History of Scunthorpe Page 1
The Steelworks
Rowland Winn (1820 - 1893), after making his marvellous ore discovery, leased his land for mining to William and George Dawes.
The blast furnace at their Trent ironworks were the first to make iron back in 1864. However, it was not until 1888 that Frodingham
Iron Company actually started to make steel with an Austrian, Maximilian Mannaberg, to guide developments. The average weekly output
of steel had risen from 670 tons to 1,353 tons by 1899 and the 100-ton Talbot furnace, the only one in Europe at the time, was
installed at the Frodingham works. Throughout World War II the furnaces ran at full capacity providing raw materials for the war effort.
A glow in the skies, caused from tipping molten slag, could be seen for miles and this inspired the motto for the Borough's
Coat of Arms - 'The Heavens reflect our Labours'.
During the 1920s and 1930s the industry weathered a tempestuous time following industrial problems, fierce competition from Europe
and the General Strike in 1926. However, re-development and modernisation, in particular at the Lysaght Steelworks, started in 1910,
which saw off any serious threats.
Their development of heat conservation brought them worldwide attention and the replacement mill was one of a number of schemes that
changed the face of steelworking. By the 1950s all three of Scunthorpe's steelworks, Lysaght, Frodingham (now called Apple-Frodingham)
and United Steel had all made varying developments and increased the annual output. 1967 was the year of re-nationalisation and Britain's
14 major steel works were brought together under the umbrella of the British Steel Corporation, (the British Steel Corporation was
established by the Iron and Steel Act March 22, 1967). Hard hats were also made compulsory in this year after experiments carried out by
the Scunthorpe and District Industrial Safety Council.
In 1970 a project, codename Anchor, was developed to increase production at Apple-Frodingham to 5 million tonnes a year. £130million
was invested in a new site that covered over 1,000 acres and included ten miles of road and 30 miles of railway. The site was producing
some of the cheapest steel in the country. Unfortunately, on November 4, 1975 disaster struck! A corroded steel plug in one of the
cooling tanks in the Queen Victoria furnaces caused an explosion that showered 90 tonnes of molten metal, at 1,700 degrees centigrade,
on workers. Four of the men were killed instantly, only identifiable from their rings and house keys. A further 15 men were
hospitalised, seven of them dying over the following week, bringing the death toll to 11. Fire-fighters said it was reminiscent of
Dante's Inferno (if you have seen the film Dante's Peak this would give you a bit of an insight as to what it might have been like).
This terrible tragedy made the national press, dubbed 'the Fountain of Death'. There is a plaque in remembrance to the men who lost
their lives in the control room of the Queen Victoria blast furnace.
The beginning of the 1980s were not very encouraging for the steel industry - a 13 week strike, British Steel losses of
£800million and the closure of Normanby Park Steelworks, with 4,100 redundancies. However, privatisation turned the steel industry's
fortunes around. The Humber Bridge, completed in 1981, used steel supplied from Scunthorpe and contracts for works such as the Channel
Tunnel, the building at Canary Wharf and major North Sea contracts, including the rebuilding of Piper Alpha, after the disaster in 1988,
were won. By the end of the decade, Scunthorpe had broken the record for having the UK's biggest liquid steel output for the fourth
consecutive year in 1988/89.
In 1996 British Steel invested £54million in the Scunthorpe works, the biggest since the Anchor development, to boost production.
The then Mayor said it was "better than winning the national lottery jackpot".
