Ships & Steel - From Small Beginnings

JOHN BROWN was born in 1816, and was the second surviving son of Samuel Brown, who was a slater in Sheffield. Samuel Brown was in poor circumstances but possessed considerable strength of character, which was inherited and afterwards shown to better advantage in a larger sphere by his son.

John Brown acquired what education he had in a local school, conducted by a master of old and unacademic type. He kept a school in a garret, and when John Brown first came under his rule, his brusque manner of replying to questions offended the dignity of the 'Master.'

It was a mixed school, another pupil being a girl three years older than John Brown, whose name was Mary Schofield, and she was the future Lady Brown. It may be said of her that she was a considerable help to John Brown in his subsequent career, and at all times took a very keen interest in the education of the young. She was very liberal, and assisted many poor and distressed persons, which much endeared her to the working classes of Sheffield. She died in November 1881.

When young Brown reached the age of 14, his father wished to make him a linen draper, but, to his surprise, the boy would not agree to such a career. When asked what he wanted to do, his ready answer was, 'I should like to be a merchant.' His father thought that it would be impossible for him ever to attain such a position, but the boy was so determined on this course that the father consulted the old schoolmaster, and was surprised to find that the schoolmaster backed up the son's idea.

John Brown then entered the service of a local firm of merchants named Earle Horton & Co., who traded in the staple wares of Sheffield. For the first two years he received no wages, but during the last five years of his apprenticeship was paid 6/- per week. At the end of his apprenticeship his father gave him a new suit of clothes and a sovereign, telling him that for the future he must rely on his own exertions.

In 1836 his employers, who had in the meantime entered into the steel trade as producers, removed from Orchard Place to Rockingham Street, where they established the Hallamshire works, and began to manufacture files and cutlery. The following year, when John Brown came of age, he was offered a partnership, but was unable to find the necessary capital and had to decline the offer. Mr. Earle, the senior partner, however, on further consideration, offered him the factoring part of the business, and John Brown managed to persuade his father and a well-to-do uncle to be security for £500, which the local bank agreed to advance. He travelled the country with a horse and gig, canvassed for orders, and carried his own samples. His industry was rewarded, and the business rapidly increased.

Being full of self-confidence, he now determined to make his own steel, rather than to retail cutlery made by other manufacturers. With the consent of his employers, he resigned and started entirely on his own account, his first works being small premises in Orchard Street. These works prospered and grew so rapidly that he disposed of his factoring business and moved to larger premises in Furnival Street, to which he gave the name of the Atlas Steel Works. In these works he, at first, manufactured crucible steel files. The great impetus, however, which the works received was due to the very rapid expansion of railways in this country at that particular period, which created an almost unlimited demand for such things as railway springs, buffers and other accessories.

In 1848 he invented and patented the conical spring buffer, which soon proved a great success both commercially and mechanically. He was obviously so proud of this invention, which he looked on as the foundation of his fortune, that he incorporated it in the subsequent coat of arms which he assumed when in due course he attained knighthood. This is still to be seen on the seal of the company.

The first pair of these buffers ever made went to the Taff Vale Railway Co., in South Wales, the second to the Glasgow and South-Western Railway, the third to the Dublin and Drogheda Railway, and the first pair used in England were supplied to the London & North-Western Railway.

A good example of his enterprise is shown in the following incident. He was in Edinburgh a few days before the date appointed for the opening of the new line to Dundee. He called on the engineer of the line on Saturday, and was told that everything was ready except a few sets of brake springs, and there was every prospect of the opening ceremony being spoiled through the default of the contractor in not having these springs ready. They were wanted by the following Thursday. The engineer was in dire straits, but John Brown said, 'You shall have them in time.' He started that afternoon by coach for Berwick, took the train to Newcastle and reached Sheffield on Sunday afternoon. The springs were put in hand first thing on Monday morning, and were finished that night. He had them packed up and started back with them himself. He went by rail to Manchester and Fleetwood, from which station the mail started for the North. The railway officials, however, refused to take such a bulky package in a mail train. John Brown, however, was not to be thwarted; he arranged for a horse-box to be attached to the train, and travelled with the springs himself, arriving in Glasgow on Wednesday afternoon, and the springs were duly delivered in time for the opening ceremony.

John Brown's existing premises proving too small, he acquired first one additional workshop and then another, until in 1853 his works were being carried on in four different districts. In 1854, however, what were then known as The Queen's Works in Savile Street, owned by Armitage, Frankish & Barker, were offered for sale; the site comprised three acres, of which one acre was covered by buildings. They were originally built at a cost of £23,000 but Brown bought them for little more than half that amount. The works covered the site of the present Atlas offices and the south department, and extended only from Savile Street to the Midland Railway line. The Queen's Head now mounted in the entrance hall of the main offices was the keystone of the arch over the entrance to the old Queen's Works. This stone was taken down and remained in one of the cellars under the main offices until the time of the Munich crisis in 1938. As the possibility of war seemed imminent, orders had been given for these cellars to be cleared and made available for air-raid shelters as far as possible, and it was during this clearance that the stone was discovered, and the managing director gave instructions that it should be mounted in its present position as an interesting historical relic.

