Sheffield Steel and the Derwent Valley Mills
Two of the places where the industrial world began sit either side of the Peak District moors. On the Yorkshire side, Sheffield spent five hundred years getting better at making knives and ended up making the steel that the rest of the world ran on. On the Derbyshire side, in a narrow valley below Matlock, Richard Arkwright put cotton-spinning machines in a building beside a stream, ran them day and night, and invented the factory. This is a guide to both: the cutlers and the crucible, stainless steel, the mills of the Derwent, and what it cost the people who worked in them.
A Sheffield knife in his hose
Sheffield was known for blades long before it was known for steel. The earliest surviving record of cutlery being made in the town is a tax return of 1297 naming Robert the Cutler. Less than a century later Chaucer gave the miller in The Reeve’s Tale a Sheffield knife: “A Sheffeld thwitel baar he in his hose,” a whittle, or general-purpose knife, carried in his stocking. Chaucer could expect his readers to know what a Sheffield knife was.
The trade organised itself in 1624 as the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire, set up to regulate the making of edged tools. The company is still there, still led by a Master Cutler, and still holds trademark powers over the name “Sheffield steel”. The town had what a blade trade needed: fast rivers to turn grinding wheels, and the stone to cut grindstones from. The S6 field guide covers the water-powered wheels of the Loxley and the little mesters who worked them.
Huntsman’s crucible
The steel itself was the weak point. Blades were only as good as the uneven metal they were made from, until a clockmaker from Doncaster set out to do better. Benjamin Huntsman (1704–1776) started out making clocks, locks and tools, and moved to Handsworth near Sheffield in 1740. There, after many experiments, he learned to melt steel in small clay crucibles and pour it as cast steel, better than any steel available before. His first piece went into a longcase clock of his own.
Sheffield’s cutlers wouldn’t touch it. It was harder than the German steel they were used to, and harder to work. So for years Huntsman sold almost everything he made to France, until French cutlery made from his steel began to beat Sheffield’s own, and the cutlers were, as one account puts it, “compelled to use it in the interests of self-preservation”. He never patented the process. The story goes that a Sheffield ironfounder named Walker got the secret by turning up at the works on a cold night “in the disguise of a starving beggar asking to sleep by a fire”. Huntsman moved to Attercliffe in 1770, and crucible steel made Sheffield.
Sheffield plate
The same decade gave the town its second trade. In 1743 Thomas Boulsover, working in Sheffield, worked out how to fuse a thin layer of sterling silver onto a thick sheet of copper and roll the two out together, so that the finished piece looked like solid silver at a fraction of the price. The story is that he found it by accident, overheating a customer’s knife handle while mending it until the silver started to run, though that is probably only a story. “Sheffield plate” lasted about a hundred years, until electroplating, such as George Elkington’s, took over from about 1840.
The Steel City
In the 19th century everything got bigger. New ways of making high-quality steel turned the old cutlery trade into heavy industry, and the town’s population went from 60,095 in 1801 to 451,195 by 1901. In 1856 Henry Bessemer’s converter made the crucible old technology, and Bessemer moved his steel company to Sheffield to be at the heart of the trade. The town got the nickname it still has: the Steel City. It also needed water, for power and for people, and in 1864 the dam of one of the new reservoirs gave way, and the Great Sheffield Flood came down the Loxley and the Don and killed 270 people. The valley it tore through, and the Hillsborough that grew up beside it, are in the S6 field guide.
Then, on 13 August 1913, in the Brown Firth research laboratory, a steelworker’s son who had left school at twelve made something new. Harry Brearley, born in Sheffield in 1871, had been looking for a steel that would stand up to the wear inside gun barrels, and was trying chromium alloys. One of them wouldn’t rust. He called it “rustless steel”. Ernest Stuart of R. F. Mosley’s came up with “stainless”, and that name stuck. It gave the world affordable knives and forks that didn’t stain, and Sheffield one more trade.
The heavy industry didn’t last. Automation and foreign competition closed many of the steel mills in the 1970s and 1980s, at the same time as the collapse of the coal mines around the city. The steel that is still made there is specialist and valuable: in 2005 the industry produced more steel by value than at any time in its history.
Over the hill: the Derwent Valley mills
On the other side of the Peak, the industrial revolution took a different shape. In 1769 Richard Arkwright patented the water frame, a machine that could spin cotton thread continuously, and that unskilled hands could run. After a first attempt in Nottingham using horses, he needed water that wouldn’t run dry, and in 1771 he found it at Cromford, below Matlock: the Cromford Sough, a drainage channel from the Wirksworth lead mines, which ran all year round, together with the Bonsall Brook.
From 1772 Cromford Mill ran day and night, on two twelve-hour shifts. It began with 200 workers and grew to 1,000. The youngest were seven years old. (The minimum age was later raised to ten, with six hours of schooling a week.) His workers needed somewhere to live, so Arkwright built much of the village for them, and most of the houses are still lived in. He went on to build Masson Mill at Matlock Bath, begun in 1783.
Others followed him down the river. Jedediah Strutt built mills at Belper and Milford between 1776 and 1781, and kept on using child labour where adults would have managed the heavier machines better. Thomas Evans put a cotton mill in Darley Abbey in 1782. At the bottom of the valley, in Derby, John Lombe’s five-storey silk mill, on a design patented in 1719, was there before any of them.
In December 2001 the whole run became a World Heritage Site, 15 miles of valley from Matlock Bath to the centre of Derby, as the birthplace of the factory system: the idea of bringing workers, machines and power together in one building, and running them to the clock.
From the Steel City to Hellsborough
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, grew up on the same ground and kept the clank. Its technology is steampunk run through something older and stranger. The real Hillsborough and Loxley valley are in the S6 field guide, the underworld’s real-world roots are in the Sheffield gang wars of the 1920s, and the Harrying of the North goes back to when it was all still the manor of Hallam. Foked is the free solo RPG set in the world. For the genre all of it belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: Robert the Cutler, the Cutlers’ Company, Boulsover, Huntsman in the 1740s, the 1864 flood and Brearley at Brown Firth from Wikipedia’s timeline of Sheffield history; the Chaucer line from the Project Gutenberg text of The Canterbury Tales; the Cutlers’ trademark powers, Bessemer’s move and the 2005 output from Wikipedia; Huntsman from Wikipedia; Sheffield plate from Wikipedia; Brearley from Wikipedia; the Steel City, population figures, Bessemer and the decline from Wikipedia; the Derwent Valley Mills from Wikipedia; Cromford from Wikipedia.
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