to deliver up the plot
of land in question to the school, somewhere, I think, about 1860
to 1865, "well cropped with potatoes." This discovery removed the
difficulty, the lease was granted, and the potato-garden is the site
of the fine pile known as Brunswick Buildings, upon each house of
which Mr. Haines's monogram, "S.H.," appears in an ornamental scroll.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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