Cornelius Adamson’s story begins in the workshops of Victorian Birmingham and ends in a pauper’s grave. Born in 1864 to a family of skilled furniture workers, his early years were shaped by the rhythm of a booming industrial city. But somewhere along the way, things fell apart.

By his twenties, Cornelius had drifted into the workhouse system — fined, jailed, and branded a “lazy tramp” for refusing the back-breaking punishments handed to the city’s poor. Newspapers mocked him, magistrates jailed him, and by 1904 he was banned from every pub in Birmingham.

Across the next two decades, his name appears again and again in court reports and prison records — always for the same petty offences, always older than he claimed to be. He lied about his age, not out of vanity, but to survive in a world that valued youth over weariness.

By 1911 he was an inmate at Steelhouse Lane Lock-Up, surrounded by the city’s drunks and thieves. A decade later, he was confined to Erdington House — part workhouse, part mental hospital — and in 1924 he died at Monyhull Colony, aged sixty, from tuberculosis. No family, no grave marker, no obituary.

His life, pieced together from faded documents and forgotten headlines, tells us as much about Birmingham as it does about him: a city that measured worth by work, and left no place for those who couldn’t keep up