Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  Despite his responsibilities at Great Ketton, Sir Richard did not relax his control over the affairs of his brewery where expanded buildings, new vats and new makings were the tangible evidence of success. But he placed his son Henry in charge of the Winterstoke Steam Milling Company, and this confidence was not misplaced. Sir Richard was inordinately proud of Henry. He had been able to give him the polish of an expensive education which he himself had lacked, but Henry was an apt pupil, and beneath this smooth surface finish was a character as hard and calculating as his father’s. ‘A chip of the old block’ Sir Richard called him and the derelict water mills along the Wendle were the measure of young Blenkinsop’s first business success. Admittedly it was not a particularly hard-won victory. When wheat disappeared from the fields of the Wendle valley and the truck-loads of imported grain waited their turn to be shunted under the hoists of the steam mill, it was a walk-over for Henry. Winterstoke Lower Mill had already disappeared for it had been the scene of old Amos Blenkinsop’s first essay in the milling trade and the Brewery now occupied its site. But the Upper Mill and the Mill at St. John’s both fell silent as a result of Henry’s enterprise. Soon all along the Wendle and its tributaries broken-down weirs, rotting wheels and races choked with reeds and mud told the same tale as derelict pastures and ruined barns. Only the Abbey Mill, grinding grist for the Winterstoke estate, survived until the first world war. With the passing of these water mills, the life of the river came to an end for the last of the Wendle barges furled its sail in 1870. Even its wild life deserted it, for the river had become Winterstoke’s sewer and in water so polluted that even the vegetation shrank from its margins neither fish nor fowl could survive.

  Sir Richard Blenkinsop looked upon the running of the Steam Mill as mere ’prentice work for the career he had planned for Henry. With no more competition than a bunch of illiterate country millers could provide, success was too easy. The lad was made for sterner stuff and an excellent opportunity to try his metal soon occurred. In 1875 at the age of eighty-two, but hale and hearty to the last, old Thomas Leeds died and his passing marked the end of a long era in the history of Winterstoke. He left no heir and his chief executor, his younger brother John Leeds, was the only surviving male representative of the family. John had been a prominent nonconformist minister in the Midshire circuit for many years. He had never played any active part in the affairs of the Darley Bank Company and was not prepared, at his advanced age, to step into his brother’s shoes. But he had inherited his share of the family’s shrewdness and it did not take him long to discover that all was not well with the affairs of the Company. The autocratic old man had held the reins of the business in his hands to the last, but even had those hands been younger and more sensitive to the demands of the hour, the Company had grown too big and unwieldy to be handled in the old fashion by a single pilot. There is always a risk that in such a position a practical man will neglect the wood for the trees in the guise of particular technical problems. This had proved true in the case of Thomas Leeds. Ever since the days of his youth when the Company had built the Hurricane, the steam locomotive had absorbed his whole interest until in old age its perfection had become almost an obsession with him. That each locomotive which the Company built should be better than the last was a principle to which every other consideration was sacrificed and that some of the splendid machines turned out at Darley Bank during his régime should be still at work is tribute enough to the achievements of old Thomas and his craftsmen. But, alas, while these locomotives undoubtedly enhanced the reputation of the Company, the profit and loss accounts on which Thomas turned his blind eye coldly revealed that they were too costly a form of advertising. The Company had been gradually falling behind in the hard commercial and technical race with the result that its methods and much of its equipment had already become out-of-date. For while Thomas had been absorbed with his locomotives the new steels, combined with the new standards of precision made possible by the work of Maudslay and Joseph Whitworth, were revolutionizing industry. Moreover, as John Leeds and his co-executors soon discovered, the managers and ‘overmen’ of mines, furnaces, rolling and slitting mills had taken advantage of their independence and lack of supervision by feathering their own nests rather than that of the Company. It was a serious situation which must obviously be fully discussed with the surviving proprietor, George, eighth Earl of Winterstoke.

  So it came about that a bleak winter’s morning found old John Leeds, an incongruous and lonely figure in his suit of sombre black amid the cold magnificence of Wyatt’s pillared hall, awaiting an audience with his Lordship. It was destined to be the last meeting between the two great families, although its significance could not be realized by either party at the time. Declining the offer of a glass of Madeira, the minister went straight to business whereupon it speedily became apparent that Lord George, the man of property, was no more capable of setting the Company’s house in order than the man of God, indeed rather less so. Perhaps both recognized that they represented an ancient régime, that this brazen new world was beyond them and that they had become as much a part of history as the splendid room in which they sat. At all events, these two proud men reached a decision which must have been hard for them and which must surely have made old Thomas Leeds turn in his grave. Sir Richard Blenkinsop should be consulted forthwith.

