The Baggies West Bromwich Albion FC

West Bromwich Albion football club also known as ‘The Baggies’ is a football team based in the heart of the Black Country. Some may question as to why I support them which is understandable as it can be quite a depressing team to back after constantly being thrown up and down from the Championship to the Premier league. But my reason is bacially being forced into supporting them as my family are from West Bromwich causing my father to take me to all the games when I was younger and getting me into football, probaly attempting to make me a die hard ‘baggy’ like he is.

The term “Baggies’ comes from when the staff and supporters in the area used to walk around with big cloth bags to carry all their coins from ticket sales to the clubs office. When the fans saw this they would shout “Here come the bag men” which then changed into “Here come the baggies”. However no one really knows the true reason for this nickname, some also say that the name was bestowed on Albion supporters by their rivals at Aston Villa, because of the large baggy trousers that many Albion fans wore at work to protect themselves from molten iron in the factories and foundries of the Black Country.

There is a large rivarly in the West Midlands football scene. Wolverhamton Wanderers and Aston Villa are the main rivals for West Brom due to them being other clubs nearby in the Black Country. As well as Birmingham City FC as it is the division from the Black Country between Birmingham. Albion vs Wolves and Villa is considered one of the fiercest rivalries in English football, and is found to have one of the most intense atmosphere’s at the games due to the pure hate that each club has for each other. Fans have stated that the rivalry goes much deeper than a game of football. I remember going to Albion, Wolves with my dad as a young boy and being scared for my life as all I could hear was the roaring of angry men screaming abuse back at each other even though I would be sat at the other end of the stadium. But now as i’ve gotten older my dad is starting to lose the energy to get rowdy at the games and is looking like it’s being transferred to me as my hate for the two Black Country teams grows deeper.

The Black Country developed as a manufacturing area before the 1700’s, producing glass and iron goods, but it was not until the 18th century, partly through the influence of John Wilkinson, that large concerns began to forge the landscape. The Black Country provided the coal and iron that transformed Britain into the world’s industrial furnace, but it’s image was not a positive one for the outside world. By the early 19th century, writers and artists portrayed it in prints and prose as a poisoned and desecrated area with few redeeming features.

The development of the region during the early industrial revolution laid down in outline the boundaries of the region we know as the Black Country. Contemporary writers were careful to differentiate between two types of activity they observed to be appearing on the plateau. In the first place they saw the towns of Walsall, Wolverhampton and especially Birmingham appearing as large manufacturing centres with also a commercial element in their population. The central part of the plateau supplied the raw materials coal and iron that were used in these large towns. Of course, some manufacturing was also carried out in the central area but the distinction is on the whole a valid one.

The three towns were themselves also separated from the mineral producing areas by very definite belts of open country or wasteland. Between Birmingham and West Bromwich lay the country district of Handsworth Heath. The area known as Soho gets his name, so it is said, from this being the cry of the hunters as they rode over the open fields and wasteland then characteristic of Handsworth. Between Walsall and Wednesbury, a belt of wasteland known as the Pleck, a word meaning waste, divided the manufacturing town from the coal and iron mining area. To the north heathland lay beyond Bilston separating it from Wolverhampton. The names Show Heath and Monmore Green today indicate where this belt of land was situated.