Walsall. 335 



retail saddler who is workshopless ; but if he charges me for 

 a job as much as Champion & Wilton, Whippy & Steggles, 

 Langdon, Harries of Shrewsbury or any other saddler who 

 gets his work done in his own premises would do, I would, 

 not unnaturally, feel aggrieved. I would certainly prefer to 

 give an order to a firm whose manager would have my work 

 done under his own eyes, than to trust to a man who would 

 have to write to someone else and tell him what I wanted. 

 When it is a question of buying a ready-made saddle, bridle 

 or set of harness, I don't care where it has been manufactured, 

 so long as it suits me. 



While on a visit to Mr Scott of Messrs Hampson & Scott, 

 we spent three very pleasant days at Walsall, where we had 

 the best possible opportunities of seeing leather, bits, buckles, 

 hooks, stirrup-irons, hames, clipping machines, saddles, har- 

 ness, etc., in every stage of preparation. What struck me 

 most was the excellence of the work turned out ; although 

 economy was closely observed as far as could be done legiti- 

 mately. One of the greatest labour-saving inventions ever 

 discovered is that of annealing, which is a process of gradu- 

 ally cooling iron castings which have been heated, so that 

 their texture becomes greatly toughened. I may mention 

 that ordinary cast iron is so brittle that it is liable to break 

 almost like glass if it is struck by, or let fall on, a hard sub- 

 stance. After being annealed it is called malleable iron, and 

 then occupies, as regards toughness, a position which is about 

 midway between cast iron and wrought iron. Before the 

 process of annealing was known, iron buckles had to be 

 made of wrought iron, and were consequently very expensive. 

 Now they are all, practically speaking, of malleable iron, 

 which fairly meets the requirements of the case in this 

 instance. During the Franco-German war, very large orders 

 for girth buckles for the French cavalry were sent to Walsall 

 by men who were so unscrupulous that to obtain all possible 

 profit out of their speculation, they contracted only for cast- 

 iron buckles, the large majority of which must have broken 



