Cynhadledd Twitter Ffurfiwyd gan Ddur 2020 /Shaped by Steel Twitter Conference 2020

Llyfryn Crynodebau / Abstract Booklet

1-2 Gorffennaf / 1-2 July 2020

@Steelworlds #SWOS20

Derbyniad Gwin Rhithwir / Virtual Wine Reception 17.00-19.00 BST, Dydd Iau 2 Gorffennaf / Thursday 2 July

Table of Contents Page

Ffurfiwyd gan Ddur / Shaped by Steel 4

John Winterburn Llangatwg: An upland common shaped by steel

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Mike Nevell Re-imagining the Park Bridge Iron Works: Engaging with industrial heritage on the rural fringes of Manchester

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History of Consett Steelworks Group IForging links in a landscape

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Louise Miskell The steelworker’s shoe: Footwear, work & the wearer in the twentieth-century steel industry

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Justin Parkes Recollections of health & safety in the North Lanarkshire steel industry

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Mariana Stoler ‘What identity does a worker like me have? The identity of the company.’ The construction of worker identity in an Argentinian Steelworks

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Leslie Mabon Steel, identity and sustainability in the steelmaking City of Muroran, Hokkaido, Japan

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Catrina Karlsson Sustainability and environmental impact from a historical perspective

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Sarah May Local Heritage – International Impact: Where is the heritage of the anthropocene?

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Hilary Orange The fires are dead - Long live culture. The mythos of steel in the Ruhrgebiet

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Dafydd WiliamRebuilding the Vulcan Hotel at St Fagans National Museum of History

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Gethin MatthewsCommemorations in steel

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History of Consett Steelworks Group IITapping the memories: The human stories behind the closure of Consett Steelworks

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Matt BeebeeNostalgia, the politics of place and the closure of Bilston Steelworks

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Christopher LawsonScotland’s steel mill? The remaking of class and nation in the fight to save Ravenscraig, 1979-1992

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Erik EklundIndustrial development, urban growth and shifting identities in the Australian steel town of Port Kembla

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Ashley Morgan“She was as hard as Port Talbot Steelworks but dead soft underneath” a feminist autoethnography of life in ‘80s Port Talbot

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Matthew BristowA new town in name only? The growth of the Stewart & Lloyds’s steelworks and the development of Corby after 1950

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Chantel CarrMaintaining lives: Caring for things and others in a steel city

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Joan HeggieSteel stories: Making sense of a Teesside without steel

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Tosh WarwickTeesside steelworks heritage: Cultural and political responses

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Paul BarnsleyThe Ashorne Hill Conference, 1977: Industrial democracy and worker ‘chicanery’ at Round Oak Steelworks

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Beth GriffithsMade from steel: Tinplate and technological change in the twentieth century

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Lachlan MacKinnonModernising to oblivion: Social upheaval at the end of integrated steelmaking in Nova Scotia, Canada

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Larissa Harris and James JuipFuture directions of industrial heritage interpretation at the Soudan Underground Mine

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Antony FirthSteel on the seabed. How catastrophe has saved the UK’s maritime industrial heritage

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Janine TiffeHammer and steel: A musical biography

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Ffurfiwyd gan Ddur / Shaped by Steel‘Ffurfiwyd gan Ddur’ yw’r gynhadledd Twitter gyntaf erioed i gael ei chynnal gan Brifysgol Abertawe. Wrth i gynadleddau ‘wyneb yn wyneb’ mwy traddodiadol gael eu canslo oherwydd pandemig COVID-19 mae tîm prosiect ymchwil ‘Byd Cymdeithasol Dur’ yr Adran Hanes yn defnyddio Twitter fel ffordd arall o rannu ymchwil ac ymarfer treftadaeth i gynulleidfa wahanol y Twittersffêr.

Bydd haneswyr, archeolegwyr a gweithwyr proffesiynol ym maes treftadaeth o chwe gwlad ac ar gyfnodau gwahanol yn eu gyrfaoedd yn cyflwyno eu papurau fel cyfres o ‘drydaron’ byw gan archwilio dimensiynau dynol gwaith a bywyd ym maes dur ac ar ôl maes dur. Bydd themâu’r sesiwn yn cynnwys cadwraeth a dehongli treftadaeth gwaith dur; ymateb y gweithwyr a’u cymunedau i gau’r gwaith dur; profiadau a hunaniaethau yn y gweithle; a chynaliadwyedd dur mewn cyfnod o newid yn yr hinsawdd. Mae’r rhaglen ddeuddydd yn cynnig safbwyntiau daearyddol eang gan gynnwys Cymru a’r Deyrnas Unedig, Canada, Siapan, Awstralia, Yr Ariannin, Yr Almaen, yr Unol Daleithiau a Sweden.

