The towns industry created - Barrow in Furness

 Barrow is the second town which Asa Briggs mentions as a 19th century creation by the railways. F. Barnes, in his book Barrow and District, may take issue.

Barnes takes his reader through the long history of iron production in Furness dating back to the 13th century and earlier where the local population fashioned iron objects from the readily available iron ore smelted with charcoal. These were very much for their own use, with ore lying on or near the surface and with temperature high enough only to make the iron soft but not molten and filled with impurities which had to be hammered out.

Iron ore was plentiful on the Furness peninsula but wood for charcoal came to be rationed in the reign of Elizabeth I as I discussed in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. In Furness there was little option but to ship ore from Barrow to be smelted at Blackbarrow in the Lake District where wood and hence charcoal was more plentiful. Production continued on a relatively small scale without the use of blast furnaces until 1711.

The new Blackbarrow furnace was first blown in 1711/12 and was followed by other 'blown' furnaces in the area. The famous Furness name of Wilkinson (Isaac the father of John known as the 'father of the English iron trade') first appears in the building of the Low Wood Furnace near Blackbarrow. The supply of charcoal once again became an issue. This time ore was shipped to Scotland for smelting.

A dramatic change came in 1839 when H.W. Schneider and his brother purchased Whitriggs mine and began to export ore from Barrow to South Wales and Staffordshire. The building of the Furness railway in 1846 from Barrow to Kirby enabled movement but it was the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway which opened up the whole country and enabled the import of coke from Durham for use with the Furness ore and limestone. Blast furnaces were built. The iron ore was well suited to the Bessemer process for steel production and James Ramsden formed a company which merged with Schneider resulting in the Barrow Haematite and Steel Company. The plant was then the largest iron works and Bessemer plant in the world. Furnaces were opened at neighbouring Askam, Ulverston and Carnforth with production reaching its peak in 1870.

Barnes offers some figures which demonstrate the shift from shipping ore to local smelting. The peak of ore exporting came in 1857 when out of 592,390 tons mined, 562,095 were exported. In 1863, one third of ore mined was smelted locally and in 1877 out of 993,912 tons mined only 42,683 was exported. The peak year was 1882 with 1,408,693 mined; this declined to 116,393 in 1938.

Fundamental to the development of Barrow were two aristocrats who invested substantially in the docks and infrastructure: the Dukes of Devonshire and Buccleuch. Much of the early iron production had focused on Furness Abbey which passed down through a number of ownerships before ending up with the Devonshire family. The Duke of Buccleugh inherited the Manors of Furness and Hawkshead and so too had a landed interest.

I came across a fascinating blog describing the housing history of Barrow. As with Middlesborough, another 19th creation mentioned by Asa Briggs, the development of the iron industry led to a dramatic increase in population which needed housing. The blog traces the housing built in the different stages of development of Barrow starting with the 28 houses existing in 1843. Clearly this was insufficient and first of all huts were built for the workers coming in. This was then followed by more substantial 'Scotch Buildings', essentially five story tenement blocks which would have been familiar to the workers coming from Scotland. These were followed by Devonshire Buildings, Maritime Gardens and then terraced Roose housing and the mock Tudor terraces of Vickerstown: the Vickers name stemming from the next chapter in Barrow's life.

Barrow did seek to diversify its manufacturing. One issue that concerned the iron masters was the fluidity of their workforce and it was thought that finding jobs for women would add stability. The route taken was jute and the Barrow and Calcutta Jute company at one time employed 2,000 women; competition from overseas and Dundee forced its closure in 1930. Barrow Paper Mills faired better staying in business until the seventies. It became part of Bowater Scott. Other later additions were British Cellophane and K Shoes.

Manufacturing in Barrow had a second focus on shipbuilding resulting from both the production of iron and the earlier export of ore. Neighbouring Ulverston was a much bigger place and attracted the earlier shipbuilders. James Fisher was established in 1847 and built a number of ships. In 1870 the Barrow Iron and Shipbuilding Company was founded, again under the direction of James Ramsden and built a good number of ships including naval craft and importantly the first submarine in 1886 designed by the Swedish T. Nordenfeldt. In 1888 the Naval Construction and Armaments Company took over the yard and eight years later Vickers bought that company and production continued under the name Vickers Sons and Maxim. I write about the development of Vickers in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. There began a long history of naval construction especially submarines. Vickers claimed a unique position of supplying naval ships complete with armaments. Vickers added the manufacture of the early airships with designs by a young Barnes Wallis and then railway wagons.

The presence of Vickers in Barrow attracted Ferranti with semi conductor manufacturing and Marconi with radar and which eventually became part of BAE Systems along with Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Limited. With a major order book of work with submarines, Barrow's future looks healthy.

