Self-Made

Joseph Chamberlain was a giant of late 19th & early 20th century British politics. Although born and raised in Surrey, he is indelibly associated with Birmingham. At 18, he joined his uncle's screw-making business in the city - Nettlefolds. This soon became Nettlefold & Chamberlain. After he left business for politics, it became Guest, Keen and Nettlefold - GKN. At one point Nettlefold was making two third of the screws made in England. Chamberlain himself made a fortune

Chamberlain was a divisive and contradictory figure who made many enemies. Initially he entered local politics in Birmingham as a radical, championing the rights of working people, greater enfranchisement, universal education and land reform. He took the provision of gas and water supply in the city into compulsory public ownership - either with public money or his own - and forced through slum clearances and the relocating of residents to the suburbs. Libraries, swimming pools, museum, art gallery, parks - he drove it all. He also established, and became first chancellor of, a university that he insisted would educate women and recruit foreign students. He built the platform for Birmingham's industrial success in the first half of the 20th century

In national politics, he emerged as an uncompromising imperialist. He opposed Irish home-rule (independence) and his opposition irrevocably split the Liberal party. Subsequently, he was one of the causes of the Boer war, and then managed the British war effort - the war in which we invented the concentration camp. He was also an economic isolationist - arguing for protective tax barriers against imports - a position which split the Conservative Party he was now allied to. There is much, much more; he led an intriguing, inconsistent, belligerent and complex life

Chamberlain's son Neville, is remembered less ambiguously as the Prime Minister whose "little piece of paper" was iconic of the appeasement of the last authoritarian tyrant to wage war in Europe. Revisionist historians argue that he bought time in which the country could re-arm before war was unavoidable, but it's not clear if that was his calculated intension

Michael Faraday, a little older than Chamberlain, had no connection to Birmingham that I can discover, living out his extraordinary life in London and South East England. Like Chamberlain, he had no education beyond his early teens, but he became a self-taught scientist and experimentalist of exceptional ability, eventually rising to become a Fellow of the Royal Society and being conferred many other academic honours. He is particularly remembered for work on electromagnetism and electrochemistry, but his mind ranged far and wide and he was, and is, revered by scientists in many fields, including Rutherford and Einstein

The tower in the background is "Old Joe" - "the tallest freestanding clock tower in the world", according to the self-promotion on the University library café wall. It was never actually dedicated to Chamberlain but, as the iconic structure at the university he founded, its association is inevitable. A photograph with Old Joe is a compulsory part of every graduating student's big day, and somewhere we have one of our son getting his masters - in politics, as it happens

The statue of Faraday is a gift (in 2010, to mark the university centenary) from the artist - presumably welcome, as it has been granted such a prominent position. The reason for Faraday being singled out for prominence in Birmingham is not clear, other than it being a city with a history of technological innovation

I amused myself wondering what irreverent name contemporary undergraduates have assigned to it, as they must have done. In my day, I think it would have been either "The Electric Chair" or "Joe 90"

Dina Asher-Smith ran 60 metres in 7.03 seconds in Birmingham today. We blinked and missed it