00:02I'm at the fabulous Coffin Works Museum in the jewellery quarter and with me is Megan Ward.
00:09Megan, the company operated here, Newman, how did they, how did the process work of manufacturing this material?
00:18Well, so what Newman Brothers made was coffin furniture, so it is anything like coffin handles, coffin plates,
00:26even like the backing plates, forehandles, and what they essentially would do is they had lots of different processes,
00:32so we have a stamp room where they'd stamp items out, they had a casting shop where there's sandcast high
00:38-end brass items.
00:39The quality of their work was very high, they had various styles, is that correct?
00:43Yes, yes, so they did develop different catalogues like across the time they were open,
00:48but we can even see like through the dies, which are stamping tools, is like the difference is in like
00:55style.
00:56So there's a lot of like Gothic elements that look kind of very Victorian.
01:00We've got Art Deco pieces as well, which sort of date from the 1930s, which was a big time for
01:05the Newman Brothers factory,
01:07because this little place in Birmingham, they ended up producing coffin handles and coffin furniture for very high,
01:14high-end clients, if you will, so such as the royal family, so George V would be the first, but
01:20that continued on George VI.
01:23Then even on to like big sort of names in British culture is Winston Churchill,
01:28and then the last person we definitely know is Princess Diana.
01:33And I have to mention this because it's really quite important for people to note that it wasn't just men
01:38working here, was it?
01:39It was women as well.
01:40Yeah, so in the early days when the factory first opened in the 1890s, there was women who worked in,
01:46for example, the stamp room doing fly press work.
01:49But later on in the history of the factory is there was a lot of women who became managers.
01:55So, for example, there was Dolly Dunsby who ran the warehouse here.
01:59She became the warehouse manager. She started here when she was 15.
02:02And then essentially, but this was her domain. She knew how to run it.
02:07She knew where to tell people to go with the orders, what orders needed to be sent out that day.
02:12And through her work really is we can see exactly like how the relations to women changed the workplace.
02:19And then the last managing director, Joyce Green, she started out as an office secretary, very young in her teens,
02:27and then worked her way up to be the last managing director.
02:29So it is quite an incredible story of women in industry, but also just different changing attitudes and very much
02:37that the Newham brothers who started this place, I can't see that they would have known that the business they
02:42might have hoped would have carried on for another hundred years or so.
02:46But it's very much all the people who were here, the men and women, they carried it forward.
02:52Well, thank you very much. So there you have it. We've been given the handle on the coffin handles.
