Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  So far this word-picture of Winterstoke has been comparatively simple in its structure because its life and growth has been almost exclusively dictated and determined by two great ruling families and the little worlds, so different in character, which they created: the great house of the Earls of Winterstoke which sapped and finally destroyed the old medieval economy; the furnaces, mills and mines of the Leeds family which attracted the new town and its tentacles of water and rail transport as a magnet attracts iron filings. But now, when we come to the great, sprawling town of the mid-nineteenth century, the old simple structure disintegrates and the picture becomes far more complex and chaotic in its form. Out of that ruthlessly competitive scramble which pauperized so many, new men of power emerge to challenge and, in some cases, to break the old ascendencies.

  The defeat of the Earls of Winterstoke by the precocious and powerful forces of the town whose growth they had done so much, indirectly, to promote could equally well be described as poetic justice, a process of long overdue reform or a tragedy. That the sins of proud and acquisitive fathers were visited upon their children could be called the Nemesis of divine justice. The tragedy lies in the fact that the process involved not merely the downfall of a ruling caste who had abused their power but the ruin of English agriculture.

  Until the end of the eighteenth century the interests of the two great families of Hanmer and Leeds had marched amicably side by side. But despite their revenues from coal and iron, the Hanmers remained landowners, and after the turn of the century the landowners and the new industrialists found themselves involved in an increasingly bitter conflict as the interests of the old green and the new black Englands diverged. The landowners fought a stubborn rear-guard action but their days of power were over. The Reform Bill gave the black a voice in the Government of England which became increasingly powerful and authoritative as the years passed. This first decisive victory was followed by the skirmish over the railways in which the black again carried the day, and by the most significant of all these trials of strength, the struggle over the Corn Laws. Expressed in local terms this was a battle waged by a united Winterstoke against the entire agricultural community of the county, a protracted encounter in which the Leeds family were at one with their workmen for the cause of the black, while Lord Winterstoke fought for the green in alliance with yeomen farmers such as Thomas Winter of Emberley Hall.

  The Corn Laws were the last surviving expression of the old conception of trade protection. They were designed to control by price regulation the importation of foreign wheat, admitting it in time of scarcity, excluding it in time of plenty in order to safeguard the interests of the English farmer. That such an anomaly should have survived so long in an age which preached that any such interference with freely-competitive trade was a violation of natural law was due to two things: to the power of the great ‘high farming’ landlords such as the Earls of Winterstoke and to the fact that, despite enclosure and industrial expansion, agriculture was still England’s greatest industry and the occupation of the majority of Englishmen. But now the supremacy of the old order was challenged. As we have seen, there was no longer any connection between the economics controlling the trade and the wages of Winterstoke and those of its rural environment. The two had drifted poles apart. Thomas Leeds could see no reason why his farming neighbours should not accept his own economic doctrine of freedom. The Corn Laws should be repealed so that wheat, like his iron and coal, could find its natural price level. Discontent was rife in Winterstoke owing to the high cost of bread. The workmen of Darley Bank and High Hanger supported the agitation for repeal to a man, and local farmers such as Thomas Winter became the victims of ugly demonstrations and wanton damage. No one questioned whether the cause of the trouble might not be that industrial wages were too low and that the price of wheat might in fact be a just price, although this would have been the first consideration to occur to a ‘primitive’ medieval economist.

