A Suburb Unlikely To Produce A Prairie Woman
Erdington is a northern suburb of Birmingham, four miles from the city centre, shaped by the Victorian railway that turned a village of under seven hundred into a working suburb of nearly ten thousand in a single generation. A world of terraced houses, tramways. Yet the wilds of Western Canada called.
Dorothy Margaret Tarplee was born here in 1893
Ancient History
Erdington is old in the way that most of the English Midlands is old — not dramatically, not with castle ruins on a promontory, but with the deep, quiet age of a place that has been continuously inhabited for so long that the documentary record only catches up with what the land itself already knows. There has been a settlement at Erdington since before the Norman Conquest: the name is a corruption of Eardwulfingatun, an Anglo-Saxon place-name meaning something like "the settlement of Eardwulf's people," and by the time of the Domesday survey in 1086 the manor was already in the hands of a Norman overlord, William FitzAnsculf, which tells you that there was something worth recording there to begin with. Before 1066 it had belonged to Edwin, Earl of Mercia, one of the most powerful Anglo-Saxon magnates in England.
The road that ran through Erdington was the ancient route from Bristol northward via Lichfield — one of those pre-Roman tracks that the English countryside absorbed into its bone structure so completely that the later road-builders simply followed the same line, and the modern street grid follows them still. The De Erdington family held the manor from around 1166, when Henry de Erdington obtained the manorial rights, until 1467 when the family died out — three centuries during which the village's very name belonged to the people who owned it. The Augustinian canons established a religious house in the area in the 12th century, the origins of what is now Erdington Abbey. By the medieval period the village was already centered on what would become Erdington High Street, between Six Ways and Holly Lane, a market-town spine that has organized the neighborhood's life ever since. None of this is spectacular — no battles were fought here, no kings were crowned — but the continuity of it, the unbroken thread from Saxon settlement to modern suburb, is its own kind of monument.
Why People Lived There in the Late 1800s and Early 1900s
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Erdington was still essentially rural: a population of under 700 in the mid-1700s, forty farms, ninety-six cottages, two smithies, and a shop. What changed it was the railway. When the line from Birmingham reached Erdington in 1862, the village was pulled into the gravitational field of one of the great industrial cities of the world. Birmingham was, by the 1860s, the workshop of the empire — a city of a thousand trades, of guns and jewelry and hardware and metalwork in every form — and the men who worked in its factories needed somewhere to live that was not Birmingham's densely packed center.
Erdington became that somewhere. The population reached 9,262 by 1891, driven by the construction of the Victorian and Edwardian terraced housing that still lines many of its streets. In 1894, Erdington separated from the ancient parish of Aston and became its own self-governing Urban District Council — a point of civic pride in a place that had always been administered from somewhere else. The UDC installed sewers and street lighting, built roads and footpaths, established three public parks, introduced a tramway, and built Erdington Library. They did this with a reputation, in the municipal culture of the time, for getting things done without raising rates, which was the Victorian equivalent of a glowing performance review. In 1911, Erdington was absorbed into Birmingham proper, its independence exchanged for the scale and services of a great city. By then it was a fully formed working suburb: not glamorous, but solid, with the institutions and infrastructure that working families needed and the railway connection that tied it to the city's economy.
The Jaffray Hospital
The Jaffray Hospital on Jaffray Road in Erdington opened in 1885, founded through the bequest of John Jaffray, a Birmingham newspaper proprietor and philanthropist who left a substantial sum for the establishment of a convalescent hospital serving the working people of the city. By the 1890s it was a functioning institution in the heart of the suburb — a red-brick Victorian building in the grounds that the endowment had secured, providing the kind of general medical care that the rapidly expanding working population of north Birmingham needed within local reach rather than requiring the journey to the city's central hospitals.
Dorothy Margaret Tarplee was born there on November 22, 1893 — in a hospital that had been open barely eight years, in a suburb that was still in the full flush of its Victorian expansion, in a city that was building itself into one of the great industrial centres of the world. The Jaffray served Erdington's families through two world wars and the decades between them before eventually closing. That the specific building where a woman was born can still be named and placed on a map, more than a century later, is one of the small gifts that English institutional record-keeping provides to those who go looking.
Woodend Road
Woodend Road runs through the residential streets of Erdington in the area northwest of the High Street, one of the many Victorian and Edwardian terraced roads that the suburb's expansion produced in the decades around 1900. The Tarplee family address in the 1901 Birmingham census places them on this street — H.R. Tarplee, his wife, and their children including Dorothy Margaret, then seven years old, living in the terraced housing that the suburb's rapid growth had filled with families of exactly their kind: lower-middle-class, commercially engaged, settled in a neighborhood that was new enough to feel like arrival but established enough to feel like belonging.
The house on Woodend Road is the physical address of the world Dorothy Tarplee left behind when the family emigrated to Canada around 1905. Whatever the circumstances of that departure — and the family's commercial letterhead suggests a degree of prosperity that makes the emigration more a choice than a necessity — the street she grew up on was this one: a Victorian terrace in a Birmingham suburb, with the tramway nearby and the High Street a walk away and the life of a working English city organized around her in the years before she left it forever.
What Happened During WWII
Birmingham was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Britain during the Second World War, a direct consequence of being the country's industrial heartland. Its factories and workshops — the same ones that had made it the workshop of the world — now made aircraft engines, armoured vehicles, and weapons at industrial scale, and the Luftwaffe knew it. The Birmingham Blitz began in earnest in August 1940 and continued through the spring of 1941, with the heaviest attacks concentrated in the autumn of 1940. Over the course of the war, more than 2,200 civilians were killed in Birmingham and nearly 13,000 homes destroyed.
Erdington, as a northern suburb containing both residential streets and industrial premises, did not escape. The area around the High Street and the surrounding terraces took bomb damage across multiple raids. The Jaffray Hospital itself survived the war, its Victorian brick enduring what the newer structures around it sometimes did not. The particular mix of destruction and survival that the Birmingham Blitz produced — streets where a bombed gap still shows between houses that were repaired, buildings where the patching is still visible in the brickwork — is readable in Erdington as in any part of the city that was there for it.
The men who went to the Second World War from Erdington went, as they had in the First, into regiments that saw action across the theatres of the conflict — North Africa, Italy, Northwest Europe. The women who stayed behind worked in the factories that made the weapons those men carried. The suburb that the Victorian railway had made into a place of settled domesticity was, for six years, a target as much as a home.
Where It Is and What People Do There Now
Erdington is a northern suburb of Birmingham, about four miles from the city center, sitting in the valley of the River Tame where the flat Midlands topography gives way to the slightly more varied ground of the inner suburbs. The High Street, with Six Ways at its heart — the junction of six roads that has been the commercial and social center of the area since at least medieval times — is still the spine of the neighborhood. St Barnabas Church, first consecrated in 1823, is the oldest surviving building in the area and continues to function as both a place of worship and a community hub, with a café and meeting spaces that serve the neighborhood's current needs.
Erdington today is one of Birmingham's more diverse inner suburb
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