Sir John Brown - Stainton

There is ample justification for the claim that Sir John Brown was one of the great townsmen of Sheffield in the 'sixties and onward; actually it is not easy to distinguish between the great Sheffielder and his contemporary, Mr. Thomas Jessop. It was John Brown who first rolled armour plates, and armour plates became of international importance. In civic life he was the more conspicuous, though Mr. Jessop also filled the town's great Offices, the position of Master Cutler and of Mayor. He was born in 1804, whereas John Brown's birth occurred in 1816, and each was in the full flush of manhood in the 'sixties. Sir John Brown died at Shortlands, in Kent, then staying with friends in the hope that he might recover his early strength, but he was 80 years old, and recovery was beyond him.

He was born on December 6th, 1816, in Favell's Yard, in Fargate, a part of the town then very much favoured by people in good position for residence. He, however, claimed no social advantages; his start in life was very humble, and his early schooling took place in a garret. However, that garret was touched by romance, for it is recorded that on the seat opposite to young Brown sat Mary Schofield, destined to become his wife. School ended at 14, and at that age John Brown's father proposed to apprentice him to a linen draper, but the youngster had a soul above a counter. "I want to be a merchant," said he, and, argue as the father might, he had his way. "Why," cried the perplexed father, "do you want to be a merchant" "Because a merchant trades with the whole world," was the answer. The result was that indentures were taken out with the firm of Fail, Horton & Co., factors, of Orchard Place. For two years the boy drew no wages, and in the next three years six shillings per week. When he attained his majority his father gave him the usual suit of clothes, his blessing, and a sovereign--and the world was open to him. Prior to this, in 1836, his firm had embarked in the making of steel in Rockingham Street, and when he was 21 young Brown was offered a share in this Hallamshire Works business. Disappointment faced him at the start, for he could not command the money required, but Mr. Earl offered him his factoring business, and offered to provide part of the necessary funds for carrying it on. That generous offer was accepted, the father and uncle found security for £500, and a horse and gig took that proud young head of a business among his customers. Very soon the horse and gig became a four-wheeled cab, so quickly did the trade increase. He made his own cutlery, and success again jumped at him; he looked into steel, and in 1844 began to make it, and, whatever he had done before, that step in 1844 formed the start of his world-career. This steel making establishment was in Orchard Street, and, like all John Brown's ventures of those days, was instantly successful. The factoring business was disposed of, and new premises acquired in Furnival Street for the making of railway springs and files. It was in connexion with railways that he had his first chance of handling really big money as his own; he had been prospering for years, but his invention of the conical spring buffer brought him such wealth as to make all future schemes and ambitions possible to him. As with most big inventions, this was quite a simple thing. It really was a case of who thought of an obvious benefit first. The railways of those days provided little comfort for passengers; the seats were hard, the trains were slow, and progress was punctuated by painful jars and concussion. So, to ease the rude shock and pain caused by the impact of two carriages, came this conical spring buffer. John Brown sold it as fast as he could make it in Ireland and Scotland, and eventually sleepy old England realized that there was a good thing on the market, and the L. & N.W. Railway was the first English company to adopt the invention. There had been jarred spines and bruised shoulders by the thousand on English railway systems in the intervening months. So the John Brown enterprise flourished. Once, when up in Scotland, the head of a great municipal undertaking asked him for goods that had to be made, but it was essential that they should be delivered in five days. By some uncanny miracle of perseverance and pluck, by ceaseless work by himself and everyone on his works, by himself undertaking carriage and partial shipment of the goods, the order was carried through in half a day less than the time stipulated, and the result was that, for years, the John Brown firm had the monopoly of the work required for most of the Scottish railways. Extension of his large premises was inevitable. Already he had distributed his shops over a wide area. He had converting furnaces in Holly Street, he made springs and buffers in Furnival Street, had a spring making shop in Hereford Street and another in Backfields, and the town-a village in reality with long ends--was becoming visibly interested in the dominating force that had arisen for its benefit. In 1856 came the great forward movement, Queen's Works in Savile Street being acquired, and all the various branches centralized. The works in question had been built by Messrs. Armitage, Frankish & Barker on one acre of land, with another couple of acres, the property of the firm, still untouched. The original cost was £23,000; the works were sold for half that sum, and on January 1st, 1856, the Atlas Works--the new name--were started by the firing of cannon, the cheers of the workpeople, 200 in number, and the waving of flags. In those days master and man, in most of Sheffield's works, were akin to a family; Trades Unionism had not stepped in to restrict output, the master as a rule was generous to a fault in the treatment of his men, and no hours were too long for the men to work in repayment of such kindness. This family business down in Savile Street grew apace; very soon its works covered 30 acres. In that year the head of the firm, as he looked from the window of his counting house, saw acres of blue wild hyacinths waving in the sun, and over acres of trees, and saw woods coming close up to the clanging of iron and the rush of steam. Brightside was then a singularly pleasant suburb, an open and fragrant country side.

Already the owner had fulfilled his boyish ambition of being a merchant "because a merchant traded with the whole world, but his ambition was not satisfied. He became the pioneer of the armour making industry in England. Once, travelling in France, he--once the little boy who sat on a school bench in a garret and dreamed dreams--visited Marseilles and there saw the French warship La Gloire. She was an armoured ship, and he found opportunities of looking at her armament pretty closely. At that time France was making marked advances in armour plating, but his investigations, the investigations of a practical man who had no need of a note book, showed him that the plates were hammered, and he came back home with the intention of seeing whether they could not be rolled. Rolled they were, as smooth as the surface of a cabinet, and in 1862, at the Admiralty tests at Portsmouth, four Government plates were smashed up, whereas a John Brown plate remained intact after it had been struck by nine projectiles. His plates gave him the gold medal at the Great Exhibition of 1862, and were awarded very many honours and distinctions from abroad. The Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, came to Shirle Hill, and visited the Atlas Works in 1862, there seeing an armour plate rolled weighing six tons. A year later a new rolling mill was built for even thicker plates, and the Lords of the Admiralty came down to see the rolling of a plate 15 feet by 20, and 12 inches thick. In 1864 the firm was turned into a limited company, with a capital of one million sterling, and one of its later enterprises was in connexion with chrome steel.

Like the present head of the firm, Sir William Ellis, Sir John Brown, despite the enormous responsibilities of the business he had built up, found time for work in the affairs of the town. In 1856 he became a member of the Town Council, he was an alderman three years later, and Mayor in 1861. In that year a banquet was given to him in honour of the dignity conferred upon him, and honour to the guest was paid by the attendance of Lord Palmerston (the Prime Minister) and other distinguished Parliamentarians. Re-elected Mayor in 1862, he was presented by the Corporation with his portrait in 1863, a picture painted by Richard Smith and now hanging in the Town Hall. Eight years later he left the Council. When he began business Sheffield was almost wholly the home of "little mesters," the people who had flourishing businesses of which very little was heard, but where magnitude was from time to time revealed by the amount of money their owners left behind them, and Sir John Brown left his native city a hive of imperial industry, and very truly--in more senses than one-- "a place in the sun." It was lamentable that his own end should have been so clouded owing to heavy losses in the Bilbao silver mines in Spain, in which he was deeply concerned. As an educationist he took a high place. He became first chairman of the Sheffield Board; he was Master Cutler in 1865 and 1866, and he was a devoted and very generous Churchman, the All Saints' Church and Schools, which cost him over £12,000, being an ever-present tribute to his munificence.

The Making of Sheffield 1865-1914 by J H Stainton Published by E Weston & Sons, Sheffield, 1924