Lancashire Glass Ancestors

The deadline for my book is looming, so this is just a very quick post to say that my latest feature on tracing Lancashire glass ancestors appears in the February issue of BBC Who Do You Think You Are? magazine. And of course there's advice on finding out about your Lancashire ancestor's occupation in my new book.

Image from author's collection:

Rolling Plate Glass. Work and Workers, T.C. and E.C. Jack Ltd., c.1920.

Looking Back Through Time

I've just come back from a holiday in the beautiful Moselle Valley in Germany, a famous wine-growing area. It was much warmer than in cloudy Cheshire! I don't know where the summer has gone.

If you have a glass-making ancestor, there are tips and hints for tracing your family tree in 'Looking Back Through Time', my latest feature for Discover My Past England. Glass was needed for the many new factories of the Industrial Revolution; the growing armies of workers needed houses to live in, too, further boosting demand for glass. 

Tyneside glass-makers dominated the UK’s window glass production for over two hundred years. By the early nineteenth century, ‘two-fifths of the whole glass manufacture of the kingdom’ was made there. By the 1830s, there were over 120 glass houses in Britain. Glass-makers faced competition from the Continent. When customs duties on glass were axed, cheap foreign glass flooded the home market. Firms such as Pilkingtons at St Helens used new technology to cut costs and improve quality. Pilkingtons’ works produced 150 tons of glass weekly by 1854. Traditional crown window glass makers like those on Tyneside were left behind.

Images: The Herbert-Cowper memorial window in Westminster Abbey. Colour lithograph for Sunday at Home, 2 June 1877.

Glass seal of the British Plate Glass Manufactory, Pictorial History of the County of Lancashire, 1844.

Children of the Furnace

Furnace work in Victorian glass 'houses', where glass was manufactured, was the province of men and strong boys. Apart from ‘intemperate habits,’ no ill effects were found from working in the furnaces. However, some of the lads were treated quite roughly. The young apprentices began work before the men. Gaskell, a twelve year old apprentice, told the 1865 Children’s Employment Commission that the boys at Pilkingtons’ crown and sheet glass works: ‘always get called about three hours before we start with the men, for we have to sweep up and get ready for them before they come. We could do it all in an hour if we liked but we like to play in that time. We are called at all times night and day. The “teazer” or furnace man goes round the town and calls every boy in the house (glass house) when the furnace in that house has heated the metal in the pots enough to start working in about three hours. He comes to the door and knocks and calls “Gaskell,” and then, if it’s night, my father looks out of the house and says “Number – called,” that is the number of the house. So I get out of bed and go off.’

Like iron foundry workers, their lives revolved around the needs of the ever-hungry furnaces. Shift times depended on the type of glass being manufactured and the size of the crucibles used to melt the glass. Boys worked in the cutting and polishing departments, too, along with young girls and teenagers.

You can find out more in my feature on Victorian child glass workers in this month's issue of children's magazine Aquila and in my book Narrow Windows, Narrow Lives.

Image:
Glassblowing, engraving by G. P. Jacomb Hood, Grindon’s Lancashire.

A window on the past

Glass casting at St Helens began over two centuries ago at the huge Ravenhead works, built c.1773. The image (left) shows an 1840s impression of glass being cast - an incredibly hot, painstaking process. St Helens became increasingly important for glass manufacture; firms like Pilkingtons were making 150 tons of glass every week by the middle of the nineteenth century. You can read my feature on the World of Glass museum at St.Helens in the December issue of BBC History magazine. It's an amazing place to visit, especially if you are lucky enough to see a glass-making demonstration; the skill of the craftsman is fantastic to watch. Like me, you'll need to wear a hard hat in the historic underground tunnels (only discovered fairly recently) which lurk under the No.9 Jubilee Cone building. This immense building housed Windle Pilkington's continuous glass furnace, designed by the Siemens brothers.

Images © Sue and Nigel Wilkes:

Casting plate glass, Ravenhead. Pictorial History of the County of Lancashire, 1844.

The author in the underground tunnels at the World of Glass.