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The assets were bought by the Consett Iron Company Ltd for £295,318 from an initial start-up share capital of £400,000 (Jeans 1877: 123). Priestman, was again managing director. Other directors included David Dale. Probably under the guidance of Dale, the North Eastern Railway commenced the building of the Blaydon and Conside Branch, known as the Derwent Valley line in 1864. The new line provided a direct route to the Newcastle and Carlisle line of the Tyne valley and then to markets on Clydeside and North West England, it also permitted easy access to high quality West Cumberland iron ore. The line opened in 1867.

Several major reorganisations took place in 1865 and 1866: the Bishopwearmouth Iron Works were sold and the Shotley Bridge Iron Company was bought and converted to malleable iron production; this added forty puddling furnaces, replacing those lost at Bishopwearmouth, plus plate mills and a drift colliery to the Company’s assets. All the blast furnaces at Crookhall and Bradley were decommissioned. These actions concentrated activity at Consett with six

furnaces in blast. The larger furnace, of 1862, produced 340 tons per week while the five smaller furnaces could produce some 1000 tons per week between them. By the end of the 1860s Consett appeared profitable with a good reputation for quality.

In 1869 the Company commissioned a report on the current state and future strategy of the business. One major finding of the report was that the Company’s profit came from the output of its eight collieries while the iron production side of the business made a small loss. The fuel profit would not be so great if the Company sold their coal on the open market so instead economies in the iron making processes were required. Stung by the criticism Priestman

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resigned. Dale and his fellow directors advertised for a general manager for the works and appointed William Jenkins of Dowlais in August 1869 (fig. 3.16).

Figure 3.16 William Jenkins.

(Jenkins 2008 [1893]: 94)

Throughout the 1870s Jenkins applied the report’s recommendations. The old blast furnaces were demolished and replaced by new larger models with efficient Whitwell air heating stoves, the number increasing to seven by 1880. The Company had seven rolling mills by 1873, four making plate mainly for a regional market, while three produced rails for overseas trade including Russia and America (Warren 1990: 37). Ovens were built to provide all the coke they needed, and which also produced waste heat for brickmaking. Company agents were sent to Spain where they discovered a high-grade haematite near Bilbao which could be mined, shipped to England, and delivered to Consett cheaper than domestic ore.

The use of steel rails within the British railway network began in the late 1850s and expanded at such a rate as to cause a near collapse of national iron rail production in 1876. Consett’s iron output was initially reduced by a third, but demand for iron ship plates counteracted the loss. Jenkins demolished one old rail mill to build a new plate mill. By 1882 the Company could produce up to 1,900 tons of iron plates per week (O’Hagan 2011: 21). Jenkins realised that steel was the future and built the West Melting Shop, which opened in 1882 with two 13ton Siemens furnaces. It was soon joined by another six, each of 17 tons capacity, producing acid grade steel.

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The advent of steel production instigated a new era of development at Consett. New general offices were built in 1884 and the East Melting Shops in 1887. In 1888 many of the old puddling furnaces were demolished as the Siemens Martin process had no need for puddled iron and were replaced with an Angle Mill to supply the shipbuilding industry. Puddling furnaces were retained at the Shotley Bridge Ironworks which continued to make iron plate (Jenkins 2008 [1893]).

In 1889 the Company bought the Chopwell and Garesfield Collieries from the Marquis of Bute, the appendages to the latter included the Garesfield Staith at Derwent Haugh on the southern bank of the Tyne. From here the Company intended to export its surplus coal, coke and finished product to both foreign and domestic markets. Jenkins resigned in 1894 due to ill health and died in the spring that year. The staith was improved and connected to the Derwent Valley line in 1898 (O’Hagan: 2011: 24) and renamed Derwenthaugh Staithes. From 1896 to 1899 the Company management considered several economic strategies incorporating development on Derwent Haugh including serious thought to moving the main iron production facilities from Consett (North-Eastern Daily Gazette 1 July 1899:2) but the economic argument was not sufficient to implement the move.

