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HANDSWORTH

(COPYRIGHT)
A  LOCAL  SOCIETY  MAGAZINE

CIRCULATING IN HANDSWORTH, PERRY BARR AND BIRCHFIELDS.

Vol. III				JULY, 1896.				No. 25
Our Picture Gallery.

No. 25. – COUNCILLOR C. A. PALMER.
Although not yet out of his thirty-eighth year, Councillor Charles Andrew Talbot Palmer has won for himself a position in the commercial world which is distinguished even in these days of rapid progress.  Thorough-going, eminently practical, quick to see and prompt to act, filled with a laudable ambition and endowed with robust health, it would indeed have been strange had he not risen above the common level.  Whatever his hands have touched has been well done.  An enthusiastic sportsman, he was a few years ago, famous throughout the length and breadth of the country for his remarkable cycling feats; a manufacturer of the first rank, he is the controlling genius of companies whose names alone are a guarantee of the best work and the best workmanship; a philanthropist, willing and able to assist in charitable enterprises, he is a governor of the General Hospital, the Children’s Hospital, Dental Hospital, the Graham Street Dissenting Charity School, and similar institutions; a loyal citizen, recognising that he owes something  to the district of which he is a life-long resident, he has during the past two years, devoted much of his valuable time to the work of the Handsworth District Council.  He is a man of whom Handsworth has just reason to be proud – a self-made man – and for this reason, if for no other, “Our Picture Gallery” would be incomplete if it did not include him in its list of local celebrities.

Mr Palmer is a native of Handsworth, his maternal grandfather being Mr John Talbot – the Talbots are a well-known Birmingham family – who resided until some twenty years ago in one of a number of houses he built in Villa Road.  He was educated partly at home, partly at the Collingiate School at Aston and later under the Rev. Charles Heaven, at Camp Hill.  At sixteen he entered upon his business career, and as an apprentice for two years to a large Birmingham firm of jewellers, he gained an insight into commercial life, which has since stood him in good stead.  The jewellery trade proving uninviting, he at eighteen joined his brother, Mr John Palmer, at the National Arms Ammunition Company – now the Government Factory at Sparkbrook.

About this time he devoted a great deal of attention to sport.  Indeed, he made a serious employment, so to speak, of some of our national games.  He had already carried off a prize – destined to be the first of a long series of prizes – for swimming; was passionately fond of shooting and now threw himself with characteristic ardour into football and cycling.  His experience of the former pastime was rather unhappy, as he met with a nasty accident.  He was a member of the Aston Villa Football Club – we are writing of events that transpired about twenty years ago – and played on the present ground at Perry Barr, where singularly enough he also won his first bicycle race.  Upon a bitterly cold day, with sufficient partially melted snow on the ground to harden on the ball and make it a dangerous missile, young Palmer stepped from the pavilion onto the field, but only to retire temporarily disabled by an accident.  A colleague, who was playing chasing the leather, kicked it violently in his face – accidentally, of course – causing a sensation for which the victim could find no more suitable word than “horrible”!   The ice with which the ball was encrusted made the blow particularly severe and Mr Palmer decided to seek glory elsewhere than on the football field.

And so he sought – and found it – on the cycle track.  From a small boy he had been a proficient rider.  As far back as 1867 bicycles were manufactured by his father and he had therefore every opportunity to excel as a wheelster.  To the full he had availed himself of these opportunities and when he commenced racing in 1881 he was as fine a rider as could be found for many miles around.  For two years (1881-82, after which he did not race) he was absolute champion of the Midland counties, winning in every great competition and establishing record after record.  At Parkhill, his handsome residence in Hamstead Road, he has a large cabinet filled with the trophies which fell to his prowess.  He owns over a hundred prizes – silver cups, medals and the like – and many are of great interest.  There is the North of England Championship Cup, which had to be won two years in succession to be won outright and for which a Herculean struggle was made; the Surrey Cup, Speedwell Cup and amongst other trophies one which recalls a Cambridge University invitation race, in which six or eight of the finest riders of the country competed, resulting in a dead heat between Charles Palmer and Mat. Whish.