Un fantais dros fformat cynhadledd draddodiadol yw gall unrhyw un ‘fynychu’ trwy ddilyn @SteelWorlds a chan ymuno â’r cwestiynau a’r drafodaeth gan ddefnyddio hashnod y gynhadledd #SWOS20. Byddwn ni hyd yn oed yn cofnodi diwedd y gynhadledd trwy gynnal derbyniad gwin rhithwir. Cysylltwch â threfnwyr y gynhadledd yr Athro Louise Miskell (l.miskell@abertawe.ac.uk) a Dr Hilary Orange (hilary.orange@abertawe.ac.uk ) am wybodaeth bellach.

‘Shaped by Steel’ is the first ever ‘Twitter’ conference to be hosted by Swansea University. With more traditional ‘face-to-face’ conferences cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the History Department’s ‘Social Worlds of Steel’ research project team is taking to Twitter as an alternative way to share research and heritage practice to a different audience – the Twittersphere.

Historians, archaeologists, and heritage professionals from six different countries, and at different stages of their careers, will deliver their papers as a series of live ‘tweets’, exploring the human dimensions of work and life in – and after – steel. Session themes include the preservation and interpretation of steelworks heritage; the responses of workers and their communities to steelworks closures; workplace experiences and identities; and the sustainability of steel in an era of climate change. The two-day programme offers a wide geographical perspective, taking in Wales and the UK, Canada, Japan, Australia, Argentina, Germany, the USA and Sweden.

One advantage over the traditional conference format is that anyone can ‘attend’ simply by following @SteelWorlds, and join in with questions and discussion using the conference hashtag #SWOS20. We will even be marking the end of the event with a virtual wine reception. Conference organisers Professor Louise Miskell (l.miskell@swansea.ac.uk) and Dr Hilary Orange (Hilary.Orange@swansea.ac.uk ) can be contacted for further information.

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Wednesday 1 July9:00-10:15 Session OneSteel in the LandscapeLlangatwg: An upland common shaped by steel

John B Winterburn (Independent scholar) @GPSJohn

The steel industry is a vast consumer of space, people, minerals and water. The South Wales valleys are conveniently located close to coal, limestone, ironstone and water resources and were the location of some of the earliest ironworks in the country. These later evolved into steelworks and one the most notable examples was the Ebbw Vales Steel Works. This paper is about an area of upland common land, known as Mynydd Langatwg, 40 km north of Cardiff and just 5 km from Ebbw Vale. Mynydd Langatwg’s abundant mineral resources were exploited in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a network of tramways and watercourses transported limestone from the quarries to the furnaces.

This paper will introduce the history of this area and show how it developed to feed the steel industry with water, coal and limestone. It will progress to show how the remains industrial extraction of resources for steel have repurposed and shaped this landscape into nature reserves, places for outdoor education, walking, climbing and subterranean exploration and how the army used it in both World Wars. It will focus on the small scale, local aspects of this often neglected but important facet of Welsh industrial steel heritage.

The presentation is based on the results of a year-long study and fieldwork funded by the Welsh Assembly and the RCAHM (Wales) as part of their Uplands Initiative project.

Re-imagining the Park Bridge Iron Works: Engaging with industrial heritage on the rural fringes of Manchester

Dr Michael Nevell (IGMT and University of Salford) @Archaeology_tea

This paper looks at the impact of landscape restoration and heritage engagement on the site of the Park Bridge Iron Works over nearly 50 years. This rural site lies in the Medlock valley, c. 9 km east of Manchester, in the Metropolitan Borough of Tameside, North West England, between the large urban areas of Ashton-under-Lyne to the south and Oldham to the north. It comprises water-powered and steam powered iron and steel processing buildings, an associated factory village, and tramway and canal access to coal mines. For nearly 200 years, from 1786 to 1963, the site was owned by one family, the Lees, trading as Hannah Lees & Sons and exporting to Europe and beyond.

The first part of this paper will explore the industrial reversion of the valley in the 1970s and 1980s and its impact on the industrial heritage of the iron works. Initial landscaping saw the planting of tens of thousands of trees but also the partial demolition of key process buildings. At the same time the Park Bridge Heritage Centre was developed from 1975

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onwards as a visitor and heritage centre. This re-used a set of stable buildings originally built to service the transport needs of the works.

The second part of the paper will look at the results of a community archaeology research project that ran from 1997 to 2007. This studied the development of the ironworks and its associated transport network, as part of the Tameside Archaeological Survey, a project funded by the local council. The research and community input will be reviewed as well as the long-term outcomes of this research in terms of current use.

Forging links in a landscape

History of Consett Steelworks group @ConsettWorks

At 900 metres above sea level in a remote corner of north west Co. Durham, the reasons behind Derwentside (later Consett) Iron Company’s decision to locate its operations in an area with no natural or established transport infrastructure is not immediately apparent. However, from this speculative beginning grew a centre for high quality steel manufacture that was to operate continually and profitably for 140 years.