  Now Sir Richard was flattered but not in the least surprised when he was invited to a meeting with the Earl in the presence of John Leeds at Winterstoke Park. He had been keeping a sure but discreet finger on the pulse of the Darley Bank Company for some time, so he had his answers ready and prescribed his infallible specific for ailing businesses—an injection of new capital and new blood. He suggested that the coal-mining and the engineering and iron-founding activities of the Company should be separated and that two new public companies should be floated for the purpose of taking over these assets, and providing the necessary capital for their proper development. As for the Company’s furnaces and rolling mill, developments in the steel industry would render them obsolete in a few years’ time if they were not so already, and he regarded them as liabilities. It would pay a new engineering company better to buy in the raw material it required for its forge and foundry from more specialized producers than to keep its own furnaces in blast for the purpose. Lord Winterstoke and the legatees of Thomas Leeds could either sell their holdings in toto or in part to the new companies or take up shares in one or both of them to the extent of such holdings at a valuation which must in any event be made. In such cold and prosaic terms as these, the old Darley Bank Company received sentence of death. For in Sir Richard’s philosophy there was no room for sentiment in business; it was a ruthless game in which no holds were barred and in which money was either made or lost according to the proficiency and strength of the player.

  In the event, Lord Winterstoke and the Leeds legatees decided to retain holdings in the newly-formed High Hanger & Camp Colliery Company but to sell out their interests in the works at Darley Bank. This suited Sir Richard’s book admirably for it enabled him, in the name of his son, to obtain a controlling interest in the Darley Bank Forge & Engineering Company and to install Henry as its first managing director. To the discomfiture of many of the older hands, the new broom lost no time in sweeping clean and the whole internal organization of the works was remodelled by Henry on the lines laid down by his father at Great Ketton. New Bank and Bedlam furnaces were blown out and dismantled. Beam blowing engines, rotative mill engines, rolling mill and forge machinery, all the plant which had been the pride of old Daniel Leeds’ eye and the last word in technical development fifty years before had become obsolete by the standards of Great Ketton. All were ruthlessly broken up and in the new cupolas of the Darley Bank foundry or the furnaces of Ketton returned to the molten womb whence they had come. Soon all that remained of the old ironworks was a few broken brick ends, a few obstinate, half-buried hulks of rusting metal and the great mounds of pot and tap cinder which resembled the vomi
t of some extinct volcano and where, in green mosses and occasional clumps of tenacious willow-herb, nature was struggling to reassert herself. In place of the old, new machines appeared in strange shapes and with new voices. The metronomic rhythm of the tilt hammer which, whether water or steam driven, had been the heart-beat of the Darley Bank forge ever since the days of Alfred Darley was heard no more.

  In the new forge the beat of each heavy drop stamp, of each one of the battery of Nasmyth steam hammers that stooped like bow-legged titans over the glowing forgings made its own individual and variable contribution to a confused and earth-shaking thunder of percussion. From the machine-shop, too, came strange voices, the urgent rasp and chatter of new tools which the steels of Great Ketton had made possible and which would in their turn beget their still more accurate and efficient successors. Wheel lathes, boring lathes, turret and capstan lathes; radial drilling machines, planing machines, shaping machines, all less cumbrous in form and motion than their predecessors, but more complex and more formidable in their speed and deft precision of movement. All these were powered by a steam engine of entirely different form. Gone was the old beam engine which had towered vertically in a tall and narrow engine house. The new giant, a mighty horizontal, tandem-compound mill engine with a fifteen-foot flywheel, reclined behind altar rails of polished steel like some recumbent god in an immaculately tiled and whitewashed temple incensed with the acrid odour of hot cylinder oil. No harsh or discordant sounds of mechanical effort disturbed the almost cloistral quiet of this new engine house where even the engine men seemed to speak in lowered voices and to move soft-footed over the polished floor. With so perfect a poise and balance was the power of this engine now harnessed that its great wheel revolved and the long burnished arm of its connecting rod rose and fell with no tremor of vibration, while the massive crosshead slid through its well-oiled guides with little more sound than that of heavy breathing.

  These new and smoothly efficient machines which populated the workshops of Darley Bank represented the mechanical incarnation of the mind which now controlled the destinies of the undertaking. Not that Henry Blenkinsop had any share in their design or installation for he was no more of an engineer than his father was but used his inherited ability to find and pay the best men for the job. He was no progressive idealist dreaming of mechanical Utopias nor did he, like the Leeds dynasty, regard the development of the Darley Bank Forge as an end in itself, as an absorbing succession of technical problems to be wrestled with and overcome. But to a far greater degree than his father, Henry Blenkinsop was obsessed by the desire for power in all its manifestations: the power of money which gave him dominion over men; the power of efficient machinery which enabled him to subdue intractable materials and conquer his commercial rivals. The whole elaborate and impersonal organization which he succeeded in building up over the years at Darley Bank was the fruit of his relentless and insatiable pursuit of power.

