User:Les1roy/Frodingham Ironstone

Introduction

This account of the origin of the ironstone mining and iron producing industry of north Lincolnshire is based on primary source research among the Nostell Priory and Lord St Oswald Muniments. The Nostell Priory papers are the family and business records and correspondence of the Winn family, and are now held by the West Riding Archive Office at Leeds. Throughout the following narrative, documents cited to and held in that office will be referenced ‘NP’ followed by the catalogue reference number. The Lord St Oswald papers are the records of the family’s interest in Frodingham Ironstone Mines, and the development of the associated iron producing industry. Those records are held by the North Lincolnshire Museum, Scunthorpe: though at the time of writing they are held in store by North East Lincolnshire Council at the Archive Office, Grimsby. Citation to them will be prefaced by ‘LSO’ followed by the catalogue number.

The present author’s research within the papers show that much that has been previously written about the discovery of the beds of ironstone that lay in the area of the present town of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, does not stand up to critical examination: this is especially true of the 1850’s and early 1860’s, the period surrounding the discovery. He therefore finds himself in the unfortunate position of having to correct much of what has been written about that discovery. It is not easy to follow in the footprints of Daff, Dudley and Pocock et al, nor is it easy to criticise their work, but they have all, without doubt, based their history of the developments in the district, to a certain extent on anecdotal and secondary source evidence, rather than the facts that primary source evidence provides. Nevertheless, Trevor Daff’s two essays ‘The establishment of the Frodingham iron industry’ and ‘The coming of the railway’ are important sources of reference. D C B Pocock has published much on the Frodingham iron industry and the related growth of the urban area, and is an equally important reference source. Standing head and shoulders above those works is Dr. F. Henthorn’s ‘Letters and papers concerning the establishment of the Trent Ancholme and Grimsby Railway’, a masterful account of the development of the railway through the ironstone district, to which only a few details of the machinations of Roland Winn et al in 1859/60 can be added. This present work seeks to emulate Dr Henthorn’s account by presenting a detailed study of the Frodingham iron industry backed up by contemporary correspondence.

Pre-decimal currency notation and abbreviation is used throughout; the sums spoken of throughout the text have no real relevance to modern financial value. Thus £12:3s:4d equates to twelve pounds three shillings 4 pence, 1/6d means one shilling and six pence, while -/6d is six (pre-decimal or ‘old’) pence. What -/6d would purchase in 1860, compared to the equivalent post decimal purchasing power of 2½p, seems to make any attempt at conversion rather pointless.

Frodingham ironstone: location and description.

The Frodingham ironstone field is located in North-west Lincolnshire between the River Trent to the west and the River Ancholme to the east. The Humber Estuary lies to the north and the field extends about 10½ miles to the south as far as the Scunthorpe-Brigg road near Ashby Ville. The modern industrial town of Scunthorpe has arisen as a result of the development and exploitation of this field, and the mid-nineteenth century development of iron (and later steel) works to utilize the ore on the spot.

The most important British iron ores were laid down in Mesozoic times between one hundred and two hundred million years ago. At the opening of the Jurassic period, during which the principle sedimentary iron ore beds were deposited, the sea covered most of England, Northern Ireland and Western Scotland. A land mass stretched to the west of a line drawn from Cornwall to the Hebrides: a northern land-mass reached south to include Central Scotland, and a promontory from a great continent to the east projected to where London is today.

The Jurassic system accounts for forty million years of sedimentation, and the material forming the sediments was derived from the neighbouring land-masses, whence it was removed as fine particles by the process of denudation. For many millions of years the sea may have held in solution an increasing quantity of iron. With perhaps local changes in conditions, partly attributable to bacterial action, vegetation or animal life, the sea was induced to precipitate its dissolved iron, and thus permitted relatively iron rich sediments to accumulate ion the sea floor. Such conditions were of fairly short duration, geologically speaking, and were interspersed amongst much longer periods when iron minerals were not precipitated from the sea.

The Frodingham Ironstone bed is the earliest of the Mesozoic iron ore beds: it has a normal thickness of some thirty-two feet and the iron content of the workable bed is between eighteen and twenty six per cent. As much as one third of the bed consists of shell fragments, which reduce the richness of the iron ore, but at the same time provide lime to form a flux in the blast furnace. The mid-nineteenth century ironmasters eventually discovered that a proportion of the relatively rich but siliceous Northampton Sand Ironstone, charged into the Frodingham furnaces along with the local ore, produced a good mixture and resulted in a cast of good quality pig iron from the furnace.

The stone itself was not easily worked, the variable composition of the many strata that formed the bed, particularly in regard to the iron versus lime content, were to cause many problems, not only in the furnace, but in the Courtrooms as well, where Roland Winn fought to justify his position as a major vendor of iron ore with a high lime content, rather than a vendor of limestone with a high iron content.

