The first ironworks were of course of a very humble description; the
outcrop of the mines did not then determine the situation so much as the
presence of a powerful stream which supplied a force to work the leathern
bellows which blew the fires. The first Abraham Darby came to the Dale
in 1709, and in 1713 the make was but from five to ten tons per week. In
1712 he used coal in smelting iron. He died at the Court House, Madeley,
in 1717, and was succeeded by his son, the second Abraham Darby, who in
1760 is said to have laid the first rails of iron for carriages with
axles having fixed wheels. The third Abraham Darby effected another
great achievement, the casting and erecting the first iron bridge, for
which he obtained the medal of the Society of Arts. The credit of having
laid the first iron rails is claimed for Richard Reynolds, who succeeded
the second Abraham Darby in the management of these works in 1763, and
who, according to Sir Robert Stephenson, who examined the books of the
works, cast six tons of iron rails for the use of the works in 1767. It
was at these works, too, that the brothers Cranege anticipated Henry Cort
by seventeen years by the discovery of the process of puddling in a
reverberatory furnace, by the use of pit-coal, in 1766, under the
management of Mr. Reynolds.
Mr. Reynolds also took a warm interest in the success and introduction of
the steam engine, which he adopted in 1778. “For no one,” observes his
daughter, “did he entertain sentiments of more affectionate esteem than
for James Watt,” with whom, as well as with Wedgwood and Wilkinson, he
was associated in several public movements of the time. Being a Friend
he was opposed to war and refused Government orders for cannon; and he
was stung to the quick when Pitt’s ministry proposed to lay a war tax
upon coal. The country had been carrying on wars—wars everywhere, and
with everybody, and to meet the lavish expenditure, the popular minister
of the day, on whom Walpole tells us, “it rained gold boxes” for weeks
running, “the pilot that weathered the storm,” sought to replenish the
exchequer by a tax of 2s. per ton, to be paid on all coal without
exception raised to the pit’s mouth. The iron-masters of Shropshire,
Staffordshire and Yorkshire, as well as those of other English and
Scottish counties were alarmed; it was felt to be an important crisis in
the history of the trade. Deputations and petitions were sent up, but
the wily premier had so carefully yet quietly surrounded himself with
facts, that he knew of every pound of iron made and of every ton of coal
that was raised. Pitt received the gentlemen connected with the trade
with the greatest freedom and affability; bowed them in and out;
appointed hours and places to meet their convenience, and left them
dumbfounded at his knowledge of details of their own business. Mr.
Reynolds entered the field in opposition to the tax, gave evidence before
the Privy Council, and by petitions to the House and letters to members
of the Cabinet, materially aided in defeating the attempt. The gravity
of the occasion is, perhaps, even more evident to us, on whom the
advantages of a cheap and plentiful supply of iron have fallen. We can
better measure the consequences that must have followed. A tax upon coal
at that period would have paralysed the trade, checked its development in
this country, and thrown into the lap of others benefits we ourselves
have derived; would have disendowed the island of advantages in which it
is peculiarly rich,—upon which it is mainly dependent for its wealth, its
progress, and its civilization. A tax upon coal would have been a tax
upon iron, upon the manufacture of iron, upon its consumption, and its
use in the arts and manufactures of the kingdom,—a tax upon spinning,
weaving, and printing,—a tax upon the genius of Watt and Arkwright, whose
improvements it would have thrown back and thwarted,—upon the extension
of commerce at home and abroad. The immense advantages possessed by the
manufacturers of the New World would then have given them the lead in a
race in which, even now, it is as much as we can do to keep up. Our
energies, just at a time when the iron nerves of England were put to
their greatest strain, would have been paralysed, and we should have been
deprived of our railways, our locomotives, our steam-fleets, and much of
our commerce, and prosperity. Mr. Reynolds saw the evil in prospective,
and in a letter to Earl Gower, President of the Council, dated the 7th
month, 1784, takes a very just review of the past history of the trade
and the improvements then about to be adopted. He says:—
“The advancement of the iron trade within these few years have been
prodigious; it was thought, and justly, that the making of pig iron
with pit coal was a great acquisition to the nation by saving the
woods and supplying a material to manufactories, the make of which,
by the consumption of all the wood the country produced, was unequal
to the demand; and the nail trade, perhaps the most considerable of
any one article of manufactured iron, would have been lost to this
country, had it not been found practicable to make nails of iron made
with pit coal; and it is for that purpose we have made, or rather are
making, the alterations at Donnington-Wood, Ketley, &c., which we
expect to complete in the present year, but not at a less expense
than twenty thousand pounds, which will be lost to us and gained by
nobody if this tax is laid on our coals. The only chance we have of
making iron as cheap as it can be imported from Russia, is the low
price of our fuel, and unless we can do that there will not be
consumption equal to half the quantity that can be made, and when we
consider how many people are employed on a ton of iron, and the
several trades dependent thereupon, we shall be convinced the Revenue
is much more benefited even by the consumption of excisable articles,
&c., than by the duty on a ton of foreign iron; nor will it, I
believe, escape observation that the iron trade, so fatally affected
by this absurd tax, is only of the second, if indeed, on some
account, it is not of the first importance to the nation. The
preference I know is given, and I believe justly, as to the number of
hands employed, to the woollen manufactory; but when it is remembered
that all that is produced by making of iron with pit coal is
absolutely so much gained to the nation, and which, without its being
so applied, would be perfectly useless, it will evince its superior
importance, for the land grazed by sheep might be converted with
whatever loss to other purposes of agriculture or pasturage; but coal
and iron stone have no value in their natural state, produce nothing
till they are consumed or manufactured, and a tax upon coal, which,
as I said, is the only article that in any degree compensates for our
high price of labour, &c., or can be substituted in the stead of
water for our wheels, and bellows, would entirely ruin this very
populous country, and throw its labouring poor upon the parishes,
till the emigration of those of them who are able to work shall
strengthen our opponents, and leave the desolated wastes, at present
occupied by their cottages, to the lords of the soil.”
