In general, I like my history to come with incompetent kings, pious queens, scheming nobles and a few bloody battles. Possibly a gruesome execution thrown in for a real treat. I am not usually as fascinated by socio-economic history, although I agree it’s often more important to understanding the modern world, because it just doesn’t seem to have such a clear narrative, or it is just harder to see before you.
But in the little South Wales community of Blaenavon (or Blaenafon in Welsh) you can quite literally see the story of the Industrial Revolution laid out around you. It’s tangible and what you can see, hear and visit reveals a coherent narrative history of dramatic change which has, quite literally, changed the world.
So, how can a little community of around 6000 souls in the valleys of South Wales be a place of such immense significance to world history that the United Nations has listed the entire place as a World Heritage site?
To Lord Abergavenny’s Hills
In the middle of the 18th century there wasn’t even a town in Blaenavon. Just a scattered rural population of a few dozen families trying to tease a living out of the not particularly fertile land.
South Wales did have the occasional ironworks. Most places did. They were all just a single furnace, small enterprises and needed to be quite spaced out as they each required a large amount of timber, turned slowly, expensively and laboriously into charcoal to allow the furnace to burn hot enough to melt the iron out of the ore.
In fact, the centre of iron (and glass) production in Britain had traditionally been in the Weald of Kent and Sussex, but as demand for iron grew three monarchs (Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and James I) passed legislation that effectively banned the establishment of new furnaces or the growth of existing ones in Kent, Surrey and Sussex. The main reason being that there was huge worry about the potential deforestation of these counties close to London and the loss of a ready source of timber to supply firewood for the city of London and building materials for the Royal Navy.
This pushed iron making more towards the English midlands and the earliest innovations took place in the English counties along the Welsh border. In Shropshire Abraham Darby had discovered that using coke (part burnt coal) produced better results than using charcoal in 1709. In the 1740s they started using steam power to power a water wheel which in turn operated a bellows and blew air into the furnace, supplying more oxygen to make it burn hotter.
So, the basic building blocks for making iron were now coal (to make coke), iron ore, limestone to absorb the impurities and the ability to blow air into the furnace to make it hot enough to melt the iron. If only a place could be found that had all of these in abundance then it might be possible to scale up the size of ironworks and have multiple blast furnaces working in one place.
The mountains of South Wales was just such a place. Coal, iron ore and limestone were all available at or close to the surface in the hills near Pontypool on land belonging to the Lord Abergavenny.
The Ironmasters Cometh
And so in 1788 three businessmen from the English Midlands got hold of a lease on a vast stretch of Lord Abergavenny’s land. 12,000 acres north of Pontypool in the area around what is now Blaenavon. They were the typical capitalist triumvirate. Thomas Hill provided the money, Thomas Hopkins provided the technical knowledge and Benjamin Pratt provided legal and commercial expertise.
Construction of the Blaenavon Ironworks began immediately. They cut into the hills to build the furnaces, so that the ingredients (coke, ore and limestone) could be dropped in from above. They also built kilns at the top level to prepare the coke and lime. All three ingredients were gathered nearby and transported by horse drawn tramways to the top level of the ironworks. Down at the lower level the blast furnaces (initially three were built) were feed by a boiler pumping air through and the molten iron was cast into pig iron in the sand of the casting yard before being taken away on more tramways towards the Monmouthshire Canal, onwards to Newport and the world.
It was the first time (that we know of) that an ironworks was built from first design with multiple furnaces powered by steam.
With such a small local population not skilled in iron making it was necessary to bring in workers from other parts of the country, mostly the West Midlands and so in 1800 the accent in the valley may have been more Brummie than Welsh.
The air quality must have been absolutely awful! The fumes belching out of the ironworks would have made people choke. It must have been a terrible place to be, but it was where the money and jobs were and most ordinary people would have considered themselves lucky to have a job and the means to feed themselves. Today we recognise the conditions as appalling and exploitative.
The only thing that was missing from this new set up was a forge where the cast iron or ‘pig iron’ could be turned into wrought iron. It would appear that the company was originally happy to sell the cast iron as it was and let someone else worry about what happened next.
Pigs and Puddlers
For those who don’t know the difference- cast iron is what comes out of the furnace and is cast in the sand on the ground of the ironworks. The shape it makes is a series of bars joined at one end. Sort of like a comb but people thought it looked like a sow feeding her piglets and so it became known as pig iron. The problem with cast iron is that it still contains about 4-5% carbon and this makes it quite brittle and liable to fracture.
For the pig iron to be able to be worked by a blacksmith to make useful things it first needed to be converted into wrought iron in a process that was very new at the time the Blaenavon Ironworks were built. It was developed in the 1780s (again in Shropshire) and was known as puddling. This process involved a lot of time and strenuous manual labour as the puddler had to stir a vat of molten iron to bring it into contact with oxygen which would gradually burn off the excess carbon.
The job of an iron puddler was a singularly unpleasant job. Due to the heat, toxic fumes, risk of accidents and extremely strenuous work puddlers had very short life expectancy. Estimates seem to suggest that a 30 year old puddler was probably living on borrowed time. This meant that getting someone to do the job required a relatively higher rate of pay and combined with the slowness of the process it made wrought iron very expensive. However, this is what was used to make the first railways and the Eiffel Tower.
In 1817-18 the Blaenavon Ironworks opened their own forge on the mountain top at Garnddyrys to turn the pigs into wrought iron. It seems an unlikely choice of location, but not when combined with the construction of a new tramway from the ironworks to the newly constructed Brecknock and Abergavenny Canal which was offering lower tolls for transport to the wharves at Newport. The tramway had a stop at Garnddyrys and so it formed a logical route for the iron to take on its journey out into the world.
