Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  The successful casting of their first Newcomen cylinder brought the Darley Bank Company a small but steady flow of orders, not only for further cylinders but for other engine parts: cylinder bottoms, pistons, pump barrels, valves and pipework. Whereas we think of an engine as a unit supplied and erected by a single manufacturer, the Newcomen engine was very different. Only the more vital parts whose production involved special equipment and skill were supplied by manufacturers such as the Darley Bank Company. Local labour erected the engines and carried out much of the work such as the construction of the regulating beam. Before 1733 only a few industrial undertakings were working upon a scale large enough to afford the cost of installing a Newcomen engine and paying the rental demanded by ‘The Proprietors of the Invention for Raising Water by Fire’ who held Thomas Savery’s patent after his death in 1715. But when the patent lapsed in 1733, the fact that rents were no longer payable combined with the improvement which had taken place in production methods led to a great increase in the number of engines built and therefore to an increased demand for castings from Darley Bank. For the same reason, although the first cylinder had been cast at Darley Bank in 1722, it was not until 1734 that Winterstoke could boast its first ‘Fire Engine’. This, a ‘bastard machine’, as the men called it, was erected at High Hanger coal pit to pump water from the deepening workings. Its introduction is indicative of the changes which were taking place in the Winterstoke coal industry.

  At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the coal industry, if such it could then be called, was still governed by the customary laws of the court of the manor of Winterstoke. The few who were digging coal at this time combined their coal getting with agriculture and in their eyes, as in those of the manor court, their black harvest was regarded in the same way as any other crop from their fields. Most of them were copyholders, their holdings being retained by copy of court roll, subject to the custom of the manor, and passing by surrender and admission in the court. As such they enjoyed the right freely to get coal both for their own use and for sale. It was, perhaps, the number of new immigrants to the district and the increase in coal working which resulted that led to the appearance in the manorial records of the 1630’s of a new distinction between ‘Free’ and ‘Customary’ copyholders. The free copyholders enjoyed the old rights, but the customary copyholders might only get coal for their own use and were prohibited from selling coal except under licence from the lord of the manor. This subject of mineral rights is a complex one because the position varied from manor to manor, but in the case of Winterstoke the distinction between two classes of copyholder no longer appears after the Restoration. It may safely be assumed that at this time Henry Hanmer succeeded in extinguishing altogether the rights of tenants freely to work minerals other than for their own use and reserved to himself and his heirs the exclusive right to the minerals under his estate. This step is important for it brought the Hanmer family greater wealth than ever the wool trade had done.

  The Earl’s mineral rights brought no immediate enrichment, for although the output of coal continued to increase, the workings were still on a small scale and carried on upon a basis which was still semi-domestic, the tenant of a working, or ‘adventurer’ as he was sometimes called, having the status of a yeoman farmer employing, perhaps, a dozen hands. It was Josiah Leed’s ‘Bedlam Furnace’ combined with the fact that the more easily accessible coal measures were rapidly being worked out, which changed the character of the Winterstoke coal industry. The success of Josiah’s coke smelting experiment made the delivery of a large and assured supply of coal to the furnace essential, and it was obvious to him that the present coal getters of High Hanger could not be depended upon to maintain that supply. Most of the coal he was using was drawn from that vertical shaft below High Hanger wood which had first been sunk over a century ago. The workings of this mine had since been considerably deepened and extended, and the lessee of the working rights was a certain Jacob Folliot, a descendant, no doubt, of the first Earl’s steward. By the standards of the time, Folliot and his twenty miners were drawing a considerable tonnage of coal from this pit, but he lacked capital and was fighting a losing battle against water in the bottom levels.

  Soon after Josiah Leeds had come to Darley Bank, Hannah Darley died and her share in the Darley Bank Company was taken up by Josiah and the Winterstoke Trustees in equal portions. So far, the ironworks and the works of the Wendle Navigation Company were the only examples of heavy capital investment in the area. But now, as Josiah explained to George Hanmer, further capital must be expended in the development of the mines if the ironworks were to continue to prosper and expand. Young George was no industrialist but a landowner whose interests remained rural, and in matters of this kind he had an implicit faith in Josiah’s judgment which, from a pecuniary point of view, was certainly not misplaced. So the High Hanger Pit, together with several smaller workings, was brought within the orbit of the Darley Bank Company, Jacob Folliot being appointed the Company’s mining manager. This marked the beginning of coal mining as a large-scale capital enterprise at Winterstoke, and within fifty years practically the entire output of coal from the High Hanger seams was being drawn from the Company’s mines.