  English agriculture was inevitably affected by the wars, the booms and the slumps of trade by which the industrial revolution proceeded on its headlong way. Agriculture shared in the trade boom which accompanied the Napoleonic war and in the immediate slump which followed the peace after Waterloo when the price of wheat fell by fifty per cent, in a matter of months and thousands of farmers were bankrupted. Thereafter, under the protection of the Corn Laws, the sick trade gradually recovered and the accession of Victoria appeared to mark the beginning of a new era of prosperous high farming. Even when the campaign against the Corn Laws was won the effect was not immediate so that few if any farmers can have realized the implications of the black victory: that it marked the end of an agricultural England which had endured for two thousand years, and that in future the country’s fortunes would be irrevocably bound up with the new and chronically unstable industrial economy. The repeal of 1842 did not take effect for seven years, while it was not until the ’seventies that the influence of the new economics in world markets really made itself felt. From that time onwards the divorce of the black from the green became complete and Winterstoke became almost entirely dependent upon the ‘cheap’ foods which she imported from overseas in exchange for her manufactures. In reality these foods were purchased at a terrible price: the wholesale exploitation of overseas producers and the rapid exhaustion of the fertility of virgin soils which new mechanized techniques of ‘conquest’ made possible. It may seem a far cry from our Wendle valley to the leached soils and dust bowls of the Americas yet they were only a part of the trail of destruction which the new town spread across the world. It is only by keeping this far-distant tragedy in mind that we can understand how it was that Winterstoke could continue to expand its population when just beyond its black periphery farm after farm fell to rack and ruin and field after field where once the good corn had waved fell back to derelict pasture amid a wilderness of unbrushed hedgerows and broken-down gates. To this tale of ruin the railways contributed their share for they preferred to handle bulk shipments of foodstuffs from the expanding docks at Westerport rather than the small, short hauls of local produce and therefore granted the former more favourable rates. At first, when imports were mainly confined to grains, the local farmers turned from corn to the hoof, but the perfection of refrigeration methods eventually made meat importation possible and soon ruined this market also. As a last resort, most of them ultimately became cow-keepers, exporting the fertility of their cow-sick pastures in the churns that their floats carried daily to the nearest station. Only the most deep-rooted of yeomen farmers such as the Winters of Emberley, husbandmen in the true sense of the word who looked upon their land as an almost sacred trust, contrived by every desperate expedient and self-sacrifice to ride the storm and keep their own lands and those of their tenants in good heart. With the lands of the Winterstoke estate it was an altogether different story. The town had already encroached considerably upon the farms of High Hanger, Ketton and Summersend, and when the great agricultural landslide set in there was no longer any incentive to check the growth of so profitable a crop as bricks and mortar. They were completely engulfed by the town and by the end of the nineteenth century only a part of Summersend and of the Abbey home farm which adjoined the Park remained under cultivation.

  A people whom the industrial revolution had cut off from the soil of England now lightly broke their faith with it and accepted with equanimity this rural catastrophe. The voice of the industrialist had silenced that of the landowner, and his view of England as the workshop of the world, exclusively dedicated to producing manufactures in exchange for the food provided by a grateful planet, was accepted without question. Each year the industrial revolution produced fresh wonders and so intoxicating were these fruits of technical ingenuity that no one stopped to ask what would happen to this system of exchange when other countries followed England’s example.

  To us, looking back over the years, it may seem astonishing that such an uncomfortable question was not asked, for already there were signs that England c
ould not hope to retain for long an unchallenged monopoly in the new manufactures. Already many of the Winterstoke nailers were faced with ruin as a result of the importation of Belgian nails. The old system of domestic industry in the iron trade with its lack of capital resources could no longer survive in the savage jungle of commercial competition. It died slowly (there were still domestic forges to be found in Winterstoke in the twentieth century) but none the less surely. Capital, which had been confined to the basic industries of coal and iron production and to heavy engineering, now began to invade the field of light manufacture. The first step in this process was made when the smith abandoned his domestic forge and went to work, with six or a dozen of his fellows, in a forging shop built and equipped by the ‘fogger’ who had previously supplied him with material and marketed his finished goods. He continued to work for the fogger on the same basis as before but with the difference that he no longer owned shop, tools or equipment. His skill was his only remaining asset, and that was soon challenged by mechanical competitors. In the production of a wide range of light metal goods and components the fly-press, the power press or the drop hammer with its dies rapidly ousted the anvil and the oliver from many of the foggers’ forges. As a result, numerous small factories, forges and foundries sprang up to provide employment for the swollen population. Many of these small businesses were little better able to withstand competitive stresses than the domestic forges they replaced. A few managed to carve a small but secure niche for themselves in the commercial world and remain, dingy but undefeated, to this day. A few by judicious amalgamation and trade agreement grew into large and powerful companies with ramifications extending far beyond the boundaries of Winterstoke. Many more have either disappeared or survive to-day as lorry garages, as laundries, as scrap-yards or warehouses for their more fortunate competitors, or simply as blackened ruins where slates have slipped and every soot-darkened pane of glass has long ago disappeared from its iron casement.

