Abstract
THE history of lead mining in the Tyne, Wear and Tees areas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was described by Dr. A. Raistrick before the Durham Philosophical Society on March 15. Two companies have worked practically all the mines in these areas, the London Lead Co. and the Beau-monts. The former began with a charter granted in 1692 to a company formed in Bristol to attempt the smelting of ore with coal. This venture closed after two years, but two Quakers, Edward Wright and John Haddon, of London, obtained the reversion of a much older charter (of 1654) of the Society of Mines Royal (Copper), a German concern formed to work Cumbrian ores. Wright seems to have invented the reverberatory furnace, long called the cupola from its shape, and found that it was very suitable for lead refining. They extracted silver, and with some Newcastle Quakers founded a smelt mill at Ryton-on-Tyne in 1704; before that (from 1696), difficulties with the oath it contained prevented their taking up the 1692 charter, but these were overcome in 1704, when the accumulated silver was sold to the mint. This company, long known as the “Quaker Lead Company”, until 1730 had an output of about 150 oz. of silver a week, and in 1705, Sir Isaac Newton then being Master of the Mint, they were granted a mark which appears on most of Queen Anne's coinage until 1737. The maundy money was coined from their silver for another hundred years. They bought ore from Alston Moor, and worked lead also in Flintshire, and finally in Yorkshire, Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man. The tale is too long to repeat here, but the Pattinson process of desilverisa-tion was discovered at Blaydon in the Beaumont works. The two concerns worked harmoniously together, and many improvements were made by the London Lead Co. In 1860, the decline set in, the company surrendered all its leases in 1907; and now only three mines are working under the new Weardale Lead Co., and those recently closed will never re-open. An interested visitor at the lecture was the last manager of the old company.
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Lead Mining in the Northern Pennines. Nature 135, 501 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135501a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135501a0