It was an American women’s right activist and scientist named Eunice Newton Foote who first put two and two together and realised that an atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide could get really hot indeed. This was 1856.

She had been experimenting at home with cylinders filled with different types of air – one moist, one dry, one low pressure, and one filled with carbon dioxide – to see how they reacted to being left in the sunshine. At first, she wasn’t especially surprised by her results, since they confirmed her own experiences of damp, dry or low-pressure environments. But she was struck by how hot the cylinder of carbon dioxide became, and how long it held on to that heat.

Remembering theories about the Earth’s temperature sketched out by French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier a few decades before – that the Earth is surrounded by an insulating blanket of gases, what we now understand as the ‘greenhouse effect’ – Foote concluded, almost in passing: “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature.”

Later that year, her findings were presented at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and were published in the American Journal of Science and Arts. The work was also cited in a write up of the AAAS meeting by Scientific American, albeit under the dismissive heading ‘Scientific Ladies’, and Foote garnered mentions in the New-York Daily Tribune as well as Canadian, Scottish and German journals. It sparkled for a time, but her work was quickly forgotten.

Lost visionary

In fact, Foote was so thoroughly forgotten that when Irish physicist John Tyndall made similar points in 1859 based on his own experiments at the Royal Institution, London, he didn’t cite her. As Tyndall’s biographer Roland Jackson points out, it’s perhaps more striking that no one else seems to have thought to send Tyndall a copy of Foote’s work in response. Jackson has pored through Tyndall’s correspondence to find any reference to someone saying a comment along the lines of “You might enjoy this similar work by one Eunice Foote”, to no avail. Instead, Tyndall is the name celebrated as a great-grandfather of modern climate science – a major, multi-university climate research centre is named after him.

Meanwhile, Foote’s work was completely lost until 2010 when retired geologist Ray Sorenson spotted it in journal archives. Then, the story of a female scientist who spoke of a warming climate back in the 1850s (and was largely ignored) hit a nerve.

• Read more | A brief history of climate change warnings

Today, it is tempting to see Foote as a great visionary, whose potentially invaluable findings were hidden by the sexism of history. There is some truth to this, but it’s important to remember that neither Foote nor Tyndall had our modern understanding of an emerging climate crisis. They weren’t worried by what they found, nor did they link the Industrial Revolution happening around them to their studies of heat and gases. It would be several decades before scientists realised that burning fossil fuels might add enough carbon dioxide to the air to cause climate change; then several decades more before it was established that this wasn’t just an abstract worry for the future, but already happening.

With the advantages of modern science, we now know that by the 1850s the combination of culling trees to clear land for agriculture and the burning of fossil fuels meant climate change was underway in the 19th century. The Earth was already warming under Foote’s feet. People at the time had no idea. Tyndall had started his scientific career working on the railways, writing movingly about the huge shifts to the landscape due to industrialisation, and yet still the idea that humans could do something as huge as change the Earth’s climate was out of reach to him.

For most people, it would have seemed quite ludicrous.

Fear of falling

Only at the end of that century did scientists connect the ever-increasing quantities of coal being burned with the possibility of global warming. A Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius – who, incidentally, is a distant relative of the young climate activist Greta Thunberg – had been arguing over the causes of ice ages at the Stockholm Physics Society and picked up Fourier and Tyndall’s works to see if he had something to add to the conversation.

But like many of his contemporaries, Arrhenius was actually more worried that temperatures would fall rather than rise, so he started by studying the impact of halving the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. It would, he found, cool the world by as much as 5°C, enough to bring on another ice age. A colleague suggested he might consider it the other way around, too: what if carbon dioxide was added? He ran the maths again and calculated that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would raise the Earth’s temperature by 5°C or even 6°C.

Arrhenius presented a paper at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at the end of 1895, and the following spring it was translated into English in the Philosophical Magazine, which meant his findings made their way to Britain and the United States. Right at the end of the century, in 1899, another colleague pointed out that if people kept burning coal at current rates, there might be a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide sometime soon, at least in a few centuries. Arrhenius included this observation in his 1908 popular science book Worlds in the Making, noting that “The slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may by the advances of industry be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries.”

• Read more | Frozen: Britain’s Little Ice Age

Still, he wasn’t too worried. If anything, the notion of a warmer Earth seemed quite pleasant. The obvious joke to crack here is that he was Swedish, after all. More to the point, access to warmth would have been much more scarce than today, even in rich countries. Heat was a literal life saver (as it continues to be, despite our greater awareness of how its power can hurt, destroy and kill).

Plus, no one had run the research to unpick how a warming climate could mess with ecosystems or increase the likelihood of extreme weather. When Popular Mechanics magazine picked up Arrhenius’ findings in 1912 it mused that future generations would look back on the rise of coal and thank their ancestors for “milder breezes” and the chance to “live under sunnier skies”. It’s awkward, if not slightly painful, to read such attitudes now, but at the time it made sense.

Sceptics and deniers

From then on, a few scientists picked up the idea, while other lab work seemed to refute the research, allowing other scientists to argue convincingly that the oceans would soak up the carbon, or that volcanic dust was the main problem, or that clouds would reflect the sunlight back into space. Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, an American geologist who had initially been excited by this area of research, would go on to repeat how sorry he was for ever being taken in by the carbon dioxide theory of global warming. He was not alone, as most scientists turned their back on it.

Yet the idea just wouldn’t go away. In 1938, a steam engineer who enjoyed a bit of weather mathematics on the side, Guy Callendar, took a paper entitled ‘The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature’ to the Royal Meteorological Society in London. He had calculated that since the end of the 19th century, humans had added 150,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels, causing about a third of a degree of warming.

Modern climate scientists reckon he was pretty much spot on. In 1938, he was laughed out of the room – politely and in a posh British scientist way, but the upshot was that the idea was dismissed once again.

Like those before him, Callendar was not too worried about it. His day job was in fossil fuels and he appreciated their power, seeing coal and its various warming powers as largely for the good. From his point of view, it would save the world from an ice age; what’s more, all that carbon dioxide might be good for plants.

The inescapable problem for those who dismissed carbon dioxide’s role in warming the planet was that the weather did keep getting hotter. There had been some media coverage of Arrenhius’s work in 1912 after a heatwave had provoked a journalist to dig into the weather records, where he realised that, yes, it really was unusually hot, and not just a matter of old men complaining that winters weren’t like they used to be.

Scientists measuring the ice caps established they were shrinking at a surprising rate and as the US and Soviet Union circled around the Cold War, the Arctic became freshly important as a possible battleground. Such military concerns presented opportunities for scientists, as did talk of weaponising the weather. There were new techniques and equipment, like computers and carbon dating, and money to try them out.

In 1957, just over a century after Eunice Newton Foote’s important findings, a global project was agreed – the International Geophysical Year – to use science and work together to study our home planet. This included exciting research possibilities, like satellite launches. The American oceanographer Roger Revelle was also asked to testify in Congress and mentioned, almost in passing, the huge quantities of carbon dioxide that were being emitted via the burning of fossil fuels.

By warning that this amounted to a giant “geophysical experiment” on the Earth, one that should be studied, he successfully lobbied for funding for a new project in Hawaii. Run by Charles Keeling, it would track atmospheric carbon dioxide, and within a decade Revelle, Keeling and their teams were establishing the concern over carbon emissions into US science policy.

Soon, the first international conference on the topic had been called, engaging ecologists who added a new layer of caution to the debate. Modern climate science had finally begun.

Dr Alice Bell is a climate policy specialist based in London and the author of Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2021)

Before the Industrial Revolution – when men, women and even children flocked to the factories to make a living – it was far more common for workers to travel from job to job.

Rather than joining a team, tradesmen, craftsmen and labourers would move around on their own, carrying their own tools and supplies, and find work where they could get it.

• Read more | How war sparked the industrial revolution

The easiest way to lug their tools around was in a sack, which they would then leave with their employer for safe keeping. The origin of the phrase, therefore, starts to become clear.

With no job security, contracts or trade unions, workers could be discharged at a moment’s notice.

Once their services were no longer required, they were literally given their sack, before being ordered to pack it up and leave.

This article was taken from BBC History Revealed

The Industrial Revolution caused a dramatic shift in women’s roles in society. Before industrialisation, the household would have been the centre of production, and women’s work largely confined to the domestic sphere, but no less physical for it. Tasks such as fetching water, and tending livestock would have kept women as busy as clothing and feeding a family, while many also took other work into their home such as hand-spinning or weaving. Cottage industry, as it was called, didn’t entirely end with the arrival of large- scale manufacturing, but the advent of machinery had an irreversible impact on women’s lives.

As machines replaced individual labour and burgeoning industries needed coal, women became part of the growing working classes that laboured in mines and mills. In the late 18th century, many families would seek employment together, with husband, wife and children all working at the same factory or pit, while for many single women, taking a job outside the home offered the chance of greater independence.

• LEARN MORE: Women’s lives during different historical periods

But women were seen as less physically strong and skilled than men and were paid less. Many employers were quick to exploit this cheaper option, and soon, tasks such as printing and working at spinning machines that didn’t require as much strength and were easy to learn, became seen as ‘women’s labour’.

Work-life-imbalance

Despite the disparity in pay, the conditions in many factories were no less dangerous for women. They could work as many as 80 hours in a week, were offered few breaks, and often served inedible food. In 1832, 23-year- old Elizabeth Bentley was interviewed by a parliamentary investigation into conditions for textile workers. She described working in the card room of a flax mill near Leeds. “It was so dusty, the dust got up my lungs, and the work was so hard… I got so bad in health, that when I pulled the baskets down, I pulled my bones out of their places.”