  Josiah Leeds’ energy transformed High Hanger as rapidly as he had changed the face of Darley Bank. Cottages were built for the miners close to the pits at what later became known as Hanger Lane. Great stables were built to meet the increased demand for horse-power. The coal-drawing ‘whims’ and Josiah’s pumps in the new drainage shafts, each called for a pair of horses working continuously in four-hour shifts; ponies were now used in the pit to drag the corves of coal from the working face to the pit bottom on sleds; more horses were needed to draw the chaldrons of coal from the pithead to ‘Bedlam Furnace’ or to the new wharf on the Wendle for shipment. Increasing traffic soon made these ways so rutted and miry that they threatened to become impassable. So Josiah ordered precious timber to be felled, squared, and laid down for the wagon wheels to run upon, the longitudinals being braced at intervals by cross ties or ‘sleepers’. The pits, the ironworks and the wharf were thus soon linked by continuous wooden wagon ways or ‘ginny rails’.

  It was the miners of Winterstoke and not the ironworkers who were the first to sever their links with their rural past. Could we but meet the men who laboured at the furnaces, forges and foundries of Darley Bank in the first half of the eighteenth century we should realize that they were far from being ‘industrial workers’ in our sense of the term. Many were still part-time countrymen, while of those who were not, very few were more than one generation removed from the soil and revealed the ties of blood in a habit of mind and in figures of speech wherein the technical terms of their new trade were curiously mixed with country usages immemorially ancient. Such a mixture was natural so long as the iron harvest was dependent upon water power and the strength of men and horses. The furnaces might impose a new discipline, but despite Josiah’s horse-pumps, it was not yet a discipline impervious to seasonal change. Summer droughts and autumn rains still set the time for the blowing out and blowing in of the furnaces, while there could be no clearer proof of the vigour with which ancient rural custom survived in this alien environment of flame and smoke than that these occasions, especially the blowing out, should become the subject of celebration. Entries in the accounts of the Darley Bank Company for Blowing Out Beef and Blowing Out Beer show that a kind of fiery ‘harvest home’ supper took place at the Company’s expense when a furnace was extinguished. Perhaps our vulgar reference to an ample meal as ‘a good blow out’ may refer, not to any abnormal distention of the stomach, but to this forgotten festival. This customary blowing out supper is only one indication of a relationship between employer and employed at Darley Bank very different from that which obtains to-day and which makes it easier for us to understand how naturally, for those concerned in it, industrialism grew out of a rural environment. The leading hands at the furnace and in foundry, forge and slitting mill were con
tractors to the Company rather than employees and they employed, and were solely responsible for, their own labour. Except for the fact that they did not own the heavy plant and buildings, they were thus master men and as such they possessed a far higher status than any foreman or works manager to-day. Helped by a common nonconformist faith which recognized no distinctions, they met Josiah Leeds as equals.

  The organization of labour at the High Hanger pits was similar. The miners were of the same country stock as the ironworkers, were men of similar habits of mind and independent temper. It was the nature of their trade which divorced them so speedily and so completely from their old environment that Hanger Lane became a place apart, the home of a community whose life was ordered, governed and knit together by the perils, the exacting labour and the special knowledge of a world unknown to outsiders. Even the language of the men who squatted on their hams before the doorsteps of Hanger Lane was often unintelligible to the laymen with its talk of ‘sides of work’ or ‘benches’ or ‘slippers’ and ‘fire stink’. For they were among the first to invade that lost land of semi-tropical forests which had flourished century after century in the swamps left by the ebb of the Silurian sea only to be submerged finally like Atlantis and petrified in that great tomb of the ten-yard seam which stretches across middle England. So that the furnaces of Darley Bank might feed upon the stored energies of primordial summers, the plodding ginny horses lowered the men of Hanger Lane down to catacombs where life and work was no longer effected, sweetened or varied by any natural rhythm of time or season, of daylight or darkness, of summer’s heat or winter’s cold. The invariable temperature of the pit was that of the earth itself; its reverberating sounds: clink of picks, rumble of sleds, or the sudden crash of undercut coal, only seemed to accentuate its sinister silences just as the feeble flicker of a miner’s candle emphasized the immanence of a darkness so unnatural in its totality as to be almost palpable.

