Bowling Iron Co

1891.

1891.

of Bradford

1776 Company established, according to 1891 advert.

Bowling Ironworks Company established in 1782, according to another source , by John Sturges, sen., of Sandal; John Sturges, jun., of Leeds; William Sturges, of Datchett; Richard Paley, of Leeds; and John Elwell, of Wakefield.

1788 Smelting commenced. One of five main iron works established at an early date in Bradford (the others being Emmetts (1782), Lowmoor Ironworks (1791), Shelf (1792) and Bierley (1811)).

1804 Change in the constitution of the partnership of the Bowling Ironworks Companye, the following being the partners: — John Sturges, the elder, of Wakefield ; John Sturges, the younger, of Bowling Hall, afterwards of Elmfield, Doncaster; John Green Paley, of Bowling ; Thomas Mason, of Horton ; George Paley, of Leeds ; Rev. John Simons, of Kent ; and William Sturges, of Datchett, Bucks. In the same year Henry Sturges went to the works, and served until his majority without salary.

1805 John Sturges & Co. entered into an agreement for the making and sale of steam engines on Richard Trevithick's high-pressure principle, and to pay patent-right at the rate of £2 10s. per cent, on the selling price of all such engines.

1844 A 30 HP engine by the Bowling Co was included in the sale of Castle Hill Mill, Gomersal.

1849 'The partnership of John Sturges & Co., formed for forty years in 1804, having lapsed by effluxion of time the Court of Chancery was moved to create a new partnership, under the title of the Bowling Iron Co., .... This order was confirmed in July, 1849....

1870 The company was incorporated and registered as a limited company.

Two 60 HP beam engines for John Priestman and Co (Bradford)

1891 Advert. Yorkshire iron

1903 Business taken over by Bowling Co

---

1867 Newspaper Account

'A YORKSHIRE MINT.— THE BOWLING IRONWORKS…... It is nearly a century ago since the Bowling Ironworks were first established ; and in the buildings and machinery are many traces of the steps by which the infant has grown into manhood, and of the various changes which have taken place in the nature of its products. There is the single dingy room, at present used as a store-room, which was once the counting-house, and is now replaced by a substantial two-storied house, at the entrance-gate. Not far from this is the original blast-engine — original, however, only in its construction — for its separate parts have been renewed, till, like the coat of the gaberlunzie-man, there is hardly a scrap of the old material left. In another part of the works, we may see the primitive tilt-hammer working side by side with the last edition of Nasmyth's steam-hammer ; and not far off, as a sort of intermediate step, is a steam-hammer somewhat on the principle of the monkey and pile-driver of the present day. Cast-iron grates and fire-irons, frying-pans, and such-like domestic utensils, were once an important item of Bowling manufacture. Later on, the casting and boring of cannon, and the making of shot and shell, employed the then valuable and ingenious machinery, which now lies useless, in the gloom and dust of a long shed. In the present day, we find them making iron bars, round and square, angle and T iron, sheets and plates, the various parts of steam-engines, and machinery, with boilers, fixed, marine, and locomotive, railway axles and tires, some of wrought iron, others of steel—a most important branch of their manufacture, only recently introduced.

‘Many of our readers may have been wakened on some midnight journey between London and Glasgow, by the great red eyes of the Staffordshire furnaces glaring through smoke and darkness ; and that is the only idea they have formed of what large ironworks may be. But it is a very different thing if we enter Bradford some bright morning by the Great Northern, to note, as we cannot fail to do, the outside features of the Bowling Ironworks. The first impression is that we are on the spot of some active volcanic disturbance, for there, on our left, rises a considerable hill of red scoriae, in places breaking out into rugged overhanging cliffs of bluish slag. Puffs of white vapour rise incessantly from its sides and summit, and over it hangs perpetually a dense canopy of smoke. Nor is the delusion lessened as we approach ; a dull rumbling sound never ceases, the ground vibrates with the many blows of the hammers ; and as we enter the, gate, we see, across a plain covered with what might be blocks of solid lava, a lake of boiling water, whose steam on a cool day obscures half the height of the hill behind it. Just as the geologist would reckon the thousands of years of the world's age by the accumulations of marine deltas, one might estimate the age of Bowling by the size of this great ash-heap, up the side of which trains of iron waggons, full of smoking ashes, are constantly ascending, and on reaching the top, are run along radiating lines to all sides of the heap, and their contents tipped over. They generally fall in a loose shower, but in places have become cemented into the great masses which form the cliffs we have seen. What the solid contents of this heap may be, it is not easy to estimate ; its greatest height is about a hundred and fifty feet, and its base cannot be much less than a quarter of a mile round. Some years ago, seven hundred pounds was offered for it, to form a railway embankment; and for this purpose it is now being carted away at the rate of some two hundred tons a day ; but the time is yet far distant when any perceptible decrease in its size can take place. The boiling lake below is very much what it seems to be—the condensed steam of the numerous engines that are used in the works, conducted by a large subterranean conduit from their furthest extremity, and brought here to cool, before being again pumped up into the boilers.

