The Wilden Ironworks was an ironworks in Wilden, Worcestershire, England. It operated for many years and was acquired by the Baldwin family, ancestors of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
An ironworks or iron works is a building or site where iron is smelted and where heavy iron and steel products are made. The term is both singular and plural, i.e. the singular of ironworks is ironworks.
Wilden is a small village about 1 mile north east of Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire. It was originally part of the parish of Hartlebury, but became a separate parish in the late 19th century, before becoming part of Stourport.
Worcestershire is a county in the West Midlands of England. Between 1974 and 1998, it was merged with the neighbouring county of Herefordshire as Hereford and Worcester.
In the feudal system, the demesne was all the land which was retained by a lord of the manor for his own use and occupation or support, under his own management, as distinguished from land sub-enfeoffed by him to others as sub-tenants. In England, royal demesne is the land held by the Crown, and ancient demesne is the legal term for the land held by the king at the time of the Domesday Book.
The Bishop of Worcester is the head of the Church of England Diocese of Worcester in the Province of Canterbury, England.
Manorialism was an essential element of feudal society. It was the organizing principle of rural economy that originated in the Roman villa system of the Late Roman Empire, and was widely practiced in medieval western and parts of central Europe as well as China. It was slowly replaced by the advent of a money-based market economy and new forms of agrarian contract.
Foley Ironworks
In 1647, it was referred to as having (or rather having had) six walk stocks and two corn mills. In fact, in about 1633, it had been converted to include a slitting mill. This was bought by Richard Foley, who subsequently gave it to his son Thomas. In 1647, he built a finery forge there, and when his eldest son another Thomas renewed the lease in 1685, it was described as having a slitting mill and two forges.
A watermill or water mill is a mill that uses hydropower. It is a structure that uses a water wheel or water turbine to drive a mechanical process such as milling (grinding), rolling, or hammering. Such processes are needed in the production of many material goods, including flour, lumber, paper, textiles, and many metal products. These watermills may comprise gristmills, sawmills, paper mills, textile mills, hammermills, trip hammering mills, rolling mills, wire drawing mills.
The slitting mill was a watermill for slitting bars of iron into rods. The rods then were passed to nailers who made the rods into nails, by giving them a point and head.
Richard Foley (1580–1657) was a prominent English ironmaster. He is best known from the folktale of "Fiddler Foley", which is either not correct or does not apply to him.
The Stour is a river flowing through the counties of Worcestershire, the West Midlands and Staffordshire in the West Midlands region of England. The Stour is a major tributary of the River Severn, and it is about 25 miles (40 km) in length. It has played a considerable part in the economic history of the region.
Pig iron is an intermediate product of the iron industry, also known as crude iron, which is first obtained from a smelting furnace in the form of oblong blocks. Pig iron has a very high carbon content, typically 3.8–4.7%, along with silica and other constituents of dross, which makes it very brittle and not useful directly as a material except for limited applications. Pig iron is made by smelting iron ore into a transportable ingot of impure high carbon-content iron in a blast furnace as an ingredient for further processing steps. The traditional shape of the molds used for pig iron ingots was a branching structure formed in sand, with many individual ingots at right angles to a central channel or runner, resembling a litter of piglets being suckled by a sow. When the metal had cooled and hardened, the smaller ingots were simply broken from the runner, hence the name pig iron. As pig iron is intended for remelting, the uneven size of the ingots and the inclusion of small amounts of sand caused only insignificant problems considering the ease of casting and handling them.
The River Severn is the longest river in Great Britain at a length of 220 miles (354 km), and the second longest in the British Isles after the River Shannon in Ireland. It rises at an altitude of 2,001 feet (610 m) on Plynlimon, close to the Ceredigion/Powys border near Llanidloes, in the Cambrian Mountains of mid Wales. It then flows through Shropshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, with the county towns of Shrewsbury, Worcester and Gloucester on its banks. With an average discharge of 107 m3/s (3,800 cu ft/s) at Apperley, Gloucestershire, the Severn is by far the greatest river in terms of water flow in England and Wales.
