When Josiah Leeds and his supporters reopened the question they encountered the same bitter opposition but the constitution now provided a different means of ventilating and settling such disputes. They applied, not to the Queen but to Parliament for an Act which would empower them to carry out the necessary work, and in this case the battle was joined and the opposition overcome before the Lower Wendle Navigation Act passed into law and the Company of Proprietors of the Lower Wendle Navigation was formally incorporated in 1710. The long overdue work of improvement then proceeded rapidly. The last of the old fishweirs dating back to medieval times were soon demolished, their owners being paid agreed sums in compensation by the Company. Two of the half-tide weirs were also demolished on the same basis while the third was raised and a pound lock constructed beside it. Pound locks were also constructed on short cuts beside each of the three old flash weirs, Pigeons Mill, Abel’s Gullet and Fingerlow, the millowners being compensated by the Company for the loss of their right to levy tolls. In addition, two new cuts and pound locks were built at St. John’s and Winterstoke Abbey Mill to enable craft to ply to a new wharf within easier reach of the ironworks in the Lob valley. The Company had originally sought powers to make the river navigable as far as Coltisham another ten miles upstream, but the opposition of the numerous millowners and the expense which would have been involved in compensation and in constructing the many locks led the proprietors to drop this part of their project. So Darley Bank Wharf, as it soon came to be called, became the upper limit of the navigable Wendle and so it remained.
Compared with the river locks with which we are familiar to-day, the first locks on the Wendle were very crude affairs indeed. The ‘pounds’ or ‘pens’ between the gates were not masonry chambers but simply an enclosed portion of the lock cut with sloping turf-covered sides. Only at the upper and lower ends where the gates were hung was there vertical timber piling consolidated at the back with clay and earth. The gates themselves did not swing in hollow quoins but were merely hung on massive hooks and rides like any farm gate, with the result that they were far from water-tight. The sluices in these gates which admitted water to or released it from the pound exactly resembled the old paddles of the flash weirs and were, indeed, so called. The paddle itself, a stout rectangle of elm planking which covered the orifice in the gate, was attached to a long wooden bar having a number of holes at its upper end so that it could be levered up with the aid of a handspike. The lock gates had no counterbalance beams but were opened and closed by means of chains and winches.
The most difficult problem which the Wendle Navigation Company had to solve was how to overcome the chronic lack of navigable draught in the two long reaches above and below the lock at Abel’s Gullet where, in dry seasons, loaded boats had often been stranded for weeks at a time. The position here was now likely to be even worse than before because one of the conditions of the agreement which had been reached between the Company and the millowners was that the former should only be entitled to draw sufficient water to fill the locks. This meant that the old practice of ‘flashing’ which had so often been employed to lift a boat off the shallows was now prohibited by the Act. Nor was it possible to increase the depth of water in these two reaches by building intermediate weirs and pound locks. The opposition of the mill-and landowners had resulted in a clause in the Company’s Act which forbade the construction of any new weirs and pound locks in these reaches. The millowners had alleged that by restricting their headwaters and at the same time causing the water at their tailraces to back up, such new weirs would seriously interfere with the working of their mills. The landowners had produced the old argument that new weirs would increase the risk of flooding. In the face of all these difficulties the Company had to resort to a compromise which, though far from satisfactory, was the only one possible. At a carefully chosen position in each of the two reaches they erected a ‘navigation weir’. This consisted of a masonry weir having a wide gap in midstream which could be sealed at will by a gate. This, like the lock gates, carried paddles and could be opened and closed by a winch on the bank. As the gate normally stood open, this arrangement satisfied the objectors. But in times of low water the bargemasters could close the gate behind them when moving upstream with the result that the reach above would make up enough to allow them to proceed on their way. Moreover, because the prohibition of ‘flashing’ did not apply to these navigation weirs, they could be judiciously used to help craft in difficulties on their downstream side.
In spite of all these works the navigation of the Wendle was still a hazardous proceeding, especially in times of flood or drought, while by modern standards it was painfully slow. Moreover, it would be a mistake to suppose that the passing of the Wendle Navigation Act silenced the centuries old disputes for ever. The countrymen of the English midlands at this time had little respect for the rule of law, and on many occasions the Company and the bargemasters had to resort to physical violence to maintain their legal rights. When the carpenters came to install the gates of the new lock at Fingerlow Mill they were savagely attacked by a party of thugs hired by the miller. The terrified carpenters fled for their lives across the water meadows while their assailants hacked their half-finished work to pieces and then threw their tools into the river. The carpenters returned and completed their work under the protection of a strong posse recruited from the ranks of the bow hauliers. There were subsequent battles over the Company’s legal right to the use of the haling way, while scarcely a season of drought would pass without some skirmish between millers and bargemasters. A bargemaster would complain that the miller’s men had forcibly attempted to prevent him using a lock. The miller would argue, rightly or wrongly, that the bargemen had been trying to draw the paddles to send down a ‘flash’ and that in obstructing them he had been acting within his rights. Thanks to the tough constitution of their bow-hauliers, the bargemasters usually had the better of these encounters.