On the 1st January, 1856, the business was transferred to the new works, and in honour of the event John Brown, his friends and workpeople, numbering about 200, celebrated the occasion. The premises were decorated with flags, cannons were fired, the schoolchildren of the district were feasted and the workpeople entertained to lunch. Mrs. Brown nee Mary Schofield, performed a christening ceremony by dashing a bottle of wine against the wall, and naming the premises the 'Atlas Steel and Spring Works.'

In the course of three years the whole of the three acres were built upon. A year after John Brown had entered the works he determined to try his hand in experimenting with the manufacture of iron fit for conversion into steel. Hitherto, this iron had been supplied from Sweden and Russia. In 1857, in spite of the scepticism of other manufacturers, he began the manufacture of iron with six puddling furnaces, one balling furnace, a mill furnace and two Nasmyth hammers. The iron proved perfectly satisfactory, and owing to its lower price Yorkshire iron had a ready sale amongst his competitors in the steel trade. The number of puddling furnaces was then doubled, and he was soon producing about 100 tons of iron per week.

The existing works now proved too small, and he acquired more land on the north side of the Midland Railway, known for many years as the North Department. The first stone of the new works was laid in June 1859. The iron made at the Atlas Works was then coming into use for other purposes besides conversion by cementation for steel making. Notably, boiler and bridge plates were beginning to be made of this Yorkshire wrought iron-for instance, some of the plates used for Charing Cross Bridge were manufactured at the Atlas Works.

A further notable step was now taken by his decision to produce steel by the Bessemer process, and it may be of interest to give here a brief account of Sir Henry Bessemer's experiments, which led to John Brown making this decision.

Bessemer was the youngest son of Anthony Bessemer, a Frenchman who had come to this country at the time of the French Revolution, and was a man of inventive genius who had been employed at the Mint. Henry Bessemer was born at Charlton in Hertfordshire in 1813, and showed his father's qualities at a very early age. His talents were diverse, and he was, in fact, the inventor of the elongated projectile which eventually superseded the old round cast-iron shot. It was his search for stronger material for the projectile and for the gun that fired it that determined him to investigate the question of how to produce stronger metal. He had no previous experience of the manufacture of iron and steel, and had not the least idea of how he was going to set about it. He studied metallurgy and found that the process then in use for making steel by the Huntsman process had been practised for nearly a century without any improvement. He started his experiments in an old factory near St. Pancras Station, London, and converted the factory into a small experimental iron works. He devoted himself first to improving the quality of cast-iron, and then turned his attention to that of steel. Following eighteen months of experiment the idea struck him to render cast-iron malleable by the introduction of blowing air into molten metal in a crucible by means of a movable blowpipe he could convert ten or twelve pounds of crude iron into the softest malleable condition. This was the genesis of the idea of the Bessemer convertor. After much experimenting the result was satisfactory. The new metal was tried-its quality was good; the problem appeared to be solved.

The British Association met at Cheltenham shortly after the conclusion of his experiments and Bessemer read a paper before it entitled 'The Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel.' This paper created great interest, but the process was regarded with considerable doubt by the steel industry generally. Numerous overtures, however, were made to Bessemer for permission to work the process in this country. The engineers of Ebbw Vale ironworks offered £50,000 for the patent, but this was declined. Henry Bessemer divided Great Britain into five iron districts, and announced that he wanted one iron master in each district to have so great an interest in the result of his invention that he would always work with him, instead of against him.

The proposal was accepted by five different iron masters, who paid £ 10,000 each, one of them being John Brown. The Dowlais Iron Company were the first to take out a licence, and it was arranged that Bessemer should advise them as to the details of working the process. A Bessemer convertor was set up, but to the surprise' of everybody the metal produced turned out to be completely useless, so that the invention which was at first received with triumph was, two months later, declared to be impracticable.

After many further experiments Bessemer found that the failure was due to the presence of phosphorus, from which Blaenavon pig, the iron used purely by chance in his first experiment, was exceptionally free. In consequence of this discovery it was decided that Swedish iron would form a more satisfactory basis owing to its freedom from this deleterious element.

At, that time Sheffield manufacturers were selling steel at £60 per ton, whereas Bessemer could buy Swedish iron at £7 per ton, and by blowing it for a few minutes in the convertor, could produce material of equal quality at a much lower cost. Various other difficulties arose, and it was not until manganese was used that Bessemer steel became really satisfactory. Bessemer found, however, that if he wanted to make his success assured it was necessary for him to erect works himself, rather than rely on licencees, whose works were not under his control, and he therefore bought land adjacent to the North department of John Brown’s works in Sheffield.

