Deel 2:
1860s
THERE were more than 40 blast furnaces producing half-a-million tons of pig-iron a year and pumping out so much smoke that the sun was blotted out. Middlesbrough's population had exploded from 154 in 1831 to 19,000 in 1861.
1870
THERE were 90 blast furnaces on Teesside. Bolckow and Vaughan's first furnaces less than 20 years earlier had been 40ft high and 15ft in diameter, but the new giants were the biggest in the country, 90ft high and 30ft in diameter. Between them, they produced two million tons of iron a year, a third of the British output. The end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1874 caused iron prices to drop by 10 per cent. Wages plummeted more. Strikes broke out. Some ironworks ceased. Plus, other places like Sheffield were adopting Henry Bessemer’s new processes which blasted air through the molten pig iron to remove the impurities and to create steel, which was stronger and less brittle than iron. Teesside was in danger of being eclipsed. But in 1875, two men who had begun as puddlers in Stockton united to take over the closed West Marsh Ironworks in Middlesbrough. They were Arthur Dorman and Albert de Lande Long, and they enthusiastically adopted the new methods.
1883
NEW open hearth furnaces on Teesside, using the latest advancements, produced more than 300,000 tons of steel and consumed 6.75m tons of rock dug out of the Cleveland Hills by 10,000 miners. The River Tees became known as the “steel river”, and Dorman Long gobbled up many of the old ironmasters to become the river’s biggest steel-maker.
1890s
THE mines of the Cleveland Hills gradually became exhausted – the voracious blast furnaces had consumed all they had to offer. Teesside needed to import two million tons of iron ore a year from Spain to keep the furnaces fed.
1917
WITH the war causing an iron and steel boom, Dorman Long, which employed more than 20,000 men and specialised in making steel for shell casings, invested £5.7m in the first blast furnace at Redcar.
1929
IN peacetime, demand dropped. To try to make financial sense of it all, in 1929 Dorman Long took over Bolckow Vaughan to make one super-company, the biggest iron and steel manufacturer in Britain employing 33,000 men.
1949
ESTON mine closed after 99 years, during which 63m tons of ironstone had been removed and 375 miners killed. The Great Cleveland Orefield finally finished on January 17, 1964, with the closure of North Skelton Pit. The furnaces are fully fed on foreign ore.
1967
NATIONALISATION by Harold Wilson’s government: Dorman Long became part of the British Steel Corporation, and survived the rationalisation of the industry as 14 steel producers were reduced to five. BRITISH STEEL built the largest blast furnace in Europe at Redcar, capable of producing 10,000 tons of iron a day, which went to the nearby Lackenby works to be turned into steel, and 3.3m tonnes a year. It was the only blast furnace on Teesside.
The end of time
MARGARET THATCHER privatised British Steel in 1988. In 1999, BS merged with a Dutch company to form Corus. In 2006, Tata of India took over, and in 2010 went bust. In 2011, Sahavirya Steel Industries of Thailand took over, restarted the blast furnace, and for a brief moment hope flickered into life, until 2015 when SSI collapsed and, after 98 years, the Redcar furnace, still the second largest in Europe, was extinguished. It would never be relit again, and this week demolition of the totemic structure
Exactly 171 years after John Marley (reputedly) stumbled down a rabbit hole to spark the industry which founded Middlesbrough, the last visible symbols are being erased: the steel river has found a new course.
Source - Strategic Research Institute