The towns industry created - Middlesbrough

The railways created their own revolution. The distinguished historian, Asa Briggs, highlights Middlesborough, Barrow in Furness and Crewe as towns created by the railways, each in their individual way.

Middlesborough on the River Tees was six miles closer to the sea than Stockton and could be readily accessed by coastal shipping. Stockton was at one end of the famous Stockton-Darlington railway built to transport coal from the County Durham pits. The railway owners saw in Middlesborough the ideal port to handle increases in coal production and so commissioned the extension of their railway from Stockton to Middlesborough. In 1826, Joseph Pease, the champion of the project and the leader of the 'Middlesbrough Owners', estimated that 10,000 tons of coal a year could be transported by this route. When the route opened in 1830, it carried 150,000 tons and by 1840 the annual throughput was 1.5 million. A whole new dock area had been built.

The expansion of the little village of Middlesborough was prodigious but carefully planned. The growing population was to be housed in dwellings built on tidy streets behind the docks. A pottery set up in business and Henry Bolckow, an immigrant from Mecklenberg, financed the setting up of an iron foundry working with John Vaughan who had learnt his skills at the Dowlais iron works in South Wales. They sourced their iron ore from blast-furnaces near Bishop Auckland in the South Durham coalfield and produced rails but also small steam engines. Henry Bolckow would be very much the patrician who, along with the 'Middlesbrough Owners', financed public buildings nurturing the embryonic town. In this he is compared to Titus Salt in Bradford and John Laird at Birkenhead.

At this point the expansion of the railways could have ended the Middlesborough story, for transport of coal by rail took over from the coastal trade. However, there was another chapter to come in the story and this lay in the Cleveland hills at Eston where a rich seam of ironstone was discovered. This transformed the fortunes of Bolckow and Vaughan and attracted both other iron masters and workers from iron producing areas across the country and beyond. Production began in 1850 and by 1873 the North-Eastern iron-field, with Middlesborough as its capital, was producing 5.5 million tons of ore a year making over two million tons of pig iron, about one third of Britain's total production. A good deal was exported and the name Middlesbrough was known around the world. Middlesbrough had been incorporated in 1853 already signifying its importance.

Of the other companies involved, the Pease family took pride of place as dealers in coal, quarrying ironstone and limestone, banking and manufacturing. The Bell family from Newcastle built the Port Clarence furnaces on the north bank of the Tees using the West Hartlepool railway and Hartlepool as their docks. Furness Withy built ships in Hartlepool and had fingers in many iron related pies. In the book Middlesborough - Town and Community 1830-1950, Asa Briggs in his introduction adds the names of William Hopkins and John Snowden, the Cochranes from Staffordshire and Bernhard Samuelson from Banbury.

The coming together of iron masters from different areas brought contrasting ideas of iron making. It is difficult to comprehend the sheer scale of what was going on: blast furnaces ninety feet high and thirty feet across spitting fire into the night sky. Iron companies worked at diversification, some vertically bringing the whole making process under one roof, some horizontally embracing fabrication and shipbuilding. Companies merged, companies collapsed and new ones took their place. This was a frontier town of the late industrial revolution.

Workers came from Durham, South Wales, Staffordshire and Scotland along with labourers from Ireland. The population grew from 7,431 in 1851 to 91,302 fifty years later. The town's founding families had provided municipal buildings but the careful plan for dwellings fell by the wayside and housing in Middlesborough became no better than that in the old industrial towns. Matters were made worse by the economic cycles which brought periods of depression to the iron producing areas. Growing foreign competition particularly with steel didn't help.

Steel was taking over from puddled iron and Cleveland ore was rich in phosphorus which prevented the successful use of the Bessemer process. The Gilchrist-Thomas open hearth process developed to enable the use of ore rich in phosphorus, but Middlesborough steel would never approach the success it had achieved with mailable iron. It was with the relative newcomer Dorman Long founded in 1870 in whom the future of the town would rest. This new company began by manufacturing iron bars and angles for shipbuilding but acquired the Britannia Works from Samuelson and later combined with Bell.

So, in 1880 the Middlesbrough iron industry had metamorphosed into steel production with two giants: Bolckow and Vaughan and Dorman Long. Heavy engineering and shipbuilding grew as local customers, but there were export markets too. Dorman Long would thrive and their iron was used to build many of the great bridges across the Empire not least that at Sydney Harbour in 1924 (shown in the image). The demands of the First World War created a temporary respite but Dorman Long eventually swallowed up the surviving Middlesborough pioneers. Thereafter the struggle with overseas competition was felt in Middlesbrough as elsewhere. I write of the problems of overcapacity in Vehicles to Vaccines. In terms of employment, the now large population supported a retail sector with its related employment. For many of the people of Middlesbrough there was mass unemployment.

This chemical industry went some way to replace earlier employment in iron and steel. ICI's massive Wilton chemical plant set up in 1949 was nearby, as was Billingham set up thirty years earlier. I write much more in Vehicles to Vaccines. Further down the coast is Staithes with the former ICI potash mine.

Further reading:

• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)
• Middlesbrough Town and Community 1830-1950, A.J. Pollard (ed.) (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1996)
• Carol Kennedy, ICI - The Company That Changed Our Lives (London: Hutchinson, 1986)