﻿6 NICHOLSON, Notes on the Wilkinsons, Ironmasters. 



Rotheram's academy at Kendal. In those days the Univer- 

 sities were closed to dissenters, but their higher education 

 was not neglected. There were a number of academies 

 in various parts of England, intended like the universities 

 principally for the training of a learned ministry, but to 

 which it was customary for the well-to-do dissenters to 

 send their sons for a few years after the close of their 

 school life and before entering business. One of the most 

 famous of these academies was that kept by Dr. Caleb 

 Rotheram at Kendal, and as John Wilkinson was one of 

 his pupils it follows that he had had the best education 

 then available for dissenters. I may mention that another 

 of Dr. Rotheram's pupils, and presumably a contemporary 

 of John Wilkinson, as they were almost of the same age, 

 was my great-grandfather Robert Nicholson, of Liver- 

 pool, who, with his brother James, had the distinction 

 of establishing the first alum and copperas works in 

 Scotland. No doubt John Wilkinson was initiated into 

 the iron trade at his father's works, but he was only 

 twenty when he went south, and got employment at 

 Wolverhampton. It was not long before he built a blast 

 furnace at Bilston, and there began his career as an 

 ironmaster. About 1756 he was assisting his father at 

 Bersham, and in 1762 he took over his father's works, 

 and there as elsewhere was very successful. From 

 his first ledger at Bersham, in 1762, it appears 

 that the Bersham Works made box-heaters, calendar 

 rolls, malt-mill rolls, sugar rolls, pipes, shells, grenades, 

 and guns, a list which suggests that all of the 

 inventions of Isaac Wilkinson were actually placed on 

 the market. It is no disparagement to John Wilkin- 

 son to say that he merely developed and improved 

 the iron trade on similar lines to those which his father 

 had laid down before him. Even in the manufacture of 