As well as the long hours and physical demands of factory labour, the domestic roles traditionally viewed as women’s work continued – unpaid. Tasks such as cooking, cleaning and childcare still needed to be carried out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few employers were understanding. Bentley described a practice known as ‘quartering’: “If we were a quarter of an hour too late, they would take off half an hour; we only got a penny an hour, and they would take a halfpenny more.”

Another common role was in the mines of Lancashire and Yorkshire, where women laboured underground alongside men in physically demanding roles until the mid-19th century.

Isabel Wilson, a 38-year-old coal putter (someone who pushed tubs of coal from the coal face to the pit eye) was interviewed as part of Lord Ashley’s Mines Commission of 1842. She told how the dual roles of having children and producing for a family came with immense hardship. “When women have children thick [fast] they are compelled to take them down early. I have been married 19 years and have had 10 bairns; seven are in life,” she said.

One job carrying coals “caused me to miscarry five times from the strains, and was gai ill after each. Putting is no so oppressive; last child was born on Saturday morning, and I was at work on the Friday night.”

But jarringly, it was not such testimony in Lord Ashley’s report that caused the most public outcry. Pushing carts underground was hot work, and both young men and women would strip to the trousers in efforts to keep cool. One small detail in the report noted
that some women were working topless alongside men. Outrage in the press fuelled a belief that mining girls were being corrupted by their surroundings, and making bad wives and mothers. It was of no matter that the investigators found just one pit where females worked without tops (the Hopwood pit at Barnsley, which was labelled “a nursery for juvenile vice”). It wasn’t long before the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 had banned women from underground work to protect their health and morals.

• How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse?

But ultimately, as legislation forced more women away from the workplace for better or worse, ideas of gender evolved to match this new dynamic; men who went out to work were seen as breadwinners and providers, and by the mid-19th century the female ideal had become that of mother, moral guardian and homemaker.

This article was first published in BBC History Revealed

On 9 June 1817, a mob of men marched nervously through darkness and driving rain down the country lanes of Derbyshire. They were on their way – or so they thought – to capture Nottingham, 14 miles away, as part of a national revolt to overthrow the government. They did not know it at the time but the Pentrich revolutionaries, as they came to be called, were taking part in the last armed insurrection in English history – and, according to the late historian EP Thompson, the first entirely working-class political uprising.

Armed with pikes and a few muskets, and led by an unemployed stocking weaver called Jeremiah Brandreth – known to them for his Luddite activities as ‘the Nottingham Captain’ – they expected to be joined by thousands of others marching down “like a cloud” from Yorkshire and Lancashire.

• Read more | Your guide to the Luddite movement

They were assured that a further 50,000 men in London could be quickly summoned to seize the government and capture the Bank of England. In reality, they were on their own.

Most of the men were unclear as to what the political aim was, beyond cancelling the national debt and shooting ministers. Perhaps a provisional government would be set up, one that would hand out provisions to the starving populace – but, more immediately, the men had been promised money, food, rum and boat rides on the river Trent.

As they marched wearily on, Brandreth led the singing: “The time is come, you plainly see/The government opposed must be.”

The men on the march were weavers, farm labourers and iron workers. Most were related to each other, and many – including Brandreth – were Primitive Methodists. They blamed the autocratic government and aristocratic ministers for their distress. Many were out of work and without food, the result of the contraction of the economy after the Napoleonic Wars.

But they were also victims of a natural phenomenon of which they had no idea. An ash cloud from the 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, is now recognised to have affected the climate across the world over several seasons, wrecking harvests in the northern hemisphere. As a result, food and particularly bread had become expensive – landowners’ incomes were protected by the newly enacted Corn Laws, keeping wheat prices high – and in short supply.

To maintain morale and keep out of the rain, the men – who had been gathered mainly from villages around Pentrich, South Wingfield and Ripley – stopped at pubs, demanding beer, bread and cheese. Brandreth led them to local farmhouses, where they coerced the residents into giving them money and firearms, and pressed workers to join the uprising.

At the home of a widow named Mary Hepworth, they smashed the window shutters when the occupants refused to open up, and Brandreth fired his musket into the kitchen, fatally hitting a servant called Robert Walters in the neck.

• Read more | The Corn Law crisis: the bitter political war that threatened thousands with starvation

The next target was the Butterley iron works. The company had recently sacked several men for attending a political meeting – some of them had joined the march – and the manager, George Goodwin, had set his remaining workers to guard the gates. When the crowd approached, he confronted them and said they should go home or risk being hanged.

One young man, Isaac Ludlum, trembling violently, retorted: “I am as bad as I can be. I must go on – I cannot go back.” Others were not so sure; many peeled off and vanished into the night, pursued by threats from Brandreth.

The depleted mob approached Nottingham on the morning of 10 June, only to be met by a detachment of the 15th Hussars. The authorities had been expecting them. The men turned on their heels and fled back across the fields, into the arms of waiting magistrates.

An uprising against the government had been brewing for some time. While many people had joined Hampden Clubs (named after a 17th-century parliamentarian) across the country to discuss political reform, others vented their frustration more aggressively. Demonstrations in London’s Spa Fields in December 1816 had ended in violence as followers of the radical bookseller Thomas Spence campaigned for the abolition of private land and universal suffrage.

• Read more | Regency inequality: the gap between rich and poor in Georgian Britain

Fearing a repeat of the French Revolution, which he’d witnessed first hand as a student visiting Paris, prime minister Lord Liverpool hurriedly introduced repressive legislation, including the suspension of habeas corpus (which requires a person under arrest to be brought before a court). And when a delegation of 5,000 unemployed Lancashire weavers attempted to march from Manchester to London in March 1817 to plead for food, they were dispersed by troops before getting beyond Stockport.

In the absence of a police force, home secretary Lord Sidmouth relied on spies to keep the government informed of what was going on. One of these was a man named William Richards, a carpenter and surveyor who had been an associate of radicals before being imprisoned for debt. On his release in March 1817, he went to see Sidmouth to offer his services, and was sent north as an undercover agent.

He adopted the name William Oliver, and would become known as ‘Oliver the Spy’. Accompanied by his friend Joseph Mitchell, a genuine radical, Richards infiltrated meetings and reported back. Mitchell was arrested soon after, but Oliver escaped capture by showing authorities a secret letter from Sidmouth – “He is an intelligent man and deserving of your confidence” – and was allowed to slip back to London.

• Read more | A brief history of Chartism

Oliver returned to the Midlands and Yorkshire in May, and continued to attend meetings. Known as “the London delegate”, he told the organisers that thousands across the country were ready to join an uprising. To what extent he actively provoked potential rebels remains unknown, but he certainly did not discourage the desperate talk at meetings in Huddersfield and Nottingham. One veteran radical, Tommy Bacon – described by the authorities as “a pertinacious old man” – returned home to Pentrich telling locals of a “coming blow”.

Brandreth was another regular at the meetings, and in June he left his wife and three young children in Sutton-in-Ashfield, and moved to Pentrich, ready for the imminent uprising. He missed a meeting at the Punchbowl Inn in Nottingham, where increasingly suspicious plotters interrogated Oliver about his background. One told him: “They were not so fond of being hung for nothing at Nottingham as they were in Lancashire.” Lucky to escape with his life, the spy hurriedly departed for London.

In the days following the rebels’ dispersal, authorities arrested 47 of the men. They were charged as false traitors, for “not having the fear of God in their hearts, not weighing the duty of their allegiance but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil”. Among the 47 was Brandreth, who had tried to escape to America, but returned penniless to Nottinghamshire.

Listen | Stephen Bates examines a failed attempt to murder the entire British cabinet in February 1820. He also explores the background and aftermath of this violent plot on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:

By the time of the trial before the Lord Chief Justice at Derby in October 1817, Oliver had been unmasked by the Leeds Mercury – he had been spotted outside a pub in Wakefield talking to a servant of local military commander General John Byng – and the authorities were worried about using him as a witness. Oliver was spirited to a nearby hotel, but his name was never mentioned at the 10-day trial – incitement was no excuse for treason.

Traditionally, charges of treason had been reserved for aristocratic rebels. Indeed, Tommy Bacon, who had lain low during the uprising but been arrested nonetheless, was quoted as saying: “[It’s been] never known in England before that labouring men were tried for high treason… men who can scarce tell a letter in the alphabet.”

With a jury dominated by local landowners, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. In the dock, Brandreth cut a fearsome figure – the stuff of respectable nightmares – as his black beard had not been trimmed in prison. He had killed a man during the march and expected no mercy.

His lieutenants, Isaac Ludlum the Elder, William Turner and George Weightman, were also sentenced to death, though Weightman’s sentence was later remitted on account of his youth and good character. Of the remaining men, 23 – including Bacon – were sentenced to transportation (none of them ever returned to Derbyshire) and 21 were acquitted. The Duke of Devonshire, owner of Pentrich, had the cottages of the rebels demolished.

The punishment for traitors was still barbaric, and included beheading and quartering, though the Prince Regent remitted the last detail. Brandreth, who was literate, left his pregnant wife Ann all his worldly possessions, which amounted pathetically to “one work bag, two balls of worsted and one of cotton, a handkerchief, an old pair of stockings, a shirt and a letter I received from my beloved sister”.

On the scaffold, a furious William Turner shouted to the crowd: “This is all Oliver and the government.”

• Read more | Peterloo: the English uprising

But to what extent did the government deliberately provoke the uprising against them? The journalist William Cobbett was in no doubt. In his Political Register newspaper, he wrote: “The employers of Oliver might, in an hour, have put a total stop to those preparations and blown them to air. They wished not to prevent but to produce those acts.”

However, Lord Sidmouth was having none of it. He wrote to the Yorkshire magnate Earl Fitzwilliam, insisting that such claims were incredible: “It was directly at variance with the instructions given to Oliver and with his communications… to myself.”

