A Rich Heritage

Over the centuries Derbyshire’s rich mineral wealth has been plundered to provide the raw materials for a vast number of products, and a whole range of commercial enterprises have come and gone since the Romans first mined lead here two thousand years ago.

The rich deposits of carboniferous limestone have provided – and are still providing – vast quantities of raw materials for use in industry, including lime, building stone, lead and all its valuable derivatives, including barytes and fluorspar and their by-products used in the metallurgic industries.

In much shorter supply however, the Derbyshire limestone has yielded other mineral treasures including silver and small quantities of gold, the unique Blue John mined around the Castleton area – and Ashford Black Marble, prized for its decorative beauty and notably the finest of it’s kind to be found anywhere in the world. Though many commentators claim that it isn’t marble at all, but an impure form of bituminous dark grey limestone (which turns black when polished), the geological encyclopaedia makes it clear:

“Marble (from Latin, marmor – ` a shining stone’) – a term applied to any limestone or dolomite which is sufficiently close in texture to admit of being polished.by accurate writers the term is invariably restricted to those crystalline and compact varieties of carbonate of lime, which when polished, are applicable to purposes of decoration”?.

Furthermore the encyclopaedia goes on to say:

“Perhaps the most generally useful marbles yielded by the Carboniferous system are the black varieties, which are largely employed for chimney-pieces, vases and other ornamental objects. The colour of most black limestone is due to the presence of bituminous matter..and the finest kind of black marble is obtained from near Ashford in Derbyshire”?.

The Black Beauty of Ashford Marble

This once fashionable product was made into a multitude of ornaments like clocks, candlesticks, book-ends, snuff and cigarette-boxes, crosses, inkstands, obelisks and thermometers. Its black beauty graces many stately homes and royal residences, churches and cathedrals, and since the industry declined in 1905 due to a dramatic fall in demand, it’s products have become prized by both art and antique collectors, and fine examples are on display at major London museums, and locally in museums at Derby and Sheffield.

When England underwent a massive re-building programme, fuelled by the success of the Industrial Revolution during the early Georgian period, easier access was provided into the Peak District with the building of new turnpike roads and canals throughout the eighteenth century, and the exploitation of Derbyshire’s mineral wealth fuelled a flourishing trade in commercial products. Into this maelstrom of commercial activity Henry Watson established the Ashford Marble Mill on the River Wye in 1748, and for one hundred and fifty years until it’s final closure in 1905, the water-powered mill manufactured some of the finest and most sought after marble ornaments and artefacts ever produced.

The main source of black marble was Arrock Quarry, on the Sheldon road from Ashford, and on the opposite side of the river from the marble works. In 1843 William Adam described it in his `Gem of the Peak’ as having,

“a bearing of at least forty feet above it of bad measures, as they are called, and the good black consists of nine beds, varying from three to nine inches in thickness..It is difficult to raise a perfect slab of more than six or seven feet long, and from two to five feet wide”?. In 1832 a Mr. Oldfield had discovered another source and opened a quarry at the Rookery Plantation. Large slabs from both quarries were taken across the river to the mill to be sawn to size, ground and polished.

For almost a century all the decorative work had been done by etching and engraving onto the polished surface, but in 1835 the industry was transformed when William Adam of Matlock, at the suggestion of the Duke of Devonshire who had seen Florentine mosaics while on a visit to Italy, introduced the art of inlaying.

The beautiful floral and geometric inlaid designs proved an immediate success. Inlay material came from many sources, but most popular was Rosewood and Bird’s Eye marble from Sheldon, Corraline and Duke’s Red from Alport, Entrochal and Encrinital from Monyash, blue fluorspar from Castleton, and yellow fluorspar from Crich. These were later supplemented by imported green Russian malachite, white Carrara, green Florentine and yellow Sienna marbles from Italy, lapis lazuli and conch shells. This resulted in a wider range of designs and local artists produced sprays of roses, pansies, harebells, forget-me-nots, lilies-of-the-valley, fuchsias, birds and butterflies to enhance and heighten the black beauty of the Ashford Marble.

