Will you take a Broseley?

"Will you take a Broseley?" was something which could, apparently, be heard in taverns all over the country in years gone by. The "Broseley" in question being a clay pipe made in the Broseley area of Shropshire. In the early days there were hundreds of individual pipe makers in the town; by the nineteenth century pipe making had become concentrated in three factories which supplied the needs of tobacco smoke inhalers everywhere. One of the factories, William Southorn and Co., has survived and is now a museum of the industry.


Remarkably, when the factory closed in the 1950s, everything was left undisturbed until it was opened as the museum in 1996. It's as if the workers could come back tomorrow and pick up where they left off. There's a mound of unprocessed clay in a corner of the yard; piles of empty cardboard boxes ready to be packed with new pipes; scrawled pencil notes on walls and bits of paper; the moulds and presses ready for action.

We stayed on a former farm in Broseley. The owner told us that there were two coal mines and a clay mine on his land, to which he still owns the mineral rights. The mines didn't survive beyond the 1940s, and locals used to tip their old fridges into the convenient holes in the ground! Something else tipped in large quantities down the bank were the reject pipes from a clay pipe factory. I was shown where to scrape the earth, and, in seconds, I'd uncovered a couple of pipe bowls and a dozen pieces of stem up to about four inches in length. These, unlike the occasional pieces which turn up in the garden, have never been smoked, and so the clay is white throughout.

Totally unconnected (as far as I know) is this house we spotted in Broseley High Street. The one in the middle with the red door. Is this the thinnest house in Britain? I think it was number 55.

Hay Inclined Plane was nearly Hay Boat Lift

It is said that the original scheme to connect the upper and lower levels of the Shropshire Canal at Blists Hill/Coalport was to build a boat lift to overcome the 207 feet difference in height. To this end William Reynolds, a local ironmaster, started to tunnel horizontally into the side of the hill in 1786. After 300 yards the workers hit a spring of bitumen, and work on the tunnel stopped while this valuable natural commodity was tapped, put into barrels and sold.


According to the Ironbridge Gorge Museums website the bitumen was boiled in cauldrons at the entrance to the tunnel to convert it into pitch for preserving timber; some was processed for use in lamps and as a varnish. At first they were collecting 4,500 gallons of bitumen a week. This slowed to 1,000 gallons a week, gradually dimishing over fifty years until the extraction stopped.

Now known as the Tar Tunnel, we donned our hard hats and walked at a stoop to the gate a hundred yards in. Bitumen still oozes through the brick walls and collects in pools in openings off the tunnel, looking like black water. (No photo, sorry!)


The tunnel is said to extend 1100 yards under Blists Hill, probably connecting up with the coal mine shafts. A plateway or railway runs the length of the bit we had access to, and there are some wagons near the entrance.

The bitumen was reckoned to be far more vauable than the boat lift, and so the inclined plane was built instead.

Cast in iron, errors and all

One of the museums in Ironbridge Gorge is Blists Hill Victorian Town. This is a mixture of original industrial remains - blast furnaces, mine shafts and a brick and tile works - and recreated shops and businesses from the nineteenth century. It feels rather like the Black Country Living Museum, and I loved it. So much so that we went back three days after our first visit.


We made sure we were in the New Inn for the music hall singing. This was excellent: two men in period clothes started a banter in loud voices, then one sat at the piano and started playing. Both men sang lustily and well. There were moments, especially when the characters held my eye, when I had a very strong feeling of being in the film Westworld. Spooky!

But to the real excitement. On Sunday we saw moulds being created from "green sand". This was actually black, after starting off yellow. It goes black after coming into contact with the molten iron and associated gases. The sand has about four per cent clay added, and is slightly dampened. This helps it to mould to the shape of the pattern, and to keep the shape when the pattern is removed. After being energetically tamped down the outer casing, which goes round just the sides, is removed, leaving the sand in a cuboid form - sitting on a small wooden pallet - with nothing but air where the iron is to go.


On Wednesday the cupula furnace was charged with coke, limestone and scrap iron. Once it's given a little heat the coke burns fiercely in the air which is blown in, and the furnace doesn't need any external heat. We missed that, but saw the next stages of the process.


The resultant molten iron was allowed to flow down a chute into a bucket.


This was then manhandled over the moulds and the iron poured in to the filling hole.


At one point in the process molten slag was tapped off, being allowed to flow onto the ground outside. This was accompanied by a spectacular shower of sparks.


After 30 minutes to an hour the pallets were picked up and thrown onto the floor, causing the sand to break up around the precious solid inside.


And here is one finished article. Something for Ruth and Mark's sixth wedding anniversary!


Despite all the skill invlolved, sometimes mistakes can creep in.


Oops!


I wonder which will last longer: the cast iron sign or my photo of it on the internet?

Ironbridge Gorge

I touched on the Industrial Revolution yesterday with Arkwright's cotton mills at Cromford. Our next stop was Ironbridge, where the Revolution really hotted up.

Before talking about Blists Hill, though, a couple of photos of the main attraction - the iconic iron bridge itself.



At Blists Hill there's a short section of the Shropshire Canal still in water. We walked along the towpath to the Hay Incline, of which more later.


On the approach to the place where we're staying, in Broseley, we came across a snake!


Unfortunately it was dead and seemed to have been run over. Grass snake? (I'll look at the book when I get home!)