Mixed Media: ‘Edwin Butler Bayliss‘ (2013)

Tipping the Slag

The Mixed Media column from the July 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wolverhampton Art Gallery recently showed the industrial landscapes of Edwin Butler Bayliss (1874-1950), ‘poet painter of the Black Country’ (Birmingham Gazette 1918) who was prolific in the early twentieth century. Bayliss was the son of industrial capitalist Samuel Bayliss who owned iron foundries in the Black Country which Bayliss painted along with the blast furnaces, steel works and coal mines owned by Tory MP and baronet Sir Alfred Hickman.

Tipping the Slag portrays a grey industrial landscape with smouldering slag heaps and smoking chimneys. Slag was the impurities from smelting iron drained from the molten iron during the smelting process and is painted in vivid orange against the grey wasteland. Blast Furnaces, Night is a black and grey industrial landscape with blast furnaces and chimneys and flecks of orange flame against the black and grey sky.

The Black Country is defined by geology; a 30 foot coal seam plus seams of coal, iron, limestone and clay which supported the development of coal mines, coking plants, iron foundries, and steel mills in the towns of Sandwell, Dudley, Walsall and Wolverhampton. In the Victorian period   it was the beating heart of   industrial capitalism, the industries of iron-making, steel production and coalmining forming the bedrock for the ‘workshop of the world’ showcased at the Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1866 Queen Victoria visited Wolverhampton and knighted the Mayor Sir John Morris.

Charles Dickens wrote in 1841 that the industries ‘poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air’ while the US consul visiting in 1862 wrote that the area was ‘black by day and red by night’. By 1860 within five miles of Dudley there were 441 pits, 181 blast furnaces, 118 iron works, 79 rolling mills and 1,500 puddling furnaces. Blast Furnaces, Bilston, Hickman’s from the Canal and In the Gin Pit (coal mined near to the surface) portray the ‘beauty in the Black Country’.

In the Black Country depicts a black and grey industrial landscape of blast furnaces and chimneys against a smoky sky with a worker struggling across the landscape. Evening in the Black Country shows three workers trudging up a dirt track between areas of dirty green vegetation towards industrial buildings and smoking chimneys.

The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 by Friedrich Engels details ‘an industrial revolution, a revolution which at the same time changed the whole of civil society’. This industrial capitalism meant the working class endured ‘filth, ruin and uninhabitableness’ in ‘the frightful condition of this Hell upon Earth’.

Steve Clayton