BOOK REVIEWS
| Date | 01 October 1963 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1963.tb00995.x |
| Published date | 01 October 1963 |
BOOK
REVIEWS
Men
of
Iron.
The
Crowleys in
the Early
Iron
Industry
by M. W. Flinn.
THE
Crowley ironworks near Newcastle, established and developed in
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was one of the
most unusual industrial enterprises of its time. It was exceptional in
location, size and organization, as well as in the managerial techniques
which were the creation of its founder, Sir Ambrose Crowley
(
1
658-
1
7
1
3).
The west Midland area was the scene of much of the iron industry
of late seventeenth century England, and especially of the manu-
facture of ironware from wrought iron.
It
was from this region, later
to become notorious for its multitude of wretched, ill-paid hand nailers,
that the Crowley family came. Sir Ambrose’s father was indeed himself
a nailer who prospered and became an iron master and merchant
on
a modest scale. His son’s achievements had a much bolder stamp
upon them. Apprenticed to a London merchant when he was
15,
made free of the Drapers’ Company when he was
26,
he started as an
ironmonger in London and then, by moves which were as striking as
they were unorthodox, he became within a score
of
years the biggest
manufacturer of ironwares in England. He achieved his success
by
turning his back on the Midlands and its out-working nailers, and
setting up factories in the north-east to take advantage of the largest
single source of demand for ironwares in the country-the Navy. First
he went to Sunderland in the
1680’s,
and then to Winlaton, near
Newcastle in
1691.
In and around Winlaton and Swalwell on the
Derwent, a tributary of the Tyne, he established factories, warehouses,
forges, as well as an iron slitting mill and a steel furnace. From here
he turned out nails, tools, anchors, and a wide range of miscellaneous
ironware. The advantages of this chosen location lay not
so
much in
labour and raw materials as in the access to the best method
of
trans-
port for bulky materials at the time: the coastal trade. The naval
dockyards whose demand Crowley was concerned to supply were all
in the south, mainly in the estuaries
of
the Thames and Medway.
So
Crowley made his sales and administrative headquarters in London.
From
1704
this was at Greenwich where, next to his wharf and ware-
house, he lived in a spacious house appropriate to the newly-found
dignity of a rich Stuart businessman.
It was from Greenwich that Crowley controlled his whole
enterprise by an elaborate administrative system of Committees topped
by
a Council consisting of officials at the factories, all nominated by
2
76
Edinburgh University Press
1962,
xi
+
270
pp.,
42s.
BOOK
REVIEWS
277
Crowley. Councils, Committees-such as those of Treasury, of Mill
Affairs, and of Survey-and officials, including such persons as the
Ironkeeper, Nailkeeper, Surveyor, Cashier, Treasurer and Clerk of the
Mill: all were fitted into the system and allotted their tasks through the
standing instructions of the Law Book and a flow of orders termed
Council Instructions. Through these devices not only did the energetic,
constantly watchful and forever moralizing Crowley organize all
details of production but he also administered a complex of industrial
welfare arrangements probably unique in its day.
A
Committee of
Aggrievances, a Court of Arbitrators, a Clerk of the Poor, schoolmasters,
a Chaplain and a doctor: these formed part of a system by which he
tried both to retain and control an inevitably unruly labour force and
also to provide spiritual and material benefit for the firm’s employees,
even to the extent
of
a scheme of insurance.
The Crowley works survived its founder, prospered during the
management of his son, John Crowley (one of whose daughters
married the 2nd Earl of Ashburnham) and was still important during
the Napoleonic Wars, when
it
employed about 1,000 persons. There-
after it failed
to
adapt itself to changing techniques and rapidly
decayed.
Mr. Flinn
is
to be congratulated on having written a lucid and
readable account
of
this unique and fascinating enterprise. He did
not have an easy task for few of the firm’s records survived their
deliberate destruction in 1862
by
an egregious history-hater named
Laycock. No book is perfect. A slip on p.
32
gives Ambrose Crowley
‘
mastership
’
instead of membership of the Drapers’ Company; the
Crowley works may have been
‘
the largest iron manufactory in Europe
’
(p. 46) and
‘
the greatest industrial organization of his age
’
(p.
55),
but
a little supporting evidence for these large statements would not be
unacceptable. Crowley may have been
‘
one of the formative characters
in the evolution of modern industrial society’ (p. 254) but, as Mr.
Flinn himself points out on the previous page, his example of successful
large-scale industrial organization was not immediately followed, nor
were his experiments in industrial relations. Sir Ambrose was an
‘
Owenite a century before Robert Owen
’
(p. 219). But is there any
evidence that Owen, or indeed any other industrialist, was in fact
influenced
by
Crowley’s achievements? And is
it
true that ‘pater-
nalism generally pays
’
(p. 255)? Who does it pay? These few points,
however, do little to mar a book which is to be recommended to all
interested not only in economic history generally but also in the
history of industrial relations. D.
C.
COLEMAN
Reader in Economic History at the London
School
of
Economics and Political Science.
To continue reading
Request your trial