It will be realized from what has been said that Bessemer steel was still regarded with a considerable amount of scepticism in various quarters. John Brown, however, was convinced that the Bessemer process would be very advantageously employed on a large scale, and he and Mr. John Devonshire Ellis, his partner, visited Henry Bessemer, their next door neighbour, and as a result decided, to put down a large plant for the Bessemer process. As previously mentioned, he was one of the five ironmasters who, immediately after the first announcement of the process, agreed to give a large sum for the right to work in his district, but when it was found that the first expectations were not realised he had, along with the others, abandoned the project.

By 1859, however, John Brown had decided to give up the production of steel from puddled iron and to change over entirely to the Bessemer process, Bessemer having proved in his own works that steel could be produced at £20 per ton less than the cost of manufacture by the puddling process. He therefore took out another licence from Henry Bessemer, for which he paid a Royalty of £1 per ton on steel rails and £ 2 per ton on steel for other- purposes. As soon as the production of this cheap steel was satisfactorily established at the Atlas Works, John Brown perceived that it was far better than iron for rails, and he was the first manufacturer to make rails of Bessemer steel; this was in 1860. Although he immediately obtained very large orders for export, particularly from Russia, the innate conservatism of the, British railways hampered the introduction of steel rails in this country.

There is a legend to the effect that John Devonshire Ellis, 'one dark arid stormy night,' took a gang of his own works platelayers and surreptitiously removed one of the iron rails of the Midland Railway line which ran through between the North and South Departments of the Atlas Works, just opposite the present road to the works from the main office entrance. He substituted a Bessemer steel rail of the same section, and by daylight the job was completed. He said nothing about this to the railway company, but about six months later he was asked by one of the Midland Railway engineers to come and look at a rail which was showing no signs of the normal wear, whereas the iron rails on each side of it had worn down in the usual manner. He then confessed to the railway authorities what he had done, and it was this rather bold experiment which eventually led to the introduction of steel rails throughout the system, and subsequently to all the other railways.

While the new works were thus making rapid strides, John Brown was busily engaged in laying the foundations of another industry, which soon became a large consumer of iron and with which his name will be for ever associated. He was the pioneer of rolled armour plate making, not only in Sheffield but in the United Kingdom. Although the first plate was actually rolled by the Park Gate Iron and Steel Company of Rotherham, who obtained the first Admiralty contract for this work, this firm only continued their process for some five years, and it was John Brown and Ellis between them who developed the armour industry. It is interesting to recall the controversy which appeared in the press at the time of Mr. J. D. Ellis's death in 1906. The following letter appeared in the Manchester Guardian, dated November 13th, 1906, from Mr. James Johnston:–

Sir-In your memorial notice of the late J. D. Ellis, Sheffield, you say that 'the first armour plate was rolled at the Atlas Works in 1859.' This is not correct. The first armour plates were rolled at Samuel Beale & Co's (now Park Gate Iron & Steel Company) Park Gate Ironworks, Rotherham, five or six years prior to the above-named date, for the floating battery Terror, built by Messrs. Palmer Bros. at Jarrow in 1853 or 1854 for use in the Crimean War, then raging. Messrs. Palmer in the first instance bought plates 11 in. thick and welded four of them together under a steam hammer to make armour plates for covering the battleship they were then building for our Government.

The plates made by this process had to be planed on the surface to get them even and uniform in thickness, rendering the process an expensive one.

The then manager (Mr. Sanderson, I think) of Messrs. Beale's Works suggested to Messrs. Palmer that he could roll these plates 4 in. thick, and so save welding and planing the surfaces, and, the Government having approved, the remainder of the plates were made in that way.

When chief engineer of the Park Gate Works, over 25 years ago, I replaced the original armour plate mill by a larger one for producing ordinary boiler and ship plates, and some of the old hands working for me at that time told me of the Sunday visits paid by officials of the Atlas Works to Park Gate, to make sketches of the rolling mill, the heating furnaces, and the apparatus for handling the heavy plates.

The first British battleship fitted with armour plate was the Warrior, the construction of which ship started in 1859, although the French had previously built the Gloire, so that we were three years behind them. On one of his Continental tours John Brown asked permission to go on board the Gloire but was refused. However, he made as minute an examination of the exterior of the vessel as he could, and found that the plates were 5 ft. long by 2 ft. wide by 4t in. thick, and were made by hammering. He was convinced that he could make thicker, larger and finer plates by rolling, and took the step of erecting a rolling mill in which to manufacture a 5-ton armour plate.

In 1862 experiments were made at Portsmouth with four plates forged in the Government dockyards and one rolled plate manufactured at the Atlas Steel Works, and the Brown plate carried off all the honours at the subsequent trials.

The same year Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister, went to Sheffield on a special visit to John Brown, who was then living at Shirlehill House at Sharrow, and witnessed the rolling of a plate at the Atlas Works.