The Winn Family: a brief history.

George Wynn of Gwydir, north Wales was Draper to Elizabeth 1st, and he may be supposed to have founded the family fortune: his wife Margaret, as noted below, inherited the Thornton Curtis Estate in the early seventeenth century. The Wynn, or Winn, family evidently prospered through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and into the early nineteenth century.

In 1654 George Winn, a London Alderman, and grandson of George Wynn, purchased Nostell Priory in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The Priory itself had been destroyed during the Dissolution, and a house built on the site. George Winn had been created a baronet by Charles II on 3rd December 1660, and his grandson, Sir Rowland, the third baronet, was the first in a series of baronets all called Rowland in succession down to the sixth, who died unmarried and without leaving a will in 1808. Burkes Peerage notes that “Charles was the second son of John Williamson (died Dec 1808) of York, who married Esther Sabine, only sister of Sir Rowland Winn, sixth Baronet of Nostell, on whose death, (October 14th 1805), the Baronetcy and estates passed to his nephew, John Williamson, (then aged 11), who took the name of Winn, but died on November 17th 1817, being succeeded by his brother Charles.”

Charles is of course, father of the Rowland to whom the re-discovery and exploitation of Frodingham Ironstone is credited. The family did have some experience of industry on the West Riding Estate, owning and operating Nostell Colliery and associated brickworks. Rowland Winn came down from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had been reading theology, without graduating in 1839: at some point after that date he was appointed by his father custodian of the of the north Lincolnshire Appleby Estate.

The family had come to be associated with north Lincolnshire in the late sixteenth century through the Thornton Curtis Estate where Edmund Wynn (son of the first George Wynn mentioned above) and his wife Mary were recorded as resident. The Nostell Papers note that on June 26th 1607: Grant in perpetuity William Skinner, esq. of Thornton College, County of Lincolnshire, to Margaret Wynne, widow, of London, the Manor of Thornton, formerly part of the late College of Thornton, with all the Appurtenances and Minerals and all other rights. (NP C2/27/80). Exactly who William Skinner was is not recorded. (Margaret’s maiden name is given as Green). A further entry notes: On October 2nd 1624, Margaret Wynne of London appointed her son, Edmund Wynn, Citizen and Merchant Tailor of London, steward of the Thornton Curtis Estate. On her death in December 1627, the Estate passed to him. (NP C 6/10) The Thornton Curtis Estate was put up for auction at Barton-on-Humber in December 1847. (NP C2/27 1317)

The Appleby Estate had been purchased in January 1652 from the Anderson family of Manby Hall. The estate encompassed land in what are the modern districts of Winterton, Roxby, Riseby, Santon and Thornholme along with Appleby and the village of the same name. NP C2/28/104

The Frodingham estate of Henry Healy was purchased in 1828. (NP C2/32/92.) An undated manuscript note book composed by T[imothy} F [arrer] describes the Pedigree of the Winn Family and their Estates. (NP C 6/10).“ …the Estate at Frodingham, Scunthorpe and Brumby was bought by Charles Winn from Henry Healy in 1828 for £62,841:6s:8d. The Purchase of this Estate was the Ruin of Mr. Winn for he had all the money to borrow at 4 or 4½ per cent, and the Estate, after having £40,000 spent on it, did not pay more than 1½ or 2 per cent.

No wonder that by the 1850’s, Rowland Winn's letters to his father Charles reveal that the family was in a precarious financial position. There were unsuccessful attempts to sell of land in Yorkshire: household goods were being put up for auction, including paintings that at a Manchester auction house failed to reach the reserve price of £50; Nostell Colliery needed modernising, for which funds were not available. Roland was borrowing heavily from friends and family, in October of 1857 for example, £500 from an Aunt and £500 from an unnamed friend. (NP A1/8/1/11) The borrowings were against revenue from Estates that barely made a profit during the period. At the same time, Roland was heavily engaged in various railway promotions, all designed primarily as an additional means of raising revenue from West Riding coals and agricultural products by tapping into the ever-growing London market. Whilst the first scheme, a direct link between the Great Northern Railway’s London-Doncaster line and Wakefield failed, the West Riding, Doncaster and Hull proposal of the late 1850’s, of which Roland was the Chairman, fared a little better. When the extent of the ironstone field on the north Lincolnshire estate became known, this latter railway, transformed into the West Riding and Grimsby Railway, became a reality in the mid-1860’s. Co-directors on these schemes were names and personalities that will become part of the history of the development of the Frodingham Ironstone field – Joseph Cliff, Robert Baxter and Charles Bartholomew in particular. Other abortive railway scheme in which Roland became involved were the Althorpe on Trent and Lincoln of the mid 1860’s, and an early 1870’s proposal, the Hull, South and West Junction, designed to link Hull and Lincoln via Appleby and Brigg.