Although they did not know it, these millers and landowners of the Wendle valley who continued so stubbornly to assert their rights represented a bygone age and might as well have tried to stop the flow of the river as resist the relentless pressure of the new world that was now building at Winterstoke. In spite of the primitive works, in spite of all the hazards and conflicts, the importance of the Wendle Navigation to the Darley Bank Ironworks was as great as that of a main artery to the heart. As slowly but as purposefully and ceaselessly as the current upon which they moved, the low-laden barges swung away from Darley Bank Wharf and slid silently downstream, their hulls hidden between the banks from all but the staring cattle but their tall masts and sails visible by the hour, now near, now far off, as they followed the Wendle’s windings through the wide water meadows. As the years of the eighteenth century rolled by they carried an increasing volume and variety of cargoes on the first stage of journeys which became ever longer as the trading orbit of the Darley Bank Company widened like the ripples from a stone flung into a pond. Cargoes of coal and of iron in every form and shape; pig and sow iron, iron blooms, bundles of nailer’s rods and bar iron, nails, edge tools and finished smith’s work of every kind; domestic cast-iron ware, pots, ‘coppers’, grates, hearths and hearth backs in increasing volume and variety. The most difficult and precious cargoes of all were heavy castings and forgings whose function was often a mystery to the bargemaster who contracted for their freight. These were the vital organs of new machines which were soon to supersede those powers of wind and water, hand and horseflesh, which had prevailed since time out of mind. Before long the Wendle barges would be bearing down-river huge cylinder castings, six feet or more in diameter, bound for the pumping engines of the deepening coal pits in the midlands and the north or the tin mines of the far south-west.
For the increased output of domestic cast-iron ware by the Darley Bank Company, Josiah Leeds was responsible. In place of the old practice of running the molten iron into crude clay moulds formed in the ‘loom floor’ he introduced the technique of using m
oulds and cores of pure dry sand formed in boxes. These moulds were still run direct from the blast furnace. So great did the output of iron castings become that one of the blast furnaces, both of which were rebuilt, enlarged and improved by Josiah, was soon exclusively devoted to this work while the other specialized in the production of pig iron for the use of the finery and forge.
One of the problems confronting Josiah Leeds, and one which was by no means peculiar to Winterstoke, was the growing shortage of charcoal. Although the Darleys had made a practice of planting coppice wood, the rate of regeneration of the depleted woodlands could not keep pace with the insatiable demands of the two blast furnaces. The bare hillsides of High Hanger and Great Ketton, once so richly clothed with noble stands of timber but now a waste of scrub and saplings, told their own tale. Something must be done if the Darley Bank Ironworks was to escape the fate which had overtaken so many Sussex furnaces. Josiah already had experience of the making and use of coke fuel in his father’s makings so, with coal almost literally at his door, he began to experiment. Coal drawn from the High Hanger pits was coked in the open and tried in the pot-casting furnace. So far as the casting trade was concerned the experiment proved an immediate and complete success, the higher temperature melt of the iron producing castings of much finer quality than did charcoal iron. But experiments at the forge with coke-smelted pigs showed that the material was quite unsuitable for the production of wrought iron. His son, Josiah II, would eventually solve the problem of producing ‘pit coal pig’, as it was called, of a quality acceptable in the forges. Meanwhile the use of coke in the ‘loom’ furnace ensured a saving of precious timber, while the furnace producing forge pig continued in blast on charcoal.
A higher output of iron from both blast furnaces was achieved, not only by the improvement of the furnaces themselves, but by Josiah’s efforts to overcome the old difficulty of water shortage in summer. He installed pumps worked by horse gins which returned the waters of the Lob from the lowest level to the upper furnace pool through iron pipes of his own casting. This reduced the length of the summer period during which the furnaces had to be blown out, although the pumps could not counteract the effect of a prolonged drought. Nor could any pumps prevail against extreme frost. The laconic and cryptic phrase ‘To treading ye upper wheel’ which appears against a substantial wages item in the Company’s accounts for the month of January 1712 suggests that an effort was made to keep the upper furnace in blast during a spell of frost by manning the water-wheel like a treadmill.
While Josiah Leeds was making these experiments and improvements at Darley Bank the domestic iron trade in the Winterstoke district continued to expand and the smiths’ demand for rod and bar iron became so great that the Darley Bank Company built a second forge and slitting mill in 1720. Because the Company found themselves unable to smelt enough charcoal iron to satisfy their two forges, they began to buy supplies of charcoal pig from other furnaces in more favoured districts to the south and west. These water-borne imports of raw iron to Winterstoke continued until the middle of the century.