The delicate, intricately skilled inlay work was done by homeworkers called `baublers’, who used metal templates to mark out the chiselled sockets to receive the inlays, which had their edges tapered on grinding wheels. The inlays were then cemented into the sockets by means of a glue made from tallow, resin and plaster of Paris, applied as a powder, and activated by the process of ironing the inlays into position. The products were then returned to the marble mill where the surface was ground level and highly polished to a perfect finish.

Queen Victoria’s Patronage

Patronised by royalty, the Marble Works at Ashford became a tourist attraction and demand soared following the outstanding success of Ashford marble at the Great Exhibition of 1851, when Prince Albert himself exhibited three beautifully inlaid black marble tables made at the workshops of T. Woodruff of Bakewell which reportedly put even the Italian Master’s in the shade. It quickly became known that both he and Queen Victoria were patrons and collectors of Ashford black marble.

Following Albert’s death, Queen Victoria’s years of mourning were responsible for creating a vogue which popularised black clothing and adornments, such as Whitby Jet jewellery and Ashford black marble ornaments. But Victoria was familiar with Ashford marble long before this.

As a girl of thirteen she stayed at Chatsworth and admired the marble interiors and massive marble doorways installed in the new wing by the 6th Duke, and thus inspired, paid a visit in 1832 to the Ashford Marble Works with her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and made a number of purchases. Even earlier than this, Bess of Hardwick used Ashford marble for the chimney piece of the Great High Presence Chamber when building Hardwick Hall in 1580, and later in 1687 it was quarried at nearby Sheldon for the columns, altar steps and floor of the chapel at Chatsworth House.Indeed, from the discovery in 1832 of a dressed piece of black marble from the Ashford area in a prehistoric burial mound at Monsal Dale, it is clear that the product has always been highly prized.

But by the close of the nineteenth century coloured glass was being used as a cheap replacement for the inlay work, and the results were regarded as tawdry and unworthy of the high quality of craftsmanship for which the Ashford marblers had become renowned.

Following Victoria’s death in 1901 demand for the black marble products began to wane and the famous Ashford Marble Works finally closed in 1905, and disappeared forever during road widening in the 1930’s.

Today Ashford black marble ornaments are greatly prized collector’s items, and the dramatic beauty of it’s highly polished black surface still graces the counties stately homes at Chatsworth, Keddleston, Haddon, and Hardwick.

One of the finest examples to be seen on public display, is a prize-winning circular inlaid black marble table, exhibited at Derby in 1882 – which most appropriately stands today in the church at Ashford-in-the-Water.

In the century since the closure of the Ashford Marble Works, the prices of black marble artefacts which are now regarded as genuine antiques, has steadily grown owing to the increase in rarity value and availability of the product. The same can be said of another `made in Derbyshire’ product of a completely different and far more delicate kind, which was produced in South Derbyshire as the Napoleonic wars were raging across Europe, and Britain was successively at war with France, the U.S. and Spain, around the turn of the nineteenth century.

Pinxton Porcelain

Close by junction 28 of the M1 motorway in the heavily industrialised corridor of the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire border, the former pit village of Pinxton is hardly the kind of place that you would normally associate with beauty. But the motorway cuts through the once stately – and quite beautiful Brookhill Park – former seat of the Coke family of Brookhill Hall. Furthermore, it was John Coke, the Squire of the Manor of Brookhill who founded the famous Pinxton Porcelain Factory which during it’s short life produced some of the most beautiful and sought after ceramic art in the world between 1796 and 1813.

The rare Pinxton porcelain was produced there for just seventeen years before the factory closed and thus the rarity value of this most distinctive and distinguished of all English porcelain has made it extremely collectable. In a recent sale of small ceramic items at Neales Fine Art Auctioneers of Derby, a tea cup and saucer was sold for £120, a milk jug for £150, and a coffee can, tea cup and saucer for £200. At the other end of the market a Pinxton porter tankard with panelled scenes of Brookhill Hall recently went under the hammer at Sotheby’s for £14,500.

