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The
images above and to the right
Cultivating
the soil
Past
and present
Compassion
Aggression
Catherine
Bailey's 'Black Diamonds'
Sheffield
as a tourist destination
The
images
This interior is very large, although many factories are
much bigger. The very large image has greater scale and
greater adequacy than the much smaller image below it. The larger
image is expressionist in its use of distortion, the outer suggesting the
inner (although as a matter of fact the image wasn't subjected to any processing
by computer program.) The inner, subjective response has been emphasized
in the history of expressionism, as when Mallarmé, 'remarked that
an artist should be less concerned with the object to be depicted than with
'the effect it produces'. (quoted in George Heard Hamilton, 'Painting and
Sculpture in Europe, 1880 - 1940.)
I'd emphasize too inscape, to use Gerard Manley
Hopkins' term, the inner nature of a person or thing, in this case the inner
nature of the steel works, its overwhelmingly impressive but baffling tremendousness.
The scale of the larger image is needed to ensure greater adequacy for inscape
too, as is the nature of the larger image, the distortions which realize
the inner with greater adequacy. The more 'realistic' smaller image gives
an impression of straightforwardness which has far less adequacy in conveying
inscape. It does, though, convey better the rationality of the processes
taking place in the steel works, the high degree of control. This factor
may well be given greater weighting. There are now far
less workers than in the past. At the time the photograph was taken the
works was facing extreme difficulties which would lead to redundancies.
Both images are without people but the smaller image seems to show a place
of work which is temporarily unattended, as at night. The larger image shows
a world which separate from any human activity, operating under its own
unfathomable laws: technology as apparently unstoppable, irreversible, autonomous.
Cultivating
the soil
There's an increasing awareness of food and its linkages
with the earth, with good and poor uses of the earth, an awareness which
is essential for understanding the contemporary difficulties and dilemmas
of food production. At the same time, there's surely a limited awareness
of the linkages between the articles we use and the earth - the iron ore
and the other metals in the earth, the minerals in the earth, the oil deep
beneath the earth, the earth and all the other raw materials of industry,
which include the air. A limited understanding of the manufacturing processes
themselves, of their difficulty and complexity, of the ingenuity and resourcefulness
which have been needed to devise the processes. A limited knowledge of manufacturing's
past as well as its present. Coal, a polluting fuel, and steam power - unimportant!
How inimportant the canals, the viaducts which took the canals over valleys,
the tunnels which took them through hills, the locks which took them over
hills!
The tools essential for cultivating the soil, unlike the
soil itself, are taken for granted, yet the manufacture of tools such as
scythes using water power required a vast degree of effort, ingenuity and
resourcefulness to make the massive water wheels, hammers and grindstones
- before steam power, a development of incalculable importance, made it
possible to site works almost anywhere, away from running water.
Past
and present
A fatuous piece by Martin Whittaker about the
city of Sheffield. A tell-tale sign is the word 'vibrant.' Whenever a city
is portrayed as a paradise for clubbers, smart people completely aware of
their smartness, for people completely convinced of the importance of style
and the unimportance of substance, you're almost certain to find the word
'vibrant.' It's a word more often used of Manchester than Sheffield, and
not the Manchester whose past achievements include the Manchester ship canal
or the manufacture of Lancasters.
Martin Whittaker writes: '...England's fourth largest city
[in area or population?] has worked hard to shake off the down-at-heel image
and today it portrays itself as a vibrant, cosmpolitan university town.'
This sentence should preferably be read aloud to the accompaniment of loud
yawning. What else does he have to say about Sheffield? 'Stripped of its
shabby past, Britain's fourth largest city shows promise.'
'Its shabby past!' What a past! A past which has included
these things but so much more: precision engineering and engineering on
a massive scale and the combination of the two: the extremely fine tolerances
for massive parts which had begun as molten metal poured from massive ladles.
The almost effortless control over great masses of metal. (The one shown
in the image above, weighting many tonnes, was flipped over and compressed
with a flick of the operator's hand on the control lever and slight pressure
on foot pedals. This control is the culmination of very long and very arduous
development, development which was never in the least effortless.) The extreme
sophistication and complexity of the manufacturing processes. Ingots of
steel weighing 200 tonnes each. Giant crankshafts for ships and other marine
forgings.Special steels for innumerable different purposes, such as heat
resistant steels for jet engines. Sheffield's prowess, Sheffield's reasons
for justifiable pride are not unique, of course. The engineer Whitworth
is part of the 'shabby past' of Manchester. He 'introduced precision tools
capable of working to one hundred thousandth of an inch.' (Asa Briggs, 'The
Power of Steam.')