The key to the location was the ready availability of the building blocks needed for iron and steel manufacture, with locally accessible raw materials: limestone, coal and most significantly iron ore. What was thought to be plentiful became almost immediately problematic as demand outstripped the local availability of iron ore, and more favourably located centres of steelmaking started to thrive. What emerged was a 140-year battle to command the north west Durham landscape through transport links that the Company could manage and control to ensure supply and protect access to markets.

This paper will explore the diverse communication methods the Company and later British Steel created and maintained to ensure Consett’s survival and continued contribution to steel manufacture in the UK, both nationally and internationally. It will discuss the impact of the location on the immediate landscape environment, the adaptability that improved means of communication provided and the ingenuity of the Company to maintain Consett’s relevance through its transport links. It will conclude by looking at the legacy of these routes and what these mean to the community now.

10:30-11:45 Session TwoWorkplace and Worker IdentitiesThe steelworkers’ shoe: Footwear, work and the wearer in the twentieth-century steel industry

Louise Miskell (Swansea University) @louisemiskell @Steelworlds

Historians of material culture have shown how the study of footwear can be used to understand the social values, technologies, changing tastes and fashions of past societies. This paper draws inspiration from these approaches and undertakes an investigation of the

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worker experience in the steel industry through the role of the shoe (or boot), as a piece of personal protective equipment and a visual signifier of working identity.

Footwear was a great significance for steelworkers. Although on one level it was a humble item of daily workwear, the shoe formed part of the essential interface between the worker and their environment. At the blast furnace, the melting shop or the rolling mill, feet had to be protected from contact with red hot surfaces, from splashes of molten metal, from sharp metal edges and from the dangers of falling heavy objects. This paper examines how steelworkers’ footwear evolved over the course of the twentieth century, from the hobnailed boot to the modern safety shoe. The importance of the shoe – both practical and symbolic – to British steelworkers will be examined using oral testimony and visual evidence. The paper will argue that this simple object can be used as a way of conveying much about the human experience of working in the steel industry in twentieth-century Britain and will reflect on some of the potential of this for the way in which stories of the steel industry are told and represented to public audiences.

Recollections of health and safety in the North Lanarkshire steel industry

Justin Parkes, (Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life) @nl_heritage

My paper will present views of the health and safety culture within North Lanarkshire’s steelworks from the 1950s through to the end of steel production in 1992. North Lanarkshire was at the heart of the Scottish steel industry, being home to two major companies, Colvilles who by the end of the First World War were the country’s largest steel producer and, secondly the Scottish side of Stewarts and Lloyds the tube-maker. The 1950s saw the construction of Scotland’s largest steelworks, Ravenscraig.

North Lanarkshire’s Museums service has been actively engaged in collecting oral history testimony since the foundation of Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life in the 1980s. More recently, we have conducted interviews with former workers in the steel industry to provide material for use in two temporary exhibitions on the post-war steel industry in Motherwell and on health and safety.

I will use quotes and audio clips from former steelworkers, contractors and office staff. They describe the dangers they faced and the roles of employees, trades unions and employers in addressing them. Some interviewees spent only a short time in the industry while others stayed for decades and witnessed considerable cultural and organisational change.

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”What identity does a worker like me have? The identity of the company”: Characteristics and contradictions in the construction of workers’ identity in an Argentinian steelworks

Mariana Stoler (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) @marianastoler

The constant modernisation of machinery and production process led Santa Rosa, one of the most important Argentinian’s Steelworks, to experience a strong growth during the second half of the twentieth century, contributing to increase its prestige. This prestige became the material base where the relations between workers and company were established, relations that included workers´ family and neighbourhood.

If we think about the factory as something more than just a space or scenario, we could see it as a social construction of a relational type. In this way, the factory space becomes a fundamental determination of the construction of the workers’ identity and sense of place. Furthermore, the factory as a productive space builds subjects and reproduces – in a way – the relations of domination and class present in society.

Certain characteristics of the work in the factory are constitutive elements of the sociability of workers. In Santa Rosa, the production process was the material base on which a sort of hierarchy among workers was established. In this paper I will analyse the construction of workers’ identity in Santa Rosa, focusing on the contradictions that emerged from the strong feeling of belonging that many workers expressed towards Santa Rosa and the consolidation of a solid-based and combative union organisation. To develop it, I will reconstruct the production process, the workplace culture and the relations between workers and enterprise.

12:00-13:15 Session ThreeIndustry, sustainability and climate changeSteel, identity and sustainability in the steelmaking city of Muroran, Hokkaido, Japan

Leslie Mabon (University of the Highlands and Islands) @ljmabon

This paper focuses on the relationship between steel, local identity and sustainability in the city of Muroran, Hokkaido, Japan. Similar to many steelmaking localities in the UK, Europe and North America, Muroran has suffered economically and socially from declines in steel manufacturing. For Muroran, this problem is compounded by an ageing and declining population typical of many peripheral Japanese municipalities. Moreover, steelmaking is targeted as one of the top five sectors for climate change countermeasures under Japan’s submission to the Paris Agreement, raising questions over how the city’s economy and indeed identity is compatible with a sustainable society.