The Pentrich Rising turned out to be the last attempt to overthrow a government by a general uprising, and not just because of the severe punishments meted out. In the ensuing years, prosperity returned to the country as harvests improved and the economy recovered. Eventually – gradually and reluctantly – parliamentary reform would be conceded. Soon, there would be local police forces (Derbyshire being the last to acquire one); governments would become more pervasive and responsive; and harassed ministers would grow more wary of employing untrained spies.

Stephen Bates is a journalist and author. His books include 1815: Regency Britain in the Year of Waterloo (Head of Zeus, 2015)

This article was first published in the June 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine

In the latest episode in our series tackling major historical topics, Professor Martin Johnes answers listener questions about the history of modern Wales. He covers topics from the rapid industrialisation that transformed the nation’s landscape and culture in the 19th century to devolution at the turn of the 21st century.

On the evening of 14 July, 1789, Louis XVI of France returned from hunting and heard the news of the storming of the Bastille. When he asked, “Is this a revolt?” the Duc de la Rochefoucauld replied, “No, Sire, it is a revolution.” Less than a week later the duke was serving as President of the National Constituent Assembly, the body set up by the Third Estate as an authority in direct challenge that of the king, and which thereby embodied the revolution he had predicted.

What exactly did Rochefoucauld mean? The word he used is notoriously difficult to define, and it is important to track changes in its meanings through time. In the 1780s, there were just two political precedents considered worthy of the name. The first was the ousting of James II of England in 1688, the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ that applied the idea of a social contract between rulers and ruled and created Britain’s constitutional monarchy. To us this may seem less of a revolution than the Civil Wars and execution of Charles I four decades earlier – to contemporaries, that was “the Great Rebellion”, and if they used the word revolution at all it was in the old sense of “turning of the wheel”, applied to the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660.

The second example was the overthrow of British rule in parts of North America and the creation of the republic of the United States in the 1770-80s – which built on the the Glorious Revolution’s concept of the social contract, and added the universalist claim that the “inalienable rights” to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness gave citizens everywhere the right to overthrow a government that undermined these.

British radicals – dissenters opposing the established church, the anti-slavery movement, proponents of free speech and political reform – came together in the 1780s in the London Revolution Society – but its name did not (as we might imagine) reflect a commitment to planning a future violent overthrow of the state; instead it reflected its roots in the Whig settlement of 1688-89.

The word was quickly adopted to describe the events in France of summer 1789 – not just the storming of the Bastille but also the earlier creation of the National Assembly. The word was apparently borrowed from the Revolution Society, which quickly became involved in developments in Paris and served as a model for the formation of the Jacobin Club. Edmund Burke’s famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was a riposte to the ideas of the Revolution Society.

In the following dozen years, the word acquired many other layers: the assertion of popular sovereignty and social justice, the sweeping away of oppressive institutions and corrupt privilege, and the release of creative energy and imagination to escape the cruel stasis of a failed system; but also chaos and mob rule, the adoption of terror by the state to protect its new order, and an authoritarian government prepared to enforce social and political change at all costs. It evoked visceral fear and visionary enthusiasm in equal measure.

Ever since Burke, philosophers and politicians, historians and the general public, have debated the choices made by Louis and Robespierre, Danton and Napoleon Bonaparte and, implicitly or explicitly, supporting or recoiling from their actions. The fall of the Bastille and its aftermath directly inspired many others to seize control of their own destiny – in the case of the Black slaves of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, to overthrow their colonial masters, abolish slavery and establish the new state of Haiti in 1804.

• Read more about the Haitian Revolution

The meaning of the word changed with the diverse Europe-wide upheavals of 1848, which began in Sicily. This was swiftly followed by barricades on the streets of Paris to overthrow the monarchy of Louis-Philippe and the installation a short-lived republic; these inevitably echoed those of 1789 and were seen as revolutionary. It came to mean any radical, popular challenge to the established order. At the same time, though, Karl Marx published his dialectical materialist theories of historical change through class conflict, in which he stressed the inevitability of the bourgeois overthrow of feudalism, and then the working-class overthrow of the bourgeois state, each of which would involve profound, irreversible social and institutional transformation, a revolution. Marx’s work led to the adoption of the term revolution for the related socio-economic changes – such as the Industrial Revolution, a term popularised by economic historian Arnold Toynbee in the 1880s.

Through the later 19th century the burgeoning ideology of revolution resulted in the emergence of dedicated revolutionaries, notably but not exclusively Marxist, who devoted their lives to developing the theory, identifying the opportunities in political reality and working to achieve the revolution. In the early years of the 20th century, Lenin developed the notion of the disciplined revolutionary party that could bring about the socialist revolution even in circumstances – like those of Russia in the 1910s, or China in the 1930s-40s – that were not apparently ripe for its imminent occurrence.

The single-minded and proactive Leninist-style revolutionary dominated much of 20th-century thinking on revolutions – even those, like the Vietnamese revolution led by Ho Chi Minh, with a strongly nationalist, anti-colonial flavour – but in the later century the word escaped the confines of Marxism.

This was seen first with the conservative, theocratic Iranian revolution of 1979. This was followed by a new style of popular, non-violent and constitutionalist revolutions against authoritarian or military rule, such as the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines, followed by the overthrow of Soviet rule in 1989–91.  The early 21st century saw the ‘Colour Revolutions’ in Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere, and those of the Arab Spring of 2010-13. These were aimed less at achieving a idealist or total transformation of society than at a liberation from an oppressive regime.

Through the past 250 years, the concept of revolution has morphed sufficiently for an exact definition to be impossible. Except perhaps for ideologues, there is no ‘ideal’ revolution against which to judge a particular historical event. Those in power might describe a rising against them as a rebellion, whereas those involved in the same rising, and sympathetic observers, may prefer the term of revolution. Arguably the broadest definition, suggested by Jack Goldstone, is of an event with four key elements: the forcible overthrow of a government; some degree of popular involvement; the creation of new institutions; and the introduction of some element of social justice. But it is not hard to find examples of events around the world described as revolutions either at the time or in retrospect, but where one or more of these elements are missing.

Ultimately, perhaps, Louis XVI’s question was not so naïve. The storming of the Bastille would not have been a revolution had he managed to quash the rising and take command of the political whirlwind that he already faced. But he could not, and the events of 14 July, 1789 became the defining moment of a revolution – because people at the time, and ever since, thought it was.

Revolutions: How They Changed History and What They Mean Today, edited by Peter Furtado, is available from Thames & Hudson

This content was first published by HistoryExtra in 2021

In an  episode of our ‘Everything you wanted to know’ podcast series, Rosalind Crone answered key questions on the history of prisons in Britain, from what life was like in Victorian prisons to the real state of the food. Listen to the full episode here and find out more about key milestones below…

1078 | The construction of the central keep of the Tower of London, built by William I following the Norman conquest of England. The Tower was first used as a prison for enemies of the king in about 1100.

1166 | The Assizes of Clarendon, a series of ordinances through which Henry II ordered sheriffs of every county to build gaols to keep in safe custody those accused of felonies (serious crimes) until they could be tried by the newly created itinerant royal judges (justices of the assize).

From about the 12th century, the obligation to establish and maintain a gaol in order to keep the peace was included in royal charters granted to towns. These gaols were the responsibility of the towns’ corporations (or governing bodies).

1352 | Imprisonment for debt, previously confined to those who owed money to the crown, was extended to those who owed money to private individuals.

• Read more: What was it like to be a Prisoner of War during the Hundred Years’ War?

1556 | Bridewell Hospital in London became a ‘house of correction’ for idle apprentices, rogues and vagabonds, disorderly women and petty offenders. The idea of the bridewell or house of correction to manage social problems associated with poverty spread across England and Wales, so that be the early 1600s there were approximately 170 such institutions.

Not only did the bridewell foster the use of sentences of imprisonment for petty offenders, but it also introduced the notion of ‘reform’, that imprisonment could be used not just to punish but to transform criminals or the socially deviant into more productive members of society.

1777 | The publication of John Howard’s State of the Prisons in England and Wales, which exposed the appalling conditions in many gaols and houses of correction in Britain, and spearheaded a movement for the reform of prisons. Howard’s efforts were mirrored by those of Jeremiah Fitzpatrick in Ireland.

1779 | The passing of the first Penitentiary Act, which contained a blueprint for prison construction and a new regime of imprisonment. The national penitentiaries proposed by the legislation were not built, but the Act triggered a wave of local prison building and renovation: during the 1780s and 1790s, approximately 60 prisons were either built or substantially rebuilt. The Act also enabled judges to sentence felons to terms of imprisonment as an alternative to transportation.

1816 | Millbank, the first state penitentiary in Britain, opens. Convicted male and female felons are sent to Millbank to serve long sentences of imprisonment as an alternative to transportation. In the same year, Elizabeth Fry began to visit Newgate Gaol on a regular basis, and to embark on a programme to reform female imprisonment at that institution, and the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline in Britain was established. A second wave of national prison reform had begun.

1823 | A Gaols Act is passed which attempts to regulate imprisonment in local prisons, and to impose some degree of uniformity. Unfortunately, the legislation lacks a mechanism for enforcement.

1835 | An independent prison inspectorate for England, Wales and Scotland is established in an attempt to enforce greater uniformity in local prisons. In the same year, two rival systems of prison discipline – separation and silence – come to characterise the debate over penal reform in Britain. Following a parliamentary inquiry, the government expresses a preference for separation.