In the year following (1785) the interests of the iron trade were again
considered to be endangered from commercial arrangements proposed by the
Irish House of Commons for the consideration of Parliament. Mr.
Reynolds, Messrs. Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, Wilkinson, and others, united
in forming an association for the protection of the trade, under the
title of “The United Chamber of Manufacturers of Great Britain.” The
Shropshire iron and coal masters petitioned the House, and Mr. Reynolds
again wielded the pen in defence of the trade. We extract sufficient to
show the extent of the works. He says, addressing Earl Gower, under date
28th of the third month, 1785,—
“We solicit thy effectual interposition against a measure so
injurious to us and to the many hundreds of poor people employed by
us in working and carrying on mines, &c., for the supply of a large
sale of coals by land and water, and of coals and mine for sixteen
fire-engines, eight blast furnaces, and nine forges, besides the air
furnaces, mills, &c., at the foundry at Coalbrookdale, and which,
with the levels, roads, and more than twenty miles of railways, &c.,
still employs a capital of upwards of £100,000, though the declension
of our trade has, as stated in a former letter, obliged us to stop
two blast furnaces, which are not included in the number before
mentioned. Nor have we ever considered ourselves as the first of
many others employed in iron or coal works in this kingdom.”
We have considered the subject of our present sketch chiefly under one
aspect only—as a man of action—and that mainly in connection with the
iron trade, and in providing against those reverses to which not only
that but other branches of industry were peculiarly liable, more
particularly during the latter end of the last and the commencement of
the present centuries. Mr. Reynolds, however, has claims no less
distinguished under a classification beneath which is frequently found
another division of human benefactors. He was not only a man of
action—great in dealing with things tangible,—but he was a man of thought
and of genius—as quick to devise and to plan as to execute. What is
still more rare, he possessed those qualities in proportions so finely
balanced, that their happy combination, during a long and active life,
gave birth to schemes of noble enterprise, valuable to the district, and
important to the nation. That which merited, from vulgar
shortsightedness, the epithet of eccentricity, a state of deep and
penetrating thought, was oftentimes the conceiving energy of a vigorous
mind mastering in the mental laboratory of the brain, plans and schemes
of which the noblest movements of the day are the just and legitimate
offspring. The schemes he inaugurated were victories won, the
improvements he effected were triumphs gained to the nation or for
humanity.
That quality of mind which too often runs waste or evaporates in wild
impracticable ideality, with him found an object of utility on which to
alight, and under the magic of a more than ordinary genius difficulties
disappeared, formidable obstacles melted into air, and the useful and the
true were fused into one. He never felt the fluttering of a noble
thought but he held it by the skirts, and made it do duty in this
work-day world of ours, if it had relation to the tangible realities of
time. “Though I do not adopt,” he writes to a friend, “all the notions
of Swedenbourg, I have believed that the spiritual world is nearer to us
than many suppose, and that our communication with it would be more
frequent than many of us experience, did we attain to that degree of
purity of heart and abstraction from worldly thoughts and tempers which
qualify for such communion or intercourse.” He was not a man whose soul
ran dry in solitude, or that grew melancholy the moment the click of
money-making machinery no longer sounded in his ears. He was one of the
old iron-kings, ’tis true, but with a soul in harmony with the silvery
music of the universe. Often with no companion but his pipe, he retired
to some retreat, consecrated perhaps by many a happy thought, and watched
the declining sun, bathing in liquid glory the Ercall woods, the majestic
Wrekin, the Briedden hills, and the still more distant Cader Idris. A
deep vein of genuine religious feeling often appeared upon the surface,
and seemed to penetrate reflections of the kind. Speaking of a new
arbour he had made, be says—
“From thence I have seen three or four as fine sunsets as I at any
time have seen, and if the gradual going down, and last, last twinkle
of the once radiant orb, the instant when it was, and was not, to be
seen—made me think of that awful moment when the last sigh consigns
the departing soul to different if not distant scenes, the glorious
effulgence gilding the western horizon with inimitable magnificence,
naturally suggested the idea of celestial splendour, and inspired the
wish that (through the assistance of His grace) a faithful obedience
to the requirings of our great Maker and Master, may in that solemn
season justify the hope of my being admitted into that city which
hath no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine on it, for the
glory of God lightens it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.”
