or Brum, subs. (old).—Birmingham. Hence contemptuously in allusion to the evil reputation of the city for spurious and shoddy manufacture (1) = base money of various denominations: spec. (c. 1691) counterfeit groats: see BRUMMAGEM-BUTTONS; (2) anything spurious, showy, or pretentious: e.g., ‘That’s BRUMMAGEM: also as adj. (or BRUMMISH); (3) copper money struck by Boulton and Watt at their works at Soho, Birmingham (1787); (4) an inhabitant of Birmingham; usually BRUM. See BRUMS.
1637. Calendar of State Papers, 105. Those swords which he … pretends to be blades of his owne makeing are all BROMEDGHAM blades and forraine blades.
1686. D’URFEY, A Commonwealth of Women, I., i. A BRUMMINGHAM Son of a Whore, affront the Noble Admiral!
1691. G. MIEGE, New State of England, 235. BROMICHAM, particularly noted a few years ago for the conterfeit groats made here, and from hence dispersed all over the kingdom.
c. 1696. B. E., A New Dictionary of the Canting Crew, s.v. BROMIGHAM-CONSCIENCE, very bad, BROMIGHAM-protestants, Dissenters or Whiggs. BROMIGHAM-wine, Balderdash, Sophisticate Taplash.
1754. B. MARTIN, English Dictionary, 2 ed. BROMIDGHAM, money of base metal.
1737. J. WEST, Trip to Richmond, in J. Ashton’s Eighteenth Century Waifs, 133. My silver I chang’d for a handful of BRUMS.
1805. G. COLMAN, John Bull (in Inchbald’s ‘The British Theatre,’ vol. XXI), 55. Two guineas … one seems light, and t’other looks a little BRUMMISH.
1834. SOUTHEY, The Doctor, cxl. He picked it up, and it proved to be a BRUMMEJAM of the coarsest and clumsiest kind, with a head on each side.
1836. DICKENS, Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, I., 11. Bad silver, BRUMMAGEM BUTTONS, etc.
1847. HALLIWELL, A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, etc., s.v. BROMIDGHAM. A corruption of Birmingham. A BROMIDGHAM groat, a spurious fourpennypicce. A person neither Whig nor Tory, but between both.
1861. New York Tribune, 28 Nov. This silence on the part of the Rebel President as to the cause of the war, and the sole reason for setting up his BRUMMAGEM government, etc.
1862. Cornhill Magazine, Nov., 648. We have just touched for a rattling stake of sugar (i.e., a large stake of money) at BRUM.
1866. G. ELIOT, Felix Holt, v. The most of the middle class are as ignorant as the working people about everything that doesn’t belong to their own BRUMMAGEM life. Ibid., xix. If anybody says the Radicals are a set of sneaks, BRUMMAGEM HALFPENNIES, scamps who want to play pitch-and-toss with the property of the country, you can say, ‘Look at the member for North Loamshire.’
1873. The Saturday Review, Nov., 661. They [BRUMMAGEM BUTTONS] were marvellously inexpensive, and being such ingenious imitations of the spade guineas and half-guineas then current that may Englishmen might have failed to detect the difference; they must have been of very great ‘use to the Indians’ indeed.
1876. C. HINDLEY, ed. The Life and Adventures of a Cheap Jack, 321. For Nottingham is a rare place for good eating; here you may buy anything to eat of the commonest person, or in the commonest place with confidence that it is good, clean, and wholesome, very different to dirty Birmingham and the BRUMS.
1867. BROUGHTON, Cometh up as a Flower, v. Those may be Manchester or BRUMMAGEM manners, but they won’t go down here.
1883. Echo, March 28, 1, 5. There is little of a BRUMMAGEM character about the municipal, parochial, and philanthropic work of Birmingham, whatever we may think of some of her industrial productions.
1883. Daily Telegraph, July 9, 3, 2. One [earring] might be gold, and the other a BRUM, though exactly alike.