1842 | Pentonville Prison, designed for the implementation of the separate system of prison discipline, opens. It was intended for young men (aged 18 to 35) sentenced to transportation who the authorities thought might be capable of reform. The men were subjected to 18 months separate confinement (later reduced to 9 months) at the prison, and those who showed signs of amendment were released on licence or given conditional pardons on arrival in Australia. Pentonville was promoted as a ‘model prison’ and local authorities were encouraged to replicate its design.

• Read more: 5 crimes that changed law enforcement in Britain

1857 | Sentences of transportation were abolished. Instead, convicted felons were sentenced to penal servitude – or long-term imprisonment – in Britain, for periods between 3 years and life (depending on the crime). Some convicts sentenced to penal servitude continued to be sent to the penal colony in Western Australia until 1868.

1865 | A new Prison Act abolished the distinction between gaols and houses of correction, and all local prisons became known as prisons. The Act also promoted a new penal regime based on ‘hard labour, hard board and hard fare’ in local prisons. At the same time, the punitive aspects of imprisonment in the convict prison system were intensified.

1869 | The Debtors Act substantially curtailed the use of imprisonment for debt. Only debtors who defaulted in paying fines or other sums ordered by the court could be imprisoned. The last debtors’ prison in England was closed.

1878 | Local prisons in England and Wales were nationalised, thus coming under the control of a new sub-department of the Home Office: the Prison Commission. The nationalisation of prisons in Scotland and Ireland soon followed, with national prison boards under the authority of the Home Office established in those countries. Sir Edmund Du Cane, chair of the Prison Commission, insisted on uniformity in prison discipline, including the strict implementation of the 1865 Prison Act.

1895 | The Gladstone Committee – an inquiry into prisons administered by the Home Office – ushered in a new era of imprisonment in Britain. In its wake, more specialist prisons for different types of offenders, as well as a range of non-custodial options for those convicted of crime, were established. There was a new interest in rehabilitation among policymakers, but this had a limited effect on the many prisoners confined in ordinary local prisons.

Rosalind Crone is a senior lecturer in history at the Open University, specialising in the society and culture of 19th-century Britain. She is currently writing a book, Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in 19th-Century England

When travelling by train in the 21st century, few of us might realise how the railway transformed the world. Railways changed the landscape physically and culturally, putting Britain at the forefront of railway technology and architecture in the 19th century. Until the railways, most people rarely travelled further than the next market town, perhaps 10 miles away. Stations were gateways to journeys of over a hundred miles, completed in a few hours in futuristic machines. Find out more about the history of the railways, when trains were invented, and where the developments happened, with this guide to the history of railways and rail travel in Britain…

Follow the links below to jump to each section:

• When was the steam train invented?
• The development of British railways
• 8 places linked to the birth of the railways in Britain
• Fascinating facts about the history of rail travel

When was the steam train invented?

Unlike the atom bomb, for example, there was no single invention with the steam engine. First you had the stationary steam engine where the most important person was Thomas Newcomen. Then James Watt improved its efficiency and its capacity to generate power. Later on, the stationary steam engine was transformed into the locomotive with George Stephenson.

What the steam engine enabled people to do was transform themselves beyond the existing constraints of energy use, meaning that human society could develop in all sorts of ways. Now we know that the long-term environmental consequences of industrialisation were detrimental but on the other hand life would have been totally different if we had remained shackled by the manufacturing, energy, and communication systems before the steam engine.

The long-term implications of steam power were everything we understand by modernity. It gave us the ability to speed up existence and overcome the constraints under which all other animal species operated. For much of human history we were not radically different in organisational terms from other animals, which have language, the capacity for acting as a group and systems of hierarchy. For much of human history that was how we were but we moved to a very different tune when we had everything that is understood by modernity. It was the steam engine that set that in motion.

Answered by historian Jeremy Black in BBC History Magazine

The development of British railways

Thundering along at previously unimaginable speeds, early steam locomotives were a frightening prospect for their Victorian passengers. Before the opening of the first major railway line, the Liverpool & Manchester in 1830, there were fears it would be impossible to breathe while travelling at such a velocity, or that the passengers’ eyes would be damaged by having to adjust to the motion.

Little more than 20 years later, their fears allayed, people flocked to this exciting new form of transport, and by mid-century, millions were dashing across the country on tracks stretching thousands of miles. From professional football and the Penny Post to suburban living and seaside excursions, the railways changed the face of Victorian Britain.

“The railways were absolutely central to the spread of the Industrial Revolution,” insists railway historian Christian Wolmar. “Britain could not have become, for a time, the world’s dominant economic power without them. But it’s also impossible to exaggerate the social impact. Almost anything you can think of was transformed or made possible for the first time by the railways.”

• How did the railways change Britain?

The technology that made it possible – engines driven by steam – was already gathering momentum by the late 18th century, when James Watt produced the steam-powered loom. But it was Richard Trevithick who opened up the possibility of making a steam-engine propel itself – by using high-pressure steam to increase the power/weight ratio. By 1804, one of Trevithick’s engines was trundling along crude early rails at an ironworks in Wales.

It wasn’t until 1825, however, with the opening of the Stockton & Darlington line, that the world saw a proper steam locomotive haul wagons for the first time. That locomotive was George Stephenson’s Locomotion, which reached speeds of 15mph on the opening day. Unfortunately, Stephenson’s engines proved so unreliable that horses were the mainstay for the first few years – and the railway age only really built up a head of steam with the completion of the Liverpool & Manchester line.

After a monumental effort from thousands of hard-working, hard-drinking navvies to construct the line, and a very public competition to decide on the best locomotive, the world’s first steam-hauled, twin-tracked railway opened to great fanfare on 15 September 1830, with Stephenson’s Rocket leading the way. Originally conceived as a freight railway to reduce the cost and time of transporting goods, the line proved equally popular among intrepid travellers.

Despite a fatal accident on the first day, thousands were using the line within weeks. Fanny Kemble, a famous actress, was awestruck: “You can’t imagine how strange it seemed to be, journeying on thus without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace”. While most couldn’t match her eloquence, Kemble encapsulated the enthusiasm. Better than anything that had gone before, the Liverpool & Manchester proved that Stephenson’s engineering was sound and demonstrated how profitable railway companies could be.

Encouraged by the success, entrepreneurs began submitting applications to parliament for all sorts of railways schemes. Known as ‘railway mania’, the ensuing rush is best demonstrated by the fact that 240 Acts were passed in 1845 (amounting to 2,820 miles of new track), compared to just 48 the year before. There was some opposition but over the next ten years, as railway companies became attractive investments, unprecedented levels of capital funded the construction of 4,600 miles of track. “It was an incredible feat of engineering and organisation, not to mention downright hard slog,” explains Wolmar. “It’s an achievement that remains completely undervalued, especially when you consider that the railways were dug out by spade and pickaxe.”

At first, train travel was too dear for the average working man but fares gradually came down thanks to competition and William Gladstone’s 1844 Railway Act, which obliged every company to supply at least one train daily at the cost of no more than 1d a mile. Meanwhile, the growth of excursion trains and the Great Exhibition of 1851 stimulated vast numbers to use the railways for the first time.

By the end of the 1850s, passenger numbers had risen beyond all expectations. In 1854 alone, 92 million journeys were made in England and Wales alone, on a network stretching 6,000 miles. The magic of train travel had caught the public imagination and the rapid expansion of the iron road left few aspects of life in Victorian Britain untouched.

8 places linked to the birth of the railways

Where the first passenger steam locomotives ran

A local holiday was declared for the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway on 27 September 1825. Aware of the importance of the day, crowds clustered around the newly-constructed line in anticipation. They weren’t to be disappointed. Ever the showman, George Stephenson hit speeds of 15mph in his steam locomotive, Locomotion – outpacing the local horses in the process. As one impressed spectator recalled: “The welkin [sky] rang loud with huzzas while the happy faces of some, the vacant stares of others and the alarm depicted on the countenances of not a few, gave variety to the picture”.

Conceived primarily to transport coal from collieries to the river Tees at Stockton, this was the first venture in the world to employ steam engines for hauling goods. But the railway also leased out the rights to run passenger services to various operators, including two female innkeepers.

Despite the fact that horses were still used far more than the unreliable locomotives, the Stockton & Darlington deserves its place in history as the first to carry passengers on steam-hauled wagons. The railway age wasn’t to begin in earnest for a few years yet, but this was a pioneering achievement.

Located on the original route of the railway, the Head of Steam museum encompasses three of the original 19th-century buildings – North Road Passenger Station, the Goods Shed and Hopetown Carriage Works. On such hallowed ground, visitors can see George Stephenson’s trailblazing Locomotion. www.head-of-steam.co.uk

Where the Rocket shot to fame

Early railway promoters understood the allure of the spectacle. Having ruled out the use of horses for their ambitious project, in April 1829 the directors of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (L&MR) announced a contest of steam locomotives to be held six months later at Rainhill, nine miles from Liverpool. Rules were laid down and engineers invited to enter their engines, with £500 and a contract to supply eight locomotives as the prize.

As expected, the Rainhill Trials captured the public imagination and around 15,000 spectators took their places on specially erected grandstands for the inaugural day of the week-long event. After the more madcap inventions had been eliminated – including Cycloped, which consisted of a horse running on a treadmill that pulled the wagons – four realistic contenders emerged. With the challengers listed like runners and riders in a horse race, the final day promised much. In the event, none mounted a serious challenge to George Stephenson’s Rocket, which was the only engine to complete the course.

Having toiled long and hard to improve the unreliable engines used at Darlington, Stephenson’s new machine performed brilliantly as it sped back and forth over the 1.5-mile track, averaging an impressive 14mph and reaching 30mph when let loose. The prize, and the adulation, was his. Bigger and better locomotives would arrive soon enough, but the spectacular success of Rocket was a critical moment because it showed the world the immense potential of steam locomotives.

