ANCESTORS AT WORK
Mike Sharpe looks at the tough lives of our relations who worked in this crucial industry
Did any of your relatives work as a nail-maker?
Nails are an essential technology, whose production dates back millennia. Any village blacksmith would have been able to make nails, for horseshoes for example.
In medieval times, as demand grew and applications diversified, specialist centres of production emerged. In England, two areas in particular became associated with the nail-making trade: Belper in Derbyshire and communities in the Black Country, to the south and west of Birmingham. In Bromsgrove, north Worcestershire, nailmaking dominated the economy to such an extent that it was known locally as ‘Nail Town’. Clusters were also found around Cramond and Kirkcaldy on Scotland’s east coast. Each of these areas exhibited similar
characteristics: easy access by sea or canal (and later the railways), and proximity to the raw materials needed to make nails – coal and ironstone.
In 1700, one third of the 20,000 tons of iron produced in Britain was made into nails. The process began at the slitting mill, which was a watermill for slitting iron bars into rods. The rods were then passed to nailers who made the rods into nails, by giving them a point and a head. Improvements to blast furnaces and the change
‘Nailers understandably gained a reputation for hard drinking’
from charcoal to coal both benefited the industry, and by the beginning of the 19th century the trade was booming.
Over time the types of nails proliferated: clout nails fixed sheet metal to wood; hoop nails held barrel hoops in position; slate nails were used with roof tiles; petit saddle nails were used in saddle-making and upholstery; and so on.
In most demand were horse nails for shoeing horses and common nails for general use.
Working Conditions
At first there was little organisation in the industry. Nailers worked independently, and transported the nails around the country themselves. From around 1800, entrepreneurial nailers recognised opportunities to make more money by becoming ‘nail-masters’. They would purchase iron in large quantities (today we would call it wholesale) which they ‘put out’ to individual nailers. They would then buy back the finished nails to trade around the country at a substantial profit.
Nailers worked in small workshops, which were often attached to their cottage or built at the end of the garden. A typical nail-shop was about 10–12 feet square with a door and one or two unglazed windows for ventilation. It was simply furnished with an anvil, hearth and bellows, and a workbench, and many nailers made their own equipment. As well as paying rent for the nail-shop, the nailers had to supply their own coal for the furnace. Those with no shop of their own could rent a ‘standing’ from a fellow nailer.
Workers would arrange themselves around a central hearth or fire so that the whole family could work together. The younger children would carry the coal and help to operate the bellows, while the husband – and often the wife and older children as well – made the nails. They worked in cramped conditions for up to 14 hours a day, and were normally stripped to the waist because of the intense heat.
Understandably perhaps, nailers gained a reputation for hard drinking. A one-mile stretch of Bromsgrove High Street had more than 50 pubs and beerhouses where nailers could quench their thirst. In Belper, nailers were seen as unruly, especially after they fought with navvies building the railway.
The ‘foggers’ were particularly despised. These were middlemen who exploited the poverty of the nailers, supplying them with iron on credit and buying the nails back at well below list prices. They also operated the ‘truck system’, paying for nails not with money but with tokens that could only be spent in shops or public houses that the foggers themselves owned. The goods were often overpriced, inferior, adulterated or all three, a practice known as ‘tommy trucking’. Although the truck system was eventually outlawed, it persisted in the Black Country into the 20th century.
Many nailers were forced to supplement their incomes. Some with large gardens cultivated vegetables and fruit; others did seasonal work on farms. In Belper mill owners rented out knitting machines and supplied yarn to
provide alternative employment that women and children could do from their homes.
The Industrial Revolution brought mechanisation. In around 1811 Joseph Dyer introduced machinery from the USA to massproduce nails at his factory in Birmingham. By 1830 so-called ‘cut nails’ were being produced in large numbers. The process involved cutting nails from sheets of iron, making sure that the fibres of the iron ran length-wise, which gave a superior grip.
Sadly, imports from continental Europe put more pressure on prices. A report in the 1840s noted: “At Bromsgrove the price paid for making nails has been reduced to one-fifth within the last three years.” By 1907 less than 10 per cent of the total nails produced were made by hand.
Danger Of Starvation
Mechanisation, the truck system and continual cuts in wages brought misery to nail-making communities, and the launch of the Horse-nail Makers’ Union in Belper in 1822 did little to protect the trade. By the 1840s nailers were dying of starvation. In 1842 moves by nail-masters in the Black Country to slash wages led to riots, and 10 years later a protest march against the truck system was held from Halesowen to Bromsgrove. The introduction of the ‘tommy oliver’ – a footoperated hammer – led to strikes.
The formation of cooperatives improved working conditions, but cottage nailers were unable to compete with the price and speed of machine-made nails. By 1900 the industry was in terminal decline, and vanished from Belper around the time of the First World War. In Bromsgrove it clung on for longer: the last nailers – Albert Crane and Charlie Troth – hung up their aprons in the 1950s.