The Wrekin was a favourite object; to its summit he made his annual
pilgrimage, together with his family, his Dale relations, his clerks, and
most of the members of the little Society of Friends. The following bit
of landscape painting betrays a master hand, and is so faithful in
itself, depicting no less the features of the country than the genius of
his mind, that we incorporate it with our present sketch:—
“We went upon the Wrekin,” he writes, “sooner than usual this year,
that my children might partake of the pleasure. The weather was
pleasant, though rather windy. From the top of that hill the
prospect is so rich, so extensive, so various, that, considered as a
landscape only, it beggars all description; and yet I cannot forbear,
as thou desirest it, mentioning the tufted trees in the adjoining
woods, upon which, occasioned perhaps by the uncommonness of the
scene, I always _look down_ with a particular pleasure, as well as
survey those more distant, which are interspersed among the corn and
meadows, contrasted with the new-ploughed fallow-grounds and pastures
with cattle; the towns and villages, gentlemen’s seats, farm-houses,
enrich and diversify the prospect, whilst the various companies of
harvest men in the different farms within view enliven the scene.
Nor are the rivers that glitter among the laughing meadows, or the
stupendous mountains which, though distant, appear awfully dreary
without their effect considered part of the landscape only. But not
to confine the entertainment to visual enjoyment, what an
intellectual feast does the prospect from that hill afford when
beheld, ‘or with the curious or pious eye.’ Is not infinite power
exerted, and infinite goodness displayed, in the various as well as
plentiful provision for our several wants. Should not the
consideration expand over hearts with desires to contribute to the
relief of those whose indigence, excluding them from an equal
participation of the general feast, is for a trial of their faith and
patience and of our gratitude and obedience! Whilst with an
appropriation of sentiment which receives propriety from the
consciousness of our unworthiness, we substitute a particular for the
general exclamation of humble admiration, in the word of the
psalmist—‘Lord, what is man, that thou art mindful of him? or the son
of man that thou (thus) visitest him?’ The romantic scenes of
Benthall Edge,—its rocks and precipices, its sides and top covered
with wood; the navigable Severn, in which its feet are immersed; the
populousness of the opposite shore; the motion, noise, and life on
the river; the adjoining wharves and manufactories, are capable of
affording a high entertainment, and I should willingly devote one day
in the year to a repetition of the enjoyments of the pleasures I have
heretofore received from them: though equally near, and equally
desirable, a jaunt to Benthall Edge is not equally facile with one to
the Wrekin. It seems more out of my province.”
Our readers, ere this, must have discovered a power of description, a
grace and polish, blended with a masculine force of thought, in the
correspondence of Mr. Reynolds, of a more than common order; and would
still more, could we feel at liberty to quote more copiously from
numerous letters to his friends. If we follow him more closely into
private life, and lift the veil that too often hides a dualism of
character from the unsuspicious public eye, we find the sterling elements
of the gentleman and the Christian.
Take the experience of the past as recorded, or the traditions of the
present, as found among a generation second in remove from Richard
Reynolds’s time, and they bring out into relief still more striking
traits of character, that do honour to our common nature. The guiding
principle of his life, in all cases of bargain and of sale, Mrs. Rathbone
tells us, were in accordance with the old adage—“Live and let live;” and
as an instance of the consistency with which he acted up to his motto she
adds that, at the breaking out of the American war, when bar-iron rose to
an extravagant price, and the makers of pig-iron could obtain their own
terms, instead of taking an unreasonable advantage of the opportunity, he
proposed to his customers that it should be left to one of themselves to
name a fair price for pig-iron in the _then state_ of the trade, and to
determine the scale of proportionate reduction which should take place
when the price of bar-iron should fall, as he foresaw that it would
follow the _then_ great and unsatisfied demand. The proposal was
accepted, and by the scale which was then fixed his conduct was governed.
Order and punctuality were exemplified in his dealings. “A place for
everything and everything in its place”—a maxim for which he confessed
his obligation to De Witt—was not only his rule, but was painted in large
characters in the kitchen, over the fireplace, for the benefit of the
servants. The appellation “honest,” given to his father, was a term
equally applicable to the son, who at the outset and in after life made
it a rule to regulate his affairs by that principle of prudence and of
equity.
He yielded to every man his own, not only as concerned demands upon his
purse, but in what are usually deemed small matters, such as those of
respect which one man owes to another. He would follow a poor person to
his or her home to apologise if he had spoken warmly or unbecomingly in
the heat of temper. It was painful, his granddaughter tells us, for him
to see waste. “I cannot bear to see sweeping on the ground that which
would clothe a poor shivering child” was his remark made respecting the
long dresses of the time.