It is from Rainhill station that the locomotives set off toward Lea Green in October 1829. Rainhill is a Grade I listed building, and still a working railway station. The nearby Skew Bridge, a Grade II listed structure over which the A57 now runs, is also well worth a visit. The most acute of 15 such bridges on the L&MR, it was built in 1828 at an angle of 34 degrees to the railway.

Where the railway age was born

On the morning of Wednesday 15 September 1830, a procession of eight trains hauled by one of George Stephenson’s triumphant locomotives was greeted by jubilant crowds at Edge Hill, the Liverpool end of the recently completed Liverpool & Manchester Railway. The presence of a VIP, the deeply unpopular Duke of Wellington, all but ensured a mixed reaction at the Manchester end, with hostile elements making clear their antipathy to the Tory government’s stubborn resistance to social reform.

Such unsavoury scenes marred the festivities but the promoters of the railway were pleasantly surprised when passengers quickly warmed to the train in the following weeks, attracted by the fact that the journey took just a couple of hours, less than half the time it took in a stagecoach. Previous lines had been open to fee-paying passengers, but within a short period the Liverpool & Manchester Railway was primarily a passenger service – and the first to rely solely on steam locomotion.

For the first time a double-tracked, steam-powered railway hauled passengers and goods between two major cities. As the world awoke to read reports of this pioneering achievement in the north-west of England, the railway age was born.

Housed in Liverpool Road station, the original terminus for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, the Museum of Science and Industry hosts a permanent exhibition on the construction and early years of the railway. Visitors can step into the first-class booking hall to see what it would have been like in the 1830s and learn about the people who worked and travelled on the early locomotives. www.mosi.org.uk

Where the first railway fatality is commemorated

Although the onlookers could not have known at the time, the sense of wonder that characterised the first day of the Liverpool & Manchester was tempered by tragedy. Having pulled out of Liverpool, the celebratory procession made good progress, reaching Parkside, 17 miles down the track, in under an hour. Ignoring warnings to stay inside the carriage, a group of notables including the Duke of Wellington and Liverpool MP William Huskisson, took advantage of the stop to stretch their legs. Huskisson approached the duke, but as they shook hands a shout alerted them to an approaching train, the Rocket.

While everyone else shuffled to safety, Huskisson panicked and struggled to clamber into the carriage. As he thrashed around for a hold the door swung open, knocking him into the path of the onrushing locomotive. A loud crunch was heard as his leg shattered under the wheels, “squeezing it almost to a jelly,” according to a report in The Times. Stephenson rushed him to Manchester, reaching record speeds of 35mph along the way, but Huskisson died in agony later that evening.

There is a memorial tablet at the scene of the accident, alongside the line at the former site of the Parklands station, near Newton-le-Willows. Far more convenient is the rather grand tomb in St James’s Mount Cemetery, in the grounds of Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral. A monument to the world’s first widely reported railway casualty, it’s a reminder of a man crushed, quite literally, by the rapid progress of the steam train. www.liverpoolcathedral.org.uk /www.stjamescemetery.co.uk

Where the ‘father of the railways’ is remembered

George Stephenson (1781–1848) is lauded as the father of the railways, but the gruff engineer is a figure that stimulates as much controversy among historians today as he did among his peers in the first half of the 19th century.

He may have adapted the ideas of others, as naysayers have argued with some justification, but there is little doubt that his vision, drive and ambition played a vital role in the construction of both the Stockport & Darlington and Liverpool & Manchester lines. As a self-educated and notoriously brusque man, it’s hardly surprising he provoked the ire of many contemporaries, not least aristocratic landowners. But it was precisely that grim-faced determination that made Stephenson such an iconic pioneer of the railway age.

The imposing statue that today surveys the main hall at the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York once overlooked the Great Hall at Euston station, the original terminus of the London & Birmingham Railway, which was established in 1833 and overseen by the great man’s son, Robert Stephenson. The largest museum of its kind in the world, the NRM tells the story of railways from the early 19th century to the present day, houses a vast array of railway artefacts and a full-size replica of Stephenson’s most famous engine, the Rocket. www.nrm.org.uk

Where the Great Western penetrated rock

As ‘railway mania’ gripped the nation and parliament sanctioned thousands of miles of new tracks, Britain’s landscapes presented some stern challenges to the progress of the iron road. Stephenson’s main rival for the title of greatest railway engineer was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the driving force behind the Great Western Railway (GWR), an ambitious venture linking London and Bristol, approved in 1835.

Sparing no expense in his pursuit of perfection, Brunel not only decorated his stations, like Bristol Temple Meads, with great panache, he also overcame considerable engineering challenges. Maidenhead Bridge, at the time the widest in the world, is a good example of his genius, but the 1.75-mile tunnel at Box, near Corsham in Wiltshire, remains one of his most impressive achievements.

Despite protestations that it was impossible to take the train straight through the hill, work on the project began in September 1836. It was a monumental task, with 4,000 labourers employed to blast out the limestone with explosives, and excavate with pickaxes and shovels. By the time it was finished five years later, the project had claimed the lives of 100 men, with many more injured while working by candle-light deep underground. Much to Brunel’s pleasure, however, the resulting tunnel was almost perfectly straight. One (probably apocryphal) story goes that Brunel aligned it so that every year on his birthday, 19 April, the rising sun is visible through the tunnel.

When it finally opened in 1841, Box Tunnel proved the doubters wrong and marked a watershed in the history of the GWR. Its striking west portal is easily visible from the A4, but walkers setting out from nearby Colerne will be rewarded with the best views. www.visitwiltshire.co.uk

Where Brunel opened up the west

Although rival schemes for a railway to Falmouth, Cornwall, were proposed as early as the 1830s, the line only got parliamentary consent in 1846, with the Act stipulating that the ferry across the river Tamar at Saltash be replaced by a railway bridge. As chief engineer, Brunel’s challenge was to create a structure that would stretch across 1,000 feet of water, a formidable obstacle.

On 1 September 1857, watched by thousands of expectant spectators, the first truss was floated out into the centre of the river supported by two barges. Gradually raised at a rate of six feet a week with hydraulic jacks, the truss reached its final height, 100 feet above the water, on the first day of July 1858. Some six years after the foundation for the first pier was laid, a south Devon locomotive crossed the bridge for the first time in April 1859.

Brunel was too ill to attend the official opening and the great engineer died that September. A few months later, his name was spelled out in vast metal letters at either end of the bridge – a fitting memorial to his achievement there. As majestic today as it must have appeared for the first time in 1859, the Royal Albert Bridge is best appreciated from one of the many vantage points on the banks of the Tamar river. www.royalalbertbridge.co.uk

Where rampant competition produced a landmark

The rivalry between the biggest train companies – by now the largest companies in the world – had intensified by the second half of the 19th century. With millions taking advantage of cheap trains to the capital, the Great Exhibition of 1851 was a real money-spinner for some. But the Midland Railway had failed to profit like its rivals because it lacked direct access to London. With all merger options blocked, the Midland had no choice but to make its own way, quickly obtaining consent to build a line from Leicester to Hitchin, connecting to the Great Northern’s tracks into King’s Cross. The line opened in May 1857 but traffic was already heavy and the Midland’s trains were constantly delayed.

If the Midland was to transform a prosperous regional network into a strategic long-distance system, carrying tonnes of Yorkshire coal to the insatiable grates and furnaces of the Big Smoke, it had to be brave enough to build another line into London. It took another decade, but the directors did take the plunge. The resulting construction project, to create a terminus at St Pancras, caused mayhem across vast swathes of north London, with 20,000 people losing their homes. Even the dead, buried in the old St Pancras church yard, had to be removed. After all that destruction, the line into London and the great Gothic station at St Pancras finally opened on 1 October 1868.

Like the station itself, the Midland Grand Hotel, completed in 1873, was a deliberate attempt to dominate its neighbour, King’s Cross, owned by the Great Northern. The Midland may have been the last train company to arrive in London, but they were determined not to be the least. The sheer scale and Gothic grandeur of St Pancras station is a lasting testament to the vigour and ambition engendered by the competition that characterised this incredible period of railway expansion. www.stpancras.com

Words by Daniel Cossins. Historical advisor: Christian Wolmar, author of Blood, Iron and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World (Atlantic, 2009).

This article was first published in the January 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine

8 fascinating facts about the history of rail travel

Peter Saxton, author of Making Tracks: A Whistle-Stop Tour of Railway History, shares eight lesser-known facts about the history of railways…

Early travel was heavy going

Early railway engineers had to overcome extraordinary challenges when building their lines. Steam engines tend not to deal well with heavy inclines, so every effort was made to keep railways as flat as possible. This resulted in huge engineering structures: bridges, tunnels, embankments and cuttings began to appear across the country.

In some areas, even flat land could be a problem. When surveying the route for his Liverpool and Manchester Railway in the 1820s, George Stephenson had to figure out a way to cross the large peat bog known as Chat Moss in Manchester. He came up with the solution of floating the railway across the bog on a bed of tree branches and heather, bound together with tar and rubble.

Huge amounts of material were swallowed by the bog before enough of a foundation was built up. The line exists today and was recently electrified as part of the modernisation of rail routes in the north-west of England.

Early train tunnels faced plenty of challenges

A damp problem of another kind faced Marc Brunel and his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, when they undertook to dig the first tunnel under the Thames, between Wapping and Rotherhithe.

Originally designed as a foot tunnel, construction started in 1825 but the tunnel wasn’t opened until 1843, because of gas leaks, floods, and financial problems. The Brunels used a revolutionary method of construction called the ‘shield’: an iron framework containing 36 chambers, each large enough to contain a workman.