The iron produced in Blaenavon at this time did indeed travel around the world. Manufacture here was concentrated on producing rails for the rapid development of railways around the globe. Blaenavon iron was used to lay tracks across England, India, Russia, Brazil and a host of other countries across various continents. Cast iron from Blaenavon was also used in the construction of Blackfriars Bridge in London and in a new and novel product – corrugated iron sheets.
An Elevator Powered by Water
In 1839 one of Blaenavon’s most iconic features was added. The water balance tower which was an ingenious piece of engineering which enabled goods to be moved between the upper and lower yards without the need for horses or humans pulling them up or down the steep slopes.
The tower works by the simple principle of using the weight of water from the mountains to power moving goods upwards. So the goods, pig iron for example, would be placed in a container at the bottom of the tower and water would fill another container at the top until the weight of the water was greater than that of the iron. Gravity then takes over and as the water container goes down it pulls the goods container up to the top.
There were breaks employed to stop the descending container smashing into the ground as it reached the bottom. The pig iron was now able to be unloaded at the upper yard and was ready to be loaded onto the tramway to Garnddyrys and onto the new export route via the Brecknock and Abergavenny Canal.
Today the Water Balance Tower at Blaenavon is the largest surviving such tower in the world and as such a key part of the listing of the World Heritage Site.
Steel yourself for the Gilchrists
In 1856 Henry Bessemer invented the “Bessemer Converter” which blew air through molten pig iron to remove the carbon and impurities, producing steel. Steel was a much more suitable material for many of enterprises and so the demand for wrought iron started to drop. Between 1870 and 1880 the demand for wrought iron rails decreased by 90%. The durability of steel was incontrovertible.
But for the ironworks of South Wales this was not necessarily the boon that would be expected. In fact it was a problem. The iron produced from South Wales iron ore was high in phosphorus and this produced poor quality, very brittle steel in Bessemer converters. So the South Wales ironworks had to start importing iron ore from places such as Cumbria, Northamptonshire or even as far as Spain. This allowed South Wales to become the leading producer of steel worldwide in the 1860s, but it meant that profit margins were heavily squeezed.
Enter the Gilchrists.
Percy Carlyle Gilchrist was appointed as the work’s chemist at Blaenavon in 1876. His cousin, Sidney Gilchrist Thomas was a court clerk in London with a fascination for chemistry. Every Friday Sidney made the journey from London to Blaenavon and the two cousins worked together in great secrecy trying to find a way to make good quality steel out of the phosphorus rich local South Wales ore.
In 1878 they announced that they had succeeded. By lining the Bessemer Converter with limestone bricks the phosphorus was removed and steel was produced. The new process also produced a new side product in the form of phosphorus rich fertiliser which could be sold.
And so the steel production in South Wales would now flourish…except it didn’t. In fact this innovation discovered at Blaenavon was effectively the end of iron and steel production in South Wales.
Although Blaenavon and the other local ironworks could now produce good quality steel, so could other producers around the globe who had been hampered by having access only to phosphorus rich ore. Notably, Germany and the United States, who both had near untouched massive reserves of phosphorus rich iron ore to call upon.
The South Wales iron and steelworks could not compete and those companies that survived re-orientated their businesses towards coal production. South Wales produced some excellent steam coal which was now in high demand across the world to power steam engines, locomotives and steam ships. South Wales became the area that supplied the largest quantity of coal in the world.
In 1880, the Blaenavon company opened Big Pit colliery as well as expanding their other coal mining operations. The Ironworks closed in 1911, reopened during the first World War to help manufacture munitions and again, very briefly in 1924-25.
In 1947 the Big Pit coal mine was nationalised by the Attlee government. The site of the ironworks fell into ruin and was scheduled for demolition in the 1960s until the emergence of the discipline of industrial archeology led to a campaign to save the site for future research. In 1974 the site of the ironworks was taken into care of the state and the slow process of conservation began.
The Big Pit enjoyed a century of operation before closing in 1980 as part of the Thatcherite pit closures. It was planned to become a museum even before mining operations ceased and the museum opened in 1983. It is now the National Coal Museum of Wales.
Today the Blaenavon Ironworks are in the care of the Welsh government’s heritage organisation Cadw.
Both are well worth visiting and the Big Pit is probably one of the best museums I have ever visited. The underground tour is a must and is best booked in advance.
The mine head baths at Big Pit now house a brilliant exhibition about the history of the mines of South Wales, the people who worked there and the dangers that they faced every day.
The King Coal exhibition recreates a modern mine without having to go underground and is an interesting experience in addition to the underground tour which is the best part of the visit (and the only bit that isn’t free) takes you down in the cage lift with a miner as guide. You see many of the older parts of the mine that were worked by hand tools and the quarters used for the pit ponies that lived underground.
You can’t take anything electrical or with any sort of battery or that could cause a spark underground so photos are not possible down there, but you are unlikely to forget the experience.
Back at the Ironworks, Cadw have established a museum exhibition in the worker’s cottages that make up Stack Square. Several houses are furnished as would have been typical at various times during the 200 year history of the cottages. There is an exhibition on the history of the site and a recreation of the company truck shop.
You need a whole day to visit Blaenavon’s attractions and it’s a day well spent.
One last bit of information that I learnt from my visit. The 1851 census revealed that, for the first time anywhere, there were more people employed in industry than in agriculture in Wales. Thus making Wales the world’s first industrialised nation.
Leave a Reply