Description:From a distance it might have looked like a typical funeral. A small group of mourners were gathered around a freshly dug grave at Key Hill cemetery, shortly after Christmas in 1894. Drawing closer, however, you might have found the ceremony more unusual. There was no reading from the Bible, for one thing, and the words that the mourners were singing were not from the 23rd Psalm. “England Arise !” they sang, followed - more unusually still - by the Marseillaise. The man being lowered into his grave was one Wilhelm Herman Severing, and he hailed from Altona, a German town just west of Hamburg. Although he had not been long in Birmingham, Herr Severing’s mastery of English was good. He even quoted from William Morris in his suicide note. At a time when asylum seekers are a constant feature of the news the fate of Herman Severing has a familiar ring to it. The dead man had been born in Altona in 1873, but at the age of 21 he fled from Germany to avoid national service. His chosen destination was England, as it might well have been had the events taken place today. England in general, and Birmingham in particular, was welcoming to outsiders, often relied on foreign labour and did not have compulsary army service. However, the reality of work in the big city was very different. As Severing wrote on his lengthy final testimony: “The economic conditions of England, the home of the poor, are marked by destitution and squalor, the light of heaven being closed out from miserable tenement rooms and alleys. Flesh and blood are becoming more cheap and bread more dear.” Herr Severing initially found himself work as a brass finisher at 12 shillings (60p) a week, and lodgings in Great Tindal Street. But employment was sporadic, and badly paid when it was available. The poor German found himself in what he described as “a literal hell”, mid-way between life and death, unable to pay his rent, unable to beg and unwilling to steal. On December 21 he bought some cartridges from a gunmaker in Steelhouse Lane, hired a cab and on the way home, shot himself as the cab turned along Sheepcote Street. The gun had belonged to his grandfather. Thus far there is nothing especially remarkable about this tale. German workers were not uncommon in Victorian Birmingham; nor were poverty, despair and suicide. What made the case worthy of not, both by the coroner and the press, was that Herman Severing was a socialist. Less than 30 years earlier, another poor exile from Germany had worked on his grand political theory of change and revolution in the British Museum. The ideas of Karl Marx and others had made little initial headway in England, but in the 1890s, under the influence of individuals like William Morris and Keir Hardy, it was beginning to grow. Although Herman Severing died without family in Birmingham, the men who gathered around his grave were all his brothers. A year after the foundation of the Independent Labour Party, they had one of their first martyrs to the cause. None of this cut much ice with the city coroner, who dismissed the case of a man who fled from his national duty in Germany and did not have the moral stamina to survive in his adopted home. Had Mr Pemberton still been around in 1914 he might not have considered the German army the force for good he so clearly thought it was in 1894. And the letters that poured in to the local newspapers in the wake of the inquest showed that many others in the city, if not socialists by name, likewise concluded with Herman Severing that England was not the earthly paradise some claimed it to be.
(The photograph is of the area where Severing lies buried in Key Hill Cemetery)