The manufacture of pottery is humankinds oldest current art form and began virtually at the dawn of civilisation. The Chinese were the first to manufacture porcelain for domestic, religious and commercial use.

The pure white clay they used was actually kaolin, a word meaning `top of the mountain’, thus once exported to English speaking countries the various porcelain products became known collectively as `china’. This should not be confused with `bone china’ which is an almost exclusively English product first perfected by Josiah Spode around 1750 by adding powdered animal bone to the mix of clay – thus producing `bone’- china.

The Pinxton Factory produced elegant porcelain of a fine, light transluscent quality which was richly and expertly decorated by a team of gilders and hand-painters led initially by William Billingsley, known for his artistry as a flower painter and especially for his design of the famous`Pinxton Roses’ – a favourite of our current Queen Elizabeth.

It was following the discovery of a fine, pure white clay within the grounds of Brookhill Hall that John Coke wrote to William Duesbury, owner of the Derby Porcelain Factory in 1795 seeking his opinion about the possible commercial prospects of building a factory at Pinxton.

These were the days of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution and the Cromford Canal, which ran from Arkwright’s Mill at Cromford to the Erewash Canal at Langley Mill before going on to Pixton Wharf, had been opened just two years earlier in 1793. Coke himself owned a number of boats which plied both the canal and River Trent, thus the siting of his proposed factory on the site of the Old Water Mill at Pinxton Wharf at the head of the Cromford Canal was ideal.

Duesbury, fearing competition tried to dissuade him, but William Billingsley who was the senior flower painter at Derby wrote to Coke offering his services. Billingsley had served his apprenticeship at Derby, where he had worked for twenty one years and had previously experimented making porcelain bodies to his own recipe. He saw the opportunity with Coke at Pinxton to produce his own porcelain and the two quickly made plans and the factory was built and in production from April 1796. A steam engine was ordered from Francis Thompson of Chesterfield to provide the power, but this proved unsuccessful and power was eventually supplied to the factory via a water-mill powered by the nearby Erewash River.

Billingsley’s `secret recipe’ produced beautiful but unstable porcelain and losses were heavy. The factory achieved it’s peak output late in 1798 but financial losses led to a reduction of staff in 1799 and Billingsley terminated his employment in April that year leaving John Coke as sole proprietor. He continued from 1801 to 1803 in partnership with Henry Bankes, and later with John Cutts. On April 26th 1806 John Coke married Suzanna Wilmott and severed his connection with the factory, leaving John Cutts as sole proprietor. Cutts finally closed the factory on Ladies Day 1813 signalling the end of the Pinxton porcelain manufactory after a short life of seventeen years. The factory site was convertaed into tenements for local colliers and the offices for Coke & Co.Ltd, a coal-mining company. At an auction in the George Hotel, Alfreton in 1859, lot 13 was described as `sixteen dwelling-houses or tenements situated at a place called The Factory at Pinxton’.The buildings were finally demolished in 1934 and the land, rather incongruously, is today being used as a scrap-metal merchants.

The fascinating story of the Pinxton China Factory, together with 370 full-colour plate illustrations, is told in an expertly researched book by local Pinxton businessman Nicholas Gent, who according to the foreword by John Twitchett F.R.S.A., Curator of the Royal Crown Derby Museum, is regarded as, “the foremost authority in his field”?.

The author describes the book as `a labour of love’, which was written to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the foundation of the Pinxton Factory in 1796, and is himself a passionate collector, owning over four hundred pieces, which constitutes one of the two largest collections of Pinxton China in the world.

Nicholas Gent probably inherited his passion for collecting from his father, who was an avid collector of antique guns. He also inherited an interest in guns and both father and son were members of the British Shooting Team. Mr.Gent Senior in the small bore rifle section, whilst son Nicholas was a crackshot with a pistol. Both shot regularly at Bisley during the Seventies and Nicholas fondly recalls the Saturday excursions when his joint passions for shooting and collecting ceramics could well have got him arrested on suspicion of terrorism! He shot at the Bisley Trials in the afternoon, but spent the morning trawling the stalls on the Portobello Road for that elusive piece of Pinxton china – whilst armed to the teeth with a bag full of guns!

