That the church of St. Cenodoc was not razed completely like the rest of the village was not due to any religious scruples but to reasons romantic and aesthetic. The church stood in a shallow depression which the indefatigable Brown proposed to transform into a lake by diverting and damming up the waters of the Winterstoke brook. He suggested that the tower should be demolished, and the nave arcades re-erected on an elevated site at the end of one of his vistas where, as he pointed out to his patron, they would make a delightfully picturesque and romantic ruin. Meanwhile what was left of the church should, he proposed, remain to be submerged beneath the clear waters of his lake like a miniature Atlantis. The Earl called this plan a pretty conceit and commended Brown for his admirable sensibility and taste. Meanwhile James Wyatt was commissioned to build a church for the new village. The result was a lofty and imposing structure of cruciform plan with a dome at the crossing, built in that early Italian Renaissance style which the architect subsequently used to similar purpose in the chapel of Dodington in neighbouring Gloucestershire. The most striking interior feature of this new church of St. Cenodoc was the huge black marble catafalque surmounted by a spectral group of mourning figures, larger than life in white marble, which covered the entrance to the Hanmer vault in the chancel. So effectually did this phantasmagoria dominate the altar that an uninitiated visitor of heathen faith could be forgiven for supposing that this was a temple dedicated to the worship of the bygone Earls of Winterstoke.
Besides the Norman arcades of the old church, Lancelot Brown embellished his skilfully contrived vistas in the new park with many other features. A Palladian bridge carried the main drive across the newly-filled lake. There was also a Temple of Theseus, a rotunda, and a Grove of Virgil with a Grotto, not to mention various statues, urns, arbours and other minor objects skilfully disposed. The old gardens with their rigid, formal patterns of borders, of box and yew and pleached alley had no place whatever in the romantic landscape picture of Brown’s fashionable conception, and they were ruthlessly swept away. In their place a series of smooth balustraded terraces and broad stone steps led, on the lowest level, to a fountain of truly heroic proportions. Here the horses of Neptune’s chariot plunged in a great stone basin, sporting dolphins spouted and Mermen blew from their conches jets which soared ninety feet into the air. To provide the necessary head of water for this display a reservoir pent up the headwaters of the Winterstoke brook on Emberley hill and a Darley Bank beam engine, discreetly concealed, patiently pumped back the water to this reservoir from an underground culvert.
Although the River Wendle formed the southern boundary of the home park, Brown’s activities extended well beyond the river as far as the slopes of High Hanger Hill. Fortunately for his plans, standing on the terrace before Wyatt’s great façade, the colliery workings and the new building at Hanger Lane lay somewhat to the east of south. He was therefore able to plan a long vista between avenues of trees which would mask this evidence of vulgar activity and lead the eye over the river and onwards yet again to the very skyline of High Hanger where an obelisk one hundred feet high provided a dramatic full stop. From the top of this column the stone effigy of Ernest, sixth Earl of Winterstoke, wearing the wreath and toga of a Roman Emperor, gazed down over his domain. A tablet on the plinth of the column bore his name and title, the date in Roman numerals, and the singularly appropriate family motto, ‘What I have I hold’.
Chapter Five
THE FIRST important development at the Darley Bank Ironworks after the death of Josiah Leeds I in 1739 was the installation in 1742 of a Newcomen engine in place of the horse-pumps to return the waters of the Lob from the lowest level to the upper furnace pool. The pumping engine at High Hanger Pit had by then been in work for seven years, and Josiah II had been encouraged to take this step by its reliable working and by the practical experience which had been gained. From this time onwards the ‘fire engines’ employed by the Darley Bank Company in their ironworks and mines increased steadily in number, in power and in efficiency, and this development was accompanied by a corresponding increase in the manufacture of cylinders and other engine parts for customers.
By 1745 another of the pits at High Hanger which the Company now controlled had reached depths which could no longer be effectually drained by horse pumps, and here another Newcomen pump was built at the pithead. Ten years later, Josiah again rebuilt and heightened Bedlam Furnace, installing there an engine with a cylinder 5 feet in diameter and a stroke of 10 feet, a labouring giant which made the original High Hanger engine seem a puny thing. Its function was to circulate a constant flow of water to the wheel which, driving box bellows of improved design, supplied the blast to the furnace. This marked another significant stage in the process whereby the regularity of the beam engine made ironworking increasingly independent of the seasonal vagaries of water power. But this independence was purchased at a price. In the ironworks, as in the pits, for the old seasonal rhythm with enforced spells of labour and of rest such as the natural world orders for all other living things, the new unflagging mechanical power substituted its own relentless discipline. It could be said that man, of his own will, was making himself the slave of his own genius.
