ABSTRACT
Unlike the failure to develop coal-using industry in Cumbria, the Great Northern Coalfield of Northumberland and Durham fostered new industry on a considerable scale.
Glass-making was an example, becoming established on Tyneside in the seventeenth century. Admiral Sir Robert Mansell obtained a monopoly in glass-making in 1615, and set about experiments using coal. (Ridley 1962; Ross 1982) After earlier setbacks in Wales and Nottinghamshire, partly due to transport costs, ‘for his last refuge he was enforced to make triall at Newcastel upon Tyne, where, after the expense of many thousand pounds, that work for window-glass was affected with Newcastle cole’. Mansell’s enterprise made bottles, mirrors, tumblers and spectacle glass as well as window panes. The factory probably produced 6,000-8,000 cwt of glass by the 1620s. Although the monopoly, renewed in 1623, collapsed with the Civil War, the family firm survived for the rest of the century. (Ridley 1962, 146-7)
Other glass-makers, including the Henzell and Tyzack families, came to Tyneside after Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes sent Huguenot refugees fleeing abroad with their expertise. A branch of the Dagnia family, already making glass at Bristol, migrated to Tyneside in 1684 and settled in Newcastle’s Closegate, making many different kinds of glass, including finer ranges. In 1697 Onesiphorus Dagnia was fined £200 for evading duty on more than 2,697 dozen glass bottles. By the end of the seventeenth century there were 15-20 glass-works operating in or near Newcastle. Manu facture was paralleled by skilled glass engravers, culminating in the Beilby
workshop in the later eighteenth century. Profits were sufficiently attractive to induce leading local interests to invest. In 1759 Matthew Ridley bought the old Henzell glass-works at Howdon Pans, and a few years later his son, the second Ridley baronet, was one of England’s largest bottle manufacturers. In 1769 a glass-works was set up by John Hopton at Sunderland, pioneer ing another centre of the industry. About £50,000 was spent in 1838 on modernizing Hartley’s Sunderland glass-works, which became one of Britain’s major producers of sheet glass. By the 1830s Cookson’s glass-works at South Shields was the largest in the country. When the company was sold in 1845 the purchase price was £140,000.