But after all, interesting as are these mementoes of many a hard won race, they by no means represent the be-all and end-all of Mr Palmer’s career.  They are, in fact, only an aside.  The real business of his life may be said to have begun at the end of 1880 when he was articled for four years to a well-known firm of cycle manufacturers.  Here he obtained a shrewd insight into the cycle trade and when on the 1^st September, 1884 – a date long remembered as the first 1^st of September allowed by Mr Palmer to slip by without indulgence in his favourite sport of shooting – he entered into the employ of the St George’s Engineering Company, Pope Street, as works manager, it was as a man of ripe experience.  In 1888 he availed himself of an opportunity, which offered itself, to become proprietor of the works, which were very old established and in 1893 he converted the business into a company.

To retrace our steps a little, an important invention – that of the present system of wheel building – was brought out by Mr Palmer in 1885 and was awarded the gold medal at the International Inventions Exhibition, London, of that year.  In 1886 he improved upon the wheel and struck out a pattern, which remains his exclusive property to the present time.

In addition to being the chief spirit in the St George’s engineering Company, Mr Palmer was one of the promoters of the R. F Hall Manufacturing Company – one of the most successful companies ever floated in Birmingham, making a profit in three years equal to the original capital – which has been amalgamated with the Cycle Components Company, of which he was also a director.

The latest of the many enterprises with which he has identified himself is the Tubeless Pneumatic Tire and Capon Heaton Limited.  The tubeless tire, which is confidently anticipated will revolutionize the cycle trade, is the invention of Mr H. A Fleuss, to whose genius we owe, among other important inventions, the best diving dress in use at the present time, a dress which allows the diver to remain under the water for an hour-and-a-half at a stretch. A practical engineer and an ardent cyclist, Mr Fleuss appreciated the enormous difficulty in getting at the air tubes of any of the existing tires to repair; this difficulty being intensified when the puncture is so small as to render immersion in water necessary and decided at once that the only to overcome the difficulty was to do away with the air tube altogether and repair the tire from the inside.  This was done and the result of various experiments was “the best of all puncture resisting tires”.  The system of manufacture combines, amongst other advantages, automatic sealing of small punctures from thorns &c., and a tire which, when punctured, can be repaired in a marvellously short time – two minutes often sufficing.  In proof of this statement Mr Palmer, who had watched the progress of the invention from the very outset, gave practical illustration of the valve of the tire when waited upon a few days ago by a representative of Handsworth.  With a pin he bored a small hole in the tire of his front wheel, deflated it, put a patch of rubber over the puncture on the inside and again inflated the tire.  The whole operation was performed in little over two minutes.  Those of our readers who ride machines will readily appreciate the value of such an invention.  The tire has all the advantages without any of the disadvantages of the best pneumatic tire in the market.  Mr Palmer has great hopes for the future of the new venture, in which he has very large interests indeed, and from what we have seen his hopes are likely to be more than fulfilled.  

Politically Mr Palmer is a Conservative of the Salisbury type, rather than the more modern democratic school of the late Lord Randolph Churchill.  Strongly attached to autocratic imperialism he distinguishes between the toryism that would rule firmly, with a sense of justice to all, and the latest development of democratic conservatism, which seeks to make its policy popular to all men by sinking many of its traditional party principles, in order to enrol among its admirers politicians who have formerly been amongst its most inveterate opponents.

Although so genuinely conservative in his political views, however, Mr Palmer is a staunch non-conformist, he and his pleasant little wife being members of the Swedenborgian Church in Wretham Road, the pastor of which (Rev. R. R. Rodgers) is a thorough-going Gladstonian liberal.

Mr Palmer is generally credited with having made a fortune of considerable dimensions and certainly the ardour with which he has thrown himself, hand and brain, into his many business pursuits is worthy of such a consummation.  Few of the public men of Handsworth work as hard and for as many hours and the average working-man would be reduced to a state of utter despair if he were compelled to toil half as hard.  Nevertheless, in the hunting season Mr Palmer manages to follow the hounds twice a week and he contrives too, to indulge now and then in his favourite pastime – shooting.