This contrivance has been in use up to the present time. During Mr. Reynolds’s life a representation of it figured upon copper tokens, one of the first iron bridge being upon the opposite or obverse side.
Another of these contrivances is still in use near the Hay, in the parish of Madeley, called the Coalport Incline. This is 207 feet in length, and the gradient is much greater, being about one in three. So great indeed that on the chain snapping we have known a canal boat with five tons of iron pigs on board gain such velocity that on coming in contact with the water in the lower canal it has broken away from the iron chains which held it to the carriage, bounded into the air, clearing two other boats moored on the side, together with the embankment, and alighted in the Severn, close to the ferry-boat, into which it pitched some of the iron-pigs it contained. At the foot of this incline Mr. Reynolds drove a level to the shaft of the Blissers Hill pits, to bring down the coals to the lower canal for loading into barges on the Severn. This was the famous Tar Tunnel from which petroleum was formerly exported in large quantities to all parts of Europe.
William Reynolds removed from Ketley to a large house formerly occupied by Lord Dundonald, at the Tuckies, where he continued to superintend the ironworks he had leased at Madeley Wood, familiarly known as Bedlam Furnaces, and was succeeded by his brother, Mr. Joseph Reynolds, who continued to carry on the Ketley Works till the recurrence of one of those fearful revulsions that have marked the history of the trade. For a quarter of a century we had been carrying on wars, levying troops, and interfering with everybody’s business but that which properly belonged to ourselves. We had obtained our object of ambition by bribery, strategy, and force of arms combined. We had restored the ancient families of France, reduced that country to its ancient limits, and annihilated its commerce. With glorious victory came fearful collapse, and the country awoke to find that a fallacy which it had been taught to regard as truth—that war brings commercial advantages that compensate for fearful waste and lavish expenditure. To add to the calamity, a succession of bad harvests was experienced, and the reduction of the army served to swell the poor’s-rates upon which working men and their families had been thrown for a bare support. Iron from £18 had gone down to £7 per ton, carriage paid from Ketley to Stourport. Mr. Reynolds believed the trade would never again rally, and resolved to blow out the furnaces at Ketley. This was in 1817. In 1818, at an immense sacrifice of property, consisting of the usual apparatus for making and manufacturing iron, he sold off at an immense loss, and removed to Bristol. Language cannot paint the deep distress which accompanied and followed this step. Men, with wives and families dependent upon them, saw their only ground of hope taken from them. Starving by thousands, and yoked like horses, they might be seen drawing materials for the repair of the roads, or conveying coal into Staffordshire. One third of the Shropshire banks failed. Disturbances were frequent; mobs of men collected in bodies and went about taking food where they could find it, and the militia had often to be called out to quell disturbances. Not only ironmasters, but manufacturers generally were reduced to despair. The parish authorities of Wellington advertised in the public journals for persons to come forward and take the Ketley works; and a company, consisting of the Messrs. Montford, Shakeshaft, Ogle, Williams, Hombersley, and others, was formed.
From what we have written, it will be seen that Mr. William Reynolds was on familiar terms with his men. In severe weather and distressed times, he made soup to give away three times a week, and he generally kept “open-house” for his workmen and friends; of the latter he had a large circle. He did not like idleness or indiscriminate almsgiving. A number of men thrown out of employ came to him in a body for relief during a deep snow. He set them to clear an entire field, and to make him a snow-stack; which they did of large proportions, receiving daily wages for the same. He allowed a house and garden rent-free to “Sniggy Oakes,” as he was called—heaven knows what his right name was, for in that day it was seldom known in the mining districts—on condition that the said Sniggy ferry’d him and his family across the river when they required it. One evening Sniggy, knowing he was out on the other side, went to bed instead of sitting up, which he found a deal more comfortable on a cold wet night, and Mr. Reynolds, after calling him first one name and then another, ringing the changes upon every alias, and changing it for “boat! boat!” “ferry! ferry!” had to go round by the bridge. Coming opposite the cottage where Sniggy was snug in bed, he smashed every window, shouting “boat” at every blow of his huge stick. Sniggy roared with fright, and promised better things another time. “On another occasion,” says our informant, “while having a balcony put up in front of the Tuckies, he gave strict injunctions that the martins’ nests should not by any means be disturbed, threatening to shoot the man who violated his instruction. They all obeyed him but one man, and he—.” “What, you don’t mean to say he was going to carry out his threat?” said we. “But he was,” it was replied, “and did.” “What shoot him?” “Yes; shot him, sir—shot him with a pop-gun!” Being a Quaker, many anecdotes are told of him not paying church-rates, and what are called Easter offerings, showing a rich vein of genuine humour running through a warm and generous nature. Old people too tell with much glee of a grand illumination they remember to celebrate one of those interludes of war, termed “a peace rejoicing,” when the bridge across the river, and a large revolving wheel, were lighted up with lamps, and the manufactory, in which—together with Messrs. Horton and Rose—he was a shareholder, was illuminated.