It was not Josiah II but his son Daniel who, in 1780, severed the last link between iron smelting and water-power at Darley Bank. For in that year he blew in for the first time the New Bank Furnace whose blast was provided, not by water-wheel and bellows, but by a blowing engine which, pumping air as previous engines had pumped water, delivered it to the furnace through a regulator which ensured an even blast. But by that time several other important changes had taken place. It is very unlikely that the Company would ever have built their New Bank Furnace had not the problem of producing a good bar iron from coke-smelted pig at last been solved.
With a few exceptions who were regarded as eccentric, the aristocratic rulers of eighteenth-century England who delighted to patronize the arts were not interested in the activities of horny-handed ironmasters. Fashionable society rang with the praises of architect, actor, or reigning wit, but of the much more significant work of the new industrialists we hear little or nothing despite the immense contributions which they were making to the revenues of great estates. Improvements in iron-smelting technique were not the subject of eager debate in salon, club or coffee-house. In this we may approve the standard of values of our ancestors but not their foresight. From the standpoint of history, the successful production of wrought iron by coke-smelting was an achievement of far greater moment that any work of eighteenth-century artist or craftsman. For the ironmaster’s blast furnace was the womb of industrial revolution, and each improvement in furnace technique meant that the machine could take another and more confident stride forward. True, the furnaces must have fuel, but that fuel could not be won without the aid of the engines which the furnaces begot. True that the expansion of trade depended on improving transport, but once again that improvement depended on iron. Without iron shoes no pack-horse could move; without iron fastenings no boat could be built. The Pennine valleys are sometimes considered the cradle of the new age, but without iron the inventions of Lombe, of Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton would have been still-born and the great mills never built. Cast iron and wrought iron were the sinews of the new world. If the production of wrought iron had continued to depend any longer on charcoal fuel, technical development in other directions would have ceased for England’s woodland resources were practically exhausted.
Until 1766 it had been considered quite impossible to smelt iron for the forge with coal or coke. It was argued that the alkaline vegetable salts in charcoal absorbed the sulphur in the iron which made it ‘short’ whereas neither coal nor coke could do this because these fuels themselves contained sulphur. But two ironworkers of Shropshire, Thomas and George Cranage, proved that if the coke-smelted pig iron was reheated in what was called a reverbertory furnace which kept the metal out of contact with the fuel, a perfectly satisfactory wrought iron could be produced withou
t the aid of charcoal. Although their method was soon superseded by the improved puddling process which is in use to-day and which was developed by Peter Onions and Henry Cort, it was the Cranage brothers who, by a comparatively simple discovery, first made the iron trade independent of the charcoal burner. Not that the prejudice of the smiths in favour of charcoal iron was easily overcome. It was only by artfully mixing coke iron in with consignments of charcoal iron unknown to the buyers that Josiah Leeds II was able to prove its suitability and secure its acceptance.
