ABSTRACT
The great depression had brought ruin to a multitude of local ironmasters and a great shrinkage in output; while the extractive industries had failed to keep pace either with the general industrial development of the area or with the advance of the British coal trade as a whole. Raw coal was no longer burned in the blast-furnaces, and, as no coking coal existed in Staffordshire, fuel for them had to be obtained from South Yorkshire, Lancashire and South Wales. Several great basic-steel works, which were established in the Black Country, had built blast-furnaces to supply them with molten pig, and these they had to keep in operation even when the supplies of cheap raw materials began to fail. By the nineties, steel was being used not only for railway material, constructional engineering, and for ships and boilers, but, it was displacing iron in the manufacture of tinplates and galvanized sheets.
