of a wartime howitzer shell he had found in the desert as a boiler. All the pipes and pistons were lovingly lagged with carefully coiled string. I only saw it operate once on his tiny lawn. But once was more than enough. It belched prodigious quantities of coal smoke and sparks while its almost blind operator blundered around behind it, spending more time wrestling with its handlebars on the weed-choked flowerbeds than the lawn. After ten minutes of mayhem I asked him whether it gave a good cut. He said he had no idea about that, but the hot coals seemed to keep grass growth to a minimum for several weeks. So I suppose it did work after a fashion.
The second person was very different but no less inspiring. Today he is very well known as one of the founding fathers of industrial archaeology and has more recently spent time running the Science Museum and English Heritage. Sir Neil Cossons first crossed my path when he came to give a lecture at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, some time in the early 1970s, when I was an assistant curator there. His talk was on the industrial archaeology of Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale, where he was director of the Museum and the Trust which ran it. I found it inspiring and the following year I couldn’t wait until I had taken all our students from our dig at Fengate, on the outskirts of Peterborough, right across England to see what he and his team had achieved.
As we walked around Ironbridge I realised for the first time just how much archaeology could appeal to the general public, but only if it was well displayed – a lesson I have never forgotten. Later I got to know Neil rather better when we sat on English Heritage’s Ancient Monuments Advisory Committee and I always made a point of seeking him out when we did field trips to industrial sites. This was because he had the rare gift of knowing where to find some obscure feature, nook or cranny which would bring the place vividly to life.
I’ve talked about Ironbridge, the Euston Arch and the origins of post-medieval archaeology and I suppose I ought to cover such major events in the history of industrial archaeology at some length in this book. But, on the other hand, this isn’t a textbook. I’m concerned here not with the history of industrial archaeology, but with current research and the direction in which it is heading. Having said that, I am also attempting to provide a balanced account of the period for the general reader.
I must also come clean and confess that many readers of my earlier books have laughed out loud when I suggested to them that I have been in search of balance. And their response: ‘Balance? You? You’re a born partisan and could no more achieve balance than fly.’ Which wasn’t quite the reply I had expected, but is possibly true, nonetheless. So in this instance I will drop such pretence and follow my instincts, which are to see what the current generation of scholars finds interesting and exciting. I make no apologies for this approach, which will generally concentrate on recent research, because that’s where the new developments are happening.
And while on the subject of bias, I should also add that I plan to pay more attention to those aspects of the period which have tended to be ignored. A classic case in point is the very start of what some historians have referred to as the Agricultural Revolution. For me this is when modern Britain really begins to emerge. I like to think I can identify with those independent farmers who, freed from old ties of feudalism, set about creating, possibly for the first time in British history, a true market-based economy. These were extraordinary times, in many respects far more interesting than the Open Field farms of the Middle Ages which are usually taught in preference at school. And while on the subject of revolutions, of course, what about the big one that everyone still talks about and takes thoroughly for granted?
When, in 1884, the great historian Arnold Toynbee published a book of his Oxford course under the title Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, he probably didn’t realise that the phrase would immediately stick and remain current into the twenty-first century; indeed, by that time television documentaries would proclaim it as proven fact. Some people were even able to tie it down with precision. One of the best post-war historical accounts, by Professor T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830, published by Oxford University Press in 1948, compresses the period into a truly revolutionary seventy years – or roughly three (short) generations.8
Anyone who has any experience of life outside academia will immediately realise that the idea of such a short period of revolutionary change is manifestly absurd. The world – and especially the world of work – simply doesn’t behave like that.9 All change requires time and things never happen with a single bang: there are always mistakes, false starts and heroic failures such as Brunel’s broad gauge for the Great Western Railway and John Logie Baird’s mechanically based system of television transmission of 1926. But the idea of the ‘Industrial Revolution’ has certainly fixed itself firmly in the popular imagination and I doubt whether it will ever go away completely.
I think there are at least three reasons for this. First and foremost it plays very well in Britain where most of the early innovations were developed, if not (like the blast furnace) actually invented. Second, for the revolution to have happened there had to be heroes to push it forward and, of course, everyone likes to admire a hero. One thinks of James Watt or Abraham Darby; it’s even better if these larger-than-life industrial pioneers were also highly enlightened men, like Robert Owen, Josiah Wedgwood or Titus Salt. Finally, the very idea of revolutionary change is exciting: we can gasp at the sheer pace of the events, wring our hands at the misery of the workforce and then thrill to the mastery of their monumental achievements, many of which are still out there in the landscape.
But for most of the post-war decades nobody working in the academic study of industrial archaeology has believed in a literal Industrial Revolution. Laying aside the impossible pace, revolutions are meant to sweep all before them, like so many aristocrats fleeing France at the onset of the Terror. Factories were supposed to have swept away small hand workshops, but in fact these persisted – and successfully – well into the twentieth century. We can also appreciate that the great heroes were actually ordinary individuals, many of whom didn’t so much invent from scratch as modify a pre-existing machine, like James Watt who adapted Newcomen’s engine to make the steam drive the piston in both directions, thereby more than doubling its power.10 Similarly, as we will see shortly, great ironmasters such as the various Abraham Darbys used their commercial and marketing expertise to develop good ideas often produced by others working in their foundries. When we examine industrial Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we see that it has many similarities with the contemporary world of the agricultural ‘Improvers’ such as Coke of Norfolk or Jethro Tull. Both history and the British propensity to admire heroes have been very kind to these men, many of whom were indeed great but probably less than heroic.
The final nail in the coffin of the rapid revolution idea has been the realisation that, far from starting in 1760, many of the industries of the period were already fully mature by then, with histories extending back over two centuries or even more, as we will see in Chapter 5 when we look at the early cutlery trade along the rivers of Sheffield, or the latest excavations in and around Ironbridge. In most instances, too, the pattern of trade and industry that developed in specific areas in early post-medieval times determined the shape of what was to happen in the era of massive expansion which began in the later eighteenth century. This was the time when infrastructure – canals, waggonways and roads – was improving rapidly. It also saw the introduction of new technologies such as coal-powered steam. Perhaps most important of all, social circumstances were changing in a way that first allowed and then actually facilitated the growth of industry. We must not forget that the era of industrial expansion was as much about social change as technology.
One might suppose that industrial archaeologists would strive to retain an idea with such popular appeal as the Industrial Revolution, but for many decades it has been only too clear that the process of industrialisation had been extended and in many instances can be traced back to the Middle Ages. One way round this dilemma has been to write of an extended or ‘long’ Industrial