  High Hanger pit was worked upon what became known as the pillar and stall system. Its galleries led to the ‘sides of work’ which consisted of a series of symmetrical chambers in which the roof was supported by four massive columns of coal and by a series of smaller pillars whose number varied according to the miners’ estimation of the safety of the roof. Upon that judgment their lives depended. Added to the risk of roof fall was the other ever-present peril of fire damp, a deadly mixture of air and finely suspended coal dust which could ignite and ‘flash’ spontaneously and which, in spite of the fact that the miners called it a ‘stink’, was quite odourless. Such a flash brought either death by burning or by suffocation from the equally deadly after-damp, but it was found that the ‘pillar and stall’ system tended to confine the danger to the particular chamber where the flash occurred.

  The method of working was to undercut the ‘benches’, as the lower part of the seam was called, and then, having cleared away the coal and waste to be carried through the galleries to the ‘pit eye’, to dislodge the overhanging coal in the upper seam or ‘slipper’ with wedges and hammers. This work was hard and hazardous enough, but when the chamber had been excavated to the maximum customary size, which was usually about fifty yards square, there still remained the task which involved the greatest danger of falls and fire-damp explosion. This was known as working ‘at twice’ and consisted of weakening the supporting pillars so as to encourage the roof to fall in. When it had fallen, some of the coal in the pillars could be recovered although a great deal was inevitably wasted. Because fire-damp is a mixture of air and fine coal dust, the danger of explosion is greatest in a dry pit, so that in this respect the extreme wetness of the High Hanger workings was an advantage. But the miners paid heavily for their comparative safety when they lay or crouched half-submerged in coal-blackened water, squinting upwards through narrowed eyes as they hacked away at the benches. It had been possible to drain the shallower workings on the hill slopes by driving tunnels to their lowest point, but as the deep pit followed the inclination of the seam to ever deeper levels, so water was encountered in greater volume, water which could not be drained by natural means and which began to tax the horse gins to the utmost. This was the situation which, in 1734, led to the erection of the Newcomen engine at the head of High Hanger pit.

  No wonder the miners christened this engine a ‘bastard machine’. Not only was its appearance strange beyond all precedent, but to ears hitherto accustomed only to the creak of horse gins it spoke with a strange voice. Enclosed in a brick engine house, the protruding pump end of its regulator beam with its dependent chains resembled the head and beak of some enormous bird, pecking into the depths of the pit with a motion so lifelike and yet, in its unvarying and unwearied monotony, so unlike life that it might provoke that same disquiet which the nodding head of a mannikin inspires; a disquiet that is no less than the ancient fear of all questionable shapes which, being dead, assume the semblance of life. It would not be surprising if this automaton of Thomas Newcomen’s awoke such sleeping terrors in those who for the first time watched the slow but unfaltering precision of its motion or heard, coming from within the tall engine house, the laboured breathing of the new power sigh and sob ceaselessly with each repetitive effort. In familiarity, fear of the new machines would soon be forgotten. To-day, the memory of this first engine is only preserved in the name of the ‘New Invention’ Inn at Hanger Lane.

  The livelihood of those below ground depended entirely upon the tireless exertions of this automaton, but as the price of its efforts it subordinated its attendants to its own mechanical rhythm which, like the life in the black depths of pit into which its pump rods fell, was arbitrary and in no way related to any natural rhythm set by sun or moon.

  The installation of this new power at High Hanger pit inaugurated at Winterstoke the first of those great cycles of expansion which gave the industrial revolution a gathering momentum like that of a great flywheel. The fact that it enabled the pits to be driven deeper into the coal seams meant more and cheaper coal. More and cheaper coal meant more and cheaper iron, which in turn produced larger and more powerful engines which could bring about another repetition of the same cycle of cause and effect. With the coming of this engine and the death of Josiah Leeds I, which occurred five years later, the first vital period of industrial expansion may be said to have come to an end. During the long reign of Josiah II at Darley Bank that expansion would proceed yet more rapidly upon its triumphal way.

