738 5 REPORT—1863. 
Wood also produced pig iron. Charcoal iron was also smelted from some of 
the bands of clay ironstone at Bedlington, where the old calcining-kilns are 
still visible, or were so until very recently. No iron, however, has, as far as 
can be ascertained, been made there for more than a hundred years. 
The inroads which iron-smelting, together with other metallurgical opera- 
tions, &c., had made upon the forests were such, that in the reign of Queen 
Elizabeth four Acts of Parliament were passed to restrict the consumption 
of timber, especially when applied to the manufacture of iron. To supply 
the deficiency thus occasioned, schemes were proposed so -early as 1612 by 
Sturtevant, and subsequently in 1621 by Dud Dudley, for smelting iron 
with pit coal. The unsuitability, however, of the arrangements in use for 
smelting with charcoal when applied to mineral fuel, in all probability 
delayed this important amelioration taking effect for a hundred years after 
its first suggestion by Sturtevant. The small furnaces and bellows of very 
limited power, which did very well with charcoal, would be literally useless 
when applied to coal or coke. After various ineffectual attempts by Buck 
and others, about 1713 the Darbys of Staffordshire reduced the application 
of pit coal to one of practical utility in that county. Darby’s progress, how- 
ever, must have been slow, and his success limited; for the number of blast- 
furnaces in the country had, in the meantime, decreased from 300 to 59, 
so that in 1740 the make of pig iron in England had fallen to 17,850 tons, 
from about 180,000 tons, the chief portion of our requirements being 
imported from Sweden and Russia. To Mr. I. Cookson, who had recently 
purchased the Whitehill estate, near Chester-le-Street, the merit belongs of 
erecting and working the first blast-furnace with coked coal in the North of 
England. The Whitehill furnace was 35 feet high, 12 feet across the boshes, 
and produced 25 tons of iron per week. The blast was supplied by a bellows, 
worked by a water-wheel, placed on Chester Burn. Its mode of supply of 
ironstone was from the thin bands on Waldridge Fell and from Robin Hood’s 
Bay, as has been already mentioned. The coal, of course, was obtained from 
the immediate vicinity. Mr. Joseph Cookson, a descendant of the founder 
of pit-coal smelting in this district, has given many curious particulars re- 
specting this early attempt. The iron was used for colliery castings, and 
latterly for Government ordnance. Frequent interruptions for want of water 
to drive their wheel led at length to the furnace being “ gobbed,” and ulti- 
mately abandoned, about the close of the last century. 
Whatever advantages, in point of minerals, any district might stand pos- 
sessed of, its power for turning them to profitable account depended at that 
time on the existence of a fall of water sufficient to drive the needful blowing- 
apparatus. The discoveries of Watt prevented the want of hydraulic power 
being any longer an impediment, and in a short time the obedient steam- 
engine was appointed to supply the necessary blast to iron-furnaces. Not- 
withstanding the poverty of our coal-field in ironstone, the high price of 
iron—£8 per ton—and the small quantity of ore required for a furnace 
when forty tons of iron was the usual week’s make, induced the Tyne Iron 
Company, in 1800, to erect their two furnaces and a steam blowing-engine 
at Lemington. An idea of the cost of manufacturing pig iron in those days 
is not without interest as illustrative of the disadvantages of this coal 
district as an iron-field. The particulars are kindly furnished by Mr. G. 
Clayton Atkinson, one of the present members of that firm, so that their 
correctness may be relied on :— 