While the Company’s production of forge iron was thus restricted, the output of castings from Darley Bank increased apace. At first the foundry had produced almost exclusively domestic cast-iron goods which were sold in the Midland markets, but thanks to Josiah’s improvements in technique the moulders were soon engaged upon much heavier and more ambitious work. Already, the tireless and indomitable hand of Josiah Leeds had wrought greater changes upon the face of Winterstoke in two decades than had occurred during the whole of the preceding century. The windows of his house, like those of the cottages he had built for his ironworkers which now terraced both flanks of the Lob valley, surveyed a scene such as no mortal eye had ever beheld before. Beside the succession of still, sky-reflecting pools in which the waters of the river had been pent, there now ranged a long line of buildings, furnace and loom house, forge, rolling and slitting mills, each making to the whole its particular contribution of smoke and flame or mechanical din of heavy tilt hammers and rolls. Between the buildings and beside the margins of the pools the valley’s green floor had already been buried beneath the arid, death-dealing excreta of ironworking: black sand, coal dust, mounds of pot- and tap-cinder. Dominating all was Josiah’s coke furnace, ‘Bedlam Furnace’ as the men of Winterstoke had aptly christened it. The sulphurous fume from the heaps of coal coking on the level space near its bridge made the furnace a column of smoke by day. At night it became a pillar of fire, the skyward glare from its white-hot heart outshining the ruddier glow of the charcoal furnace below. When Josiah and his son, who was already becoming active in the works, looked down upon this creation of theirs, did they find it good? Did they ever question whither it was heading, or were they too absorbed by the fascinating problems of technical mastery to consider the future? We shall never know.
Although no history book has recorded it, February 15, 1722, was a date of momentous significance in the history of Winterstoke. For this day saw the successful birth, out of the molten womb of ‘Bedlam Furnace’, of the first cylinder for a Newcomen engine to be cast in iron. Never was birth more carefully prepared for or more anxiously awaited. The two Josiahs, father and son, were themselves the midwives. Nothing must be left to chance, for the big cylinder, over three feet in diameter, eight feet long and an inch thick, would tax the capacity of the furnace further than any casting so far made. The mould, fashioned and perfected, checked and rechecked with infinite labour and care, had been completed some time before but had been awaiting a moment when they could be assured of a strong and unfailing blast. Now that moment had come. For the past four days the February rains, sluicing down from curtains of cloud which hung low over Deepforest, had sent such a roaring spate of waters down the Lob that with all the wheels at work the ponds were still running weir. Old Josiah himself superintended the boys who, with their laden baskets or ‘boxes’, had stocked the furnace bridge with the exact proportions of coke, calcined limestone and ore. And later, standing below on the loom floor, it was he who, with no word spoken but only an impassive and scarcely perceptible nod of the head, signalled the furnaceman to broach the tapping hole. How vivid is the picture of that far-off dramatic moment. The furnaceman couching his tapping rod like a lance; the sudden scintillating sizzle of sparks as he breaks through the fireclay, and then the molten iron gushing out, its glare lighting up the circle of intently watchful faces. Even when the pouring had been satisfactorily completed there could be no assurance of success. That was only confirmed later when the big casting had cooled and when, after being cleared from the mould, it rang true under the fettling hammer.
To the Devonian, Thomas Newcomen, belongs the distinction of being the first man in the world to master and command a power other than that of wind or water. His first successful engine, erected near Dudley Castle in 1712, was the fruit often years’ labour and experiment. In the erection of this and many subsequent engines his name was linked with that of another Devonian, Thomas Savery. The latter had previously invented a machine for drawing water from mines by the vacuum produced by condensing steam. This machine had no moving parts and was never satisfactory in working, but Savery’s patent was so worded as to cover any possible method for ‘Raiseing of Water and occassioning Motion to all Sorts of Mill Work by the Impellent Force of Fire’. Therefore, until 1733, when the patent lapsed, Newcomen’s engines could only be built under licence from Savery and his successors who received royalties from them.
Although contemporaries called Newcomen’s invention a ‘fire engine’ and we would call it a steam engine, it was really neither. It was a vacuum or atmospheric engine. The most characteristic and noteworthy feature of the Newcomen engine was its ponderous wooden regulating beam. Poised on its central trunnions overhead, its ends formed segments of a circle over which rode the chains which connected them to piston and pump buckets respectively. When steam was admitted from the copper boiler to the lower, enclosed end of the vertical cylinder its pr
essure was so little above that of the atmosphere that the power it exerted on the piston was negligible. Rather was it the weight of the descending pump buckets which raised the piston to the top of its stroke. At this moment of the cycle the steam admission valve was closed and a jet of cold water was sprayed into the steam-filled cylinder. By condensing the steam, this created a vacuum below the piston which was therefore driven downwards through the cylinder by the pressure of the atmosphere acting on its upper surface. Thus did the engine perform its power stroke. Remarkably ingenious though it was, Newcomen’s working cycle involved the alternate heating and cooling of the cylinder and this continual heat loss made the engine uneconomical in fuel by the standards of a later day. It is not surprising that the first engines were installed to pump out the coal mines where plentiful supplies of fuel were at hand. In an attempt to minimize this defect, the cylinders of the earliest Newcomen engines were cast in brass, a metal which absorbed and lost heat rapidly. The thicker cylinders of cast iron were naturally less efficient, but improved foundry methods produced them so much more cheaply that iron replaced brass on all the larger engines.
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