Wooden shutters were installed at the front of each chamber and the whole apparatus was positioned against the surface to be excavated. The workmen removed the wooden shutters and proceeded to dig away at the earth facing them. Once they had dug to the required depth, they would prop up their excavated chamber, place the wooden shutter against the new earth face, and the whole structure would be winched along for the process to start again.

This must have been back-breaking, unimaginably hard work, with the constant risk of the river breaking through. Upon completion the tunnel became an immediate tourist attraction, with people flocking to experience the thrill of walking beneath the river. Eventually, though, it became part of the railway network, and today it sees an intensive railway service as a part of the London Overground network.

Train travel helped to standardise UK time

Before the railways were built, communities across the UK set their clocks according to their own local time. Bristol, for example, was 10 minutes behind Greenwich Mean Time. This was fine for as long as the pace of life was governed by the natural speed of humans and horses, but the advent of a fast, structured form of transport in the railways meant that a standardised system of time became imperative.

The risk to safety of various parts of the country working on slightly different, locally agreed time is clear, not to mention the difficulty in constructing understandable timetables. The Great Western Railway had already adopted standardised time, but it was the Railway Clearing House – a body set up to apportion financial receipts among the many private railway companies – that set the pace elsewhere. It decreed in 1847 that all railway companies should operate using GMT, and by 1855 the vast majority of towns and cities had complied. Clocks were set to a signal set to GMT sent along the newly installed telegraph system.

Charles Dickens was a prolific rail user

Charles Dickens had described the coming of the railway to London’s Euston station in a powerful passage in Dombey & Son (1848). He described the havoc and dislocation brought to Stagg’s Garden (Camden) as an almighty canyon that was cut through the existing streets.

Dickens was in fact a prolific user of railways, both in Britain and on the occasion of his visits to the United States. In 1865, however, he was involved in a tragedy that would change his life: Dickens was returning from the continent with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother, on 9 June 1865. Near Staplehurst in Kent, a gang of workers was busy repairing the track – they had, however, misread the timetable and had thought there was no train due. They had removed a section of track, and the train, hitting this missing section, crashed down into the valley of the river Beult.

Dickens’ carriage was precariously close to the edge – he and his companions managed to climb out and he then went down into the valley to help the victims. Dickens later remembered that he had left the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend in the carriage, and he climbed back into the wreckage to retrieve it.

The incident marked him – he had flashbacks for the rest of his life, and the year after the crash he published his eeriest short story, The Signalman: the chilling tale of a lonely signalman, haunted by an apparition that appears just before tragedy strikes.

There was stiff competition for the fastest trains

All over the world, railway companies produced locomotives that were grand statements of the new age. As technology improved, trains got faster and railway companies vied with one another to produce the fastest locomotives.

In the 1920s and 30s, the two great companies running trains between London and Scotland engaged in a battle to win passengers to their lines. These were the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), running up the West Coast line, and the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), running up the East.

William Stanier of the LMS produced the Princess Coronation class of locomotive – the most powerful steam engine to be built for use in Britain – and for a time one of these engines held the steam speed record, beating its arch rival the LNER. The latter, however, held the trump card. Designed by Sir Nigel Gresley, the A4 class of locomotive was a sleek, streamlined wonder, and on 3 July 1938, one of the class named Mallard famously snatched the record back, reaching 202.8 km/h (126mph) and achieving a record for steam that still stands today.

Trains were central in early brand awareness campaigns

City transport systems also invested in strong design, such as the Art Nouveau Metro stations designed by Hector Guimard in Paris or the huge decorated stations on the Moscow Metro. In London, from the early decades of the 20th century, transport companies recognised the value of a strong image for the transport system. Underground station platforms had become cluttered with advertising that made it difficult for passengers to pick out the actual station name boards.

_{Advertisements for beer and port at Holborn Underground Tram Station, London, 1931. (Photo by City of London: London Metropolitan Archives/Heritage Images/Getty Images)}

Consequently, Albert Stanley and Frank Pick, two geniuses of early brand awareness, created a standardised name board consisting of a blue bar showing the station name against a solid red circle. This later evolved to become the ubiquitous London Transport roundel seen throughout the capital today.

Further to this, Pick decided to commission designer Edward Johnston to come up with a new typeface, bold and clear, that could be used on signage throughout the system.  The Johnston typeface can still be seen across the London transport network – in the 1970s it was tweaked slightly to create New Johnston, but the principle of clarity remains.

Plan, plan, plan

The railway network in India was planned in its earliest years by the then governor general, Lord Dalhousie. He stipulated that there should be a common ‘gauge’ (the width between the rails), and he settled on 1676mm (5ft 6in) – wider than the generally adopted standard.

In such a vast country, the need for a coherent system to link the cities and regions was paramount – initially, of course, with the imperial objective of moving troops and goods quickly and efficiently. Today India has a well-used railway system that with a few exceptions runs throughout on one gauge.

In Australia, however, there was no one to plan out a rail system for the whole country. Early signs were promising, with an objective laid out that the standard gauge be adopted throughout the country. Unfortunately, a farcical set of circumstances ensued, with one Irish chief engineer in New South Wales plumping for the Irish broad gauge, only to be replaced by a Scottish engineer who favoured the standard gauge.

The decision by Queensland and South Australia to adopt a narrower gauge still meant that once the various networks met up with one another, Australia had an almighty transport-related headache. As early as 1911, agreement was reached to convert lines to standard gauge where possible – this is a process that continues today, where finances allow.

The high-speed dream

Speed has been a key selling point for the railways throughout their history. In 1957, Japan opened its first high-speed line and has since become famous for its (to British eyes) unbelievably punctual network. Countries around the world are investing in high-speed networks – none more so and most astonishingly than China.

A slow starter in railway history, China has invested huge amounts in steam technology, building main line steam locomotives right up to 1988. In a complete reversal of this policy, in recent years the country has invested huge sums of money in its high-speed network, meaning that today it possesses the biggest network of high-speed lines in the world, and one that continues to grow.

China is also home to the fastest regular service in the world, albeit not on a conventional railway: the Shanghai Maglev (magnetic levitation) train operates from Shanghai Airport and reaches a top speed of 431 km/h (268mph).

This information first appeared in BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed magazine and has been combined for this guide

Listen to this article:

Every historical age sees extraordinary inequalities of wealth. Whether we are talking about ancient Rome or 20th-century Britain, the pattern is commonly described as a pyramid, with a small number of exceedingly rich individuals at the apex and a large number of poor people at the base. As we all know, the differences between the top and the bottom are extreme – to the extent that some of the super-wealthy have incomes more than a thousand times greater than the national average. But what about the variance in their basic standards of living? Aside from the glitz and the glamour, are the lifestyles of the rich and poor always poles apart? 

You might assume that the only possible answer to that question is yes. Peasants and slaves never live like lords and kings. But consider it in terms of life expectancy. In the Middle Ages, a lord’s sons and daughters could expect to live into their mid-thirties and the peasantry about five years less, so the poor lived around 85 per cent as long as the rich. The modern world is only a little more equal: children growing up today in the most deprived areas of Britain can expect to live between 85 per cent and 90 per cent as long as those in the least-deprived areas. It looks as if that proportion is more or less a constant. 

But one period stands out as different: the early 19th century. In the 1830s, middle-class Londoners could expect to live to 44 but working-class ones only 22, just 50 per cent as long. Working-class people in towns like Liverpool, Preston and Manchester were lucky if they reached 19, at a time when average life expectancy from birth in the UK was more than 40. In the unsewered streets of Ashton-under-Lyne, artisans’ life expectancy at birth was just 13, less than a third of that of their more prosperous fellow citizens. 

Listen: Historian Ian Mortimer discusses how a vast chasm between rich and poor marked society in the early 19th century:

Extremes of opulence

Why was the early 19th century so unusual? As you can imagine, there were several reasons. The industrial revolution obviously led to the worsening of the living conditions of the poor. At the same time it had an impact on the wealthy, too, enriching them to an unprecedented degree. The result was a greater variance in living standards than probably ever before or since. As the American ambassador to Great Britain, John Quincy Adams, put it in his diary while in London in 1816: “The extremes of opulence and of want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in this country than in any other I ever saw.” 

Anyone who has even so much as glanced at a gentleman’s country house built before 1830 will be aware that the wealthy were surrounded by uplifting, refined architecture and design, in which comfort was combined with a fabulous sense of style. In the grandest houses of all, such as the Prince Regent’s Carlton House on Pall Mall, the internal fittings were a wealth of silk damask and gold. The decorative features were covered in gold leaf, as was the furniture; the huge glass chandeliers were trimmed with gold; golden clocks and ornaments were exhibited on gold-leaf-covered plinths; the paintings were framed in gold. The prince spent vast sums on the place – by 1795 he was £630,000 in debt – and in 1826, as king (George IV), he could afford to have it demolished. 

Even an ordinary gentleman with an income of about £2,000 per year from his country estate could afford a London house as well as a country seat stuffed with mahogany furniture designed by the likes of Hepplewhite and Sheraton, and decorated with art by Reynolds, Gainsborough and many more great British artists of the time. By the 1820s most gentlemen’s residences had water closets and provisions for washing. Some even had dedicated bathrooms with hot and cold running water. 

In marked contrast, the workmen who physically built the houses of the gentry could consider themselves well paid in the 1820s if they received 15 shillings a week. Factory workers and labourers would receive less than this, and servants less still. Hundreds of thousands of men and women lacked regular employment altogether. Their accommodation was truly appalling, especially in the rapidly growing industrial towns. In the parish of St Giles in London, a surveyor visited a slum terrace and found the yard “covered with night soil from the overflowing of the privy, to the depth of nearly six inches, and bricks were placed to enable the inmates to get across dry shod”. 

