Vanessa Collingridge and the team answer listener’s historical queries and celebrate the way in which we all ‘make’ history.
Programme 4
21ÌýOctober 2008
Vanessa Collingridge and the team explore themes from Britain’s past thanks to queries raised by listener’s own historical research.
Bricks
Iona Burbidge and her 5 year old daughter Marianne are fanatical about archaeology. Everywhere they go they pick things up. Marianne has even started digging trenches in the garden of their mid-Victorian cottage in Shearsby south of Leicester. The house is made out of brick and it’s these that inspired their question to Making History. Some have finger marks on them and there are stories in the village about ‘Shearsby bricks’, i.e. bricks made in Shearsby. But, how to find a long-gone brickworks?
Finger marks on the brickwork
Vanessa first spoke to one of Iona and Marianne’s neighbours, John Burton who is in his eightieth year. His family have known the village for the best part of a century and a half and when he was a child playing hide and seek in some farm buildings he found some wooden brick moulds with the initials T.H. stencilled on them.
John Burton with his brick moulds.
From Shearsby, Vanessa moved on to one of our leading researchers into bricks and brick making, Dr James Campbell at Queens College, Cambridge. James explained that the raw material for brick-making, brick earth, is widely available throughout Britain. Right up until the first few decades of the industrial revolution, people would simply dig pits close to the building site they were working on and small kilns would’ve fired the hand-made bricks. Then once the building was finished or the supply of brick earth exhausted, the pit and kiln was abandoned. Dr Campbell explained that the arrival of the railways and the first industrial kilns (which allowed for brick firing 24 hours a day) meant that brick-making became more centralised and local manufacturing steadily decreased. Bricks were shipped around the country and local differences disappeared.
Vanessa then went to Sudbury in Suffolk to meet Peter Minter who runs the Bulmer Brick and Tile Company. All the bricks are made by hand and Peter is an expert at spotting the provenance of bricks.
Making bricks the old fashioned way..
He thought that the brick he’d been given by Iona Burbidge was machine-made but when he heard about some of the house bricks having finger marks on he agreed that these could have been made by hand as they were turned to dry. He suspected that this demonstrates that first phase of building used hand-made bricks and then there was a second phase using machine brick. However, to discover whether or not there had been a brick-works in the village he advised that Vanessa turn to evidence from maps.
At the Map Room of the British Library in London, Vanessa and Dr James Campbell went through several maps of Shearsby made at different times throughout the nineteenth century. On one of these maps for the 1830’s they found evidence for a kiln and then later in the century a disused kiln. James then turned to a trades directory for south Leicestershire which revealed that there had been a brickmaker in Sheasby in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.
Useful links
Some local histories:
Further reading
Brick: A World History – Dr James Campbell. Thames and Hudson
ISBN-10: 0500341958
ISBN-13: 978-0500341957
Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway
A Making History listener had come across the biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel written by his son. In it there is a reference to an atmospheric or vacuum railway which Brunel was involved with between Exeter and Totnes. A footnote mentions speeds of over 300 miles per hour! Could this be true?
Making History consulted the transport writer and historian Christian Wolmar who described the speeds achieved as fanciful. But, he confirmed that Brunel was indeed involved in a vacuum railway between Exeter and Totnes. This was in 1847 when he was trying to build a railway between Exeter and Plymouth. The best route was away from the coast, but it was quite hilly and this is why he experimented with a vacuum railway because these were more efficient over steep gradients.
The vacuum was created by stationery steam engines and carriages were attached to a tube in between the rails which was able to propel them in much the same way that canisters with money or news copy were once distributed around department stores and newspaper offices.
Unfortunately for Brunel there was a limit to the vacuum and a limit to the weight it could move. The idea failed, costing his company half a million pounds (equivalent to £40million today). The lasting impact of this failure is the iconic stretch of railway besides the sea at Dawlish in Devon, a less desirable but flatter route between Exeter and Plymouth.
Useful Links
Further Reading
Fire and Steam. A New History of the Railways in Britain. Atlantic Books (2007)
ISBN-10: 1843546299
ISBN-13: 978-1843546290
Steventon Causeway
Listener Dick Boseley in Steventon Oxfordshire wants to know the origins of a causeway that is still a prominent feature in the village today.
Local historians Ros Faith and Anne Cole have been studying the causeway and have found place-name and map evidence which shows that it is an old route – possibly Anglo-Saxon – by which sheep were moved onto and off the local hills and then taken to market.
Vanessa has presentedÌýscience and current affairs programmes for ±«Óãtv, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Discovery and has presented for ±«Óãtv Radio 4 & Five Live and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, Scotsman and Sunday Herald.Ìý
Contact Making History
Send your comments and questions for future programmes to:
Making History
±«Óãtv Radio 4
PO Box 3096 Brighton
BN1 1PL
Vanessa has presentedÌýscience and current affairs programmes for ±«Óãtv, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Discovery and has presented for ±«Óãtv Radio 4 & Five Live and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, Scotsman and Sunday Herald.Ìý