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In this paper, I hence reflect on how local authorities, citizens and practice-focused academics in Muroran simultaneously draw pride from and tries to retain their steelmaking identity, whilst also trying to project forwards to a low-carbon future with which steelmaking arguably does not sit easily. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Muroran between 2014 and 2018; interviews with local authorities and technically-focused researchers in Muroran; and online ethnography looking at how Muroran’s citizens project a sense of local pride and identity through imagery and hashtags relating to steelworking and the city’s geography.

Key findings I draw out are (a) a tension between a sense of resignation towards the decline of steelworking and associated infrastructure, versus moves to present Muroran’s steel industry as a means of ‘making’ Japan’s low-carbon future through the construction of wind turbines and other low-carbon infrastructure; and (b) the continued embeddedness of steel within the everyday landscape of Muroran, which is celebrated through signage, branding and social media.

Sustainability and environmental impact from a historical perspective: Metal manufacturing, mining and steel industry new project

Catarina Karlsson (Jernkontoret, Swedish Steelmakers’ Association) @CatarinaKarlss3Project group: Ove Eriksson, Stockholm University; Eva Svensson, Karlstad University; Dag Avango, Luleå University of Technology; Jonas Monié Nordin, Stockholm University; Andreas Hennius, Uppsala University.

A new interdisciplinary project is being planned in Sweden. The start of the project will be a workshop organised by several researchers with a focus on "Sustainability and environmental impact from a historical perspective". The purpose and focus of the workshop is to discuss problems and opportunities for future projects and collaboration based on different themes.

The intention is to chart interdisciplinary knowledge in various sciences such as archaeology, history, technological history, biological cultural heritage and metallurgy – with a focus on the environmental impact of steel production. New technology and new methods give new opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.

During recent years, much research has been about the steel industry's environmental impact and how the Swedish steel industry can make a difference to the climate. Among other topics, are technology development towards a fossil-free Sweden and how the Swedish steel industry can work with global sustainability goals. From a historical perspective, sustainability and social benefit have been very important, but have been discussed with other concepts than today and implemented with other methods. Within the framework of a feasibility study, we want to work together to investigate how a research project could be formulated around the questions of how sustainability and environmental impact have been historically managed within the subject area.

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Local Heritage: International impact – where is the heritage of the anthropocene?

Sarah May (Swansea University) @Sarah_May1 Since the decline of heavy industry in South Wales there has been steady and persistent efforts to utilise the pasts of this industry for heritage. In addition to the potential for tourism income, industrial heritage offers the hope of maintaining community cohesion through pride in these contributions to the ‘making of the modern world’. As criticisms of that world mount, and concerns about climate change make the industrial revolution seem more like a legacy than a heritage, what happens to the pride? For example, where should we commemorate the dark global impact of coal? While coal mining heritage sites, such as ‘Big Pit’ showcase both the benefits and hardships of coal mining life, the back story is that their sacrifice was noble. Communities built on industry already often shoulder the physical and chemical legacies that consumers communities may not. Can we conceive of an Anthropocene heritage which acknowledges the links between the local and the international impacts, while allowing local communities to take pride in their past? This Twitter paper will consider the various spatial and temporal scales that this social heritage can or could operate at.

14:30-15:45 Session FourPreserving & Interpreting Steel Heritage IThe fires are dead – long live LED lights: The mythos of steel in the Ruhrgebiet

Hilary Orange (Swansea University) @HilaryOrange @Steelworlds

In 1988 the Nordrhein-Westfalen government instigated the Internationale Bauausstellung Emscher Park Project (IBA Emscher Park for short) to kickstart structural change in the Ruhr region of West Germany, in response to the decline of the region’s coal and steel industries.

Dubbed a ‘Workshop for the Future of Old Industrial Regions’, a total of 117 projects were instigated, many of which resulted from a decentralised planning process whereby proposals were made by city authorities and civic groups. New uses were found for former industrial sites, including the development of social, cultural, sport and adventure opportunities (Hospers 2004).

In this paper, I explore the connections between these new ‘fires’ (albeit fired by LED technology) and the mythos of the Ruhr as the ‘Land of a Thousand Fires’ – a steel region. I consider IBA’s commissioning of light art to create landmarks at industrial sites. The lightworks have various functions and carry various meanings. Being placed at height they provide orientation and branding and were seen by IBA as being carriers of regional memory as well as signifying new culture. Although they are popular, particularly with photographers, there are concerns that the creation of spectacle obscures the darker histories of labour conditions, unemployment and pollution and serves to pacify industrial histories (Barndt 2010)

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Rebuilding the Vulcan Hotel at St Fagans National Museum of History

Dafydd Wiliam (Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum Wales) @SF_adeiladau

After 159 years as a precious community space, and a four-year campaign to save it, The Vulcan Hotel was scheduled for demolition in 2012. It was a typical urban pub on the outskirts of Cardiff City centre that, for most of its life, served the predominantly Irish community of Newtown. It provided lodgings and quenched the thirst of dockworkers and steelworkers. Here at St Fagans National Museum of History – an open-air museum in Cardiff, Wales, we accepted the pub to enable us to interpret life during the First World War in an industrialised south Wales. Interviews with former customers, residents and neighbours enable us to tell the story of its close-knit community, once thriving and multicultural, itself long since gone. Rebuilding work has begun, and this presentation charts its history from its beginnings in 1853 to the present day.