Inspectors frequently reported similar conditions in the northern towns. In parts of Liverpool, people were crammed into court houses at a density of more than 1,000 people per acre. Liquid from cesspits and the foetid rubbish strewn across the ground outside oozed through the cellar walls where many were forced to sleep. The communal cesspits in the courts had no doors as the landlords claimed they would have been used for firewood. 

Those without homes had to cram together in boarding houses, often on the floors, or find a place in a communal barn at 2 pence per night, where every imaginable disease spread quickly among the unwashed bodies, including such killers as smallpox, tuberculosis and, from the 1830s, cholera.

• Uncertainty and unrest: the madness of the Regency period

Life-threatening labour

While the poorest Britons lived in squalor, the upper classes managed their estates and indulged themselves in their enthusiasms. Most didn’t work. Younger sons and those who opted for employment chose a well-paid and dignified patriotic service, such as a commission in the army or navy, an ambassadorial role, parliament or the church. The middle classes similarly selected how they wanted to make a living. 

The working classes, who made up more than 70 per cent of the population, had no such choice. Those who were lucky enough to work as agricultural labourers could expect to live for 36 years – approximately twice as long as their cousins in the industrial towns. But agricultural opportunities were on the decline as more machines were employed, more arable land was given over to sheep farming, and more food was imported. For the remainder, the options were to go into service or to work in a factory or mill. 

Robert Blincoe’s career is illuminating in this respect. He was born in London in 1792, orphaned at the age of four, and placed in a workhouse. From there he was sold at the age of seven to the owner of a mill near Nottingham. For the next 14 years he was required to work without pay for 14 hours a day, six days a week, on the spinning frames, in dusty conditions. His clothing was minimal; he was not given soap to wash nor was he fed properly. He started stealing doughballs from the mill’s pigsties but the pigs soon became wise to his pilfering and threw them in the mud when they saw him coming. He suffered from constant diarrhoea, was regularly beaten, and like all his young colleagues, he lost parts of limbs in the unguarded machines. One day he watched in horror as a girl his age was dragged into a spinning machine by her skirts. He heard her bones all snapped by the whirling mechanism and then her blood “thrown around like water twirled from a mop”. Later, he tried to run away from the mill but was quickly caught and returned, with a reward being paid to the man who found him. 

Those who had such a start in life, with no education and nothing else to offer, were generally doomed to a short existence of hard labour. Blincoe left the mill as soon as he was old enough but many stayed there for their whole lives, and died either from the dust or their injuries.

Huge numbers of men, women, boys and girls worked as labourers in the mines. In 1813 in Cumberland, 630ft underground, the author Richard Ayton raised his lantern to see lines of wagons driven by young girls in the pitch-black tunnels. He described all the people down there as being “distinguished by an extraordinary wretchedness. Immoderate labour and a noxious atmosphere had marked their countenances with the signs of disease and decay; they were mostly half-naked, blackened all over with dirt, and altogether so miserably disfigured and abused that they looked like a race fallen from the common rank of men and doomed, as in a kind of purgatory, to wear away their lives in these dismal shades.”

Whatever the industrial process, it was likely to contribute to the workers’ ill health and premature deaths. Painters and glaze dippers developed lead poisoning. Tailors developed chronic heart and stomach problems. Chimney-cleaning boys developed scrotal cancer. Arguably the worst working conditions of all were those to be found in the grinding industries, especially in Sheffield. The work was carried out in poorly ventilated cellars and generated a lot of dust. Most fork-grinders in Sheffield were dead by the age of 28. Ninety per cent did not make it to 40. 

For the rich, the Regency period was one of haute cuisine and epicurean variety. As the poet Robert Southey wrote in 1807: “All parts of the world are ransacked for an Englishman’s table. Turtle are brought alive from the West Indies… India supplies sauces and curry powder… hams [are imported] from Portugal and Westphalia; reindeers’ tongues from Lapland; caviar from Russia; sausages from Bologna; macaroni from Naples; oil from Florence; olives from France, Italy or Spain; cheese from Parma and Switzerland.” 

Over-indulgence was common. Several ‘ordinaries’ or standard menus in the finest London hotels at this time cost 3 guineas (£3 3s) per head, with an extra guinea for a bottle of fine wine. The earliest restaurants in London were established at this time; there was even an Indian curry house in the 1810s catering to returning nabobs.

• Escaping the workhouse: the Victorian war on child poverty

Tea-stained water

The poorest sectors of society found themselves eating as their medieval ancestors had done, with very little protein in their diet. Many examples were quoted by the Revd David Davies in his examination of the living standards of agricultural labourers in the 1790s. A typical case was that of a Berkshire couple and their five children, who bought 7½ gallons of flour each week for their daily bread, plus 1lb of bacon. They also purchased a little tea, salt, sugar and butter. And that was it. No fish, no cheese and no vegetables other than what they grew for themselves. No beer, even. Of their total income of 8s 6d per week, 8s 3d went on food. Most meals were simply bread and butter. So when the price of flour in Berkshire trebled, as it did in 1800, their lives became wretched. 

As for tea, people talked about it being a great leveller, but there was a world of difference between the fine teas drunk by the wealthy and the water stained with a few re-used tea leaves consumed by the poor. 

An agricultural labourer’s family could at least use the garden that probably went with their cottage. It was precisely for this reason that the growing of potatoes spread across the whole of the British Isles over the course of the 18th century. In short, gardens saved lives. Those living in the over-populated urban slums had no such opportunities to grow their own. For them, it was not so much a matter of having a balanced diet as obtaining anything to eat. 

Among the lower classes, the difficulties faced by mothers and newborn babies were particularly challenging. For a start, the mothers were malnourished. The children of those transported to Australia grew about 2 inches taller than their parents, due to food shortages having stunted their parents’ growth in England. 

When it came to the birth, well-heeled families could afford their own accoucheurs, midwives and doctors, equipped with forceps and good medical knowledge. Some private doctors saw maternal mortality rates of just 0.2 per cent over the course of their careers. 

The poor had only limited access to professional medical help and hence their women and babies died more frequently in childbirth. If both survived, the malnourishment of the mother was then passed on to the child. Hence one of the key reasons why life expectancy was so low: many more working-class babies did not live. In Liverpool, 53 per cent of babies died before they were five; in Preston, 57 per cent did. These figures are almost exactly the same as those of slaves in the West Indies. 

These infant deaths must have sapped many mothers’ will to live. But the position was so dire that some deaths were welcomed, on account of there being fewer mouths to feed. In the 18th century, the philanthropist Jonas Hanway estimated that an infant under the age of four had a life expectancy of just one month after entering a London workhouse. As he put it: “Parish officers never intend that parish infants should live”. 

Even more shocking was the desperate strategy of families living off the deaths of their own children. Hard-pressed couples would enrol a baby in one or more burial clubs and then, when the child fell sick, they would let him or her die so they could claim on the insurance. This is why rent collectors were sometimes asked to wait a few days until a child had died. 

On one occasion, a wealthy Lancashire gentlewoman heard that her wet nurse’s child was ill, so she kindly offered to send her own physician to help. But the mother replied: “Oh, never mind, Ma’am, it’s in two burial clubs.” A government inspector reported that “It is not an unfrequent circumstance to find a child enrolled in three or more burial clubs, so that the parents may receive at its death from £16 to £20. That, in certain instances, this has been productive of infanticide is proved beyond all doubt by the well-known trials for infanticide at Bolton and Stockport.” And, he adds, “an analysis of returns from Preston, where, in three societies alone there are upwards of 23,000 members, has distinctly shown that there is a greater rate of mortality among children entered in burial clubs than in those not belonging to them”. 

Shockingly, babies under the age of six months whose parents entered them in a burial club were 35 per cent more likely to die than those who were not in such a club. 

Turning to prostitution

Extreme poverty was, almost inevitably, accompanied by high levels of crime. If a couple with a family were denied poor relief and did not wish to go into a workhouse,
they had no choice but to resort to more desperate measures. Huge numbers of women turned to prostitution: it was estimated at the time that one in five women in London lived off immoral earnings. 

Large numbers of men and women took to crime. More than 90 per cent of all cases in the county courts in the early 19th century were for theft. (For comparison, in the modern world, less than a quarter of arrests involve stolen property.) Until 1823, the Bloody Code was still in force, meaning that the penalty was death for more than 200 crimes, including stealing goods worth more than 12d. If the principal breadwinner was hanged or transported to Australia, then a family was left in a worse position than before. 

Another strategy was to obtain food on credit. However, most shopkeepers only advanced credit facilities to those they believed could pay. Moreover, if a poor family failed to pay, then the father could be sent to prison at the shopkeeper’s request for non-payment of his bills. This meant extra costs (gaolers’ fees) and prevented him from earning while inside. Some people spent decades in prison for failing to repay a few pounds; many died behind bars. Again, the family was even worse off as a result. 

Given these circumstances, it is easy to see why there was so much discontent, especially in the industrial north of England. Fashionable ladies in London could spend £4 on a single tall feather to wear in their hair at a ball – a sum that would have fed a labourer’s family for 10 weeks. 

• Was Victorian life really so grim? 5 reasons why the Victorians were ‘happy’

From rags to riches 

It really was both the best and the worst of times (to paraphrase Dickens), depending on how much money you had. Yet this age offered men and women more opportunities than perhaps ever before to start life at one end of the social spectrum and end it at the other. James Morrison was the orphaned son of an innkeeper. He gained a job in a London haberdashery business, married the daughter of the senior partner, and made himself rich through overseas investments: by the time he died in 1857 he was worth more than £6m. 

