The Derwent Iron Works

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The Derwent Iron Works, Consett in 1860

Chapter One

The Derwent Iron Works, Consett, in 1860 was the largest in all of England. They formed in themselves as a very prominent object of Consett town. A more complete establishment was, perhaps, nowhere to be found.
To the visitor, in Derwent iron works the vast works presented an object of curiosity, wonder, and awe.
If you entered the works by the turnpike leading from Consett down to Blackhill, the entrance was a complete highway in point of space. You would have imagined, but for the roaring and hissing of the steam engines, the clatter of the steam hammers and all the other accessories, that you were entering a large village.
The spell was broken almost before it had been laid hold of the observer’s mind.
Crossing you in all directions were lines of railway. In all directions, the loaded wagons were hurrying on, either with articles used in the manufactures that were going on around or bringing away massive wheels, plates, bars, and a thousand other things.
An inadequate idea could have been formed of the extent and capacity of the works when they state that they covered upwards of seventy acres of land and was intersected at all points with their own railways. The total length of line which had been laid down was twenty miles. These lines, at the time, gave employment to no fewer than five steam locomotive engines.
So much had the economy of manual labor been studied, that these railways ran to the very mouths of the various forges, blasting furnace, engineer’s shops, finishing-rooms, etc.

It would have struck you at once that provision on the largest scale had been made for facilitating work with the utmost dispatch and that completeness reigned on every hand which none but a most enterprising firm could have achieved.
The company not only smelt their own ore and manufactured the most used and heaviest articles in engineering and shipbuilding purposes. They also raised their own coal. This gave employment to seven hundred and sixty-nine men and boys in their collieries. Those mines were: The Delves, the Bradley, the Iveston, the Medomsley Busty Seam, the Medomsley Derwent, and the Eden Pits.


In addition to those six collieries, the company opened a new coalfield called “The Medomsley Cut” and from all of them combined they raised 13,400 tons per week. All of the coal raised was consumed at their ironworks. Not a chaldren was won for exportation or sale to manufacturers or others at home.
All of this immense quantity of coal was raised within three miles of the company’s ironworks.
The company had eleven blast furnaces in blast at that time. There were six at Crookhall, another establishment of the company, and five at Consett.

Iron stone (Derwent Iron Works)

The ironstone that was used by the company, or rather the bulk of it, was received from the Cleveland district, at the rate of 3,100 tons per week. They also rose from their own workings in the Medomsley and Iveston royalties about 100 tons per week. In addition to this, they received about 700 tons per week of Hematite ore from Whitehaven. This gave a total of nearly 4,000 tons of ore was received per week.
In the ore that was blasted each week at the works 5,000 tons of coal were consumed, producing 2,000 tons of metal.
The puddling department consisted of eighty-six furnaces, employing 172 puddlers, 172 under-hands, 23 shinglers, besides a number of helpers and ten rollers with helpers. The produce of these mills averaged 800 tons per week of pig iron. When refined iron was used the amount produced was 1000 tons per week. In addition to the above named skilled hands, there were 250 men and boys employed as laborers in the puddling mills.
The large rail mill, connected with and formed a conspicuous part of the works, was capable of producing 1,000 tons of finished rails per week.
The heaters, rollers, laborers, etc., employed in that department, numbered 280 men and boys.
The plate mills, five in number were capable of producing 400 tons of manufactured iron per week and gave employment to 240 men and boys.
The bar-iron mills produced 100 tons of bar-iron per week and employed 50 men and boys. In addition to these, there were the locomotive and wagon departments also the engineers, the coke ovens, etc., employed a great number of hands, a return of which we have not yet been furnished.

Summarizing here, we find the following startling results:-

Coal raised, per week ………………………13,400 tons
Metal manufactured per ditto …………..2000 tons
Manufactured iron per ditto ……………..2,000 tons
Men and boys employed, nearly ………..4,000
Wages paid per fortnight …………………..£6,000

Vast as were the dominions of the Derwent Iron Works and formidable and striking as they appeared in the broad daylight, the appearance at dead of night was still more striking
A reporter had the opportunity of inspecting them both by day and by night, and to the latter view of the works, we will devote a few words.
When approaching these domains of fire and smoke from the Blackhill turnpike, the scene was one of almost unequaled grandeur. The darkness of night only tended to bring out the scene in stronger relief. On the left, rising above their fellows, were seven blast furnaces, from five of which a vast sheet of white fire towered away through a cloud of white smoke
These blasting furnaces were like so many Martello towers, the remembrance of the existence of which upon the South East Coast of England had been brought to mind by the exploits of Sir W. G. Armstrong’s guns. One of the rifled 40-pounders had leveled one of these brick-work towers with mother earth.