Operation of the ironworks passed in 1669 with the rest of the older Thomas's Midlands ironworks to his youngest son Philip Foley, and he operated them until 1679, when he arranged for his brother to lease the works to Richard Avenant and John Wheeler, who had been his managers. They ran them until 1692 when a new partnership, 'Ironworks in Partnership', was formed between Philip Foley, his brother Paul, Avenant, Wheeler, and Wheeler's brother Richard, with John Wheeler as managing partner. Richard withdrew in 1698, taking over certain other ironworks on his own. In 1705, the partnership gave up its last ironworks in the Midlands, when William Rea of a new partnership.
Philip Foley was the youngest of the three surviving sons of the British ironmaster Thomas Foley. His father transferred all his ironworks in the Midlands to him in 1668 and 1669 for £60,000. He also settled an estate at Prestwood near Stourbridge on him on his marriage, to which Philip added the manor of Kinver.
Paul Foley, also known as Speaker Foley, was the second son of Thomas Foley of Witley Court, the prominent Midlands ironmaster.
William Rea (1662–1750?) was a British ironmaster, owner or partner in many ironworks.
An estate enterprise
The forge lease was transferred to Richard Knight of Bringewood for its final years. When it expired in 1708, the landlord used it himself. He was the third Thomas Foley of Great Witley, who was in 1712 created Lord Foley to enable Robert Harley to have a majority in the House of Lords. His son Thomas 2nd Lord Foley operated it until his death in 1766, when it passed with the rest of the Great Witley estates to his distant cousin (descended from Paul Foley), Thomas Foley of Stoke Edith, who was created Lord Foley in 1776, the year before he died.
Bringewood Ironworks was a charcoal ironworks in north Herefordshire. It was powered by the river Teme, with a blast furnace, a finery forge and latterly a rolling mill for blackplate.
Thomas Foley, 1st Baron Foley FRS was an English landowner, ironmaster and Member of Parliament.
Great Witley is a village and civil parish, in the Malvern Hills District in the northwest of the county of Worcestershire, England. It is situated around ten miles to the north west of the city of Worcester.
Blaenavon link
Lord Foley probably leased the forge to Thomas Hill & Co. from Michaelmas 1776. In 1789, this firm leased coal and ironstone mines at Blaenavon in Monmouthshire, and built Blaenavon Ironworks, from which they presumably supplied pig iron to Wilden Forge. At that time, the firm comprised Thomas Hill of Stourbridge, Thomas Hopkins of Canckwood Forge near Rugeley, and Benjamin Pratt of Great Witley. Thomas Hill & Co. remained tenants until 1825, but by 1820 the works were in a distinct partnership from Blaenavon consisting of Thomas Hill and Thomas Barnet. In 1826 Henry Turner became tenant and was still in occupation in 1837, but became insane the following year. W. T. Lewty was in business there in 1840.
Baldwins and after
The works were acquired by E., P. & W. Baldwin, who had previously had an iron foundry at Stourport. In 1870, Alfred Baldwin bought out his relatives to become the sole proprietor of the firm, but continued to trade under the old name. In 1888 he brought his 21-year-old son Stanley Baldwin, who would later become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, into the business. The firm was incorporated as E. P. & W. Baldwin Ltd in 1898, and gradually acquired other tinplate works, mainly in South Wales. Eventually in 1948, it amalgamated with Richard Thomas & Co., to form Richard Thomas and Baldwins Ltd. They decided to close the Wilden Works (by then a tinplate works), declaring the workforce, many of whom lived in the village of Wilden redundant. The works were acquired in 1964 by Wilden Industrial Estates Ltd, and it became an industrial estate, which it remains today.
