Challenging the ‘decline’ of the industrial elite in the manufacturing town: Middlesbrough’s steel magnates and the urban sphere 1880-1931

Warwick, Tosh ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9112-4612 (2019) Challenging the ‘decline’ of the industrial elite in the manufacturing town: Middlesbrough’s steel magnates and the urban sphere 1880-1931. The Local Historian, 49 (3). pp. 230-238. ISSN 0024-5585

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Abstract

In 1862, on a visit to the town, the future Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone hailed Middlesbrough as a ‘remarkable place, the youngest child of England’s enterprise … an infant Hercules’. In only a century it expanded from a tiny hamlet of only 25 inhabitants in 1801 to a town of 90,000 in 1901 and had almost 140,000 people thirty years later. Central to its growth was the iron industry, which dictated its economic, political and social development in the early decades: ironmasters sat on the town council, provided the first MP and gifted the first public park and early urban institutions. The last quarter of the nineteenth century has been characterised as a period heralding a decline in participation by British urban elites in the day-to-day activities of the towns and cities that housed their businesses, with it argued these businessmen withdrew from leadership in the urban sphere and adopted a more leisurely, country-facing, gentrified lifestyle. Recent work has challenged the extent of elite withdrawal from towns and cities and this paper suggests that it is useful to consider the period as one of reconfiguration of industrialist engagement with the Victorian ‘boom town’ rather than one characterised by decline. Taking the North Eastern England industrial town of Middlesbrough as a case study, this article highlights evidence of continued industrial elite involvement in the traditional areas of influence such as municipal and economic life, as well as placing heightened emphasis on their exercise of authority through leadership of voluntary bodies and patronage of company-driven initiatives. It is argued that through this evolution of industrialist urban engagement, Middlesbrough’s steel magnates continued to play a crucial role in the fabric of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ‘Ironopolis’ alongside the petite bourgeoisie and working-classes that have often been portrayed as displacing the industrial elite.