Blast furnace used in Derwent Iron Works

As you looked at these furnaces, roaring and emitting their bright, vast volumes of fire, it struck you that they were a huge and fitting entrance to that domain of the mythological Vulcan, who, great as may have been his powers either with the stroke hammer or at the anvil, in his own time and among his own kith and kin, would figure as the veriest Lilliputian among the brawny Hercules’s who sweat and toil there from day to day and from year to year.
Nor could you help to believe that Milton with his rolling, tumbling angels, as down they fall into the bottomless pit. As well as Dante in his INFERNO; or our own neighborhood of the Tyneside, Martin the painter, might have the two former been permitted to witness those sheets of the flame of various hues, from the bright white heat down to the dullest red, or the latter had he taken the trouble to view them, or had been enabled to form a better notion of the regions of Pandemonium than they ever dreamt of.
Let your eye, now traverse along the outline of these works, taking in the blast furnaces, and following the outlines of buildings from the extreme left to the extreme right. To the eye, from the stand-point on the Blackhill and Consett turnpike road, these buildings presented the form of a huge crescent, of apparently 300 yards in length. At the foot of the blast furnaces and to their front were a row of refining furnaces, in which iron was refined. From these, a dark red and green flame was emanating, along with a most internal, loud, creaking noise as if the imps of Vulcan were trying, how terrible they could make their abode. Truly if that other mythological being, Cyclops, instead of occupying the fairest of lands skirted by the most charming of seacoasts, had found a habitation in such a place as there, few of the superstitious ones from the neighboring shores would venture to disturb his quietude. He might have daily milked his 100 goats for the delectation of his own capacious maw and remained unknown in his own borders.
Let the eye travel on to another group of monsters…the boilers, which lay half-buried in the earth, and in countless numbers; but securely as they occupied the place allotted to them-a sort of half ambush-they never failed to make known their presence.
Imagine several rows of ponderous hot-water kettles and every stack made up of ten or twenty boilers-puffing and whistling, whilst the white steam curls up far above the buildings, the light of a hundred adjacent fires revealing the wreaths as they ascend up and mingle with the denser and blacker volumes of smoke which the forges belch forth.

Go on to the right, and what a scene of bustle and activity was presented all along that crescent-like group of buildings. The doors were wide open, and hundreds of men and boys flit through the scene like specters in a vision. Close up to the doors of some of the buildings the puddlers were seen at work. Excepting a pair of trousers, they were as naked as the day they were born. The bone and sinew of England were here to be seen in all its might and energy. Every man and boy is at his post-the processes were being worked out, and activity, strength, and rapidity, marked the exertions of every soul.

A bright flash of fire lights up the group every now and again, as the puddling furnace door was raised, and the stalwart puddler and his under-hand grasped with iron implements a huge ball of fire. It is a puddle ball of iron in a soft-sometimes in a half liquid state. when it appears at the mouth of the furnace-hole; in an instant, one of the boys thrust forward his iron-car, receives the ball upon its circular, cup-like end, and whirling round, trotted off with his burden to the forge hammer. These balls slightly varied in weight, but as near could be they weighed one hundredweight. The door of the furnace was let down as soon as the ball came forth, and the group of men and lads at the puddling hole mouth are for a few seconds left in comparative darkness.
Another group then demands attention. These men surrounded the forge hammer-every man at his place. The red hot ball was hurled off the bogie, and a man or two seized it with tongs and placed it under the hammer. As the hammer once more descended, the sound it produced in contact with the hot metal was dull and heavy, but as it rose and fell, stroke upon stroke, the blows became more distinct in the ear, the iron under process became harder or acquired the requisite amount of cohesion.
The hammer-men continued to turn the now bar-shaped lump until it had been drawn out into an oblong slab of about six or seven inches in width. An inch in thickness and perhaps two feet six inches in length.
This hammering process displayed another fine grouping of men and boys, the strength of the former being only equaled by the agility of the blackened little imps who flitted about in all directions, as earnest-countenanced as if the fate of nations more than that of a ball of iron depended upon their unceasing exertions.

On the process went, however, in spite of our interpolation; and the small boy with his little iron chariot again shoots off with the now flattened plate. Now the plate was passed through the rollers, pushed from one side and caught at the other by the rollers and their assistants. These plates were then sent to another department, where several of them were piled, re-heated, again placed under the forge hammer, battered into one lump or bar, rolled again, and a plate was produced which would weigh no less than thirty hundred-weight. Thus boilerplates, plates for steel rammed frigates, railway bars, and a thousand other things were formed, cut, and finished for use.

Hammering Process in Derwent Iron Works

In noticing these processes, you had almost lost sight of the contour and appearance of the place at night. On getting a little nearer to the huge manufactory, it slightly changed its appearance, taking now the form of an immense triangle. One side of which was formed of the long row of cottages in the foreground, known as the Staffordshire-row. All was blaze and smoke, and hissing and hammering. Behind these cottages, along by the side of which, skirting the high road, were a few gas-lights. These, in the nightly illumination of the works, were almost ludicrously small, dim, and pale, hardly worthy of more attention than we should feel disposed to bestow on a farthing “dip.”
A description of the iron-smelting, blast-furnace works, the manufacture of iron, etc. You can read about this in chapter two.

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2 thoughts on “The Derwent Iron Works

  1. Of the time and authentic. A good read and looking forward to the following chapters…

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