BETWEEN RIVERS: MAY 2025 ‘IRON AND STEEL’ – ALAN HORNE

BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly series edited by Alan Horne. It is focused on the area bounded by the rivers Alun, Dee and Gowy, on the border between England and Wales in Flintshire, Denbighshire and Cheshire. You can read about the background to Between Rivers in the Introduction.

In this edition we feature four pieces of writing related to the iron and steel industries of the Between Rivers area. Much of the heavy industry which was characteristic of the area within living memory involved extractive industries: coalmining, mines for iron, lead and other minerals, and quarrying for limestone. But the co-occurrence of these resources, together with easily available water power and charcoal from local woodlands led to the development of iron smelting on the eastern slopes of the Denbighshire hills around Bersham and Rhiwabon by the time of the Civil War in the middle of the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, the industry consolidated at the ironworks which later, with the development of blast furnace technology, became the steelworks at Brymbo, near Wrexham. Then, at the end of the nineteenth century the Summers family took advantage of the chance to build on land reclaimed from the Dee estuary to create what became a very large steelworks at Shotton, where raw materials and finished steel could be shipped in or out by sea. Brymbo steelworks closed in 1990. Steelmaking ceased at Shotton in 1980, when the blast furnaces were closed and a large part of the site shut down with many redundancies, but the works still exists on a smaller scale, coating and providing other treatments for steel brought in from elsewhere.

Bersham ironworks was in the valley of the Afon Clywedog near Wrexham. You can still see it today, and a few original buildings form a small museum. It had an important role in the industrial revolution under the Wilkinson family. John Wilkinson developed a method for the accurate boring of cannon. When James Watt patented the steam engine in 1769, he struggled to get cylinders bored to the standard he needed, but Wilkinson adapted his cannon technology for the purpose, and cylinders from Bersham were an essential component of the Watt steam engines ubiquitous at this stage of industrial development.

Part of Bersham Ironworks today. Photo: Alan Horne

 

Here we have David Selzer’s Lament for Bersham Ironworks. It was first published on David’s site in 2011, and captures just how novel this enterprise would have been at the time.

Lament for Bersham Iron Works

Not for the hard, life-denying graft of it

or the danger, not for the polluting smoke

or the banishing of bird song,

not for the exploitation and social

upheaval, least of all for its cannons

at Naseby, Bunker Hill, Waterloo,

but for its madness, the sheer reach of it,

the invention of it, the ambition,

the defiance, the rhythmical creak

of the horse-drawn gin pumping water

from the river, the sulphurous roars

of the furnace, the forge hammers pounding

through the ancient woods, along Offa’s Dyke,

their echoes dying…

 

By the time the linguist and writer George Borrow (1803-1881) was active, the Romantic movement was in full swing, and he is best known for travel writing and novels which feature picturesque scenery and picaresque action among the Welsh, Spanish and Romany subjects whom he saw as having more real character than his unimaginative English fellows. For some mysterious reason Wild Wales, his account of a walking tour through the country in 1854, was something of a set book in my family when I was growing up, and I continue to find Borrow engaging, as he walks long distances, drinks remarkable amounts of ale, tries out his Welsh on passers-by, and barges into isolated farmsteads to question the inhabitants about their life and locality.

Borrow’s account is of a largely agricultural, or indeed wild, Wales, but when he encounters industrial settlements his descriptions are just as vivid. During a stay at Llangollen he walked out in the Wrexham direction to explore the various settlements around Rhiwabon. Industry had taken off around here with the arrival at the start of the nineteenth century of the canal, which crossed the Dee valley by the spectacular Pontcysyllte aqueduct, subject of David’s poem The Aqueduct  published on this site in 2015. (The anglophone may easily romanticise about this gorgeous Welsh name, Pontcysyllte, polysyllabic and so hard to pronounce. It means Connecting Bridge.) Borrow got to the village of Cefn after dark.

I struck across the fields and should probably have tumbled half-a-dozen times over pales and the like, but for the light of the Cefn furnaces before me which cast their red glow upon my path. I debauched upon the Llangollen road near to the tramway leading to the collieries. Two enormous sheets of flame shot up high into the air from ovens, illumining two spectral chimneys as high as steeples, also smoky buildings, and grimy figures moving about. There was a clanging of engines, a noise of shovels and a falling of coals truly horrible. The glare was so great that I could distinctly see the minutest lines upon my hand. Advancing along the tramway I obtained a nearer view of the hellish buildings, the chimneys, and the demoniac figures. It was just such a scene as one of those described by Ellis Wynn in his Vision of Hell. Feeling my eyes scorching I turned away, and proceeded towards Llangollen, sometimes on the muddy road, sometimes on the dangerous causeway.

George Borrow, Wild Wales (1862), chapter 62.

 

We now leap forward by more than a century, into the era of large-scale steel production under the auspices of a nationalised industry, British Steel. I have spent some time looking for contemporary poems or other writing about the local iron and steel industry, but have not found much. They are probably there, and I may have been looking in the wrong places: I would be very happy to be directed to writings or other artistic productions about the industry. As it is I will, for the first time in Between Rivers, make use of two of my own poems.

 

Shotton Steelworks. Photo: BBC.