'The works occupy a sort of deep horse-shoe valley, and the banks, some sixty feet high, which surround it, consist principally of shale and cinders, the accumulations from old coal-pits and from the furnaces. The whole area, enclosed by a high stone wall, is somewhat more than a mile round. Looking from the counting-house at the entrance, on our right is a large waste space, with the steaming lake and the cinder-bill behind. Next come the blast-furnaces and refineries, where the first two processes of manufacture are carried on. The whole of the middle space is occupied by the puddling and ball furnaces, thirty-seven in number, each with its pair of square brick chimneys, always either smoking or aflame : these, with the steam-hammers which stand in the same block of sheds, come under the general term of the Forge. Behind these are engine-shops, smithies, carpenters' shops, and store-rooms ; and behind all these, a large open space of about three acres, reminding one of a "valley of dead men's bones," full of moulds and models, and old machinery broken and rusty. On the left bank are the steel works, the model-house, where is a collection, of very great value, of wooden models of every piece of machinery that has been made in the works ; and the boiler-shop.

'The Bowling Company itself supplies the coal and the ironstone which it consumes ; its collieries extending five or six miles in various directions, and the main pits being connected together and with the works by a tramway worked with ropes, as the old Blackwall Railway used to be. In this district, the coal is found in two seams; the ironstone, containing about thirty per cent, of iron, lying just above the upper of the two. This is called black-bed coal, and lies from forty to one hundred and forty yards below the surface, in seams averaging twenty-six inches thick. It is the more abundant and less valuable of the two seams ; and is used only for firing and engine purposes, as it contains too many impurities to make it fit for smelting. Fifteen years ago, this coal was sold at three shillings and sixpence per ton ; now the price is seven shillings and a penny; and in another ten years it will most probably have risen to ten shillings. The better-bed coal lies generally about forty yards below the upper seam, and averages sixteen or seventeen inches in thickness, though it is sometimes worked when only twelve inches thick. Just as the main deposit of ironstone lies above the blackbed coal, so there is above this a stratum in which ironstone is found in nodules containing about forty per cent, of metal ; not, indeed, in sufficient abundance to make it worth working, but still so as to give some good pickings out of the shale, which is of necessity brought out with the coal. The whole of this better-bed coal is converted into coke for smelting ; and the company have to buy about one thousand tons a week besides. Reckoning roughly about ten thousand tons of coal are weekly sent in to the works, and from one thousand two hundred to one thousand four hundred tons of ironstone. Of course the number of men and boys employed in the collieries and works is very large ; indeed, until recently, there was no means of knowing how many there were; at last on the occasion of the Prince of Wales's marriage, the company gave a feast to all its people, and it was then found that there were more than four thousand five hundred in constant work. Nearly three thousand pounds a week go in wages—the average for men being about twenty-five shillings ; but many of the skilled hands earn much more than that; and cases are known in which as much as twelve pounds a week is regularly earned by a first-rate workman.