From the advent of the twentieth century and throughout the Great War the Consett Iron Company increased capacity and developed its infrastructure which included new larger blast furnaces, electrification of the Consett works and enlargement of the Derwenthaugh Staithes to handle the greater output. The 1920s saw a downturn in demand as the steel industry entered a decade long period of depression. The Company responded to the fall off in

demand by taking the opportunity to demolish the old steel melting shops with their twenty 35 ton furnaces and plate mills, and build new mills including one to produce chequer plate. Nine 75 ton furnaces replaced the older models and the efficiency of the electricity supply was improved. A new 60 oven coking plant was constructed and a new brickworks for silica bricks was built at Templetown (O’Hagan 2011: 26-7). The downturn was worsened by the General Strike of 1926 and a Government economic policy which resulted in a strong pound which depressed exports and the ship steel market. In 1927-8 the Company built the

Derwenthaugh Coke Works between Winlaton Mill and Swalwell to convert coal from its Chopwell and Garesfield collieries.

From the outbreak of the Second World War the Company worked with the assistance of the Ministry of Supply which provided investment to add an acid steel furnace and four ingot

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annealing furnaces. The Company financed a sinter plant in 1942. In 1943 a new generation blast furnace was blown in, and another two were planned. Two old furnaces were

demolished in early 1945 to make room for the second which was only completed after the war ended. The third new furnace was constructed in 1947.

The general election of 1945 returned a Labour Government who, in 1947, nationalised the coal industry including the collieries of the Consett Iron Company. This resulted in a loss of control over their coal reserves and a loss of income for the Company, however, the Company kept investing in plant and added 54 coking ovens to the Fell works at Consett, which entered operation in 1950. In February 1951, the Labour administration nationalised the iron and steel industry. Under nationalisation the running of Consett remained under the control of the former management but pricing strategies were carried out by the Iron and Steel Board. The Conservative Government of 1955 returned the iron and steel industry to its former owners.

Under the Board, Consett had received investment in the form of a slabbing, blooming and continuous billet mill and had received its first two Bessemer Converters to run alongside the open hearth furnaces in the duplex process for steel making (O’Hagan 2011: 34-40).

In the late 1950s the Company decided to manufacture steel plate. The plate mill of the 1920s was considered inadequate for the projected output and so a new plant covering some 70 acres at Hownsgill, Consett, was commissioned. The first new plate was produced in September 1960 in what was considered the most up to date plate mill in Europe (ibid. 41). However, from the plants commission in 1958 to its completion in 1960, demand for ship plate had fallen by 10% and would never recover.

The Company then began producing Oxygen Steel, a cheap-to-manufacture bulk material which had been developed in Europe and had already been introduced into some steelworks around Britain. There were two systems available to produce oxygen steel, the Linz Donawitz or LD process from Austria and the Kaldo process from Sweden. The differences between the processes lay in their relative abilities to handle impurities in the ore which, in the case of Consett, was now being sourced from all over the world, notably Africa and Sweden. Consett became the first British company to run both processes in tandem with a new steel plant being built from 1959 containing two 100 ton LD convertors and two 100 ton Kaldo convertors. The oxygen steel plant could produce 750,000 tons per year. The open hearth furnaces were considered redundant and all decommissioned by 1966 resulting in 250 job losses (ibid. 41-5).

110 3.4.4 British Steel Corporation 1967-1980

The Labour Party were returned to power in 1964 and 1966 and presented the Iron and Steel Act which was duly passed on 22^nd March 1967. Under the Act the majority of the nation’s iron and steel production, including Consett, passed into State ownership. The British Steel Corporation (BSC) was formed on 28^th July 1967 and commenced a systems analysis of the fourteen plants which constituted the new Corporation. In three years the analysis identified four divisions within British Steel which corresponded to the individual plant’s main product.

Consett was placed into the General Steels Division. Unlike 1955, the Conservative election victory of 1970 did not return the steel industry to private ownership.

Government investment in Consett virtually stopped in the early 1970s. The management of Consett produced a plan named ‘Conquest’ to show how further investment in the plant could be used to reduce costs, but this was ignored (O’Hagan 2011: 49). The final investment in Consett came from BSC in 1977-8 with a finishing section for the slabbing and blooming mill; nothing that was outlined in ‘Conquest’. By this time national shipbuilding output was less than a quarter of its 1963 level (ibid. 49) and consequently the demand for plate was falling too. The new Conservative administration of 1979, the Thatcher Government, introduced a policy of fiscal non-intervention with failing state-sector businesses. The immediate result of this policy was that the Hownsgill Plate Mill, which had never run at anything like capacity, was closed down. In December 1979 the BSC announced that the Corporation’s smaller plants would be closed down and Consett, once the largest ironworks in England, fell into this category.

The Consett Steel Works closed on 12^th-13^th September 1980. Demolition began in December with the material, equipment and scrap being taken away by rail which was itself taken up two years later when the work was complete. All traces of the plant were removed.