As a matter of strict fact, all the sybarites who jet off
to distant countries for beach holidays, all the people who like imported
CD's and DVD's (and countless other things) are dependent upon castings
and forgings, electroplating, all the industrial processes, and the massive
works of civil engineering which gave us such things as modern ports.
Compassion
A simple example of compassion, giving
water to the thirsty. (See the simple-minded Gospel according to Saint Matthew,
25: 35, where the righteous who go away into 'life eternal' are praised:
'...I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink.') Water, although not an element,
is elemental, a basic requirement of life, but providing this basic requirement
isn't at all simple. Water illustrates the complexity of reality. It can
carry disease organisms, such as those that cause cholera. The separation
of water for drinking and water for disposal of faeces poses immense practical
problems. If gratitude should be shown to the compassionate, it should be
shown too for those who by their practical achievements made the compassionate
act possible: for the engineers who designed dams, for those who built the
dams and made the bricks and the other materials for the pipes which led
the water from the dams, for the foundries and other factories which manufactured
the taps, the pumps. For the mathematical and scientific innovators who
developed the techniques in calculus, fluid mechanics and the other techniques
needed for supplying water.
Religious people are often very fond
of simplicities, such as compassionate feelings and compassionate acts.
Compassion, like love, is thought to be in a sphere beyond complexities.
Taking fruit from trees, taking vegetables from the earth - perhaps to feed
the hungry (Matthew 25: 35 again) without the need to bother about diseases
or pests and the best ways of controlling them, without any thought given
to the manufacture of the tools and equipment needed for cultivation.
Vegans are an instructive example
of mindless compassion. The section on 'vegan compassion' is here.
Since vegans reject leather and wool (and fur, which I would also reject),
for clothing in cold climates and for many other purposes, they're dependent
upon synthetic substitutes. The processes by which these are made from the
raw material, most often crude oil, are almost unimaginably complex. The
lack in vegan writing of any appreciation for these, any gratitude for these,
is striking.
Generally, the compassionate are
given a far higher status than any scientists, engineers and workers - according
to fine feeling or the appearance of fine feeling a much higher status than
to human activities which make vast demands on intellectual achievement,
complex planning and effort.
George Orwell, in 'Marrakech:' 'All
people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important
the work they do, the less visible they are.'
Unless the sick are to be looked
after in simple shelters or in the open, the work of roofers and scaffolders
and other manual workers in building hospitals is so important that they
deserve heartfelt appreciation - and proper pay and working conditions -
but the work of roofers and scaffolders is almost invisible, their work
taken for granted. The average roofer or scaffolder probably lacks refinements
and many would fail any tests for political correctness, but few people
in possession of those advantages would choose to do physically demanding
work at a height in almost all weathers.
When transport - and travel - was
very slow and often hazardous, then how was coal to be transported in bulk?
To get through a winter without the ability to heat homes and workplaces
effectively, to heat food and heat water - as an exercise in compassionate
and realistic imagination, it's useful for people who take for granted the
simplicity of turning on central heating, turning on an electric kettle,
having a hot shower, to enter into the harshness of the pre-industrial age.
The industrial revolution was as harsh or harsher, but a necessary prelude
to this age of comfort and comfortable assumptions.
The harshness of the industrial age,
like the comfort of this age, wasn't, of course, shared by everyone. The
harshness was experienced by people who really are all but invisible today,
such as the navvies.
'Men of Iron,' the superb book by
Sally Dugan, is mainly concerned with the audacious work of the engineers
Isaambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson (she also does justice to
the genius of their fathers, Marc Brunel and George Stephenson).
Sally Dugan writes, 'Engineering
history tends to be dominated by the men who put their signatures on the
plans. Brunel, in his diaries, writes about his Chateax d' Espagne -
castles in the air. They would have remained just that if it had not
been for the army of individuals who not only made his dreams possible,
but sometimes died for them. This was true of Brunel, as it was for every
other railway engineer in the country.'
She writes of the navvies' work,
'Maiming or mutilation came with the job, and navvies were lucky if they
escaped with nothing more than the loss of a limb. They worked using picks
and shovels, crowbars and wheelbarrows, and their bare hands; the only other
aid they had was the occasional blast of gunpowder. Some were blinded by
explosions; others were buried in rock falls. All led a life of hard, grinding
physical toil, tramping from one construction site to another in search
of work. Their reputation for violence and drunkenness made them a frequent
focus for missionaries and temperance society members, as well as turning
them into the bogeymen of folk myth.' Elizabeth Garnett was the secretary
of the Navvy Mission Society and might have been expected to give a harsh
verdict on their uncouthness and worse. Far from it. 'Men of Iron' quotes
her words: 'Certainly no men in all the world so improve their country as
Navvies do England. Their work will last for ages, and if the world remains
so long, people will come hundreds of years hence to look at it and wonder
at what they have done.'