Commemorations in steel

Gethin Matthews (Swansea University) @WelshMemorials

In the aftermath of WW1, communities in all the combatant countries sought to commemorate their own who had served and died in the war. As well as the plethora of official civic memorials that were established, an enormous variety of memorials were established by particular communities, such as schools, religious congregations, clubs and workplaces.

Many of these ‘unofficial’ memorials have been lost, but among those that have survived are a number that were established by Welsh steelworks. Indeed, some have survived because they were (literally) made of steel, such as the memorials of the Guest Keen and Nettlefolds company (which had works at various locations in south-east Wales).

Some memorials have survived which list all of those who served in the war, not just those who died, such as that of the Gilbertson Company of Pontardawe. Also, some memorials have survived which took other forms – the Brymbo Steelworks magazine, in its first issue in 1920, gave pride of place to a ‘Roll of Honour’ of those who died.

16:00-17:15 Session FiveSteelworks Closures and Sense of PlaceTapping the memories: The human stories behind the closure of Consett Steelworks

History of Consett Steelworks group @ConsettWorks

2020 marks the 40th anniversary of the closure of Consett steelworks, an event which transformed the reality of the town’s daily experiences into community memories in a matter of months. As the workforce of the steelworks ages, the History of Consett Steelworks Group was established to record, store and share these memories. The aim is

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not only to form a tangible legacy and tribute for the many people who contributed to the production of steel in Consett but also as a means of connecting the current community with the importance of their history and the significance of place for the generations born subsequent to the closure of the Works. The Group exists to tell the very human story of the works and the town that supported it.

This presentation will highlight the fascinating stories behind those involved in the last days of the Works, giving voice to their memories and exploring their perspectives on the closure. The focus will be on the story of Tommy Moore, steelworker and local historian who tapped the last steel at the plant in September 1980. Tommy’s story is representative of so many of the Consett workforce: one of skill, adaptability and commitment that developed into a determination to secure both the social and economic history and future of the town. By unlocking these hidden stories through both oral and written histories, this paper aims to tap into how the works and its closure shaped a community.

Nostalgia, the politics of place and the closure of Bilston Steelworks

Matt Beebee (Exeter University) @Steelworlds

The Bilston Steelworks, which during the 1970s had come to dominate the local economy of not only the town of Bilston but the wider Black Country region, closed partially in May 1979 and totally in July 1980. During the 1970s, Bilston steelworkers celebrated the fact they remained the last steelworks in the region as a mark of uniqueness and pride. A consequence of this was that the closure of the steelworks was perceived as both final and all encompassing; it was not simply the loss of industrial employment that was significant, but also the radical change to what it meant to be a ‘Bilstonian’.

By exploring both contemporary accounts – TV interviews and local press – and retrospective memories from oral history, this paper argues that the implications of Bilston’s industrial decline for self and place became complexly intertwined, while also being reworked by the fraught nature of nostalgia. Indeed, this paper shows that nostalgic reworking was something that manifested itself as much within the immediacy of deindustrialisation as in recollected testimony. The paper concludes that notions of community and belonging, which were given meaning and reinforced by a collective culture around the meaning of the Bilston Steelworks, did not necessarily wane but were rather reconstructed, adapted, and rationalised through the state of flux deindustrialisation.

Scotland’s steel mill?: The remaking of class and nation in the fight to save the Ravenscraig Steel Mill, 1979-1992

Christopher Lawson (University of California, Berkeley) @ChristopherL_TO

The threatened closure of the vast Ravenscraig steel mill posed an existential threat to the town of Motherwell, Lanarkshire from the late 1970s onwards. Faced with the rise of neoliberal economics under the government of Margaret Thatcher, the restructuring of the global market for steel, and the breakdown of class-based industrial alliances in Britain, the people of Motherwell resorted to a broad-based community mobilisation in an attempt to

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save Ravenscraig. This mobilisation achieved a degree of success: in the 1980s the Thatcher Tories twice forced British Steel to commit to retaining Ravenscraig, despite the determination of management to shutter the mill. However, tensions developed within the campaign over whether to appeal to class solidarity or to Scottish national identity, over the appropriate role of the local community, and over the perception that Ravenscraig steelworkers were receiving privileged treatment. My paper will explain the ups and downs of this campaign, from the election of the Thatcher government in 1979 to the final closure in 1992. Through an exploration of its internal tensions, I will show how the struggle to save Ravenscraig helped to challenge long held assumptions about what it meant to be working class and shaped the development of Scottish nationalism in post-industrial Lanarkshire. My paper will thus add to the growing literature on how deindustrialisation generally, and the decline of the steel industry specifically, led to the remaking of community, class, and national identities across the UK.

