Alum

The alum industry in Cleveland

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The Alum Industry

The Jurassic shales and sandstone of Cliff Ridge overlooking Great Ayton and Gribdale on the northern slopes of the moors contain bands of ironstone, jet and alum, as well as whinstone.

The oldest of these industries was alum.

Alum has been used since ancient times for many purposes including medicinal. It has variously been used as cure for haemorrhages, nits and dandruff, and other ailments. From the Middle Ages it began to be used to increase the suppleness and durability of leather and in the textile industry as a mordant to make vegetable dyes fast.

Until the middle of the fifteenth century the supply of alum primarily came from Turkey. There was a flourishing trade between Asia Minor and Italy. The Italians used alum for their dyeing establishments. After the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, they looked for alternatives to Muslim sources. John di Castro, who had been a dyer of cloth in Constantinople and had watched the manufacture of alum, discovered an alum rock at Tolfa, a commune of Rome and part of the papal states, and an industry began there which still exists. There was soon a papal monopoly in alum.

The economy of England, prior to the Industrial Revolution, centred around wool and linen. This was very much a legacy of the monasteries. They had established the rearing of sheep, in very large numbers, from which to produce the wool, and the cultivation of flax, from which to produce the linen. The elite classes of Tudor England liked to wear bright, rich colours. The only dyes available at that time were derived from plants and minerals. These were not colour fast during washing. To fix these natural dyes to the natural fibres of the wool and linen cloth, it was necessary to soak the cloth in a mordant before putting it through the dye bath. Alum could be used as a mordant.

Until the reign of Henry VIII, alum had been sourced from the Italian sources which remained under the tight control of the Pope. When Henry VIII seized domestic control of religion from the Pope, it became imperative to find a domestic source of alum. After some fifty years of prospecting and experimenting, a viable process evolved for manufacturing alum from a rock stratum that was particularly abundant in north east Yorkshire.

The earliest prospecting for alum, towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign, took place in Ireland, around Wexford. During the reign of Elizabeth I, further prospecting continued on Lambay Island, off the Irish east coast. In England, the earliest attempts to make alum were on the Isle of Wight and in Hampshire.

Although German miners had settled in England long before the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the queen encouraged home industries and in order to escape the payment of tribute to the Pope, she invited to Britain certain foreign chymistes and mineral masters. Among them was Cornelius Devoz, to whom was granted the privilege of mining and digging in our realm of England for allom and copperas. After that there is a gap in our knowledge of the alum industry, but the Belham Bank works near Guisborough seem to have been opened in 1595. According to A Anderson the first alum works in England were constructed at Guisborough in 1608. The person responsible was either Sir Thomas Chaloner, who according to T Pennant suspected the presence of alum because the trees in the district were of a weak colour, and according to G Young because of the taste of the water issuing from the shales; or Sir J Bouchier, who is said to have improved upon the method of manufacture. At any rate, Chaloner apparently induced Italians to leave the papal works at Tolfa and come to Yorkshire, for which he was excommunicated and heavily cursed by the Roman Church.

The Farndales and the alum industry

John Farndale wrote that Johnny Farndale, who was a Kiltonian, employed many men at his alum house, and many a merry tale have I heard him tell of smugglers and their daring adventures and hair breadth escapes.

He also recalled in his works of about 1870 Lofthouse, and their long famed alum works, which has been the support of Lofthouse for ages gone, but now discontinued. How well I remember my school days when we faced all weather through Kilton Woods, and how I respected my masters – the Rev Wm Barrick, Mr Wm King, the great navigator, and Captain Napper, steward to the works. The popular Midsummer Lofthouse fair was the only fair we children were allowed to attend.

Johnny Farndale

1724 to 1807

Old Farndale of Kilton, the patriarch of the Kilton Farndales, regaler of smuggler tales, alum merchant and farmer, of whom the Squire once said “When you are gone, there will never be such another Johnny Farndale”

The Process

Alum was extracted from quarried shales through a large scale and complicated process which took months to complete. The process involved extracting then burning huge piles of shale for 9 months, before transferring it to leaching pits to extract an aluminium sulphate liquor. This was sent along channels to the alum works where human urine was added.