There are many people who like their
reality smoothed out, comfortable, free of unsettling paradoxes and contradictions:
in the terminology I use, with {adjustment} of reality, a sub-theme of {modifiction}
of reality. How could such drunken, violent people (although they were not
all drunken and violent) have done so much to reduce human suffering, and
far more, in general, than the genteel? (The human suffering they reduced
was not their own, but the suffering of the wider population, including
the suffering of their critics.)
Aggression
For those who question the morality of manufacturing bombers,
such as the Lancasters manufactured at Manchester: during the Second World
War, it was proposed that the rail links to the German extermination camps
should be bombed. The proposal was never adopted. It would have been better
if it had. If the bombing had been carried out - with what? This is not
to condone the area offensive on German cities, but bombers were essential
for resisting aggression, in effect for furthering compassion.
The resistance of Britain against German aggression when
it stood alone in the early part of the war is morally neater, but of course
relied just as much on the ability to kill and destroy with complete reliance
upon manufacturing industry. Sheffield played a prominent part in this as
in other aspects of the war. In the first 18 months of the war the only
drop hammer in Britain capable of forging crankshafts for Spitfires and
Hurricanes was the 200 tonne hammer at the Vickers works in Sheffield: a
descendant of the hammers which forged scythe blades for peaceful use by
means of water power.
Catherine
Bailey's 'Black Diamonds: the Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty
The story she has to tell, and tells so very well is so remarkable that
it deserves to be very widely known, and the book and its author too. Simplifying,
the book portrays the Fitzwilliam dynasty and the mining communities who
generated their wealth. The mines have now gone and the aristocratic dynasty
is at an end. The tangible remains are a house, 'Wentworth House,' (or 'Wentworth
Woodhouse'), which is the largest in the country (twice as wide as Buckingham
Palace). It was bought by a recluse and is now derelict, apart, presumably,
from a very few rooms. Even the stable block is huge, with a huge fountain,
glimpsed behind an ornate gate. Even on a summer's day, to see the palace
is a melancholy and eerie experience.
There are writers who could do justice to the aristocratic world portrayed
in the book, ones who could do justice to the emotional world of the characters,
ones who could do justice to the tragic deaths of some of the upper class
people in the book, in war and in a plane crash, there are writers who could
have done justice to the exotic aspects, such as travel through the Canadian
wilderness, and ones who could do justice to a main strand of the book,
the desperately harsh lives of miners and their families, the tragic deaths
of so many of them. There are writers too who could do justice to the political
background, the financial and the legislative background.
Catherine Bailey has an understanding of all of these strands -and others
- and the empathy, compassion, knowledge and skill to bring them all to
life. Although I concentrate here on the working class strands, the aristocratic
strands which are necessarily prominent in the book are of the greatest
interest too.
The miners employed by the Wentworths had, it was said, the most enlightened
employers in the country. The miners who lived at Denaby Dale, not so far
away, had employers who were amongst the least enlightened. Denaby Dale
was 'the worst village in England.' In Chapter 9 of the book, the author
tells us about the 'despotic powers' of the mine owners, the accidents and
the mining disasters, the slums and the evictions in the slums. Of small
evictions (At Denaby, 'it was company policy to evict the dead miner's family
from their house within weeks of bereavement'). And of a mass eviction,
200 policemen putting on to the streets 3,500 miners and their families
in bitterly cold weather in early January.
In the previous chapter of the book, there are accounts of working conditions
in the previous century. 'Samuel Scriven saw women and girls 'chained, belted,
harnessed like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet and more than
half-naked, crawling upon their hands and knees and dragging heavy loads
behind them.' After 1842, women and boys under the age of 10 no longer worked
in the mines. The miner David Swallow is quoted: 'The roads are very wet
in some of the pits. The boys are continually wet at their feet...With being
continually wet on their feet and legs they have inflammations in those
parts, on their legs and knees. Boils and rheumatism in all parts of the
body, particularly in their lower parts...Where the road rises very fast,
it is very heavy work indeed.' Catherine Bailey: 'For the majority, there
was no safety net: no unemployment, sickness or injury' benefit.'
This is the fine closing passage of the book, describing the view from
a structure erected to commemorate the English victory over the Scots at
the Battle of Culloden:
'At night, the view over the surrounding country stretches for miles. To
the south, the hills above Sheffield are coloured by a livid orange glare;
to the south-west, Rotherham and Rawmarsh blaze, a sodium-lit sprawl; the
M1 marches along its western edge. But like totality in a solar eclipse,
in the midst of this, one of England's greatest urban conurbations, there
is a vast expanse of black. Startling in its size and density, it conceals
woodland, fields and parkland. It is the land once encompassed by the nine-mile
perimeter wall that encircled Wentworth House.'