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Thursday 2 July9:00-10:15 Session SixSteeltowns: Creating and Changing Urban IdentitiesIndustrial development, urban growth, and shifting identities in the Australian steel town of Port Kembla, 1901 to 1950

Erik Eklund (Federation University Australia) @ErikEklund10

Port Kembla is an industrial and port town on the south coast of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia. The town developed as a coaling facility in the 1890s. The NSW Government began construction of the port from 1901, and industrial development began in 1908. The Hoskins Steel works relocated from inland Lithgow with production beginning in 1929. The new company, Australian Iron & Steel Pty Ltd (AI&S) was taken over by Broken Hill Proprietary limited (BHP) in 1935. A commercial and residential area grew alongside the new industries with the first subdivision in 1908, the Wentworth estate. By 1921 the population had grown to 1,622, increasing to 4,960 by 1947.

This paper charts the emergence of local identity amid major industrial development and a developing labour movement. It identifies a period in the 1920s when a town-based localist politics was the dominant, but not the only, theme of local politics. It then outlines the slow but inexorable movement to larger spatial scales based on the entire region. I highlight the exclusions to localist politics including the Indigenous people of the region, the contending forms of class politics and class conflict, and how the arrival of new migrants from post war Europe led to new forms of identity and attachment after 1945.

‘She was as hard as Port Talbot Steelworks but dead soft underneath’: A feminist autoethnography of life in 80s Port Talbot

Ashley Morgan (Cardiff Metropolitan University) @DrAshleyMorgan1

Notions of shifting paradigms of masculinity in post-industrial South Wales have been well-documented by academics in terms of the impact on masculine affects and modes of masculinity (Walkerdine and Jiminez, 2012; Ward 2013; Walkerdine, 2010). Port Talbot and its steelworkers has also been examined in sociohistorical, political and cultural contexts (Penny, 2016; 2020). Virtually absent from this research are any perspectives from or about women. The absence of female discursive voices in such communities suggests that there might be no female story to tell. In this paper, I argue that academic focus on masculinity in steel and mining towns has left an absent presence of women (Leder 1991), which I wish to address. Using the feminist autoethnographic approach as laid out by Ettore (2017) which contends that this perspective ‘tells the story of those who are marginalized’, I address the issue of female absence by reflecting on the politics of my life as a teenager growing up in Port Talbot in the 1980s. Unlike other steel towns in the UK and abroad, I argue that Port Talbot is unique in its geographical location and the way it exists in both reality and fantasy.

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Recently Port Talbot has been heralded as a ‘nice place to live’, a seaside town, with thriving communities and easy access to larger Welsh cities (Lloyd, 2020). Yet 80s Port Talbot was a time of economic depression, political conflict, male hardness and violence. This research aims to offer a new perspective of life in a steel town, by examining the politics of life as a woman and the subsequent issues that that has yielded.

A new town in name only? The growth of the Stewarts & Lloyds’ steel works and the development of Corby after 1950

Matthew Bristow (University of London) @eric_180uk @HistoricEngland

On 1 April 1950, Corby was designated a New Town, one of the first phase of ten New Towns created after 1946. Corby however had very little in common with the seven New Towns which formed the ring of new settlements around London first proposed in Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan of 1944. Most significantly, at the time of its designation, Corby was already a sizeable town, developed from a small village to an ad hoc town during the first half of the twentieth century. It also diverged dramatically from the principles of New Town planning in that its economy relied almost entirely on a single employer, following the decision by steel manufacturer Stewarts & Lloyds to relocate their operation and workforce to Corby in 1932.

This paper will detail Stewarts and Lloyds’ move to Corby, the construction of a company town and the efforts between 1945-49 of the Urban District Council to provide housing to allow the works to hit post-war recovery targets. It will also reappraise the Master Plan in the context of this pre-existing settlement and open cast ironstone mines; including the non-traditional housing types constructed for the expanding workforce. Additionally, it will be argued through the steel output statistics, that further expansion of Corby was driven by the assumption that the works would continue to require an ever larger local workforce following Nationalisation. This manifested itself physically in the form of the Lincoln Sector, an award winning, but ultimately unsuccessful departure from the New Town model of low-density living.