Alum a colourless crystal, is a double sulphate of aluminium and one other element, usually either potassium or ammonium. The manufacturing process was very slow. From first quarrying the alum shale, to shipping the first cargo of alum crystal, could take twelve months or more.

Alum was extracted from quarried shales through a large scale and complicated process which took months to complete. The process involved extracting then burning huge piles of shale for nine months, before transferring it to leaching pits to extract an aluminium sulphate liquor. This was sent along channels to the alum works where human urine was added.

The first part of the production process took place outdoors in a quarry. The quarry was known as the Alum Works, which included all its associated fittings such as bared rock, a burning place, steeping pits and storage cisterns.

Here workers would use pickaxes to excavate the rock from the quarry face, and then use mauls to break the pieces down to a more usable size. Shovels would be used to load the broken rock into wooden wheelbarrows, in which it was transported along wooden planks, later iron plates, to the burning place. Here the rock would be calcined in heaps known as clamps.

The clamps were created by laying down a base of brushwood, about five metres across and a metre high. Around and on top of this, the rock was added until the pile was two metres high. At this point the brushwood was lit and the burning started. More rock was added to the heap and around its sides, until the clamp was perhaps fifty metres in diameter and twenty metres high. The clamp was then left to burn, in a controlled manner. The skilled eye of the heap controller would gauge when the burn had progressed to a suitable state.

At that point, the burnt rock, now called mine by the alum workers, was removed and placed in an empty steeping pit. Spring water and collected rainwater was used to leach the soluble salts out of the mine, resulting a solution called the liquor. The steeping process was a complicated affair, involving pumping of the liquor from one pit to another in a carefully regulated sequence. Eventually, the liquor arrived at the strength desired. It was then pumped into a holding cistern, to await being sent to the alum house. When it was required at the alum house, it would be transported there along wooden troughs or stone conduits.

The Alum house was the collection of buildings in which the liquor from the steeping pits was processed through to the finished product, the alum crystals.

On arrival at the alum house, the liquor was run into cisterns and left to stand overnight. This allowed debris and detritus to fall to the bottom or float on the surface. Either way, the clarified liquor could then be used in the alum house. It would first be run into large evaporating pans set over open coal fired furnaces. The pans were made of lead and were around three metres long, two metres wide and one metre deep. They were set on iron plates which, in turn, were set on iron bars, with the coal fires below them. The liquor was brought to the boil and kept there until the desired strength was arrived at.

When it arrived at the appropriate strength, the liquor was run off into settlers where an alkali was added. The effect of the alkali was twofold. First, it brought about reactions whereby unwanted chemicals were precipitated out. Second, it reduced the acidity to the point at which the alum crystals could form. Once the waste products had precipitated, the liquor was run off into coolers which were large wooden casks with numerous wooden frames suspended in them. Here the alum crystals had large numbers of surfaces on which they could form and grow.

Next the mixture was transferred to small coolers to crystallize. The resulting crystals of alum were then further boiled and condensed to get rid of impurities.

It was recorded that the workers suffered terrible conditions. The heaps of shale gave off poisonous sulphurous fumes. Their wages of 6d a day were often withheld or they were given in half rotten meat and corn. The alum workers were described as poor snakes, tattered and naked, ready to starve for want of food and clothes.

During the final part of the process the crystals were scraped off the frames and the sides of the coolers and washed with fresh spring water, to remove any remaining surface impurities. The crystals were transferred to a roaching pan, smaller than the evaporating pans but made of lead. Just enough hot water was then added to dissolve the crystals. The liquor, after a final check on its strength, was transferred to the roaching casks. Here it would cool for about 10 days. The outer cask would then be dismantled, revealing a column of solid alum crystal. This would be left for another ten to fifteen days to allow the liquor within the column to have a chance to crystalize further. At the end of that period, the column would be broken into. The saleable alum was finally bagged, ready for transport.

Alum and North Yorkshire

Alum Shale is found in beds immediately beneath the sandstone of the North York Moors.