The effect of the new process at Darley Bank was immediate. Charcoal smelting in the old furnace ceased and it was soon rebuilt and blown in on coke fuel. Imports of charcoal pig iron to Darley Bank Wharf also ceased. Hitherto there had been little development in the forge since the second forge and slitting mill had been opened in 1720, and the Company’s output of bar iron had barely kept pace with the demand of the local smiths. It was the expansion of the Darley Bank casting trade which had marked the reign of Josiah Leeds I. But now the distinguishing feature of the Darley Bank works under Josiah II and Daniel was increasing activity in the forge. So far as ironmasters such as the Leeds family were concerned, the invention which made the expansion of wrought iron production possible could scarcely have come at a more opportune moment. For as Enclosure Act followed Enclosure Act from 1760 onwards, so the demand for bar iron and nailers’ rods soared. It was simply a repetition on a far greater scale of the social process which had accompanied the less radical enclosures of Tudor times. All over the country commoners and small freeholders who had hitherto subsisted either wholly or partly upon a share of the soil of England found themselves robbed of this unfailing source of livelihood. Except for the minority who could obtain work as labourers on the new enclosed farms, all must turn to some industrial employment. In Winterstoke and throughout the Midlands the trades which absorbed the majority were coal mining, ironworking and, above all, because it need not be so strictly localized, the domestic metal industry. The pack-trains of the powerful ironmongers and their agents—the ‘foggers’ as they were called—delivered rod and bar iron and collected finished goods in villages which had never before known the glare of the forge and the thud of the oliver in cottage outshuts. As a result this domestic iron industry in general and the nail trade in particular became appallingly overcrowded, a situation which was grossly exploited by the foggers. The old life of these countrymen had never been an easy one; it was never the rustic idyll which some romantic writers on rural England would have us suppose. But the life had been bred in the bone for generations and the seasons dictated its rhythm and its periods of rest. And so long as a man possessed land he possessed a sense of security which nothing else could give and could look the world in the face. But now in order to earn the barest necessities of life doled out to them by the foggers under the truck system, whole families of dispossessed countrymen, men, women and children must needs work at the forge from dawn until midnight. Thus, stubbornly, they fought to preserve their independence, to hold the family together and to avoid the ultimate degradation of ‘going on the Parish’. What were their opinions on the high park walls, the arbours, grottoes, temples and obelisks of Ernest Hanmer and Lancelot Brown? Perhaps, to use a countryman’s term, the sheer magnitude of their tragedy and its wantonness left them dumbstruck.
For Daniel Leeds and the Darley Bank Company these changes meant only one thing—more wrought iron. The ironmongers’ insatiable demand for rod and bar iron became too much for the old water-driven forges and slitting mills to satisfy and so the next important technical developments at Winterstoke took place. In 1782, two years after the New Bank Furnace with its direct blast engine had been blown in, a Watt rotative beam engine was built and installed by the Company to drive the helve hammers of a new forge. In 1788 a second Watt engine of similar type was driving a new and improved rolling and slitting mill. Hitherto the steam engines of High Hanger and Darley Bank had all been reciprocating pumps, but now Winterstoke saw for the first time an engine which was not only more efficient in its working but which had been endowed with rotative motion. It was thus a machine far more versatile in application which made obsolete the intermediary water-wheel. Once again the tempo of work on Darley Bank quickened in obedience to a pace set by these new machines. Could we but hear a series of sound recordings of the voice of the ironworks made in each decade of the eighteenth century, their cumulative effect, in quickening rhythm and gathering volume, would be reminiscent of Prokofief’s L’Apprentice Sorcière; the first muted rhythms of water-wheel, helve hammer, leathern bellows and horse-gin yielding, in mounting crescendo, to the surge and thunder of full orchestra and percussion in steam rolling mill and heavy forge.
James Watt’s particular contribution to this industrial overture was not rotative motion but an engine of vastly improved efficiency. The crank, the simplest form of deriving rotary from reciprocating motion, had been patented by James Pickard of Birmingham, and to circumvent this patent the two Watt engines at Darley Bank employed the more cumbersome method of sun-and-planet gearing which was soon to be discarded. The problem which Watt had set himself to solve was how to obviate the besetting fault of the Newcomen engine—that alternate heating and cooling of the cylinder which made the engine so inefficient. Watt’s solution was to exhaust the steam from the cylinder into a separate receiver and condense it there instead of in the cylinder itself. Although the working pressure was still low, Watts’ machine was a true steam engine, deriving its power from steam pressure aided to a limited extent by the vacuum created in his condenser and not, as in the Newcomen engine, from atmospheric pressure alone. At this time the efficiency of an engine was judged by its ‘duty’, which represented the number of gallons of water which could be raised one foot for each bushel of coal consumed. It is a measure of Watt’s achievement that the ‘duty’ of his first engine was nearly twenty-three million gallons as compared with the figure of 4.3 for the Newcomen. In a little over fifty years this ‘duty’ figure would rise to one hundred and fifty million gallons.