  None of these small concerns threatened the supremacy of the Darley Bank Company; they merely replaced the domestic smiths as customers for its coal and iron. The Company appeared to grow from strength to strength. Each year its output of coal from the High Hanger field increased. Tall pithead gear and winding house transformed the appearance of the old High Hanger pit, while further to the west a new and deeper pit known as Camp Colliery was sunk on the remaining lands of High Hanger Farm. The farmhouse itself became the colliery office and its buildings were converted into pony stables, lamp room, and fodder stores. This new colliery meant more housing, and in the low-lying fields west of the colliery marshalling yards a new suburb of terrace cottages no better than their predecessors at Hanger Lane was added to the town. This was tersely known as Camp. The name was apt, for living conditions in the new terrace were comparable with those in the shanty town of the railway builders which had once occupied the same fields.

  In the ironworks of Darley Bank, Bedlam and New Bank furnaces had been replaced by hot-blast furnaces of greater capacity and in 1856 the Company achieved a record output of raw iron. No one in that year could have guessed that this would stand as a record for all time; that the days of the Darley Bank Company as a great iron producer were nearly over. For this very same year when the furnaces roared and flamed as never before was marked by the introduction of the Bessemer Converter in place of the crucible process of steel-making. This revolutionized the industry in a few years by substituting mild steel for wrought iron and by moving the centre of the basic trade away from the Midlands to the North-east where the ores were more suitable for steel production. The Bessemer Converter was followed ten years later by the Siemens-Martin open-hearth process which transformed the boiler-making and shipbuilding trades by producing mild steel plate at a price far lower than that of the wrought iron equivalent.

  Why did not the Darley Bank Company adopt these new processes? The question is difficult to answer. The local ores might not be so suitable as the northern lodes, but that steel production at Winterstoke was perfectly feasible events were soon to prove. Perhaps Thomas Leeds, the last of his line to be actively connected with the Company, was not of the same adventurous metal as his forebears; or, more probably, he was too absorbed in the engineering side of the business, particularly locomotive building, which had greatly expanded. However it came about, for the first time in its history the Darley Bank Company allowed the initiative to pass into other hands. If they were not prepared to produce steel at Winterstoke there were others who would, for the demand was insatiable, and even if the ores were not of the most suitable quality there was an abundance of coal still untapped. Again, the vast extension of banking and credit, ‘the funding system’ as Cobbett called it, which was the foundation of industrial expansion, and, finally, the passing of the Companies Act which limited liability in the event of failure, all favoured the promotion of new and ambitious commercial enterprise. These were the circumstances which, in the ’sixties, brought the Great Ketton Steelworks to birth.

  The idea of forming a steel company at Winterstoke originated with a number of small manufacturers in the metal trade who used an increasing quantity of steel which they must needs import by rail from the North. They had for long looked jealously at the Darley Bank Company’s monopoly and now that Company’s failure to hold the initiative and to supply their needs was their opportunity. Yet the moving spirit, the financial genius of the new enterprise was a man with no previous experience in the industry whatever, a new man of power who had emerged head and shoulders above the commercial free-for-all to challenge the hitherto undisputed sway of the families of Hanmer and Leeds. This was Sir Richard Blenkinsop, Whig Member of Parliament for Winterstoke, twice mayor of the town, director of the Great North-Western Railway, owner of the brewery known as ‘Blenkinsop’s Entire’ and of the Winterstoke Steam Milling Company.

  Whereas the Hanmer family had ridden to power on a woolsack and the Leeds on a fiery juggernaut of coal and iron, the vehicle which had brought the Blenkinsops to prosperity was the beer barrel whose contents had helped to drown the sorrows of several generations of Winterstoke’s poor. Sir Richard’s ancestors had kept the little alehouse on Darley Bank known as the ‘Woodcolliers’, making their beer in a brewery behind the house which resembled the ‘outshut’ forges of the adjoining cottagers. It was the coming of the Lobstock Canal which had founded the family fortunes by encouraging old Amos Blenkinsop to gamble the whole of that thrifty family’s accumulated savings on the ‘Navigation’ at Darley Bank Basin with most profitable results. It was the demand of the canal traders for corn and fodder for their boat horses which had encouraged the Blenkinsops to branch out into that trade with a success which had been crowned by the building of the steam mill. What matter that the fortunes of the canal were now in eclipse? The Blenkinsops had followed the trade. The brewery and the Railway Hotel were built out of the profits derived from slaking the thirst of the railway builders. Sir Richard never tired of telling this family success story as proof of the doctrine of self-help of which he was a great exponent, but his heirs were much more reticent.

