Inheritance

The Unitarian church is a non-conformist Christian sect that grew out of the Protestant reformation. From the perspective of mainstream Christianity, Unitarians were considered heretical: they did (do) not accept the concept of the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the absolute authority of the Bible, or any book, or that any individual, group or institution can define what is religious truth. They are open to science and human reason as routes to religious understanding

Charles Darwin came from a Unitarian family, though he was schooled and trained as an Anglican, and in his later life declared himself agnostic. He published On The Origin Of Species in 1859, just over twenty years before this toy was made, for a child growing up in the Unitarian Nettlefold family. It is a surviving part of a set of toy animals and a wooden 'Noah's Ark'. I assume it is also made of wood, but it is covered by real animal skin, though I don't know which animal. I'm not sure how that would go down with millennial parents

I wondered how the myth of Noah's Ark would have been presented to a Unitarian child in the years after Darwin's ideas had swept the western intelligentsia. Some sort of real history? Or a cautionary fairy tale about decadence and lack of religious observance?

Whatever way the story was slanted, it's probable that it was first told to John Nettlefold by his nurse or nanny. He was from an affluent manufacturing dynasty that could afford life-like nursey toys and a significant number of household servants. In the house that, as a successful businessman in his 30s, he and his wife had designed and built in Birmingham - Winterbourne House, which is now open to the public - a whole room is given over to their photographs and stories. One of the housemaids, I noticed, was dismissed after four year's employment for being "not strong enough"

The Nettlefolds were one of the archetypal Birmingham families of the industrial revolution - iron and steel producers who turned to the manufacture of screws on a colossal scale. Eventually, they merged with other companies to become Guest, Keen and Nettlefold - GKN - which still exists today as an automotive and aerospace business

John met his wife Margaret Chamberlain at their Unitarian church. There is another industrial family name that echoes down the generations, producing Joseph, mayor of the city, founder of the University and iconoclastic MP, and Neville, tarred forever as the appeaser of Nazism

Informed by their religious ideals, the Nettlefolds were social reformers, to the extent that they achieved improvement in the housing conditions of the city's poor - the employees in their factories. They embodied the paternalistic approach to capitalism that may have prevented, or at least deferred, the revolutionary uprisings that were anticipated by Marx (and Nettlefold's conntemporary, William Morris, as I noted yesterday). Sharp-eyed Mrs M noticed that this did not stop them reducing wages in 1921, the early years of the depression between the wars, as evidenced by old wage cards now displayed on the house wall

After my musings about Morris yesterday, it is almost too perfect that the Nettlefolds were great enthusiasts for the Arts and Crafts movement, and that Winterbourne House is decorated throughout with wallpaper designs by, you guessed it, William Morris