Qualla: Newman Brothers Coffin Furniture Factory

Newman Brothers Coffin Furniture Factory: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MDcoffins, CC BY-SA 4.0. When Princess Diana's coffin was carried into Westminster Abbey on 6 September 1997, the brass handles holding her body were made on a quiet street in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. So were the fittings on Winston Churchill's coffin, Joseph Chamberlain's, and Neville Chamberlain's. Newman Brothers had been doing this kind of work since 1894. The factory at 13 to 15 Fleet Street closed in 1998, and rather than gut it for flats, the Birmingham Conservation Trust did something unusual. They left it. The brass dust on the workbenches, the half-finished breastplates, the tea-stained mugs, the timecards on the wall. The Coffin Works museum that opened here in October 2014 is not a recreation. It is the factory exactly as the last worker found it when she locked the door.

Image: MDcoffins | CC BY-SA 4.0

Newman Brothers Coffin Furniture Factory: A Brass Foundry That Became a Funeral Empire

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MDcoffins, CC BY-SA 4.0. Alfred and Edwin Newman started the company in 1882 as a general brass foundry. Twelve years later, they moved into a purpose-built factory designed by Roger Harley in 1892 at the heart of Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter, the dense network of small workshops where the city's jewel...

Image: MDcoffins | CC BY-SA 4.0

Newman Brothers Coffin Furniture Factory: The Trade That Cremation Killed

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brumbug, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cremation was rare in Edwardian Britain. By the 1960s it accounted for more than half of all funerals, and rising. Legislation began appearing across the country that prohibited metal coffin fittings in cremators, because the metal would not burn cleanly and contaminated the ashe...

Image: Brumbug | CC BY-SA 4.0

Newman Brothers Coffin Furniture Factory: Joyce Green Refuses to Let It Go

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MDcoffins, CC BY-SA 4.0. Joyce Green had worked at Newman Brothers. When the firm collapsed, she would not accept that the building would be redeveloped and the social history of the trade forgotten. She led the campaign to save it. In March 2001, the Birmingham Conservation Trust carried out a feasibili...

Image: MDcoffins | CC BY-SA 4.0

Newman Brothers Coffin Furniture Factory: A Building That Was Allowed to Be Itself

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MDcoffins, CC BY-SA 4.0. The restoration was deliberately light-handed. The nineteenth-century brickwork was not altered. The slate roof was stripped and replaced with Welsh slates, the type the building had always worn. Plastic rainwater guttering was swapped out for cast iron. The modern company sign w...

Image: MDcoffins | CC BY-SA 4.0

Newman Brothers Coffin Furniture Factory: The Quiet Trade Beneath

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brianboru100, CC BY-SA 3.0. Coffin furniture was made by people whose names do not appear on the brass. The polishers were mostly women, often working with toxic finishing compounds and breathing brass dust for forty years. The shroud-makers stitched linen interiors at piecework rates. The men who operated ...

Image: Brianboru100 | CC BY-SA 3.0