Autumn 2004

Bradway mourned - Huntsman Ter-Centenary

Bradway mourned

Readers with an interest in tradition may care to mourn the passing of 700 years of history, brought about by the insensitivity of Sheffield City Council.

The first mention of Bradway as a place was in a deed of 1280. There were two main areas of settlement, Upper Bradway (Tinker’s Corner) and Lower Bradway (roughly from Murco garage and round the bend to the Lodge on Beauchief Drive).

There is now nothing to mark the boundary between Greenhill and Bradway, there being a continuous line of houses along Bradway Road and Hemper Lane. 80 years ago the division was obvious, from the last buildings in Bradway, Fox Hall and the Lodge; there was open farmland until the first dwellings of Greenhill, by the White Hart pub. Much as the division between say Dronfield Woodhouse and Holmesfield is obvious.

Lower Bradway was originally the main area of settlement, in fact from before the war until 1978 Bradways’ general store and the post office were in Lower Bradway, in a building approximately opposite the end of Elwood Road. It is only since the enormous post war development to the west of our area that the centre of gravity of Bradway has changed.

Despite Lower Bradway once being such an important part of our community, the City Council has now changed our boundaries, breaking Bradway apart as a historical entity. In the Parliamentary and Council Ward areas Lower Bradway has now been severed from the rest of Bradway and attached to its ancient rival village of Greenhill, in the Beauchief and Greenhill Ward. Representations were made to the Council to maintain Bradways’ historic boundaries, but they fell on deaf ears.

Another boundary has been recently established, that between area panels, formed to facilitate dialogue between the residents of an area and the Council. The boundary between the South West area and the South area has also ignored Bradway as a historical entity, putting Lower Bradway in the South area and the remainder in the South West area. One imagines people in the Town Hall drawing lines on maps without bothering to do any research into the significance of ancient boundaries.

We are now seeing the practical results of these ham fisted decisions. The Council have recently called a public meeting to discuss BRADWAY ISSUES, held in Harold Jackson School on the 21st July. But the people in Lower Bradway were not invited, do they not think people in this area may also be interested in BRADWAY ISSUES?

Bradway has recently been pulled together by the founding of the Bradway Action Group, but at the same time the Council pulls in the opposite direction by breaking Bradway apart and calling public meetings for only part of its residents.

So let us mark this passing of Bradways’ 700 year history as a single historical entity.

Tony Smith

Ed. Just to complicate matters, the Bradway Bugle is delivered to parts of Greenhill and parts of Bradway have a Totley Rise postal address!

Huntsman Ter-Centenary

One man laid the foundations for the industrial city of Sheffield. Without him the cutlery and edge tool industries would have stayed cottage-based and Sheffield might have remained an industrial backwater.

Benjamin Huntsman was born on 4th June 1704 at Epworth in North Lincolnshire, to Quaker parents and Quaker principles were to underpin his life and business practices. Very little is known about his early life and indeed little is known of the man himself.

At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a clockmaker in Epworth and seven years later he was working in his own right as a clockmaker in Doncaster. By 1741 he had purchased a house there for £210. He gained. a reputation as someone able to fix machinery but he found that the steel he needed to make tools was of inferior quality. He pondered over the problem and came to a startling conclusion. If he could melt raw steel in a crucible rather than just cooking the outside layers at red heat, he could produce steel of more uniform quality. This was already done with brass and as a clockmaker he was familiar with the process.

He moved to Handsworth on the outskirts of Sheffield, where he started to experiment in steel making. The work was carried out in great secrecy.

By 1751 he had perfected his ‘crucible steel’ process and built his first factory at Worksop Road, Attercliffe. The problems he faced in trying to master the process were great. To melt steel meant using a very high temperature, which in turn meant using crucibles that could withstand such heat.

Huntsman’s process relied on keeping the crucible and its contents at a very high temperature for several hours. The secret of doing this was simplicity itself. Huntsman designed a furnace consisting of a hearth, known as a hole with a special flue leading out to a tall chimney. This required no powered blowing aids such as bellows or fans. The crucible was covered with a lid and sat on a bed of coke. The lid was to prevent contamination of the steel. The fire was lit and more coke was placed around the crucible. The chimney provided enough natural draught to keep the coke incandescent whilst the melt took place.

His steel making prospered, yet Huntsman did little to make his fortune. He sought no personal recognition for his invention, nor did he patent it. The cutlers of Sheffield initially rejected crucible steel as it was hard to forge but with increasing competition from the continent they were forced to adapt to new methods.

The process had one limitation, the weight of the crucible plus its steel content had to be lifted by manpower alone. The total weight was anything up to 601b of metal plus 25lb of crucible plus the lifting tongs weighing about 201b, yet even this was overcome and the steel ingots produced in crucible steel gradually increased in size until ingots of 25 tons could be poured - requiring around 670 crucibles of molten steel being poured into the same mould, one after another, over a period of about an hour.

Crucible steel making was gradually adopted by most manufacturers in the city and became the principal method until Bessemer introduced his converter in the 1850s. At that time there were about 3,000 individual crucible ‘holes’ in the city. Even then it took 12 years before the output of Bessemer steel exceeded the output of crucible steel, and for certain applications crucible steel was still preferred.

Crucible steel manufacture continued to decline throughout the earlier part of the twentieth century, but some crucible plants were reinstated during World War II to cope with demand for special tool steels in small quantities, the previously abandoned Abbeydale Works was pressed into service and produced around 500 tons of steel before being mothballed once again and finally becoming a museum (Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet).

Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet is the best preserved example of a crucible furnace. Benjamin Huntsman died in 1776 and is buried in the Graveyard of Attercliffe Hilltop chapel.

Ed. This article first appeared in the Sheffield History Reporter and is reproduced with the kind permission of Sheffield City Libraries Local Studies section.

Further reading:

Barraclough, Kenneth C Benjamin Huntsman l704-1776. Sheffield City libraries, Local Studies Leaflet: 1976. (The leaflet is the text of the bicentenary lecture given by the author.) The leaflet is out of print, but can be used for reference only at the local Studies Library.

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