Charles Winn appears to have taken little part in these proposals, giving Roland a free hand to act, as he did in respect of the agreements and leases negotiated by Roland in north Lincolnshire, though his signature signed of all the Agreements and Leases. It is obvious from the correspondence that the family were a close knit one; Charles addressed his letters to ‘My dearest Rowley.’ Roland signing of letters to his father ‘your most loving and affectionate son, Row.’ The younger son, Edmund John, was frequently referred to, and when during the 1850’s came of age, was frequently consulted on matters pertaining to Frodingham and the estate. Edmund eventually become Treasurer to the West Riding County Council and a local Justice of the Peace in that district, a position that Roland held in north Lincolnshire.

Upon the death of Charles Winn in 1874, Roland inherited the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire estates, Nostell Priory then becoming his main home: between the early 1840’s and until his elevation to the peerage in 1885, his home had been at Appleby Hall. Roland had married Harriet Dumaresq in 1854; improvements to the Hall soon followed that event. Harriet survived her husband by 33 years, upon his death she moved back to Appleby Hall, where she died in 1926. Roland was elected to the House of Commons as a Conservative representing North Lincolnshire in 1868, and ennobled in 1885, one of several conservative Members of Parliament seconded to the House of Lords, “one of a dozen from the meritorious ranks of the civil servants” during the Salisbury Administration. Roland Winn was a conservative whip and a first secretary in the Treasury Office. Up to his ennoblement in 1885, he will be referred to as Roland Winn, from that date until his death in 1893; he will be referred to as Lord St Oswald. From 1893, his son will be referred to as the second Lord St Oswald.

Winn had first come across the ironstone in 1854. A memo, in his own hand, written on 26th May 1859, describes the event: “Ironstone was first discovered by me in a pit made while marling the land near the village of Scunthorpe in 1854 and samples were sent in that year to Mr. Sollitt of Hull to analyse. The samples I sent were extremely poor, containing only 8 to 11 per cent iron. In consequence, I abandoned the matter till the year 1858 when other pits had been opened for marling the land about a mile east of Scunthorpe, and which appeared to promise much better. I had a very satisfactory analysis made in December of 1858 and January of 1859. In March of 1859 I sent for Mr. Roseby of Whitby to report generally on the minerals on the Estate, he came early in April, and he at once pointed out that the upper portion of the bed was of the greatest value and showed a very high percentage of iron. He also found the Top Bed at Lower Santon, this I had noted previously on Sheffield’s Hill. Messrs Dawes agreed to take this portion of the bed on 3rd October 1859.” NP C3/1/6 (300)

Stories of the discovery by knowledgeable gamekeepers, tramps, road menders etc. are, as usual in these cases, apocryphal. Roland Winn’s memo also contradicts that most popular local myth regarding the discovery, the ‘while out shooting with a certain party’ story. It cannot be said that the existence of ironstone was unknown: it was in use as a building material from at least the beginning of the nineteenth century, as, for example, the cottages built of ironstone in Normanby village, and dated 1804, bear witness, and in fact in 1851 a paper in the Royal Agricultural Society’s journal noted that the yellowish soil in the High and Low Risby area of north-west Lincolnshire was impregnated with iron.

Winn's memo not only throws into doubt all previously published accounts regarding the discovery, but also the location of the first working of the ironstone. Previously published accounts put the ironstone firmly in Frodingham Township.  It is generally asserted that this was in the region of the Frodingham railway goods yard, or the site of the Frodingham Iron Company’s works, where the supposed discovery was made. This area, usually described as the site of the first mines,  was later, (in 1863) to form part of the Cliff and Hirst lease: it is hardly likely that Joseph Cliff and his partner would contemplate leasing an area which would have been, if the supposition were correct, mined for the easily-won outcrop stone: Winn's statement of 1858 however, firmly states that the discovery was made in Scunthorpe Township: ‘About a mile east of Scunthorpe’ would be where the soon-to-be-built Dawes tramway came up to the Scunthorpe East Common Road,  and in fact an 1860 plan of the area, discovered amongst the Nostell Priory papers, and copied below, puts the seal on any further discussion; indicating as it does, quite clearly, that that is the location of the Winn’s ironstone pit. Of course this is all purely academic, what is important is that both townships lay within the Parish of Frodingham, hence the generic name of Frodingham Ironstone.