Because Watt’s design demanded much greater accuracy in construction and finish, for some years the inventor had been frustrated by a manufacturing technique unable to fulfil the demands he made upon it. One of the greatest difficulties was the machining of his cylinders. The old Newcomen cylinders had been bored at Darley Bank by means of a rotating boring bar which produced a bore that was perfectly circular but seldom truly parallel throughout its length. It was the great ironmaster, John Wilkinson of Berstham, who first succeeded in producing a machine capable of boring a cylinder to satisfy Watt’s more exacting standards. It was upon such a machine, whereon the cylinder revolved about a stationary boring bar, that the cylinders for these Watt engines were finished at Darley Bank.
The new engines with their demand for steam at higher pressure called for better boilers, but here the engines themselves helped to solve the problem by driving machines which revolutionized the art of the boiler makers. The first spherical iron boilers to supersede the copper boilers of the earliest Newcomen engines had to be made from small plates forged under the helve or ‘plating’ hammer, but now the steam-driven mill could roll plates four feet long, eight inches wide and half an inch thick. There was thus set in motion another of those cycles of expansion by which the revolution proceeded: more powerful engines, larger rolling mills, larger boiler plates, stronger boilers with fewer seams, higher steam pressures, more powerful engines. Within two decades the pioneer, Richard Trevithick, was using steam at a pressure of 145 pounds to the square inch, and demonstrating that a small direct-acting high pressure engine could deliver as much power as a ponderous beam engine many times its weight. But for the moment let us admire the engine of James Watt by contrast with the earlier Newcomen.
The Newcomen pump which delivers water back to the upper furnace pool has been made more efficient by the addition of what is known as a ‘pickle pot’ condenser to adapt it to the Watt cycle. Yet with the elimination of
water power in sight, its days are numbered and already it looks archaic. The massive but crude workmanship of the wooden regulating beam and the piston and pump chains with their wooden links and iron pins is so obviously that of millwrights versed in the medieval tradition of wind and water mill or horse gin. Its method of working is, as Samuel Smiles described, ‘a very painful process, accompanied by an extraordinary amount of wheezing, sighing, creaking, and bumping.’ But so soon as we enter the tall engine house beside the new rolling mill we realize that the age of wood is almost over; that this is the iron age and that the millwright is fast becoming a mechanical engineer. But he is still a great and proud craftsman. The engine is more cohesive in form, and the proportion of each part is more nicely adjusted to its purpose. And by contrast to the old Newcomen with what smooth precision do these parts move; the tireless swing of that long connecting rod to the planet wheel; the centrifugal governor wheeling round; the exact geometry of the parallel motion between beam and piston rod; the delicate levers of the gab valve gear rising and falling. Long after the architects had abandoned the classic tradition, the engineers, by a strange irony, would embody the proportions and symmetry of a vanished style in beam engines of monumental scale; engines in which graceful fluted columns of cast iron supported the great beam high overhead and where the shape of each part was determined not only by function but by classic form.
On the technicalities of the many different engines of Newcomen and Watt types which were built by the Darley Bank Company during the eighteenth century there is no need to dwell, but one engine, which was really a combination of both types, must be mentioned because of the important part which it played in the expansion of the High Hanger coalfield. This was the small two cylinder beam engine patented by Adam Heslop. Heslop’s steam or ‘hot’ cylinder was powered by steam pressure as on the Watt engine, but instead of exhausting into a condenser, the steam passed to the second ‘cold’ cylinder which actuated the other end of the beam and which produced additional power on the Newcomen ‘atmospheric’ principle when the steam was condensed. A connecting rod and crank on the atmospheric side of the beam produced rotary motion. Because the engine was neat and compact compared with its contemporaries, and because its two cylinders made it unusually smooth and flexible in operation, there was one particular duty for which it was ideally suited—it could replace the old horse gins for colliery winding. This little engine of Heslop’s, therefore, completed the conquest of steam at Winterstoke. It banished horse power from the pitheads just as the Watt engine had made the ironworks independent of water power. The new winding engines made a bizarre addition to the already sombre landscape of High Hanger for, unlike the earlier Newcomen pumps, they were not enclosed in engine houses but stood in the open beside their cupola-shaped boilers and tall smoke stacks. With their gaunt framework and nodding beams they might have been the animated skeletons of the armoured monsters which had once stalked through the tropical forests of the coal measures.
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