 

I do have some slight claim on the subject. As an undergraduate in 1973 and 1974 I spent the summer working at Shotton steelworks, first as a cleaner and then – a real step up – as an electrician’s mate, mostly in the cold strip mill, which is where coils of steel sheet were taken to be trimmed, heat-treated and otherwise finished off. After that, by a curious reversal, my father followed in my footsteps and spent the last few years of his working life as a cleaner in the hot strip mill. This was the previous stage of the steelmaking process, in which slabs of red-hot steel were squeezed through a press, shooting out at the other end as a long thin sheet, which flew down a runway of rollers and coiled itself around a spindle. Safety rails surrounding the area were buckled and bent at all angles, as things did not always go to plan.

The experience of the steelworks stuck in my mind, and about ten years ago I wrote three poems about it. One, The Electrical Cellars, became part of an early edition of Other People’s Flowers on David’s site. Here are the other two, Clearing Scrap and Overhead Crane. As with almost anything that is – at least in the United Kingdom – disappearing, it is easy to feel a nostalgia for heavy industry, so I should record that my main memory of the actual work was of considerable boredom, in an environment which retained some risks even if these were much less than in earlier days. At the same time, the scale of the works and the undeniable drama of some of the industrial processes made a strong impression which for me is always linked with the ubiquitous smell of hot steel and oil. It was the last hurrah of nationalised industry, providing quite well-paid jobs to large numbers of employees who were not continually policed to maximise productivity; when steelmaking ended in 1980, 6,500 people were made redundant, my father being one. On YouTube you can find a series of atmospheric amateur videos of the cold strip mill, shot just before final closure of the mill in 2003. You can see one of them here.

 

The vast majority of the workforce were men, and this was plainly a traditional masculinity which had plenty wrong with it. I recall the commotion when women from the offices appeared in the mill one day; and some parts of the works had a hard-drinking culture that must have caused terrible problems for family members. Conditions which were often squalid evoked a sordid response in some. And like many another young and naïve person, I was sent to the stores to ask for items that did not exist. (In fairness, I can add that this also happened to me when I first started working in the female-dominated environment of a hospital.) But I think that the old hands often showed a care and concern for apprentices and people like myself, and a wish to guide. Some of these features emerge in the poems.

As one of the main tasks in the mill where I worked was the trimming of coils of steel sheet to a set width, large quantities of jagged offcuts were produced, which have a role in both poems. The first, Clearing Scrap, recalls an incident, trivial in itself, that happened to me one day while gathering this scrap together. The poem first appeared in the Poynton Poetry Trail in 2017.

 

Clearing Scrap

Lined with carved old concrete, slick oil-grey,

sunk in the factory floor like a diving pool

abandoned and long dry, was a five yard hole

down which we threw the steel scrap that day.

Snaking pieces shook like rough-toothed eels

and snapped at face and hand as we whipped them away

into the smoky space.  The lengths lay

on the air, then piked from view, jangling in the well.

But up then flew in Scouse and Welsh a voice,

which begged with kindly swearing that we cease

(should we not mind) while yet its owner lived;

plus other efficacious words. We peered with silly faces

down the rim. We’d cornered one of the hard cases

who grinned leniently, sought an underground door, and left.

 

The second poem, Overhead Crane, is an amalgam of the kinds of experience which would have been common to a young man, as I was, in that environment. The cranes were a characteristic, seemingly animate part of the mill, and their drivers were the aristocracy of the workforce, given the precision of their work and the chance that they could drop tons of hot metal on unsuspecting heads below. Rumour suggested that they were the most highly paid of the workers; whether this was true I do not know.

 

Overhead Crane

Child.

Look up.

And up you look.

Lewis at your elbow

looks up also,

here’s no solitary world.

Smeared faces, turning to the lights.

 

On tracks high up there in the eaves

a crane is rolling with a popping roar

towards you, hoisting an electromagnet

to which cling, as iron filings might,

a bale of shards trimmed from the coiled steel,

severally hurled in a pit and now

en masse extracted for the scrap-mill,

each one yards long,

hooked, torn along the edge.

 

Had your boyish idiocy stirred

a mobile footbridge into affronted life

it would be so: cornering you

in the bay with hot, non-human breath

of plastics and electric cables,

flicking its metal tongues,

drumming on the wall, hooting now.

You look about for the cab

as for a sentient eye, seeing at last

he who is at the controls.

 

Marring the stillness of his lordly role

the crane driver makes movement at the wrist

to shoo you from the way, or to impute

your favourite pastime, you can’t tell.

You duck, Lewis pulls you to the side,

the crane accelerates off down the bay,

its load of points a modern flail

away to the great burning.

 

Lewis mimes a deadly blow.

You giggle and get back to work.

But it’s a sign that’s unmistakeable,

though minor. You are yet babies.

You have not your wits about you:

losers of tools,

forgetters of basic instruction.

Later you will be more competent.

For now, balding, brawny little men

called Albert or Llewellyn

tap their pates and look up

to the Lord if you appear.

And every foolishness will draw you,

as with magnets,

to their superheated heart.

 

I hope you have enjoyed this collection of writings and other material about iron and steel production. It causes me to think that there are more poems to be written on the subject. And it is just one aspect of the industry which is such a feature of our area. We will come back to that in future editions of Between Rivers.