John Roseby Reports

John Roseby was undoubtedly a mining engineer of some little fame in the ironstone districts. From the nature of Roseby’s report, he must also been asked for advice regarding leases and rentals. In reply to Roland Winn’s enquiry he replied on March 28th 1859:

“ In reply to your letter of the 26th inst. I beg to say that I have had considerable experience in making Geological Surveys of Estates in the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire and also in many of the Southern Counties of England, it being part of my Profession. I have the satisfaction of seeing many valuable mining operations at present at work from my discoveries, particularly in the North Riding. From the Analysis you give of the beds of ironstone you have opened, I think it will be one of the Lower Oolite beds and not the Cleveland, this I should be able to define as soon as I saw it. There must also be other beds of ironstone in the immediate vicinity and they can I am quite sure be turned to profitable account provided the cost of transit out of the district is not to much. My charge to you for discerning whether the ironstone is to be profitable will be £3:10 shillings per day, but should my services be required for more than 6 days than an additional charge of £3:3 shillings a day will be made. I am at present retained by the Stockton & Darlington Railway Company on Parliamentary business for the next ten to fourteen days but after that should have an opportunity of attending upon you should you require my services. I see by the map you are in a good position for supplying the Market.”

Roseby completed his survey and wrote to Roland Winn, from Sandsend, near Whitby, on May 4th 1859 with his findings.  Across the Winn Estate, Roseby found ironstone of workable quantities in the parishes of Frodingham, Scunthorpe and Appleby. Roseby initially makes much of the limestone he found on the Appleby portion of the estate; stating that “(these) parties who may lease the minerals on this estate and also secure sites for building blast furnaces or other works will require a supply of limestone.” Later experience by the ‘parties’ proved this not to be the case. Roseby also comments on the strata of shales “lying between the Lower Oolites and the uppermost stratum of the Marlstone series.” These shales, obviously known to Roseby from his experience in the Cleveland area, where they were known as Alum Rock are mentioned as “possibly …being brought into commercial value… in the production of Alum or Rough Salts.” To turn now to Roseby’s comments on the ironstone beds, firstly it must be said that it is not easy to relate Roseby’s findings to modern knowledge. He describes the stone as outcropping on the surface in the vicinity of Santon Farm,  on the Appleby Estate. The stone here he describes as “proved in a bed of about four feet four inches in thickness and with 49½ percent content of metallic iron.” The second area examined, was in Scunthorpe parish. Roseby here examined workings that indicated a bed of stone “six feet in thickness but owing to this being covered with Alluvial, it is quite uncertain as to its thickness, we are however quite safe in saying that it must exceed six feet and from analysis is found to contain in a dry state 69¾ percent metallic iron.  This bed will extend under the whole of the Appleby Estate and over the greater portion of the Frodingham and Brumby commons. The depth from the surface at the boundary of the Appleby and Frodingham estates cannot be much over thirty feet, so that the two commons of Frodingham and Brumby being let in seperate (sic) patches would make a valuable working in the lower bed… I have no doubt that a mixture of the two ores would be more suitable for making a good iron.” Roseby’s analysis at the Scunthorpe pit and his estimate of the area to which it would extend on the Winn Estate was quite correct, this is in fact the Frodingham Ironstone bed, and, as we now know its extent was far greater than Roseby may have suspected, stretching as it did in workable beds some nine miles from West Halton in the north through Scunthorpe, Frodingham and Brumby to Ashby Ville in the south. To the east, as we shall see, the bed extended to Appleby village, and, under considerable cover, beyond the River Ancholme. 
Roseby then turns to the Appleby portion of the Winn estate, through which he assumes the two beds of stone (that is the stone from the Scunthorpe area and that from the Low Santon pit) “may be safely calculated to run ten feet in thickness.” He suggests dividing the estate into five lots for leasing, four of roughly 1000 acres and one of 658 acres, that land should be reserved for building Blast Furnaces, or other works and dwellings, that routes for railways, tramways and roads crossing the various leases should be covered by wayleave agreements between the various tenants. Roseby is obviously suggesting that the main centre of production be situated on the Appleby estate, that ironstone be extracted by deep shaft mining and that the stone not used locally be shipped out via the River Ancholme. We should note that Roland Winn had, in all probability encouraged Roseby in this respect: by early November 1859, Winn had constructed one mile of railway, from Thornholme, east of Ermine Street, to the Ancholme bank.  The report then goes into suggestions for lease and rent charges and finally makes a comparison between the cost to West Riding ironmasters of their local carboniferous ironstone compared to mining stone at Appleby and shipping it out via the Ancholme to the West Riding. Needless to say, the advantage, according to Roseby lay in favour of the latter. In the event, Roseby’s proposal regarding the leasing of the estate were not put into practice, only three leases to mine ironstone were agreed. By late 1859 or early 1860, Roland Winn’s ideas had changed from proposing to lease areas for mining, to only leasing areas for the establishing of blast furnaces and ancillary plant that would be supplied with ironstone mined by an organisation that he was to establish. John Roseby would however, continue to play a part in the exploitation of north Lincolnshire ironstone.