Forgotten Brummies - The men and women who shaped today’s Birmingham, who are now largely forgotten
by Les Williams, paperback, 328 pages

People make history in the place they call home. ‘Forgotten Brummies’ commemorates and seeks to bring back to popular consciousness significant figures, native and adopted, from the history of Birmingham, the second largest city in England. The book comprises a collection of short biographies of twenty nine people who have significantly contributed to the development of Birmingham. Their lives are seen within the stages of Birmingham’s development, from Middle Age settlement in Deritend, to a village around a manor house, to the town called the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, to Britain’s second city. Virtually all are forgotten, barely known today. With 328 pages and 72 black and white illustrations, the book includes John Rogers, martyred for his beliefs, James Brindley, father of the canals, William Hutton, Birmingham’s historian, Joseph Priestley, who provoked a four day riot, Thomas Attwood, universal suffrage campaigner, Josiah Mason, big-hearted philanthropist, Peter Stanford, Birmingham’s first black minister, Austen Chamberlain, overshadowed Nobel Prize winner, and Hilda Lloyd, women’s health care pioneer, along with twenty other Forgotten Brummies. All of them made an impact locally, and deserve to be remembered, and many had a national or global impact.