Further reading:

• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)
• F. Barnes, Barrow and District (Barrow in Furness, 1968)
• J.D. Scott, Vickers - A History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962)
• John F. Wilson, Ferranti - A History (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 1999)

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)

Wigan manufacturing history

Wigan wears the triple manufacturing crown: coal, cotton and iron.

In the South Lancashire Coalfield, which covered 217 square miles, Wigan stood out for its 'cannel' coal which burned 'as bright as a candle' and so was perfect for gas production. The town also had access to seams of Wigan, Arley and Ince coal suitable for domestic use and Pemberton and Haigh which were used in steam engines. These coals had a big market with supplies going by canal to Liverpool, Manchester and the Cheshire salt towns as well as Preston, Blackburn and other cotton towns. In the early days pits were sunk all around the countryside surrounding Wigan. They were based on the landowner and pit villages would spring up to accommodate the miners: men, women and children. The landscape was punctuated with winding gear and in the town soot was everywhere.

In 1858 the coal field had 380 collieries and this increased to 588 by 1874. In his book, The Making of Wigan, Mike Fletcher adds that Wigan's fifty pits were thriving, producing four million tons of coal a year. As demand grew, pits were dug deeper and bigger and the individual colliery enterprises combined. As was the case in many places, alongside coal, iron ore was extracted and smelted. The two largest Wigan coal businesses were Wigan Iron & Coal formed in 1865 including the Kirkless Hall Iron works, and Pearson & Knowles which joined with the Warrington Dallam Forge and Warrington Wire. These were big businesses.

The massive growth in coal production was enabled by the canals. Improvements in communication had begun with the turnpikes and then work on the Douglas navigation linking to the river Ribble. Wigan was served first by the Leeds Liverpool canal which ran from Liverpool and terminated in Wigan at No 1 Wigan Pier allowing 'cotton and coal to flow smoothly between the two.' I am grateful again to Mike Fletcher for unravelling both canal building and the later Lancashire railway mania. In terms of canals, a project to link Lancaster to the south Lancashire coalfields benefitted Wigan and linked Lancaster to Kirkless. This canal linked to the Leeds Liverpool by means of the Wigan flight of 21 locks. The last piece of the jigsaw was to link the bottom of the Wigan flight to the older Bridgewater canal. Now Wigan could ship its coal to parts of Lancashire without their own coal reserves such as Liverpool and Preston and the Wigan cotton mills could receive a ready supply of their raw material.

Later, the railways began to arrive. The first was a branch line linking to the Liverpool & Manchester railway at Newton le Willows. The second linked to Preston with a number of stations including at Boar's Head at Standish. Through a sequence of mergers these two lines became part of the London & North Western Railway firmly linking Wigan north and south. The railway mania of the 1840s saw a line linking Wigan to the seaside town of Southport providing much needed recreation for Wigan's hard-working population. The 1860s saw two further lines of greater industrial significance linking Wigan to Blackburn and St Helens. These and further lines resulted in Wigan being the centre of a complex web of railways lines rationalised a century later by the closures under Dr Beeching. Wigan still has two railway stations almost side by side.

Cotton was Wigan's second industry where it followed the lead of so much of Lancashire. Fast running water was limited and so Wigan's expansion was built round steam powered by locally dug coal. By 1834, Wigan had 115 steam engines working in its mills. I explore the development of steam power in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

The expansion of the town into industry may have been positive for the land and mill owners, but for the population as a whole it meant child labour both in the pits and the mills; working hours were long and conditions dreadful. Wigan men weren't ones to lay down and they frequently fought for better pay and conditions. Groups of Luddites opposed the mechanisation of cotton production. The cotton famine following the American civil war led to hunger for many leading to starvation for some. Towards the end of the nineteenth century matters did improve.

Thomas Beecham began his chemists business in Wigan in 1858 before moving to St Helens.

I first discovered the Kirkless iron works on my way up the Wigan flight and all that was visible were undulations of land where buildings, furnaces and crucibles used to be; the Wigan Archaeological Society is doing great work unearthing its history. Founded in 1858, Kirkless merged with Haigh collieries ten years later and produced pig iron for the next fifty years. Steel making came in 1890. During the First World War the company manufactured railway wagons amongst its general steel production. With the slump in the twenties much production was moved to Irlam with its access to the Manchester Ship Canal. All production ceased in 1965.

In the Second World War the Wigan Royal Ordnance factory produced five and half million 25lb shells. After the war HJ Heinz set up production on the site of a former mill. It has become a major employer in the town. Wigan is also home to AB World Foods part of Associated British Foods of which I write in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Further reading

Mike Fletcher, The Making of Wigan