  Chapter Four

  ‘EVERYTHING THAT GROWS holds in perfection but a little moment’. Ripeness is all, yet the fruit is no sooner ripe than it is rotten; the flower no sooner full than overblown, faded and fallen. Should we savour the beauties of the world so keenly were it not for the knowledge of this transience? Certainly we esteem most exquisite a loveliness which we know is doomed soon to pass away or which, in retrospect, may be seen to carry within it the seeds of its own mortality. This is as true of the works of man as it is of natural things. The century following the Restoration witnessed the development of industrial techniques which, judged by any valid moral or aesthetic standard, were destined to become the most desolating and destructive force which the world has ever known. Yet this development was accompanied by a flowering of craftsmanship of a perfection never seen before in England and, as we know now, never to be seen again. With the swift decay and fall of that flower in the nineteenth century we are familiar, for the evidence, as remote from our time as the monuments of the ancient world, lies all about us. Much more mysterious are the circumstances which produced so sudden and so prodigious a blossoming at that very same moment in history when there were sewn the tares which would destroy it. For although only a few great names survive in popular esteem, the genius which created this all too brief golden age of the visual arts was not the monopoly of a small minority but was in widest commonalty spread. Unknown country craftsmen could execute work which was little, if at all, inferior to that of the great masters and which makes the task of attribution difficult for those who treasure these past r
iches. An infallible and instinctive sense of fitness and proportion which is at other times either wholly lacking or vouchsafed only to a chosen few, suddenly inspired the vision and informed the hands of a whole people. Certainly for a time, but for a time only, it seemed that they were incapable of making any ugly thing, and by what other or better standard than this are we to judge the achievement of a civilization?

  To appreciate to the full this tragic paradox of flower and tare growing in the same soil there is no need for us to travel far from the flare and fume of Bedlam Furnace or from the close darkness of High Hanger Pit. We have only to cross the Wendle, stroll through the formal gardens of Winterstoke Place, and then wander in imagination through the splendid apartments of the house itself. Wrought iron gates screen but do not conceal terrace from terrace of the garden, superimposing upon their background of sky, green tree and flower a spider web of metal as delicate in its complexity of loop and scroll and slender vertical as silver filigree work. Surely, we might say, only the hammer of Jean Tijou could transform so intractable and unpromising a material into a screen of such lightness and grace. But we should be wrong. The gates were forged by an unnamed local smith from rods that had been wrought and slit in Alfred Darley’s mill. The same is true of the house. To the order of Henry Hanmer it was much altered, and its interior completely replanned and redecorated. Who was the architect? Certainly it was not Wren although it would seem to be the work of some outstanding genius. Could William Talman or Robert Hooke be the author? Possibly, but more likely it was the work of some architect quite unknown. Though classical in conception, the execution could only belong to the English tradition. We know from surviving records that it was not the Italian Antonio Verrio but his English peer, Sir James Thornhill, who painted ceiling and fresco, fancifully including a portrait of his noble patron, heavily periwigged, being escorted through his garden by lightly-clad muses who seek to entwine him in their garlands. But of the other masters who helped to create the rococo splendour of Winterstoke, who wrought those ceilings with their heavy yet perfectly-proportioned mouldings of fruit and flowers, of twined oak and acanthus leaf, we know nothing. If we should suspect the hand of Gabriel Cibber or Gibbons in the carving of marble fireplace, or of pine panel or doorcase, again we do but honour the unknown dead. Most probably these carvers, too, were local men, for even such details as doorlocks and furniture or hearthgrates are exquisite in workmanship and design but would certainly have been made locally. As we wander, visitants from a twilit future, from beauty to beauty in these now vanished rooms, furniture, china, silverware, clocks by Quare or Tompion, books in superb bindings of tooled morocco, everything however small or mundane that the eye rests upon displays the same virtuosity, a prodigality of craftsmanship which can never be either overwhelming or individually ostentatious because its natural exuberance is perfectly controlled and disciplined.