The story of Teesside's iron and steel, from Witton Park to Redcar

What John Marley found while out rabbit-shooting created an industry which dominated the coastal end of the Tees Valley for 172 years until Thursday when the last blast furnace came crashing down.

Marley (above) was born in 1823 at Middridge Grange, near Shildon, and he went to school in the hamlet of Denton on the outskirts of Darlington. At the tender age of 17, he was beginning his engineering apprenticeship, working in the mines of Durham, followed by a spell working as a surveyor on railways around Belford in Northumbria and then Whitehaven in Cumbria.

In 1845, the Stockton & Darlington Railway brought him home and he helped designed its extension up Weardale. The following year, he entered the employment of the Middlesbrough ironfounders Bolckow and Vaughan by becoming the viewer at Woodifield Colliery near Crook.

Henry Bolckow and John Vaughan had been attracted to Middlesbrough in 1840 by Joseph Pease, who had offered them a cheap piece of riverside land which was “a dreary waste of mud on which sailors had discharged their ballast” near the Port Darlington of the S&DR.

They’d built a foundry (above) on the mud at Vulcan Street, near where the Transport Bridge would be built, and began shipping ironstone from Grosmont, near Whitby. In the foundry, it met the coal from south Durham and in furnaces the two raw materials made iron.

READ MORE: THE FULL HISTORY OF IRON AND STEEL MAKING ON TEESSIDE

To take control of their supplies, in 1845, Bolckow and Vaughan opened Woodifield Colliery, and appointed 22-year-old Marley as manager, and then in 1846 built their first blast furnace at Witton Park, near Bishop Auckland. Witton Park was an ideal location: it was beside the railway, midway between the coal at Woodifield and the iron ore arriving in Middlesbrough.

Their furnace first blasted on February 14, 1846, and it created pig iron which was loaded back onto the railway and returned it to Middlesbrough where it was rolled into bars in the foundry, ready for export.

Then, on June 8, 1850, Marley and Vaughan (above) were out rabbit-shooting on the Cleveland Hills, near Eston. Marley got his foot stuck in a rabbit burrow, and tumbled over. As he fell, his hand when down the hole and clutched onto something to stabilise himself. As he withdrew his hand to dust himself down, he realised that he had been clinging on to something: ironstone.

“Eureka!” he shouted.

The story, though entertaining, does the men a disservice. It had long been known that there was ironstone in the hills. There is evidence of early bloomeries – the primitive furnaces used for melting the iron out of stone – on the North York Moors going back to at least Roman times.

The beaches from Saltburn to Whitby were full of nodules of ironstone which had tumbled out of the cliffs and were collected and sent by ship to furnaces on Tyneside.

So in reality, at Vaughan’s instigation, Marley had been studying Cleveland’s geology in the search for the Holy Grail of a seam of rich ironstone from which these nodules came. Having developed a theory on paper, they walked into the hills that day and were immediately proved right: they found evidence of a 16ft thick layer that was so near the surface that rabbits and foxes kicked it out as they dug their holes.

Marley wrote: “Having found this bed, we had no difficulty in following the outcrop west without any boring, as rabbit and foxholes were plentiful.”

Scientific study had hit upon a eureka moment. They had found it.

On August 13, they started mining at “Bold Venture”. On August 17, they started laying a tramway to the mouth of the mine. On September 2, the first seven tons of limestone came out of the mine, down the tramway, onto the railway and up to the Witton Park furnace.

There it was pronounced good.

The ironrush began. Men dashed to Middlesbrough dreaming of making a fortune. There was iron in them thar Cleveland Hills. It must have felt exactly like the gold rushes of California (1849) and Victoria, Australia (1851).

In 1851, Bolckow and Vaughan opened their Eston ironworks with Teesside’s first blast furnace. They were followed by Joseph Pease who opened a blast furnace at Eston in 1853. Other ironmasters - Samuel Bernhardson, Edgar Gilkes, CA Leatham, William Hopkins, Thomas Snowden, Isaac Lowthian Bell – rushed to join the ironrush, and within a decade there were more than 40 blast furnaces producing half-a-million tons of pig-iron a year.

They pumped out so much smoke that the sun was blotted out.

Middlesbrough’s population exploded from 154 in 1831 to 19,000 in 1861 to 40,000 in 1871 – the first “smoggies”, or smogmonsters.

John Marley built Thornfield in Darlington's west end in 1859 - nine years after his famous discovery. Now Thornfield Road runs right round the impressive property which has John's coat-of-arms next to the front door. Picture: Google StreetView

In October 1862, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, WE Gladstone, visited “Ironopolis”, and you can sense his amazement when he said: “This remarkable place, the youngest child of England’s enterprise, is an infant, gentlemen, but it is an infant Hercules.”

Hercules in classical mythology was noted for his superhuman labours, his extraordinary strength and his voracious appetite, rather like Owen on I’m A Celebrity...

The infant grew rapidly, fed by railways, mines and furnaces, which has grew in size. Bolckow and Vaughan’s first furnaces had been 40ft high and 15ft in diameter, but by the early 1870s, their new giants were the biggest in the country, 90ft high and 30ft in diameter.

The ironworks of Bolckow and Vaughan at South Bank in the late 1930s, from The Northern Echo archive

And there were at least 90 of them along the Tees, producing two million tons of iron a year – a third of the British output.

But it was a notoriously fickle industry. Recession caused some furnaces, from Witton Park to Middlesbrough, to close, but, in 1875, two men who had begun as puddlers united to take over the shut West Marsh Ironworks in Middlesbrough. They were Arthur Dorman and Albert de Lande Long, and they enthusiastically adopted the new Bessemer methods of making steel rather than iron.

Now the Tees became known as “steel river”. In the 1880s, Teesside 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 hills were soon exhausted and so by the 1890s, two million tons of iron ore a year were coming from Spain to keep the furnaces fed.

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. Their name was pressed into bridges around the world – Thailand, Egypt, Sudan, Denmark – and most famously, in 1932, into the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Even the Tyne Bridge, that Geordie icon, was made on Teesside.

Nationalisation in 1967 led to rationalisation as the British Steel Corporation reduced the number of steel producing areas from 14 to five. Teesside, though, survived, and in 1979, BS 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 3.3m tons of steel a year. It was the only blast furnace on Teesside, but it was a big one.

Yet privatisation of BS in 1988 marked the beginning of the end. British Steel became owned by a Dutch company, then an Indian and then a Thai, SSI, which collapsed in 2015 and the blast furnace –still the second largest in Europe – was extinguished.

Perhaps while the structure stood, there was hope that it could one day be reignited and the industry rekindled, but those hopes are now dust as on Thursday it came crashing down to make way for the future.

In the end, there was a kind of symmetry. The iron and steel industry on Teesside was snuffed out in 2022 as the blast furnace came down just as in 1922 Witton Park’s era ended as its furnaces – which John Marley may have recognised – also came crashing down.

The Witton Park blast furnaces, above, which came down in 1922 as these amazing pictures from Dale Daniel show:

The moment on Wednesday that Teesside's last blast furnace fell, captured by Doug Moody on Seaton Carew beach