Alum mining has been a North Yorkshire industry since alum was first discovered in the hills around Guisborough by Sir Thomas Chaloner the younger in the 1590s. At the end of the 16th century Thomas Chaloner visited alum works in the Papal States where he observed that the rock being processed was similar to that under his Guisborough estate. At that time alum was important for medicinal uses, in curing leather and for fixing dyed cloths and the Papal States and Spain maintained monopolies on its production and sale. Chaloner secretly brought workmen to develop the industry in Yorkshire, and alum was produced near Sandsend Ness 5 km from Whitby in the reign of James I. Once the industry was established, imports were banned and although the methods in its production were laborious, England became self-sufficient. Whitby grew significantly as a port as a result of the alum trade and by importing coal from the Durham coalfield to process it.

The first alum works in Cleveland started at Belman Bank in Guisborough Woods at the turn of the seventeenth century by Sir Thomas Chaloner the Younger, who suspected the presence of alum because the trees in the district were of a weak colour. He had visited alum works in the Papal States where he observed that the rock being processed was similar to that under his Guisborough estate. He seems to have induced Italians to leave the papal works at Tolfa and come to Yorkshire, for which he was personally excommunicated. Thomas Chaloner of Guisborough is reputed to have sold his own urine for one penny a firkin, which was about nine gallons. There were many odd names for imperial measures including pecks and gills and a firkin a fortnight for urine.

Alum was produced near Sandsend Ness five kilometres from Whitby in the reign of James I.

This was a local industry from the early 17th century until the mid 18th centuries. Pack horses and wagons were used and some mines had rail tracks.

Alum was used for fulling, dyeing and tanning. The process began in Greek and Roman times but appears to have been lost until the 16th century when Italian alum working employed 800 men. The monopoly was held by the Pope, who forbade Christians to buy it from any other source.

Tradition credits Sir Thomas Challoner of Guisborough with the discovery of Yorkshire alum. He noticed the rock and vegetation of the Italian sites were similar to that near Guisborough. He smuggled papal workmen in England, one story says in barrels, and after several trials succeeded in extracting alum. The Pope put a potent curse on him, but by 1609 to 1612, there were four mines at Slapewath, Belman, and West Bank, all near Guisborough and also at Sandsend, employing hundreds of workmen. Other early mines were at Grosmont, Goathland, Eskdaleside, Stoup Brow (1752 to 1817), Saltwick, Nab and Mulgrave Woods.

Coal had to be brought from Durham or West Yorkshire at great expense and the mines suffered from corrosion and the action at the sea on the cliffs.

Alum is a double salt, a combination of aluminium sulphite with either potassium sulphate or ammonium sulphate. Processing it was complicated, worked by rule of thumb methods. A layer of brushwood or gorse was piled on the ground. On this alum shale in lumps was placed to a height of two to three feet. This was lighted and caused the bituminous shale to burn. Further shale was added to a considerable height, and much care taken in keeping the internal temperature even. In windy weather, the sides were plastered with slurry, burnt shale mixed with water, but if the fire was slow, the interior of the heap was poked with rods. It seldom took less than a year to burn out one of the heaps, so several heaps were burning at the same time.

At Boulby and elsewhere, they managed to set fire by accident to jet shales which burnt for years.

When the burning process was ended, the heap was allowed to cool slowly until it was mellow. Then it was steeped in water in tanks or lead pans. The spent shell was thrown into the sea, and the liquor concentrated to a specific gravity, determined according to tradition by floating an egg on it. The alum workers’ secret was knowing the exact point at which to stop and to separate the impurities from the solution.

Two methods of manufacture were used locally. Potash alum was made from burning seaweed, centred on staves. Ammonium alum was produced by the substitution of urine for kelp. This was, like the former method, finally recrystallized in wooden caskets, the staves of which could be loosened by knocking away the supporting hoops.

The peak of the alum industry came by the mid 18th century. In 1764, 3,200 tons at £22 per ton was recorded, but a new process patented in Lancashire in 1860 put an end to the Cleveland industry. Loftus had finished by 1830, Eskdaleside and Peak had almost finished by 1860 and Sandsend about 1870. Remains can be seen at Boulby, excavated by Keith Chapman of Brotton, and at Kettleness, Sandsend’s remains have almost gone.

