Engineers to the world
When Isambard Kingdom Brunel died in 1859, it was the end of an age where engineers stamped their own names on the great work they had created, it was also the beginning of a new age: – Steel.
Brunel's career had blossomed with the growth of the railways in 1830, a time when the career of his great predecessor, Thomas Telford, was just ending. Both men were undisputed champions in the materials available to them to carry out their great works – cast iron and wrought iron. Telford designed and shaped cast iron to support heavy loads and span long distances, he did this with more confidence than anyone else, before or since. On the other hand, Brunel distrusted cast iron, and used it as little as possible. Perhaps it was because many of his bridges had to carry locomotives, and were likely to be affected by movement and vibration, a problem which Telford did not have, and perhaps it was because a fire on one of his few cast iron bridges caused the main girders to crack. For whatever reason, Brunel put his trust in wrought iron, and it served him well.
In the march of progress, a number of new engineers began to embrace the new iron technology available to them. One such person was Andrew Handyside, a Glaswegian born in 1806. Handyside had something in common with his two great predecessors, sharing his Scots nationality with Telford, and his year of birth with Brunel. He moved south in 1848 and took over the Britannia Ironworks at Duke Street Derby. The works had been established by Weatherhead and Glover in 1818, and specialised in ornamental ironwork. By about 1840 it changed hands and the then owner expanded by establishing contracts with the railway companies, thus taking full advantage of the railway mania of the mid 19th century.
Even so, the works were little more than a foundry and smithy at that time, but Andrew Handyside had other ideas. Business with the railway companies could mean anything from supplying nuts and bolts, to building locomotives or constructing viaducts, bridges, buildings, and machinery. Handyside chose to focus his business on helping to build the rail network, which was rapidly expanding across the country. He began to expand the works at a period when cast iron was becoming less fashionable, but this did not deter him. The Britannia Works had built up a reputation for its artistic ironwork, this was attributed to a combination of the skills of the foundry men, and the fine quality of moulding sand that was quarried locally. The number of different foundry products ran into thousands, for example, there were nearly two thousand different designs of window frames.
Other products included an enormous range of street furniture, railings, bollards, pillar-boxes, lamp standards, conservatories* and even prefabricated bungalows. Many of these products were not just plain and simple, they were cast to exquisite designs with fine tracery of ironwork, and sold nationwide and abroad. Andrew Handyside’s reputation as an iron founder was such, that he could be compared with the famous Shrewsbury Ironmaster William Merlin Hazledine, (Steel Times, March 98).
*Henry Bessemer commissioned a conservatory from Handysides, complete with a 21ft dome, it was said to be a magnificent work of art. |
