My repost earlier this year of my piece on the history of the Sheffield steel industry prompted an interesting response from John Austin, who has written a history of one subsector of that industry – The Sheffield Heavy Spring Trade – and was kind enough to send me a copy. Reading it prompted these thoughts.
Capital investment bubbles always offer great, and sometimes unexpected, opportunities for producers of some relatively obscure intermediate goods. We’re seeing that now as a result of the the huge AI-driven investment in data centres; aside for the obvious demand for GPUs and memory chips, the makers and installers of HVAC systems (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) are also seeing a bonanza. For a 19th century parallel one can, perhaps, look to the great railway boom. The railways were built on steel – for boilers, for bridges, and above all for track. But they also needed waggons to run on those tracks, those waggons needed springs. By 1861, there were about 175,000 waggons on a railway network that was still exponentially growing, and most of the springs for those waggons were made in Sheffield, building on that city’s predominance in the steel trade.
Austin’s book tells the story of the rise and fall of this significant subsector of the steel industry, and illustrates in microcosm much about the wider story of the UK’s industrialisation. The industry emerged in Sheffield from the craft traditions of the coach builders of the early nineteenth century, and built on the availability there of crucible steel, Benjamin Huntsman’s great 1740 invention. Sheffield’s near-monopoly position bred a complacency about foreign competition, and its early lead led to technical conservatism. But essentially, the industry rose and fell with the wider fortunes of the railway industry in the UK and in overseas markets.
The spring industry’s workforce were well-paid, and transactional in their relationship with their employers. They were well aware of their value, arising from their skills and their resilience in being able to cope in a job that made huge physical demands in a dangerous and unpleasant environment: the “romantic image of the Sheffield craftsman, hard and coarse but skilled and strong” wasn’t entirely groundless. There was a long tradition of trusting craft wisdom over science; the crucial processes of heating, tempering and working the metal were optimised purely on the basis of experience, while much depended on the quality of the spring steel itself. So what technical improvements came along in the 19th and early 20th century were largely upstream of the spring industry – in the transition from crucible steel, first to the output of the Bessemer process, and then the Siemens open-hearth process.
Even these innovations were met with suspicion by the workforce. Austin quotes the recollection of Harry Brearley, the inventor of stainless steel and one of the pioneers of the new early twentieth-century scientific approach to steel-making. Brearley asked a spring smith how he liked working with the new Siemens open-hearth steel compared to the older Bessemer steel. “I don’t like it… I can’t explain the difference but I can feel it. He talks of steel being composed of molecules; if there are such things in Bessemer steel they are round and in this new stuff they are square – I can feel them grate over the corners as I bend it”.
The twentieth century saw a decline of the industry, inevitable perhaps given economic depression and the troubles of the railway industry. A government “Spring Research Committee” doesn’t seem to have had a lot of impact. There was undoubtedly some mechanisation, but this was resisted by a pride in doing things the old way. After the Second World War the industry suffered, as a rather peripheral player in a series of nationalisations and reorganisations of the wider steel industry. Despite the invention of a new design of spring for the Ford Transit van in the mid-sixties, the Sheffield industry failed to adapt from the decline of the railways and the growth of road transport.
The nicely written book is both a colourful look at the sociology of the steel industry in Sheffield, and a thoughtful and informed reflection on the way an industry responds – or fails to respond – to changing markets, wider economic conditions, and technological change. The final section is more personal – Austin’s reminiscences of his own time in a spring shop in the 1970s. There’s no sentimentalism here about the nature of work in this kind of heavy industry: “It was a coarse and somewhat brutalising existence, desensitising to an extent that was too often taken home … physically hard, lacking sophistication, arrogant, disdainful of authority, hedonistic, lived in the moment”. These are words that are worth remembering when we consider what it might mean for the UK to re-industrialise.