  Henry more than fulfilled his father’s hopes. A knight baronet, Member of Parliament, head of a great engineering firm with a world-wide reputation, director of many public companies; successor to his father on the boards of the Great Ketton Steel Company and the Great North-Western Railway, his career was a model of success as success was measured in Victorian England. Unfortunately, old Sir Richard did not live to see his son set the final seal on the family aspirations when, comparatively late in life, he married Letitia Hanmer, sole heiress of Winterstoke, and was subsequently rewarded for his many services to industry with the title of Baron Winterstoke, first of the new creation. Yet despite this glittering record, of all the characters who have so far played a part in this story of Winterstoke, that of Henry Blenkinsop is the most unsympathetic and the least enviable. The Hanmers were ambitious and pursued wealth and power in ways which were sometimes as ruthless and as unscrupulous as those of any commercial magnate. But for them the pursuit was never an end in itself. It was a means which enabled them to create a long tradition of gracious living, to patronize the arts of the golden age and so to surround themselves with a store of beauty for the enrichment of their posterity. The Leeds family set no store by the beauties of the world, but neither did they seek wealth and power. They were content to live simply and to derive a craftsman’s satisfaction from the work of their hands and brains, enhanced by the misguided but none the less sincere belief that they worked for the lasting benefit of mankind. But Henry Blenkinsop sacrificed all such rewards and satisfactions to the indulgence of the most barren and fatal appetite that can afflict the human mind. He also sacrificed the warmth of human friendship and sympathy, for there is no one so lonely and unloved as the man who makes himself the incarnate symbol of material power. Like his father before him he enriched his native town by his enterprise and by various benefactions and endowments but they did not make his name beloved. For these contributions were never wholly disinterested, being calculated either to yield a dividend or to promote the name of Blenkinsop with an eye to further honours. Moreover, the town accepted his gifts in the spirit in which they were given, for they expected such crumbs to fall from his table, knowing very well that they were but crumbs when measured by the scale of his fortune. Although the first Baron Winterstoke died full of wealth and honours and although a statue of him was to be seen in Winterstoke until 1941, his name is now forgotten where those of the Hanmers and the Leeds have become part of a remembered tradition. Neither practising nor patronizing any art, he created nothing of lasting worth or beauty and left behind him no memorials other than the great organizations of the Darley Bank Forge and the Ketton Steelworks. But they were machines far too efficient to falter when their designer’s hand dropped from the controls.

  Chapter Ten

  WHILE THE INDUSTRIES of Winterstoke were undergoing their nineteenth-century transformation, the town itself began to change its shape, or rather a recognizable shape began to emerge out of chaos as one by one there arrived the amenities and institutions with which we are familiar. In the dusty files of the Winterstoke Sentinel which made its first appearance in 1840 we may read, for example, the pæans of praise which accompanied the paving of the streets, the opening of gas and water works and of new town and market halls. Each in turn was described as a remarkable combination of art and industry and a milestone along the road of human progress. But to-day the inhabitants of Winterstoke have grown so accustomed to these monuments of the Victorian age that if they were asked to describe their appearance in any detail they would be quite unable to do so. Like the clock on the domestic mantelpiece they have become so familiar that they never consciously see them and would only become aware of them if they disappeared or ceased to tick. The basket and bag laden throng which packs the market hall every Saturday afternoon never notices the quite astonishing neo-Gothic elaboration of the ironwork with which the painstaking moulders of the Darley Bank foundry enriched each pillar and truss of this lofty shed which lurks, filled with echoes and the smell of bad fish, behind an imposing false façade of stone in Bridge Street. Not one among the thousands who hurry past the Town Hall every day looks up at its prickly Gothic pinnacles, at the grime-laden intricacies of variegated brickwork, Purbeck stone mouldings and columns of coloured marble, or pauses to ponder over the incongruous absurdity of its romantic balcony where a succession of portly mayors or town clerks have announced election results or other important events to an expectant populace.

  When Sir Richard Blenkinsop built ‘Cedar Lodge’, an imposing stucco villa standing in spacious grounds off the Coltisham Road, he chose a kind of debased Italianate style. Was it because Sir Richard also founded the Winterstoke Gas Light & Coke Company, that this same style reappears in the Gaswork’s retort house? We may think it inappropriate in a building which, hemmed in by dropsical gasometers, belches smoke from every cranny at not infrequent intervals. Similarly we may wonder why the municipal pumping station by the upper Wendle should present the appearance of an elaborate fortification, and why it was necessary to provide even the top of
its chimney stack with a crenellated parapet. Was the architect an enthusiastic reader of the novels of Sir Walter Scott or did he dream of building a tower for the Lady of Shallot instead of a flue for a Lancashire boiler? With the passing of the years, some of us begin to see these Victorian buildings once again, but perhaps only a visitor from some other planet or from a remote past could ever appreciate them to the full. It requires that unclouded eye of wonder and surmise which we, alas, have lost. The only nineteenth-century public building in Winterstoke which has never aspired to resemble anything but its own mundane self is the sewage works, which, with its odorous outfalls and filter beds, was established on the island formed by the lock cut and the old channel of the river.