A Man of Iron
The Daily Ordeal of a Pelsall Iron Puddler
by
Jan Green
When Jan Green found her grandfather described as an ‘iron-worker’ in Pelsall on the 1881 census, she was intrigued enough to want to discover more about the kind of life he would have had as a nineteenth-century employee in the iron industry.
Pelsall
Pelsall is a village which in the 1880s fell within the boundaries of Staffordshire. Its local history centre contains a large collection of helpful resources, some of which enabled me to discover that up to the mid-1880s my grandfather John Hooker worked as an ‘iron puddler’ at Pelsall Coal and Ironworks.
Iron was vital to the advancement of the Industrial Revolution. Its strength and durability made it ideal for large-scale construction of a multitude of crucial inventions, including steam engines, spinning mules, cotton mills, railway lines and the great iron ships which conveyed Britain’s machine-made goods across oceans to global markets. By the beginning of the 18th century, iron manufacture using the blast-furnace method had spread to several parts of Britain.
The whole of the Walsall area was a hotbed of ironworks and coal mines in the 1800s. Coal and iron rapidly became the lifeblood of Pelsall and the village’s extensive ironworks, with its gargantuan chimneys, sprawled alongside the Wyrley & Essington canal.
Pelsall Ironworks
Pelsall Ironworks was founded around 1832 and achieved an excellent reputation for the fine quality of its bar and sheet iron. Later in the century, under the management of the Bloomer family, the ironworks and its several allied collieries expanded into the Pelsall Coal and Iron Company. At its height, the ironworks shipped cargoes of iron and nails to Europe, the USA, Canada, China, India and Northern Africa.
Initially, Pelsall village was a small community rooted in agriculture, but by the 1870s hundreds of men from outlying areas had migrated there to work as miners or ironworkers. My great-grandfather Henry Hooker had been one of the early 1860s influx to the collieries, but when his son John grew up he headed instead for the ironworks.
Puddler
A ‘puddler’ was the man in charge of the furnace at an ironworks. Puddling was the procedure, perfected by Henry Cort in 1784, which enabled iron workers to transmute pig iron created in a blast furnace into wrought iron, a leathery, malleable product which could not be shattered easily.
Pig iron is brittle because it contains impurities such as carbon. Cort’s enclosed ‘reverberatory furnace’ enabled hot air to be dragged over the iron without it directly contacting contaminants in the furnace’s fuel. The molten iron thus produced was then ‘puddled’ (stirred vigorously) with a heavy ‘rabbling-bar’ (a long iron rod with a hook at one end) to remove residual contaminants. This lengthy operation caused oxygen from the oxides blended with the pig iron to react with impurities, so that the resultant slag and gases could be extracted.
To ensure a uniform consistency throughout, puddlers had to stir the iron constantly as it thickened. The furnace had to be fed continually as the carbon burned off and the melting temperature of the mixture rose. The process was complete and the iron could be removed when the carbon had been mostly burned off to leave a more supple material.
The puddler would now have to roll the charge into equally weighted balls with the hook on the end of his rabbling-bar before wheeling them to the ‘shingling hammer’, with which the slag was beaten out and internal fissures fused together. All of this manoeuvring of the iron had to be performed in the face of searing heat and the white-hot slag which spurted out with each slam of the massive hammer.
The flattened iron was fed into grooved rollers in the rolling mill and shaped into cylindrical rods or flat bars. These were then rolled out, sliced into lengths and re-stacked, and the whole process repeated many times until high-quality wrought iron was finally produced.
A Man of Iron Part 2
Iron Workers
