Page 40 - Life of Gertrude Bell

28 GERTRUDE BELL
around the Cleveland area where the family’s Clarence ironworks
was situated, with the object of visiting a thousand homes of
working people and assessing the problems and deprivations of
their lives. Gertrude appears to have been appointed treasurer of
the group for in October 1889 she sent a note to Florence from
Red Barns to tell her: ‘The ladies of Clarence were friendly, and oh,
unexpected joy I their accounts came right’ Over a period of
several years these visits gave rise to a highly informative and use­
ful document on the steel industry of the north-east of England and
the needs and expectations of those who worked in that industry.
Florence charted the growth of the industry from its tentative
beginnings at the turn of the eighteenth century when her
husband’s grandfather Thomas Bell, already the owner of a
successful alkali plant at Jarrow, went into partnership with the
barrister and classical scholar James Losh and a mutual friend
George Wilson to form the ironfounding company of Losh,
Wilson and Bell at Walker-on-Tyne in 1807. Later came the
establishment of the first of the Cleveland factories by Henry
Bolckow, a Newcastle corn merchant who came originally from
Mecklenburg in Germany, and a knowledgeable Welshman John
Vaughan, and the subsequent arrival of the Bells led by Sir
Lowthian, the ‘high priest’ of chemical metallurgy, in 1854. She
traced the Quaker influence on the development of the town of
Middlesbrough which grew up around the ironworks; the effects
of the railroads and shipping routes on the initial prosperity and
eventual decline of the industry; the growth of its population
from thirty-five souls in 1811 to nearly a hundred thousand at
the end of the century; the discovery of the rich ores of Eston in
the Cleveland Hills which brought ironworkers flooding in from
Staffordshire, Scotland and South Wales to work the puddling
furnaces of Middlesbrough in the 1850s until the town supplied
one third of the country’s pig-iron and Britain’s output exceeded
that of the rest of the world. ‘In less than a century,’ she wrote at
the end of her report, which she completed in 1907, ‘the proprie­
torial presence of the iron industry had come and gone. Mean­
while, Bell and others had made great fortunes, Teesside had
become a vital part of the might of England and British iron had
fed the growth of railways, bridges and communications through­
out the world.’
The Bells had become rich indeed, though many less responsible
manufacturing families had spent the fortunes made in those