'We will now try to describe in order the several processes of the manufacture of iron-smelting, refining, puddling, and rolling. At intervals, along the edge of the bank on our right hand, stand the six blast-furnaces, of which four at least are in constant work. Night and day do the pale, sulphurous flames flicker from the mouths of these great towers ; and twice in twenty-four hours, at four o'clock in the afternoon and morning, they disgorge their well-digested provender in a bright-red, sparkling stream. Four furnaces will produce on an average three hundred and sixty tons of pig-iron in a week, or between six and seven tons apiece at each heat. The furnace itself is nothing more than a large hollow brick chimney, round or square, very often enclosed in a casing of iron, about sixty feet high. The materials are supplied at a great mouth close to the top, and this mouth is on the level of the bank above, where is a large flat space occupied by the coke ovens and heaps, and the ironstone kilns. In these kilns, the ironstone is calcined, to remove from it, as far as possible, the earthy and watery constituents—the process lasting from six to eight; hours, and being performed with the ashes taken from the ball furnaces. At the end of that time, the ore will have gained about eight per cent, of pure metal in proportion to its weight. Next come the coke ovens, in which the coal for smelting with the ironstone is burned for twenty-four hours, and when it is to be used in the refinery hearth, for twice that time, to make it harder and purer. On the other hand, when it is intended not to be used in contact with metal, the coke is burned in the long heaps or ridges which occupy the rest of this space — a cheaper and more rapid process, taking only fourteen hours. A tramway runs from furnace to furnace, with branch-lines at right angles along the calcining and coking ovens, and with short sidings on the other side up to the very mouth of the furnace. Here you may see the iron trucks standing, and ready to be driven forward and tip in their loads — the coke in the largest, and in the smallest the limestone ; the proportions used being by weight two and three-quarter tons of coke to one ton each of ironstone and limestone. At this rate, the weekly consumption amounts to one thousand three hundred tons of limestone and ironstone, or about an acre superficial of the latter, and some three thousand tons of coke.

'An accident which happened here a year or two ago, shows the recklessness of danger which familiarity begets. Two of the boys employed about the furnace were amusing themselves by rolling each other by turns in one of the smallest trucks, to see which could stop nearest to the furnace mouth; at last one of them lost command of the truck, which ran quickly down to the edge, and the poor boy in it was jerked out into the burning heap. Of course, there was but little of him left to pick out. We now descend by a steep staircase beside one of the furnaces to its foot, and are struck with the size of the pipes by which the blast is conveyed. The main pipe is about two feet in diameter, with smaller feed-pipes running from it to the back and two sides of the furnace, where they end in short flexible tubes with a mettle nozzle, fitting into a conical recess in the wall; this opens into the interior by a corresponding nozzle of double metal, called the twyer, which is kept cool by a stream of water flowing between the two thick masses of metal. We may take out the tube and see the glowing mass within, and shall then have some notion of the force of the blast as it roars into the open space. All the furnaces are worked with the cold blast, at a pressure of about one and three-quarter pounds to the square inch, and there are three engines constantly at work to keep up the supply. Besides the twyers, there are two other openings at the foot of a blast furnace — one about four feet from the bottom, where the dross runs off from the top of the liquid metal; the other at the lowest point, where the metal is run off. As it is the nature of iron to pass slowly from a solid state to that of complete liquefaction, remaining for a long time in a pasty condition, the contents of the furnace sink slowly down; and when they reach the level of the twyers only does the metal begin to melt. Just below this level the dross or scum flows off, it is, in fact, the pulse of the furnace, by which the workman can tell from minute to minute whether the giant is digesting his meal properly. If all is right, it runs evenly and rapidly, and solidifies into a mass of coarse-looking, opaque glass, prettily marbled with blue, and green, and brown; otherwise, it runs dull, and in cooling becomes black or dark brown, showing an imperfect combination of the materials, and containing a considerable quantity of the protoxide of iron, the result being a waste of material, and a white pig-metal—the bane of the ironmaster. The dross runs into large, square iron tubs, kept cool by a current of water flowing between their double sides, and is finally carried off to the waste ground at the entrance, where it is broken up and sold for making the roads—and very rough and dusty roads it makes. It is a fine sight to see a heat run, especially on some dark night, when the glowing metal lights up the faces of the two or three workmen, and shows the shadowy outline of sheds, and chimneys, and skeleton castings, and the long arms of cranes, and the massive hammers. In front of the furnace is a sloping floor, on which the mould for the pig-iron is made of coarse sand, looking like a long double gridiron, a broader channel running down the side, with stops at intervals; and these are successively removed as the upper grooves are filled. As the time for tapping the furnace approaches we see the men strip to their trousers ; then the foreman takes a long iron crowbar and begins to pick out the fireclay with which the orifice is stopped ; at last a bright red spot of metal appears ; at first it only oozes forth, but as the opening increases it glides and flows, and then bubbles along, almost with the speed of a mill-race. The rich yellow of the apricot bears, perhaps, the nearest resemblance to the colour of this molten stream, the intense heat of which, as it increases in volume, and spreads through all the channels of the mould, drives us some paces backwards, until the covering of sand which is quickly turned over the solidifying mass absorbs some part of it. The iron lies now four or five hours in the moulds, and is then carted away and stacked. From each heat a sample is broken off, and the pigs are classified according to their quality, the characteristics of excellence being grayness of colour, and a texture of large bright granulations, which become smaller and denser only towards the outside of the bar ; this is called "openness" in the metal. Almost all the pig-iron passes from the blast-furnace to the refinery hearth —the exception being that comparatively small quantity which is used for castings. For this purpose, the pigs are broken up and melted again in the cupola-furnace, a small square chimney about twenty feet high, and in principle much the same as the blast furnace ; from this the metal is taken in large ladles, and poured into the moulds as it is wanted. There are four refineries at Bowling, three of which are used entirely for Bowling iron ; in the fourth, a certain proportion of other sorts of iron is combined with the former, the product being required for a different purpose. These hearths, as they are more properly called, stand in the same block of buildings as the blast-furnaces; they look like large square chimneys about thirty feet high, and open at the bottom on three sides, the back only being walled up, but having large iron doors on the other sides, which are shut during the process of melting. The twyers, three in number, enter at the back, and below and round them the metal and fuel are piled up against the back of the hearth, then the blast is turned on, and the melted metal gradually sinks into the square cistern-like bottom of the hearth. It is run off in one large slab, about twenty feet long, and eight broad, which is then broken up with heavy sledge-hammers into pieces about the size of a stout folio volume, whose edges show a coarse fibrous structure in place of the granulation of the pig-iron.

