Local Interest - Railway/Engineering - a Victorian leather a...

Hammer

£160

Local Interest - Railway/Engineering - a Victorian leather accounts ledger, for the Alfreton Iron Works, inscribed in ink MS from December 31st 1868 to December 31st 1919 (388 of its numbered 744 pages), including work for the construction of St. Pancras Station, London, overclad period calf, gilt-embossed red leather title label to front, Barras & Co, Stationers, Sheffield & Rotherham, label to front marbled pastedown, MS letters enclosed, folio The Alfreton Iron Works, this was founded by three Derby grandees, William Edwards (attorney), Mr. Saxelbye and Richard Forester Forester of Abbott's Hill House (surgeon) who bought the manorial estate of Riddings from the Rolleston family for the iron bearing shales beneath the sod. In 1800 they founded the works, hiring Derby pub landlord's son James Oakes as manager. He took on as Scottish person called David Mushet (1772-1847) to help him and Mushet vastly improved the processes so that in 1806 the firm was making almost as much pig iron from one Mushet-modified blast furnace than the hallowed Butterley Company was making with two. By 1861, they were running, as James Oakes & Co., three blast furnaces. Oakes built Riddings House c. 1819 where his descendants lived until c. 1990, and also ran coal mines at Somercotes where OPakes and Lyon (later 1st Lord) Playfair first identified oil shale and successfully fracked it. The St. Pancras roof of 1867 was designed by Derby based MR Engineer William Henry Barlow and made by the Butterley Company, whose manufacturer's plates are clearly visible of the main bearers there. Presumably from the ledger entry Jas. Oakes & Co. probably supplied the pig iron,from which the Butterley Company subsequently made the roof, The roof itself was in its day the widest free span of girder roof (at 240ft) in the world, and it apparently weighs 6,898 tons and covers 4.5 acres. The Riddings Iron Works (alias the Alfreton Iron Company), trading as James Oakes & Co. was sold to Stanton Ironworks in 1920 and closed as a result of the General Strike of 1926, although it was later revived as a forge and went to Stewarts & Lloyds before being nationalised and eventually closed completely.