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Furness and the Industrial Revolution Find!

I am writing this blog on behalf of fellow Reading Detective, Liz.

"Furness and the Industrial Revolution" was written by J. D. Marshall and was first published in 1958 with a revised edition in 1981. It is easy to think of the Lake District as pretty scenery, tarns and lakes, mountains and fells, sheep and rain. This book shows that whilst all the above have been constant companions since time immemorial there is another, altogether different, side to the county, that of its industry - and one that pre-dates the tourist by several hundred years - or thousands of years if we are to include the stone age axe factories of the area.

The book charts the industrial development of Furness, one of the most active and wealthy areas of the county, since the early 18th century. Furness roughly encompasses all the land from Barrow-in-Furness, up the Duddon estuary and the River Duddon, along to the northern tip of Windermere and down the west side of that lake to Cartmel, Grange and the Kent estuary.

Before tourism we had slate and copper mines, iron ore mines and limestone quarries, charcoal and gunpowder, steel, railways, shipbuilding and shipping. All of these have left an industrial legacy, largely still to be seen. This book is full of facts and figures - but don't be put off, it is fascinating! Open it anywhere and read what you will: John Pattison receiving 6% on a £400 loan to the Backbarrow company (iron ore and smelting) was doing rather well in 1715. The same Backbarrow company was making box irons, sad irons (whatever they were), firegates, heaters, hatters basins and possnet handles. They had sales of such goods of £5500 in 1744 and even exported pots and pans to the West Indies.

Move onto 1864 and read about the strikes at Barrow docks when the stonemasons wanted Saturdays as a half holiday, or of the shipwrights who earned princely sums of 36 shillings a week in 1889.

Social history is well covered too, though the fact that child mortality accounted for 36% of all deaths in Dalton in 1861 shows that relative prosperity was exactly that - relative.

The book has just enough illustrations and maps to help the reader find what's where - though more would have been helpful, but the narrative is detailed enough to be able to ferret out what's interesting, wherever you happen to be wandering in Furness.

What makes Liz's find even more interesting is that John Marshall lived in Grange and was a regular visitor to the library and in later years, due to failing health, we would deliver books to his home once a month as he could no longer walk to the library. I have copied the following obituary from the Times Higher Education website:

J.D. (John) Marshall, 1919-2008.

A "hardy frontiersman" of academia who developed a passion for regional history while based in Cumbria as a Second World War conscientious objector has died.

J.D. (John) Marshall, who spent the bulk of his career at Lancaster University, was described by a former colleague as an unorthodox academic who wanted to connect with the public rather than restrict himself to an ivory tower.

Oliver Westall, now MBA director at Lancaster, said: "He liked to take on new projects, new ideas and new frameworks. He was always breaking new ground; he was very early into new fields of study such as urban history, oral history and industrial archaeology, but the field he really got embedded in was regional history.

"He was a man of great pragmatic intelligence and was able to see how those new areas would make history much more vivid both for academics and for the public as they were actually dealing with things people cared about."

Dr Marshall grew up in the Midlands, leaving school at 16 and working as a local newspaper journalist and debt collector before the Second World War.

As a left-wing conscientious objector during the early years of the war, he was sent to Cumbria to work for the Forestry Commission, where he became involved in the Communist Party in Barrow.

Mr Westall said this was "a kind of epiphany" for Dr Marshall, sparking a passionate engagement with the political Left and with Cumbria. "He began to form a clear view that his vocation in life was to explain to the working classes of Barrow how Barrow had come to be how it was.

"That was an expression of his great passion for the area and its people, and however much he became an academic - and he was never the most orthodox of academics - you could never escape from the feeling that he had a deep need to give back to the people of Barrow and Cumbria an understanding of the history that made them," he said.

Towards the end of the war, Dr Marshall volunteered for the Royal Army Signal Corps as a radio operator. In the late 1940s, he went to the University of Nottingham to study economic history, completing a PhD at London University in 1958.

He taught history of science and technology at Bolton Training College, among other institutions, before being appointed as a lecturer at Lancaster in 1966.

There, he helped to develop a new history department and became a reader in North West regional history. He also founded the cross-disciplinary centre for North West regional studies in the 1970s, before taking early retirement on medical grounds in 1980. He remained, said Mr Westall, a radical all his life, "a sharp-eyed sniper at power and privilege to the end".

After a quick Google I've discovered what a sad iron is: The sad in sad iron (or sadiron) is an old word for solid, and in some contexts this name suggests something bigger and heavier than a flat iron - so now we know!

20 September 2009 from Mary Rossall

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