'Puddling is the next operation, which is, in fact, boiling the iron in a close furnace till it attains the consistency of putty, being from time to time worked about by the puddler with a long iron hook into an irregular spherical mass called a ball. At last, the experienced eye of the workman tells him, by the colour of the metal, and the pale flaming tongues of carbonic oxide which flicker about it, that it is ready for the steam-hammer : up runs a boy wheeling a light iron tray ; all spitting and sparkling, the lump is raked out, and hurried off to the anvil The hammer is raised, and a long flat bar or lever, suspended by the middle from above, is placed on the top of the metal ; down comes the hammer, and the two are welded together. The workman can now turn the metal without difficulty; and after a sound beating, it is brought into the shape of a square flat cake; another blow cuts off the lever, and the cake is carried on to the next process. There are twenty-seven of these puddling-furnaces at work at Bowling, each employing a foreman and two under-hands ; and these men "work off ten heats a day, at a rate of about three hundredweight of metal for each heat. The metal comes from the hammer in two shapes, nobblins and stampings; the former are about eight inches square, and half as thick ; the latter, longer and thinner. Nobblins are of the mixed iron, and are taken to another furnace, where several of them are heated together, and again put under the hammer and welded together, coining out either as slabs or as blooms. The former are now to be rolled into sheets, or plates of iron, and are of different weights according to the size of the plate to be rolled from them, but are commonly about two feet long, and a foot wide, and about four inches thick. The blooms are short, thick, square bars, and go to the rolling-mill also, to be converted into common bars and angle-iron of various shapes. Stampings are pure Bowling iron, and go through another boiling process in the ball-furnace. For this, they are broken into smaller lumps, and are treated in the same way as in the puddling-furnace, are again hammered, and come out in the shape of wheel-bar blooms, larger and longer than the common blooms. There is no difference in principle between the ball-furnace and the puddling-furnace, and the ten of the former make up the whole number of the forge-furnaces at Bowling, whose operations are completed by no less than sixteen steam-hammers, the heaviest of which weighs seven and a half tons.

'The rolling-mills, through which the wrought iron now passes to assume its final shape, are all of the same character, consisting of two pair of steel rollers placed horizontally; the roughing rolls, through which the metal first passes, and the finishing rolls. The surface of each pair of rolls is grooved to the shape required, so that a large stock has to be kept, to make the numerous sizes and shapes of the bars that are required ; and these are shifted into the massive framework, as the work changes. For rolling, the bloom is again heated, and passed in succession through smaller and smaller grooves, till it is rolled down to the proper size ; it is then placed on a flat table, straightened by blows of heavy wooden mallets, which it takes three men to work ; and the ends are sawn off to a proper length by a circular saw. The plates are, of course, rolled between smooth rollers, which are brought closer and closer at each passage of the metal; they are then laid down to cool, and their proper shape and size traced on them with chalk ; and lastly, are carried to the steam-shears, where inch-thick metal is sheared off as neatly and noiselessly as cambric by a lady's scissors.— Chambers's Journal. ’

---

• Exhibit at Bradford Industrial Museum. [?]

See Also

Loading...

Sources of Information

• 1891 Post Office London Trades Directory