10:30-11:45 Session SevenAfter Steel: Post-industrial IdentitiesMaintaining lives: Caring for things and others in a steel city

Chantel Carr (University of Wollongong) @lifeofstuff

This paper explores how a cohort of retired maintenance workers from an Australian steel plant use their skills to enact an ethics of care in the home and community. As trades workers cease waged work and begin to negotiate a new identity outside of the paid workplace, the repair and maintenance skills that characterised their waged working lives continue to be highly sought after. Material skills are enrolled to care for, and maintain relationships with partners, children and grandchildren, elderly parents, friends, community members and each other. This paper demonstrates how shop floor routines of repair and

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maintenance do not get packed away at the end of the working day (or life), but rather accompany workers out into the home and community. A re-working of industrial work through the lens of care demonstrates that kinds of work are not inherently gendered, but rather come to be so through the structures and spaces in which they proceed.

Steel stories: Making sense of a Teesside without steel

Joan Heggie (Teesside University) @JoanHeggie

On 2 October 2015, SSI (UK) Ltd., owners of the Redcar steelworks, went into liquidation. The Thai-backed company, despite investing millions in the site since purchasing it from TATA in 2011, could not compete in a turbulent global market and the UK government called in the official receiver. Unlike the TATA shutdown of 2010, however, there was no mothballing of the blast furnace – this was a hard closure. With the company unable, and the government unwilling, to keep the coke ovens going. Tons of iron solidified slowly but inexorably inside the blast furnace, the coke ovens cooled and broke apart – while a workforce and region watched, reeling from the impact. There was no way back – this was the end of steel making on Teesside.

About 2,000 workers lost their jobs that day – and about 10,000 contractors, but the effect rippled across Teesside and beyond. Iron and steel had put Teesside on a global map; it owes its very existence to the industrialists, entrepreneurs and migrants who came to work in the fledgling iron industry from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Despite the changing fortunes of the industry in the last fifty years, the area clung to its identity as a steel-making region. For many, therefore, the closure shook the foundations of their own sense of self and identity. ‘Steel Stories’ was able to capture the thoughts and impressions of some of those impacted by the closure. This paper draws upon those words to try and make sense of a Teesside without steel.

Teesside steelworks heritage: Cultural and political responses

Tosh Warwick (Manchester Metropolitan University) @Tosh_Warwick

[no abstract]

13:00-14:15 Session EightModernisation and Changing TechnologiesDeindustrialisation, the 1980 Steel Strike and the moral economy of Round Oak Steelworkers

Paul Barnsley (University of Wolverhampton) @Barnspaul31

In this presentation I explore the reasons for the lack of support for the 1980 national steel strike by Round Oak Steelworkers. Using primary sources, I examine the impact of management initiatives to subvert ‘worker chicanery’ and threats to close the Works. The contradictions within the steel union’s belated efforts to induce private sector workers to

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strike in support of a pay dispute with the publicly owned British Steel Corporation were also significant.

However, steelworker oral testimony suggests that the decisive reason for their refusal to support the strike was their belief that the ISTC had failed to effectively defend the terms of the 1975 Beswick Review. This perceived inability or unwillingness of the union to enforce the planned and managed reorganisation of the British steel industry, as promised by Beswick, had by 1980 already resulted in works closing and the loss of steel jobs. The recent closures of nearby Bilston and The Patent Shaft confirmed in the mind of workers that their union would also allow Round Oak to “quietly bleed to death”.

This presentation offers new perspectives of the 1980 national steel strike. It suggests that the failure of the steel unions to offer a coherent plan to resist the looming threat of deindustrialisation significantly undermined worker support for the strike and their own union.

Made from steel: Tinplate and technological change in the twentieth century

Beth Griffiths (Swansea University) @BethGriffiths7

This paper initially outlines the link between steel and the tinplate industry, what tinplate is used for and how it is made. The aim of this paper will be to examine the part that tinplate plays in everyday life, how the technological changes of the last one hundred years have gradually, and nearly imperceptibly, changed tinplate based products. Consumers buy food and drinks cans to use the contents and recycle them but generally do not pay much attention to the can itself.

I will argue that at times local communities have depended upon the tinplate works. I will also argue that local dependence has changed but, none the less, has remained important. This paper will seek to illuminate the historical role of women within the industry and show that women still enjoy equal opportunities within the tinplate industry.

I will also argue that the continuous rationalisation of the tinplate industry in Wales has been necessary. I will conclude that if these measures had not been taken that the tinplate industry in the United Kingdom would not have remained viable.

Modernising to oblivion: Social upheaval at the end of integrated steelmaking in Nova Scotia, Canada

Lachlan MacKinnon (Cape Breton University) @LachlanMacKinn

Cape Breton Island, an outcropping on the northernmost coast of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, emerged as one of the country’s largest repositories of bituminous coal by the end of the 1800s. At the turn of the century, Boston financier H.M. Whitney established the Dominion Iron and Steel Company Ltd. in the island’s former colonial centre, Sydney. The following decades were fraught, and the famed labour confrontations that occurred in the Cape Breton coal fields and steel mills had a direct impact on the emergence of Canadian

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labour legislation. As the 1960s approached, the island’s major industries – like those around the world – found themselves facing protracted crisis. In 1967, in an effort to stave off industrial ruination, the provincial Government of Nova Scotia decided to nationalise the city’s steel mill in response to a threatened closure by its private owners.