His passion for Pinxton pottery began as a 16 year-old following family visits to Mr.& Mrs.P. Dennis at Langton Hall, who owned the world’s largest collection. Soon he was building his own collection by attending auctions in Nottingham and Derby and since then his passionate pursuit of Pinxton pieces has seen purchases from as far afield as Toronto and Cape Town.

He is a regular at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s and after thirty years of collecting, handling and valuing porcelain his enthusiasm remains undimmed; when asked, “what is the easiest way for a beginner to recognize genuine pieces of Pinxton porcelain”?, he replies, somewhat but not totally tongue-in-cheek, – “First, buy a copy of my book!!”?

The foundation of the Pinxton Porcelain factory in 1793 almost coincided with the construction of the Cromford Canal which was completed the following year. The Pinxton factory was erected at the southern end of the canal at Pinxton Wharf, in an ideal location for the cheap and easy transportation of Pinxton’s precious porcelain products. But whilst the Pinxton porcelain production lasted a mere seventeen years, the Cromford Canal continued to be an artery of industry for the next century and a half.

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The Cromford Canal – A Forgotten Artery of Industry

On March 13th 1937 the owners of the Cromford Canal finally declared their intention to close it. Sixty-five years later to the very day – March 13th 2002 the newly-formed Friends of Cromford Canal (FCC) declared their intention to re-open it! Now the burgeoning membership of the F.C.C. has risen to almost four hundred and Chairman Mike Kelley has announced ambitious plans to help preserve this valuable national heritage and to turn the canal into one of the area’s top tourist attractions.

Having recently been granted World Heritage Status by UNESCO, (not the canal) the Cromford area already attracts thousands of visitors a year from all over the world and is famously known as `The Birthplace of The Industrial Revolution’ with the world’s first ever water-powered cotton mill being built beside the Derwent at Cromford by Richard Arkwright in 1771.

For centuries prior to this, long before the turnpike roads were built into the previously impenetrable interior, the yeomen farmers and tradesmen of Derbyshire’s Peak District relied on pack-horse trains to carry goods in and out of the area. But by the turn of the seventeenth century these were proving too slow and expensively inadequate to meet the demand for the sheer volume of goods, including coal, iron, cotton, lead and limestone that were needed by merchants throughout England to fuel the burgeoning Industrial Revolution.

A system of man-made inland waterways or canals was constructed during the eighteenth century and these became the motorways of the age; arteries of industry connecting one region with the next through a series of interconnecting channels which ran almost the length and breadth of the land and provided faster and cheaper transportation of goods.

But the canals only came as far north as Langley Mill (Erewash Canal) – until in 1788 at a meeting in Matlock attended by Sir Richard Arkwright and Engineer William Jessop, it was proposed to build a canal to link the Erewash Canal with the Peak District.

The following year work began on the Cromford Canal with William Jessop as Engineer, assisted by Benjamin Outram and Thomas Dadford to build the fourteen and a half mile canal from Cromford to Langley Mill, where it would link up with both the Erewash and the newly proposed Nottingham Canal and eventually allow passage from the Peak District to both Derby and Nottingham.

The canal would serve several mines, quarries, lead works, the iron works at Butterley and Somercotes, as well as Arkwrights cotton mills at Cromford, and would include the 3,000 yard long Butterley Tunnel, one of the longest in the land.

Arkwright died in 1792 and did not see the completion of the canal, which was fully open, aquaducts, tunnels and all, in August 1794.

The Cromford Canal was a success right away and by 1797 Nathanial Wheatcroft was running a passenger service twice weekly to Nottingham from Cromford Basin. The fare for the 38-mile trip was five shillings (25p) first class, and three shillings (15p) second class!