Sheffield
as a tourist destination
In 'The Road to Wigan Pier,' George Orwell gives his opinion on the beauties
of Sheffield: '...even Wigan is beautiful compared with Sheffield. Sheffield,
I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World:
it inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in everything, very likely
do make that claim for it. It has a population of half a million and it
contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of
five hundred.' Far, far fewer than the village of Lavenham, that's certain.
I live on the outskirts of Sheffield, where the countryside starts. It
goes on and on, across the Pennines and is unbroken as far as Glossop in
the far West of Derbyshire. I'm near to the boundary of the Peak District
National Park and the Derbyshire border isn't much further. I think I've
developed the characteristic attitude of many of the people who live near
a border, feeling an affinity for what lies over the border rather than
their own territory. Certainly, feeling more affinity with Derbyshire than
with with Rotherham, Doncaster, Barnsley and many other parts of South Yorkshire.
When I've been outside Sheffield in this country, it has been most often
to the Peak District and the Lake District, to the Cotswolds, to Oxford
and Cambridge (Cambridge more than Oxford) and to parts of the West Country.
My visits have reflected interests which are very common, in fact conventional
- in such things as mellow stone and brick, gardens, thatched cottages,
tithe barns, village churches, cathedrals, in the variation in building
materials and building styles as you travel in England.
Although there are tourist offices in Sheffield, I've seen no particular
reason why tourists should visit the city. Anyone wanting to visit the Peak
District would be better advised to stay in a Peak District village or town.
The rural world interests me intensely, the world of rural materials -
straw, manure, barley, wheat - and rural activities, such as dry-stone walling,
But the industrial past of Sheffield has never lost its hold upon me, or
an interest in its industrial present. My interest in these things has steadily
increased, and with it, an interest in the preservation of Sheffield's industrial
past.
Of decisive importance was reading Catherine Bailey's Black
Diamonds, which I discuss in the previous section, and
visiting the village of Wentworth and looking at the great house, Wentworth
Woodhouse. All the mines in the area are gone, but they are a very potent
absence. The vanished mines renewed my interest in the industrial history
of Sheffield, which is centred, of course, upon steel making. A grandfather
was a steel-worker, and lived in the slums. My step-father was a pattern-maker.
The 'patterns' were used for making the moulds into which the molten steel
would be poured. For a short time, I worked as a labourer at Firth Browns,
one of the great names in Sheffield steel, its factories long gone.
Jane Grigson writes in 'English Food' about one effect of urbanization
in this country: 'We have been long cut off from the experience of food
production.' And, 'I remember the situation during the last war...when children
evacuated from the big towns refused to drink milk because it came from
those dirty cows rather than from a nice, clean tin.'
The places in the list below are all open to the public. After visiting
all but one of the places in the list below, all but one either in Sheffield
or very near to Sheffield, I'd recommend a visit to them wholeheartedly.
They're all concerned with manufacturing or extraction in the past rather
than the present but the historical dimension is essential. In no particular
order:
(1) Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet
www.simt.co.uk
Not too far from the centre of Sheffield (about 7km south-west) and near
to the busy main road which goes from Sheffield to Bakewell, but for all
that, with an air of seclusion, set amongst trees, a very large dam alongside
it, idyllic, but used to provide power, using massive waterwheels. A centre
for scythe making.
(2) Top Forge, Wortley
www.topforge.co.uk
Not far from Stocksbridge, a suburb of North Sheffield, on the banks of
the River Don. The setting is quiet and leafy. The industrial buildings
are like the the cottages and today picturesque, not at all grim. When they
were the site of manufacturing, it would have been very different. Like
Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, full of equipment, tools, things used in everyday
life, as well as machinery and other equipment in the open, some of it massive.
Wrought iron was manufactured here, including wrought iron railway axles.
The oldest heavy iron forge in the world.
(3) Kelham Island Industrial Museum
www.simt.co.uk
On the banks of the River Don, a few km from the city centre. The museum
was heavily damaged by flooding in 2007. It's now open to the public again,
giving essential insight into the stupendous achievements of Sheffield industry.
(4) The Magna Centre
www.visitmagna.co.uk
(A very slow Web-site, as it uses Flash.)
Probably worth a visit just to see the vast building (the former Templeborough
steel works) but this is full of push-button gadgets.
(5) National Coal Mining Museum
www.ncm.org.uk
Further away from Sheffield (about 30km) and south of Wakefield. Admission
free. Remarkable displays of equipment and machinery and articles to do
with the life of mining families, as well as visits underground - an altogether
memorable and humbling experience.