(Old Roads and Pannierways in North East Yorkshire, Raymond H Hayes MBE, FSA, 1988, page 66).

In the Skelton area alum production began from about 1603. The first profitable site in Yorkshire was opened in 1603 at Spring Bank, Slapewath, which was then part of Skelton. This was the project of John Atherton, joint owner by marriage of a third part of the Skelton Estate. Robert Bell wrote There was a house at Spring Bank, near Mygrave (Margrove Park) erected, but not completed for the manufacture of Alum. On the 15th November 1603 an agreement was made between John Atherton and Katherine his wife of the one part and Mr Leycolt of the other, under which the Athertons were, at their own cost, to complete the house and furnish it with the necessary appliances, namely, four Furnaces and four pans of lead and iron for boiling Alum, Coolers of lead for congealing , and convenient Cisterns of lead for keeping and saving the "mothers" or strong liquors of alum and Copperas (green vitriol or Iron Sulphate). They were also to set up a lead-finer with furnace, a balnium for trial of the earth for alum and copperas, pits, pipes, vessels for draining the earth and making liquors and all other necessary implements.

Once the industry was established, imports were banned. Britain gradually became self-sufficient. Whitby grew significantly as a port as a result of the alum trade and by importing coal from the Durham coalfield to process it. In 1610 James I made alum production a monopoly of the Crown.

In 1616 alum production began at Coombe Bank, Boosbeck and Selby Hagg between Skelton and Brotton, located to the east of Hagg Farm and would seem to have had three distinct periods of operation.

It is said that ships anchored off Saltburn to transport the finished product. They brought with them casks of urine, which was mixed with the liquid that had been obtained from the calcined shale. We don’t know where this process was carried out initially, but it was later done in an Alum House sited near Cat Nab in Saltburn. The shale liquid ran from Selby Hagg by gravity down a trough that followed the course of Millholme Beck.

Nevertheless after 1630, alum works sprang up all around the northern escarpment of the North York Moors and along the coastal cliffs from Loftus to Ravenscar. Competitor works started to emerge at Pleasington in Lancashire, at Hurlet and Campsie in Scotland, and at Neath in South Wales.

From the early seventeenth century until the 1860s it was extensively mined at Guisborough and along the East Cleveland coast. The actual extraction of alum from shale was a long and expensive process and it took an average of fifty tons of shale to produce one ton of alum.

The early works consistently struggled to make alum. There was little chemical knowledge to turn to. Everything was done by trial and error. Large sums of money were spent in trying to perfect the process. Something like £150,000 pounds or more had been spent between 1550 and 1630. At least half a dozen prospectors were bankrupted.

The Alum Works, peculiar to this part of the country, owed their institution to Sir Thomas, who, while on a visit to Rome, was struck with the resemblance of its mineral deposit to that of Guisbrough, and determined to introduce the industry into his native country. In order to carry out this project, it was necessary to obtain the assistance of some of the Pope's labourers, and tradition has it that, at the risk of his anathemas, workmen from Rome were shipped to England as merchandise! This of course requires confirmation, but as these important works have vanished, and we no longer compete with his Holiness, we can afford to leave the question in its obscurity. (Ryedale and North Yorkshire antiquities, George Frank, 1888, page 235).

The Alum workings at Hummersea, Loftus were worked well into the 19th Century Alum mine, Cleveland

In the mid eighteenth century the price of alum was particularly high and reached a peak of £24 per ton in 1765. It therefore became commercially viable to mine in places where this had not been the case previously. Several new mines were therefore opened including one east of Ayton at Ayton Bank, just north of Hunter’s Scar.

Cockshaw Alum Works at Gribdale quarried and processed the shale to produce alum crystals in the eighteenth century.

At the peak of alum production the industry required two hundred tonnes of urine every year, equivalent to the produce of 1,000 people. The demand was such that it was imported from London and Newcastle. Buckets were left on street corners for collection and public toilets were built in Hull in order to supply the alum works. This unsavoury liquid was left until the alum crystals settled out, ready to be removed. An intriguing method was used to judge when the optimum amount of alum had been extracted from the liquor by testing whether an egg could be floated in the solution.