“He is a wise son who knows his own father,” it is said, but it is sometimes more difficult to trace the paternity of an anecdote, and we tell the following as it was told to us.
“Mr. Reynolds was kind and generous to a fault, but he did not like to be tricked. Returning late from a party on horseback, he was requested to pay again at a turnpike gate. Old Roberts, who having been in the army, looked with contempt upon all but a red uniform, and hated Quakers’ plain suits in particular, the more so as the wearers were known to be averse to war, now found himself, as he imagined, in a position to ‘take the small change,’ out of the Quaker. Mr. Reynolds disputed the charge, knowing from the time he left his friend’s house that he must be in the right; but, as the other insisted upon being paid, he paid him. When the latter had opened the gate, Mr. Reynolds remarked, ‘Well, friend, having paid, I suppose I am at liberty to pass through as often as I like?’ ‘Certainly, sir,’ said the old robber—as the juveniles would persist in calling the old man, adding an additional ‘b’ to his name, and clipping it of the two terminating letters. Mr. Reynolds had not travelled far on the home-side of the gate—sufficiently far however to allow the other to get into bed, before he returned, and called up the gatekeeper; having occasion, as he said, to go back. By the time he had again got into bed back came his tormentor at an easy jog-trot pace; and as he again passed through the gate he begged to be accommodated with a light. ‘Thou art sure it is past twelve o’clock, friend?’ said Mr. Reynolds. ‘Quite sure,’ said the other, adding ‘I thought I had done with you for to-night.’ ‘Thou art mistaken,’ said Mr. Reynolds, ‘it is a fine night, and I intend to make the most of it.’ In about ten minutes time the hated sound of ‘Gate, gate,’ brought old Roberts to his post, muttering curses between his teeth. ‘Thou art quite sure it is past twelve, art thou?’ was the question asked, and asked again, till at last the gatekeeper begged of his tormentor to take back the toll. ‘It cured him, though,’ said our informant, ‘and made him civil; but they called him ‘Past Twelve’ for the rest of his days.’”
When Mr. Reynolds removed from Ketley to Madeley Wood, he also removed from the former to the latter place some very primitive steam engines, from the fact that they were constructed by a man named Adam Hyslop, and differed from the ordinary condensing engines of Boulton and Watt in having a cylinder at each end of the beam: one a steam cylinder and condensing box; the other a condensing cylinder only, into which the steam, having done duty in the steam cylinder is conveyed. They were invented prior to Boulton and Watt’s final improvements. Three of these singular looking engines are still used in the field, and work most economically, with five pounds of steam to the square inch.
Of the early history of the Madeley Wood Works, we have been able to glean little satisfactory, beyond the fact that Richard Reynolds, who bought the manor in 1781 or 1782, granted a lease in June 1794 of the Bedlam or Madeley Wood furnaces to his son William, and Richard Rathbone, who very shortly after gave up his interest to William Reynolds, who afterwards carried them on himself. The site was a good one at that time, being at the base of the outcrop of the lowest seams of coal and ironstone, which could thus be obtained by levels driven into the hills, or by shallow shafts, from either of which they were let down inclined planes to the furnaces, close by which flowed the Severn, to take away either coal or iron.
It was on the side of this hill on which the Madeley Wood works were situated, at a place called the Brockholes (broc, or badger-holes), that in 1332 Walter de Caldbrook obtained a license from the prior of Wenlock to dig for coal. Speaking of coal found in this or similar situations in Shropshire, we find, too, that quaint old writer, Thomas Fuller, two centuries ago, as quoted by W. O. Foster Esq., at the meeting of the Iron and Steel Institute at Coalbrookdale, in 1871, giving his opinion thus:—
“One may see a three-fold difference in our English coal—(1) the sea coal brought from Newcastle; (2) the land coal at Mendip, Bedworth, &c., and carried into other counties; (3) what one may call river and fresh water coal, digged out in this county at such a distance from Severn that they are easily ported by boat into other shires. Oh, if this coal could be so charmed as to make iron melt out of the stone, as it maketh it in smiths’ forges to be wrought in the bars. But Rome was not built all in one day; and a new world of experiments is left to the discovery of posterity.”