Hanbury, John
NAME:
Hanbury, John
ACHIEVEMENTS:
Developed an iron-rolling process that helped set up the British tin-plating industry
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
None
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:
1664, probably Gloucestershire, England
DATE AND PLACE OF DEATH AND AGE AT DEATH:
14 June 1734. Aged 60
DISCIPLINE:
Manufacturer
FIELD:
Tinplate manufacture
LANGUAGE:
English
PARENTS:
Father: Capel Hanbury
Mother:
SIBLINGS:
SPOUSE:
1.Albinia Selwyn
2.Bridget Ayscough
CHILDREN:
By Ayscough:
6 sons
EDUCATION:
Pembroke College, Oxford
MAJOR WORK:
None
LIFE AND TIMES:
John Hanbury’s father owned an iron forge on the borders of Wales in Monmouthshire. The ironworks had been leased by the Hanbury family since the sixteenth century (although they lived as country gentlemen some distance away in the west of England).
John Hanbury studied law for a short time in London but disliked it and returned to Gloucestershire. When he came of age in 1685 he took over the ironworks on his father’s retirement. At the same time, he was granted a commission in the militia and was thereafter referred to as Major Hanbury. His father had bought the land at Pontypool and showed some interest in developing the ironworks.
When Hanbury took over the Pontypool works they included a furnace and forge where malleable iron was used for making wire, a wireworks and nail works near Usk, and double iron furnaces and forges at Pontymeol. Hanbury increasingly concentrated on the ironworks at Pontymeol. He was convinced he could produce better quality iron more efficiently.
When he took over, the bars of iron produced in the forge were hammered into metal sheets used to make kitchen and ovenware. The tilt-hammer operation was time-consuming and expensive, and the sheets of metal were thick and uneven. Hanbury’s great contribution was to develop a system by which the iron was flattened between water-powered rollers instead of being hammered.
John Hanbury also invented a screw mechanism to reduce the gap between the top and bottom rollers. The lengths of bar iron were rolled in several stages to make sheets of different thicknesses and by 1697 the hot-rolling mills at Pontypool were producing the smoothest, thinnest and cheapest iron sheets in Britain.
The thin, malleable sheets were used to make pots, kettles and saucepans at about the third of the previous cost.
The land leases at Pontypool were transferred to Hanbury in 1698 and around 1700 he built himself a house at Pontypool and settled there, the first member of the family to do so. In 1701 he was elected Member of Parliament for Gloucester.
In 1704 when his father died, Hanbury decided to invest in the works at Pontypool. <works manager was> Edward Allgood*, his manager at Pontypool, overcame the problem of coating the black plate with a thin rust-resistant coat of tin, and the demand for Pontypool tinplate goods soared. The first commercial production of tinplate in Britain began in Pontypool and their tinplate goods were sold in Bristol, Goucester, Birmingham and London.
Hanbury continued to develop the rolling process and it was not until 1728 that he was granted a patent for the art of expanding bars by means of compressing cylinders, by which time the use of rolling mills had been expanded and established in Sweden by <work related to> Polhelm*.
Having re-organized the Pontypool works and overseen the introduction of the rolling mills and tinplating, Hanbury increasingly left the management to Allgood. The works prospered and Hanbury became a major landowner.
His second marriage in 1703 brought him an entree to fashionable circles through the friendship of his wife with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. After five years out of Parliament, Hanbury became member of Parliament for Monmouth in 1720. He was known as a prominent industrialist and served as chairman on a number of parliamentary committees.
After the financial scandal of the South Sea Bubble, when many speculators lost a fortune, he was appointed one of the new directors of the company. He was now a very rich man, having been left another fortune by a friend. He bought land in Whitehall, London and built a home there where he entertained on a large scale.
ASSESSMENT: Hanbury’s development of the rolling mills for producing sheet iron paved the way for the rise of the British tinplate industry.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: John Hanbury, early tinplate manufacturer
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Gomer, Paul Jenkins, Twenty by Fourteen, a History of the South Wales Tin Industry, 1700-1961, Gomer Press, Wales, 1995
John, WD, Pontypool and Usk Japanned Wares, The Ceramic Book Company, Newport, Monmouthshire, 1953
Minchinton, W E, The British Tinplate Industry, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1957