Black Country History
Black Country Landscape by Edwin Butler Bayliss, Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Dudley Worcestershire. J W M Turner (1832)
There are Black Country towns and villages mentioned in the Domesday Book e.g. there was an Anglo-Saxon monastery at Wolverhampton and a Norman castle in Dudley (you can still visit the castle’s extensive ruins which have Dudley Zoo in its grounds). The area was initially rural but the beginnings of industrialisation were apparent with coal mining carried out from medieval times. Metalworking was important in the Black Country area as early as the 16th century with the first blast furnace built at West Bromwich in the 1560s. All of this was possible because of the ready availability of iron ore, limestone and especially coal which was present in a seam 30 feet thick, the thickest in Great Britain, which outcropped to the surface making mining easy even with simple technology. It was common for people to have an agricultural smallholding and to supplement their income by working as nailers or smiths and by the 1620s it was said that “within ten miles of Dudley Castle there were 20,000 smiths of all sorts”. Shown here is Turner's apocalyptic view of Dudley in 1862, Dudley Castle and St. Thomas Church can be seen on the skyline but the canal has been moved to aid the composition: I suppose that we must allow Turner some artistic licence. The overall impression of industrial squalor is clear.
In the early 17th century, Dud Dudley, an illigitimate son of the Baron of Dudley, experimented with making iron using coal rather than charcoal and obtained patents for the process. It seems unlikely however that this would have been successful because sulphur, originating from the coal, would have contaminating the iron making it brittle. Probably more significant was the establishment of an iron works near Bilston by John Wilkinson; in 1757: he started making iron there using coke (the coke coming from coal which had been roasted to remove the sulphur and other contaminants to leave purer carbon behind) rather than using coal itself or charcoal rom wood. This development was followed by others and thereafter iron making spread rapidly across the Black Country. Another significant invention by Henry Cort in 1783 was the development of grooved rollers which enabled "round iron" to be produced for the growing chain making industry.
The iron industry grew during the 19th century and in the mid-1860s there were 200 blast furnaces in the Black Country and over 2,000 puddling furnaces, which were used to converted cast pig-iron into wrought iron. Also the first Black Country plant capable of producing steel by the Bessemer process was constructed at the Old Park Works in Wednesbury and later, in 1882, at Spring Vale in Bilston, a development followed in 1894 by an open-hearth steelworks at the Round Oak works in Brierley Hill.
A further development of the 18th century was the construction of canals to link the output of the Black Country coal mines, which previously could only be used locally, to the rest of the country, they of course also enabled the transport of the finished metal goods manufactured from the iron and steel produced locally. Important examples are the Brindley canal which starting in Birmingham and traversed the heart of the Black Country eventually joining up with the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, the Birmingham Canal Navigation serving the eastern part of the region, and the Stourbridge and Dudley canals. These eventually allowed access to the river Severn thus enabling transport more widely to the rest of the UK. The great extent of the Black Country canal network can be seen from the diagram below.
In the 19th century local railways were developed which progressively took much of the transport of goods from the canals. Industries rapidly developed based on the ready availability of coal and minerals. Clay, often appearing with the thick coal seams, was used in the production of ceramic pipes, crucibles and engineering bricks, limestone from the Wrens Nest area of Dudley was used as a flux in iron and steel making, and dolerite hard rock quarried from Rowley Hills for road making. The Black Country can claim to be the first industrial landscape with a wide range of metal working industries being developed, chain making and nail making being of particular interest in that they were in effect cottage industries with nails or small chain made in back-yard smithies, usually by women. Their terrible working conditions are described in the book by Sherard in 1897 called 'The White Slaves of England' which can be accessed online here; additionally much detailed information on the women chainmakers of the Cradley Heath area and the 1910 chainmaker's strike can be found at the University of Warwick modern records centre here. If you need any further persuading you can read a similar grim report on child labour in the nail making industry of the Sedgley area in 1841 by R.H. Horne.
In addition to the metal-working industries fire brick manufacture was developed in Amblecote, glass in Stourbridge and enamelling in Bilston.
Heavy chain when made in factories were produced by a team of only three men, a chain smith and two sledgehammer men who were paid piecework i.e. by the type, quality and amount of chain produced (although the heaviest anchor chain may have needed a larger team). They would start early in the day, maybe 6.00 a.m. and after 6 hours or more of hot and exhausting work would go home to tend to their allotments, racing pigeons or whippets. The video here by Ron Moss, the curator of Mushroom Green Chain Shop, explains very well the history and manufacture of both heavy and lighter chain in the Black Country. Additionally you can see a shorter film of heavy chain making here and of the lighter chain making which was carried out more in back yard smithies here. It is quite possible that if your ancestor came from the area of the Black Country where coal was readily available they were either miners, chain makers or nail makers. This is particularly so for Pennsylvania and other areas of the east coast of the USA. This is because wages were pitifully low for chain makers in the Black Country in the 19th century and emigration to an area of the 'new world' which had need of their skills and plentiful supplies of coal, iron ore and other minerals, was attractive.
Another important development of the early 17th century was the introduction of glass making to the Stourbridge area driven by the availability of sandstone, limestone, coal and fireclay for making the pots in which the glass was melted. (See the section on the Huguenot settlers on the Brettle Name Origin Page for more information on Stourbridge glass making).