THIS is part of a series by the society and it looks at the large, and largely forgotten, ironworks that once occupied the loop of the Tees where Margaret Thatcher took her famous walk in the wilderness in 1987.

The Whitwell brothers were Quakers from Kendal whose close connections to Darlington’s Pease family helped them set up their ironworks in Thornaby in 1859. It was a substantial concern, with three blast furnaces and hundreds of employees. For the most part, it was profitable, too: William Whitwell lived in a house in Saltburn built by the renowned Quaker architect Alfred Waterhouse, who designed many of Darlington’s most iconic buildings.

But it was a dangerous place, too. There were lots of horrific deaths. The author tells how in 1877 James Higgins was “consumed in a furnace”.

He fell in, and once it was safe for his colleagues to look for him “not a vestige of the poor fellow was to be recovered”.

The Northern Echo of the day said: “All that was known was a sickening smell emerged from the fire for some 20 minutes, by which time the body would be reduced to ashes.

“The furnace will be tapped on Thursday morning, when it is proposed to take a portion of slag which will contain the deceased’s ashes and bury them in the usual way.”

Even Thomas Whitwell, the co-founder of the foundry, was killed there.

He was a wonderfully inventive fellow – he had trouble getting up in the morning so created a pulley system which removed his bedclothes at an appointed hour – but when in 1878 he was inspecting a Belgian gas heating furnace, an unexpected blast of flame caught him in the face.

  • The book is available from Stockton library, Guisborough bookshop or by email alan@abetteney.freeserve.co.uk