Transport links
The works had the benefit of unusual transport link. There are the remains of a lock at Pratt's Wharf (miss-named Platts Wharf by the Ordnance Survey) on the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, connecting the canal with the river, enabling canal barges to use the River Stour to deliver goods to the works. The wharf was built by Isaac Pratt from Henwick, Worcester in 1835. He is described as businessman and merchant. It was chiefly used to carry timber to a steam saw-mill in Wilden. Later it was used to transport coal and iron to the Wilden Works. There were two houses at Pratt's Wharf, one occupied by a lock keeper and the other by a clerk. The link was closed c1950.[1]
Further reading
B. L. C. Johnson, 'The Stour valley iron industry in the late seventeenth century' ''Trans. Worcs. Arch. Soc. N.S., 27 (1950), 35-46; 'The charcoal iron industry in the early eighteenth century' Geographic J. 117 (1951), 167-177; 'The Foley partnerships: The iron industry at the end of the charcoal era' Econ. Hist Rev. Ser. II, 4 (1952), 322-40.
R. G. Schafer, 'Genesis and structure of the Foley ""Ironworks In Partnership"" of 1692' Business Hist. 13(1) (1971), 19-38; A selection from the records of Philip Foley's Stour valley iron works 1668-74 (Worcs. Hist. Soc., n.s., 9, 1978 and 13, 1990).
H. W. Gwilliam, 'Forges, Furnaces, and mills on the river Stour' (Typescript. 2 vols. 1984: copies in Kidderminster and other Worcestershire libraries).
Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin: a biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1969).
E. H. Brooke, Chronology of the tinplate industry of Great Britain with 1949 appendix (Cardiff 1944 & 1949).
Tinplate consists of sheets of steel, coated with a thin layer of tin. Before the advent of cheap mild steel the backing metal was iron. While once more widely used, the primary use of tinplate now is the manufacture of tin cans.
Andrew Yarranton (1619–1684) was an important English engineer in the 17th century who was responsible for making several rivers into navigable waterways.
Alfred Baldwin was an English businessman and Conservative Party Member of Parliament (MP). He was the father of Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Prime Minister.
George Pearce Baldwin came from Broseley in Shropshire and moved to Worcestershire at the start of the 19th Century, becoming an iron founder at Stourport-on-Severn. He was the son of Thomas Baldwin and Mary Gough.
Cookley is a village in the Wyre Forest District of Worcestershire, England, a few miles to the north of Kidderminster, and close to the villages of Kinver and Wolverley. It lies on the River Stour, and the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal in the civil parish of Wolverley and Cookley. At the time of the 2001 census had a population of 2,491.
Swindon is a village and civil parish located in Staffordshire, just outside the West Midlands conurbation. The nearest major town is Dudley, approximately five miles eastwards. It stands halfway between the small town of Kingswinford and village of Wombourne.
Thomas Foley, 1st Baron Foley was a British landowner and politician.
Shadrach Fox was the ironmaster who preceded Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale.
Richard Thomas and Baldwins Ltd (RTB) was a major iron, steel and tinplate producer, primarily based in Wales and formed in 1948 by the merger of Richard Thomas & Co Ltd with Baldwins Ltd. It was absorbed into British Steel Corporation in 1967. The business now forms part of Corus, a subsidiary of Tata Steel.
John Bradley & Co was a company established in 1800 by John Bradley at Stourbridge in the West Midlands area of England. The company developed into a large industrial concern with furnaces, ironworks and mines. Under James Foster, John Bradley's half brother, it was instrumental in bringing the first commercial steam locomotive into the Midlands area in 1829. The firm stayed under family control until the early years of the 20th century when first the mining (1913) and then the ironworks (1919) were sold off. Part of the business continued to trade under the name John Bradley & Co. (Stourbridge) Ltd until after the Second World War.
Thomas Hill of Dennis, also known as Thomas Hill or latterly Thomas Hill I, to distinguish him from his son, was a Welsh ironmaster, and the leading partner in the establishment of Blaenavon Ironworks in south east Wales.
References
↑ Stourport-on-Severn Civic Society. Newsletter No 41. June 2005.
Note
The basis for this article includes unpublished sources, including certain Worcester Episcopal archives in Worcestershire Record Office; archives of Earl Baldwin (by his kind permission) also there; and those of the Foley family (also by permission) in Herefordshire Record Offices.
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