Harriot Mellon was the illegitimaate daughter of a poor Irish woman who looked after the wardrobe of a troupe of travelling actors. She learned from them how to act and came to London to star on the stage. There she caught the eye of the banker Thomas Coutts, who eventually married her. When he died, he left her his 50 per cent share in his bank, which she then controlled, enhancing its value and becoming the richest woman in England. Then she married the much younger Duke of St Albans and ended up both a multi-millionaire and a duchess. 

But for every James Morrison and Harriot Mellon, there were millions who failed to bridge the chasm between rich and poor in early 19th-century Britain, and who were condemned to live and die in the poverty in which they were born. So what changed? The answer is that such poor living conditions gradually gave rise to public outrage – at both ends of the social spectrum. Workers’ protests made the grievances increasingly clear; the religiously inspired social consciences of upper and middle-class social reformers did the rest. 

Following the Great Reform Act in 1832 (which extended the franchise) and the abolition of slavery the following year, there was a greater political will to take responsibility for the welfare of people in Britain. Within two decades there were profound changes in urban sanitation, poor relief and working conditions in factories and mines. Gradually the difference in life expectancy between the poor and the rich declined – in fact, it constantly diminished between the 1870s and the 2010s. 

But anyone who thinks of the early 19th century as a glorious age, when Britain was riding high on the profits of the industrial revolution and victory over France, should be aware: such wealth and glory had long, dark shadows.

Ian Mortimer is a historian and author. His latest book, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain (Bodley Head, 2020) is out now

This article was first published in the December 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine

To stand inside a Staffordshire bottle oven is to find yourself at the heart of an industry that once totally dominated this corner of the country. “No one calls Northamptonshire ‘the shoes’ or Sheffield ‘the cutleries’,” a volunteer at the Gladstone Pottery Museum tells me proudly. “But this corner of north Staffordshire is ‘the Potteries’.”

The museum stands in Longton, one of the ‘six towns’ (with Stoke-on-Trent, Burslem, Hanley, Tunstall and Fenton) that since the 17th century have been the heartland of the UK’s pottery and ceramics industry. While the nearby Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley holds the world’s largest collection of Staffordshire ware – some 50,000 pieces, with around 5,000 on display – Gladstone was established to preserve something of the industry itself: the skills, technology and, of course, the iconic brick bottle ovens.

What was it about this string of towns that gave rise to a world-leading industry and immortalised the names of Wedgwood, Spode and Minton, among others?

“A lot of it’s down to the geology,” explains Miranda Goodby, senior curator of ceramics at the Potteries Museum. “Basically, Stoke-on-Trent is built on clay and coal. So you’ve got the two raw materials you need for making pottery. That’s absolutely key all the way through the 17th century.”

• The Industrial Revolution: everything you wanted to know

Jiggerers and jolleyers

These materials were used to create coarse Staffordshire ‘slipware’, which was characterised by the reds, yellows and browns of the local clay. The slipware would soon go out of style – but by then, the Staffordshire potters already had a head start. The emerging 18th-century fashion for ‘white ware’ required potters to source white clay from Dorset and Devon, 200 miles away, but the skills and infrastructure of the six towns meant that the area was nevertheless able to maintain its hold on the industry. Aside from anything else, the South West had almost no coal of its own. “To turn one tonne of clay into pottery you need between 14 and 20 tonnes of coal,” Goodby points out.

This was a monumental endeavour. The Potteries lie 30 miles from the navigable waters of the Trent, Mersey and Severn. Between the factories and the riverboats, the raw materials coming in and the finished products going out all had to be transported on horses, in laden panniers (containers). This all changed when a coalition of industrialists led by Josiah Wedgwood – in so many ways the founding father of industrialised pottery manufacture – pressed ahead with plans for a linking canal.

“The Trent and Mersey Canal opened in 1777 giving access by water to the east and west coasts,” Goodby explains. “It provided new opportunities to export to America and Europe. A horse pulling a canal boat can pull something like 40 times more weight than it can pulling a cart. And of course there’s less breakage. Canals made a huge difference: it was cheaper to get raw materials in and to get finished products out again.”

Pottery in the six towns – built on local resources, worked by generations of craftspeople, supported by a formidable infrastructure – dominated the district. In socio economic terms, it employed tens of thousands of local people, including children (in 1861, more than 4,000 children under 14 were at work in the Potteries). A factory, or ‘potbank’, would employ a bewildering array of specialists, from ‘mouldrunners’ (youngsters who carried moulds to and from the workshops) to ‘jiggerers’, ‘jolleyers’ (crafters who shaped the clay), ‘saggarmakers’ (who made the clay containers in which the ware was fired) and ‘stilt-makers’ (workers, usually women, who made the clay separators that supported the wares during firing). Add to these the thousands of jobs linked indirectly to the industry – in coal-mining, not least – and the enormous and enduring influence of pottery-making in these parts becomes clear.

Organic growth

The industry also came to define the urban landscape of the area. The bottle oven – a tall, tapered brick shell in which the oven was housed – was a familiar sight in the six towns for centuries.

“There were more than a thousand bottle ovens at the height of the industry,” says Miranda. “Like steam engines, each had its own personality, so it was important you had good fire-men who knew the peculiarities of their own ovens. Ovens tended to be clustered around the centres of towns. If you look at aerial views of the six towns in the 1950s, they’re thick with them.”

People lived cheek-by-jowl with the work shops and smoking ovens in which they made their livings. Says Goodby: “What you’ve got to remember with the pottery industry is that you don’t need a lot of heavy machinery – you certainly didn’t in the 18th and 19th centuries. When the textile industries took off in northern England, they needed steam engines and steam- driven machinery; the buildings used were often iron-framed and occupied large spaces to house this equipment. In Stoke, however, comparatively little machinery was needed. A series of workshops arranged around a courtyard were used instead, much like you can see at the Gladstone Museum today.”

Josiah Wedgwood, Goodby adds, did things a little differently. “Wedgwood was unusual. When he built his works at Etruria, he used a greenfield site just outside Burslem and built a model factory. This did also sometimes happen in the second half of the 19th century, but more often than not pottery-making sites grew organically.”

As is so often the case with industrial heritage, the bottle ovens of the six towns very nearly vanished without anyone really noticing. “The ovens were never built to last,” Goodby explains. “Invariably they’d be demolished and rebuilt after four or five years at most. They were constantly being heated up and cooled down, and if you look at their structure – a thin, domed form with a bottle-shaped chimney around the outside – it’s clear they could be rebuilt regularly.”

With fewer than 50 remaining in the whole area, the Gladstone bottle ovens are one of the things that make this site special. Visitors can take a walk around the hovel – the outer shell – and even step inside the oven. It’s a powerfully evocative insight into an icon of the region’s industrial history.

It was the Clean Air Act of 1956 that spelled the end for the bottle oven. Like most industrial districts in Britain, the Potteries had sweltered for many decades in an unhealthy stew of coal-smoke and other factory effluents. The act changed all that.

“The Potteries were given less than 10 years to comply with the Clean Air Act,” Goodby says, “and by the early 1960s increased use of gas and electric for firing had made bottle ovens redundant. People saw no reason to keep them and most were pulled down. It was really only in the late 60s and early 70s that people realised that all the bottle ovens were going, so a decision was made to preserve at least one factory as it had been in the 19th century.”

And so the Gladstone Working Pottery Museum was born. The museum helps to keep alive not only the historic buildings and hardware of the Potteries, but also the craftspeople’s skills – honed over generations, but now no longer in commercial demand. In the museum’s workshops, you can watch (and sometimes join in with) demonstrations of these skills; on my visit a flower-maker deftly shaped blobs of bone china clay into an immaculate ceramic flower in a matter of minutes, using only her hands and a few improvised tools.

Firing on all cylinders

Just as important as these live demos are the hundreds of hours of film held in the museum’s archives. Jobs from flower-making to kiln-firing have been preserved in this way. “We’ve filmed a lot of processes,” Goodby says. “It’s like the bottle ovens: if you’re not careful, you lose them without noticing.”

It would be a mistake, however, to think of the six towns pottery industry as nothing but a historical artefact. “We make more pots in Stoke-on-Trent today than we ever have done,” Goodby points out. “But we need fewer people to do it. In the 18th century, making pottery was very labour-intensive; there really was no machinery. But during the 20th century, the industry moved more and more towards mechanisation. In many ways that was a good thing, because hand labour (often child labour) had previously been used for processes like preparing the clay – literally kneading and hitting and knocking the air out of it. Meanwhile, carrying clay and ware around the factory and physically turning the wheel for the thrower were all heavy labour.

“Once you have a pug mill [a type of machine] to prepare the clay, or the thrower’s wheel is electricity-powered, or they’re using a jiggering machine, then instead of employing several people you only need to employ one. The people taken out of the process are the ones who were doing the heavy, dirty jobs.

“Factories like Emma Bridgewater’s [in Stoke-on-Trent] still employ many decorators, because a lot of their creative work – hand-painting, sponging, printed patterns – is still very much hand-work; but it’s at the clay end that all the heavy labour has largely been mechanised and done away with.”

Gladstone’s unique exhibitions, dedicated to the history of tiles and bathroom-ware (that is, toilets), are a reminder that ceramics have always been put to a wide variety of uses. That is still the case today when cutting-edge engineering relies on ceramics in applications as diverse as internal combustion engines, medical implants, watch casings and ‘bulletproof’ aircraft housings.

Staffordshire pottery is very much a living industry – but it’s an industry that can only be fully understood by taking into account the soot-stained heritage of the six towns – bottle ovens, saggar-makers and all.

Miranda Goodby is an expert in the history of ceramics. She is senior curator of ceramics at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery. Words: Richard Smyth

This article was first published in the December 2018 issue of BBC History Magazine