By the mid nineteenth century, an industrial process for making alum was patented by Peter Spence. His works at Pendleton, Lancashire and Goole, Yorkshire were each capable of producing more alum in one month than the entire Yorkshire alum shale works ever produced in a year.

By 1871 the last two alum works in northeast Yorkshire had ceased operation. They were driven out of business by more efficient production processes and the arrival on the market of synthetic dyes that did not require a mordant to make the colour fast.

5 – Belman Bank; 8 – Selby Hagg; 9 – Saltburn (the alum house for Selby Hagg); 10 – Loftus; 11 – Boulby; 12 – Kettleness; 13 – Sandsend; 20 – Eskdaleside

There are many sites along the Yorkshire Coast which bear evidence of the alum industry. These include Loftus Alum Quarries where the cliff profile is drastically changed by extraction and huge shale tips remain. Further South are the Ravenscar Alum Works, which are well preserved and enable visitors to visualise the processes which took place

Alum and Skelton

In the Skelton area Alum production began from about 1603. The first profitable site in Yorkshire was opened in 1603 at Spring Bank, Slapewath, which was then part of Skelton. This was the project of John Atherton, joint owner by marriage of a third part of the Skelton Estate.

Rich rewards seemed to beckon those who could create a home industry. The process was complex. The alum bearing rock was quarried, broken up and calcined or built into large clamps with alternating layers of wood and these piles would be ignited and a controlled burning would last for weeks. It needed many tons of shale to produce 1 ton of alum. The burnt, calcined, shale was then steeped in water-filled stone troughs until a certain specific gravity had been reached (tested for, the story goes, by floating an egg in the liquid). The liquid was then run off and boiled in large pans heated by coal for 24 hours and mixed with an alkali, obtained from urine or seaweed.

Thomas Chaloner of Guisborough is reputed to have sold his personal urine for one penny a Firkin, which was about 8 gallons. How often he earned or spent a penny or earned one is not recorded. History shows that we have had many odd names for imperial measures, pecks and gills etc. A Firkin a Fortnight for pee.

Other Alum mines were eventually opened by the Skelton Estate, notably at Coombe Bank, Boosbeck and Selby Hagg between Skelton and Brotton and were worked on and off during the next two centuries. The Selby Hagg works were located to the east of Hagg Farm, near Skelton-in-Cleveland, and would seem to have had three distinct periods of operation.

During the first of these, from about 1617 to 1643, the Alum house may have been located within the quarry.

The second phase ran from 1670 to 1685, and the third from 1765 to 1775. The alum houses for these latter two phases were located at Saltburn.

Most successful were the ones on the coast which did not have the cost of transporting fuel and the finished product for shipment.

The Alum workings at Hummersea, Loftus were worked well into the 19th Century.

Major Robert Bell Turton of Kildale Hall, N Yorks The Alum Farm, 1937: There was a house at Spring Bank, near Mygrave [now Margrove Park] erected, but not completed for the manufacture of Alum. On the 15th November 1603 an agreement was made between John Atherton and Katherine his wife of the one part and Mr Leycolt of the other, under which the Athertons were, at their own cost, to complete the house and furnish it with the necessary appliances, namely, four Furnaces and four pans of lead and iron for boiling Alum, Coolers of lead for congealing , and convenient Cisterns of lead for keeping and saving the "mothers" or strong liquors of alum and Copperas [green vitriol or Iron Sulphate]. They were also to set up a lead-finer with furnace, a balnium for trial of the earth for alum and copperas, pits, pipes, vessels for draining the earth and making liquors and all other necessary implements.

Bibliography

The Alum Folk, Peter Appleton, 2023

The Alum Industry of North-East Yorkshire, Chris Twigg, 17 January 2018

A Brief History of the Alum Industry in North Yorkshire 1600-1875, Roger L Pickles, The Cleveland Industrial Archaeologist Issue no.2, 1975

Boulby Alum: The Works Diary of George Dodds 1772-1788, K Quinn, Cleveland Industrial Archaeology Society Research Report No 9, 2010

The Alum Farm, Major Robert Bell Turton Whitby, Horne & Sons, 1938