Provincial ownership of the mill proved a difficult task; modernisation of equipment was costly, and consecutive governments were hesitant to make the necessary financial commitment. The steelworkers, for their part, were torn between the necessity of infrastructure renewal and a political atmosphere that was increasingly sceptical of state-lead economic development. In this presentation, I trace the contours of technological modernisation at Sydney Steel between 1973 and 1988 through oral history testimony from former employees, management, and economic development staff. Through this approach, we can better understand the massive pressures that faced steelworkers and their representatives during the global industrial crisis of the late twentieth century and how it directly affected these men and women as they sought to maintain their communities and cultures in the face of structural upheaval.

14:30-15:15 Session NinePreserving & Interpreting Steel Heritage IIFuture directions of industrial heritage interpretation at the Soudan underground mine

Larissa Harris and James Juip (Michigan Technology University) @tworowscholar

Since its inception in 1965, the Lake Vermilion Soudan Underground Mine State Park (LVSUMSP) has worked to interpret the 80 year history of the Soudan Underground Mine. Park guests travel in a mining cage 2,341 feet down to the bottom of the mine. Once there, they learn about the three generations of miners who pulled 15.5 million long tons of the highest grade hematite sent to steel furnaces out east. With all the 1960s mining structures intact and in use, LVSUMSP successfully interprets this visible history. The site’s historical importance varied interpretive programming, and the proud groups of locals combine to create a unique heritage tourism experience unlike any other in Minnesota. As an industrial heritage site, interpretive programs have expanded in recent years to offer not only the historic underground tour, but also tours of a high-energy physics lab and a walking tour of the drift with a geology focus. However, interpretation of peak mining operations in 1890 and the stories of the local community members and Ojibwe people are lacking. The authors are currently working to fill these large gaps through two separate projects that hope to facilitate the interpretation of these histories by 1) contextualising the temporal changes in mine structures and community identity by integrating 3D modelling of past mining structures, HGIS, and live interpretation in a mobile application platform and 2) using community-based participatory research under an Indigenous research paradigm to guide future Indigenous heritage interpretation.

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Steel on the seabed: How catastrophe has saved the UK’s maritime industrial heritage

Antony Firth, Fjordr Limited @FjordrInfo

It is a paradox that thousands of monuments to UK steelmaking and manufacturing survive because of calamities and catastrophes. Around our shores, ships sunk c. 1850-1950 represent a crescendo of technological innovation and industrial production of critical importance to UK history in terms of economy, commerce and society. This extraordinary heritage is hardly recognised because it is underwater, yet it has little counterpart on land or amongst ships still floating: the built heritage of civil shipbuilding has largely been erased; there are no sizable cargo vessels of this period in preservation. Fortunately, advances in marine survey and imaging are making it easier to access and appreciate this heritage without getting wet. Our increasingly digital world is making it easier to reconnect this steel on the seabed to documents, drawings, photographs and recollections that provide it with context and meaning. It is becoming possible to re-populate this maritime industrialheritage with the communities of shipbuilders, seafarers and travellers whose lives – and sometimes deaths – were entwined in these most complex of metal artefacts. In very few words, this presentation will outline the scale and character of the maritime industrial heritage lying just off UK shores and indicate avenues of recent research and engagement. Examples will be drawn mostly from the east coast of England, where direct links can be drawn between the industrial landscape that lies underwater and the men and women whose worlds were shaped by steel.

Hammer and steel: A musical biography

Janine Tiffe (Kent State University) @KSU_SOM

The Trinidadian steel drum (steelpan) was created in the mid-twentieth century by lower- and middle-class urban youth in Trinidad and Tobago where it eventually became a symbol of national identity and the official instrument of the country. Current estimates suggest 15%-20% of the population has hands-on experiences with the steelpan (Munro 2016). While there is no single inventor of the instrument, Elliott “Ellie” Mannette (1927-2018) was a particularly vital contributor to the steelpan movement in both Trinidad and abroad as a craftsman, pedagogue, historian, mentor, advocate, and composer. Hailed as the father of the modern steel drum, Mannette’s life-long obsession was making the perfect musical sound from steel.

This paper discusses Mannette’s lifework, that is, the construction and perfection of musical instruments from 55-gallon oil barrels. As an instrument craftsman and innovator, Mannette provided key transformations that helped forge a more resonant and warm tone to the steel drum. As a mentor, Mannette has directly and indirectly impacted thousands of others – giving them the necessary tools to formulate their own lives in steel, teaching many to build and tune drums, and inspiring others through his personal narrative; he gave up a college scholarship in England and close family relationships to follow his dreams by continuing to put his hammer to steel, following his singular vision, and contributing handily to the development and propagation of the only acoustic instrument family invented since the nineteenth century.

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