Victorian Do-gooders

In partnership with Everything to Everybody and Norman Bartlam of TNT, the Jewellery Quarter Research Trust presents a selection of short films about Victorian Do-gooders buried at Key Hill Cemetery. A different film for each day of Birmingham Heritage Week.

Discover how George Dawson (Non-conformist minister and founder of the Shakespeare Memorial Library), Marie Bethel-Beauclerc (first female newspaper reporter in England), John Davis Mullins (Chief Librarian at The Central Lending Library and Art Gallery), Charles Reece Pemberton (Shakespearean actor), Joseph Tangye (Entrepreneurial industrialist and manufacturer) and others changed Birmingham for the better, and how Dawson’s ‘Civic Gospel’ influenced social reform on a national scale.

The ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project unites the Shakespeare archive at the Library of Birmingham – the first, oldest and largest Shakespeare collection in any public library in the world, and one of the UK’s most important cultural assets, with the George Dawson Collection.

Opened in 1836, Key Hill Cemetery is the oldest nondenominational cemetery in Birmingham and the last resting place of some of Birmingham’s most influential citizens.