  The new Company purchased Ketton and Summersend farms from the Winterstoke Estate and it was on this site where the lower slopes of Summersend Hill fell away into the Lob valley that the steel plant grew up, its tall blast furnaces and stacks, coke ovens, slag heaps and rolling mills dominating the old works of the Darley Bank Company strung along the floor of the valley below. To supply the furnaces of ‘Ketton Bar’, as the new works was called locally, the Company opened its own colliery a little to the East of the steelworks. This became known as Ketton Deep and was in its day the most up-to-date pit in the country. Reared high on their gaunt gantries above the twin shafts of the pit, the upcast and the downcast, the spinning wheels of the headgears plunged the cages like plummets to a depth of a thousand yards. No wooden props but hoops of steel which frequently buckled under their immense burden supported the roof of the main haulage ways where pit ponies were replaced by compres
sed air haulage engines. Strung like beads on the whipping steel thread of their head and tail ropes, trains of coal tubs rumbled along these ways with a roar and rattle deafening in the confined darkness. Working at such great depths was only made possible by an improved ventilation system. Air was forced into the mine from the surface through the downcast shaft and was eventually exhausted through the upcast, its circulation throughout the mine being ensured by a system of air-lock doors so laid out that they required no ‘trappers’ to mind them.

  The organization of the Great Ketton Steel Company was typical of the new and powerful public companies which grew up during the latter half of the nineteenth century following the Companies Act; an organization completely different from that of the old Darley Bank Company with its family control and its association of semi-independent ‘overmen’. Each presiding member of the Leeds family had, during their successive reigns, exercised a degree of personal control over the destinies of their great undertaking which is quite unknown to-day. Not for nothing were they called ironmasters. Each generation served a long apprenticeship, learning the hard way under his father’s strict eye to become a master of his trade, and had by that mastery guided not only the financial but the technical development of the Company. Thus each member of the family, the two Josiahs, Daniel, Jonathan, Peter and Thomas had been personally responsible for improvements in foundry, furnace and forge, in the application of power, in transport, in the machine shop, and finally in locomotive building. To the last, old Thomas Leeds remained the ‘gaffer’, a man whose decision in any dispute or technical problem was the ultimate law from which there was no appeal; an iron autocrat whose life was dedicated to the great responsibilities which he accepted and wielded by inherited right. But in the case of Sir Richard Blenkinsop who, as chairman of directors, was the presiding genius of the Great Ketton Steelworks, the position was quite otherwise. Whereas the figure of Thomas Leeds, like that of Abbot Luttrell or Ernest Hanmer belongs to a historic past, that of Sir Richard is recognizably modern. He was what we now call a ‘tycoon’ or a ‘V.I.P.’, a financier who concerned himself not at all with the technicalities of the various businesses he owned or controlled but was master of one craft only—the making of money. While the Leeds family had lived for their business, Sir Richard lived for himself and for the advancement of the name of Blenkinsop. His aim was success, and success for him spelt two things: money and power. To their acquisition he devoted his great abilities with complete singleness of mind and purpose. That every undertaking he touched prospered was due to two remarkable gifts: an almost infallible commercial flair which he exercised with the unperturbable and ruthless skill of an expert gambler; and a remarkable capacity for assessing the character and ability of his fellowmen. He possessed the instinct to find and the means to buy the best brains for whatever job he sought to fill and this was the secret of the success of the Great Ketton Steel Company. For practical purposes, responsibility was delegated at Great Ketton to an elaborate, highly-organized human machine of key men; a hierarchy of managers, under-managers, works engineers, superintendents, foremen and charge-hands which took the place of the old ‘overmen’. There was no sub-contracting at Great Ketton. Every man was an employee of the Company. Although Sir Richard Blenkinsop occupied the apex of this pyramid of responsibility, only a matter of the highest policy could scale that exalted height and whereas at Darley Bank a man never knew when he might not find old Thomas Leeds standing at his elbow regarding his activity with a critical and practised eye, he might work for years at Great Ketton without setting eyes on the chairman. Only the ‘high-ups’ of the hierarchy had access to the heavy mahogany holy of holies of the chairman’s office, and even amongst that exalted company a summons thither usually occasioned considerable trepidation. The relationship between employer and employed which had inevitably weakened at Darley Bank as the Company grew in stature was broken altogether at Great Ketton. In fact, the organization of the new works was as recognizably modern in character as its author.