In 1802 Peter Nightingale, father of Florence, opened a half mile channel known as the Lea Wood Branch just south of Wigwell aquaduct which provided access to a number of quarries, two lead-works, cotton mills and a hat factory. Such was the success of the canal that by 1814 dividends to shareholders reached 10%. A number of tramways connected to the canal at various points. They reached high into the surrounding hills, mostly drawn by horses or pulled up the inclines by a balance and gravity system.

At Crich the limestone quarries situated high above the canal were connected to the waterway at Bullbridge via a tramway, whilst at Riddings a donkey-drawn tramway was built and at Swanwick a steam-driven tramway was in operation. At Butterley ironworks an even more ingenious transportation method allowed the works cargo, mostly cannonballs and shot bound for navy use at Woolwich Arsenal, to be sent straight down shafts onto waiting boats inside Butterley Tunnel!

The Cromford canal was originally envisaged as the first step in a canal system to link the East Midlands with Manchester but the Trans-Pennine canal was never built due to the technical difficulties and costs involved. However the link was eventually created when the Cromford and High Peak Railway was opened in 1831, joining the Cromford Canal at High Peak Wharf with the Peak Forest Canal at Whaley Bridge.

Business boomed and by 1841 the ever increasing success of the route brought dividends to an all time high of 28% with the canal carrying double what it had done at the turn of the century.

Coal carriage had doubled and the canal now carried substantial quantities of farm produce as well as ironstone, gritstone and limestone, and the amount of iron from Butterley works had increased considerably. Coal was mainly carried down to the Erewash Canal and on to the Soar Navigation, and then to Leicester. Limestone was shipped further south to the West Midlands and London.

Many of these materials were used in the construction of the growing railway network – and the ringing of hammers on steel rails eventually became the death-knell for the Cromford Canal Company, which in 1852 was taken over by what later became the Midland Railway Company.

In 1888 with most goods now carried by rail, canal traffic had declined to just 15% of it’s pre-railway levels and the glory days of the canals were over. When Butterley Tunnel collapsed for the third time in 1900 and was pronounced beyond economic repair by a Royal Commission in 1909, Cromford Canal went into steady decline, being little used, and eventually on March 13th 1937 it was officially closed to traffic.

The link with the last traffic to have any real association with the Cromford Canal ended when the last train crossed the Peak District on the Cromford and High Peak Railway in 1967. That railway is now the High Peak Trail, and in 1974 Derbyshire County Council also bought the northern-most five and a half miles of the Cromford Canal, which stretches through the beautiful countryside of the Derwent Valley from Ambergate to Cromford.

The towpath has been cleared and has become a popular and tranquil waterside walk and because of the abundance of wildlife it supports and its value as a natural habitat, the canal has been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The southern end (Whatstandwell to Ambergate) is managed as a Statutory Local Nature Reserve by the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, whilst Cromford Wharf at the northern end has been restored and the canal is navigable as far as the High Peak Junction.

High Peak Junction Workshops (1830) have also been restored and house an Information and Exhibition Centre, and the latest issue of `The Portal’ magazine produced by the F.C.C announces that the Arkwright Society have requested and been granted corporate membership, and that the F.C.C. are committed to restoring the Cromford Canal to full navigation.

Chairman Mike Kelley writes,

“I see an aspect of our project as having the potential to become one of the major tourist attractions of the East Midlands, not only that, but a unique feature of British tourism”?.

He then refers to the success of the Standedge Tunnel on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, which was re-opened by Prince Charles and has since attracted thousands of visitors who come for the experience of travelling through it.

“Imagine this attraction for our own Butterley Tunnel (3,086 yds) coupled with a steam railway trip. Tourists would be able to enjoy the equivalent of the `Standedge Experience’ through the Butterley Tunnel, but return on the preserved steam hauled train the other way, courtesy of the Midland Railway Preservation Group at Butterley, Ripley. What a potential we have, and what an impetus to get the whole of the Cromford re-opened”?.

Planning permission is already being sought to extend the southern end at Langley Mill by half a mile and to build a marina, so who knows? – perhaps the Cromford Canal, that forgotten artery of industry, is destined once again to pulse with the life-blood of a new industry – tourism!