Inventing the Black Country

The Black Country: industrial heartland of the nation. Forged in the white heat of an industrial revolution based on the exploitation of its mineral resources. Surrounded by a verdant green borderland and defined today by strong regional pride and identity, a unique dialect, popular local delicacies, and a thriving tradition of local beer brewing.

Sounds familiar? What if I told you that I was talking about the Belgian Black Country? That’s right, the area the locals call Le Pays Noir, centred around the city of Charleroi in Wallonia?

In recent months I’ve been researching the invention and spread of the idea of the Black Country in the nineteenth century, including investigating the use of the term in the French language and the birth of the Pays Noir, in striking parallel to our own region.

I found it particularly exciting to discover that one of the pivotal figures in the Belgian industrial revolution and the creation of the region that would become their Black Country was a man named Thomas Bonehill, who has numerous commemorations in his adopted hometown, an entry in the Belgian Dictionary of National Biography, and figures prominently in histories of national industrialisation. Not bad for a boy from Bilston!

Born in the town in March 1796, the sixth child in a working-class family, Belgian biographies offer little further detail on his early life but undoubtedly he must have gained extensive industrial training in the local furnaces and metal workshops as in 1824 he was recruited by an industrial agent migrate to Wallonia. Bonehill’s move abroad illustrates clearly for us how industrial development was not simply about raw materials and hard work – it was also about ideas and innovations that underpinned ever-improving technologies and techniques.

We could be forgiven for thinking that freedom of movement is an obsession of modern politics, but a glance at the history books shows that this is not the case. As the world’s industrial leader in the early nineteenth century, the British establishment did its best to protect that competitive advantage by severely limiting the movement of skilled workers who would not only take their labour, but also their deep knowledge and skills, with them if they emigrated to find better opportunities.

Foreign companies and states funded extensive networks of industrial espionage and clandestine recruitment, at least one of which was clearly successful in the Black Country, as Bonehill moved to Belgium within months of the British government lifting the migration ban. Employed first by a company in which the King of the Netherlands was a shareholder, over the next seven years he worked for at least 15 companies, advising on the design and building of Belgium’s most advanced new furnaces, fineries, and cannon boring machinery and training local staff in the skills he had learned back home.

After working as an employee for so long, a turning point in his career came when he formed an association with Ferdinand Puissant, the owner of a small iron and steel site reliant on water and charcoal power. Bonehill persuaded Puissant to invest in a 3-hectare site at Gougnies, near a major watercourse and in close proximity to coal supplies, leading the building of new puddling furnaces and a rolling mill in the early 1830s.

When Puissant died in 1833 the company was reconstituted with Bonehill as a partner as he continued to develop its operations. By 1839, his company, Forges de la Providence, was manufacturing a wide range of steam engines, metalworking equipment like hammers, rolling mills, shears, puddling furnaces, casting equipment and moulds, and brick making equipment. With the business thriving and his finances secure, he gave up his post as director to begin his second round of itinerancy, this time as one of the Continent’s most important engineers.

Historians estimate that he worked on at least 40 factories and furnaces across Belgium, France, and Germany, including Charleroi’s most important steelworks and, in 1843 another steelworks in Hautmont, northern France, which he equipped to produce the plate and rails that helped build the vast new, state-backed French railways.

He returned permanently to Charleroi in 1855, retiring to his newly-built mansion, Laminoirs de L’Ésperance, near his steelworks. Renovated by the local authorities in the 1990s, it and the road bearing his name are two lasting memorials to his influence. Following his death in 1858, ownership of his metalworking interest passed to his three sons Paul-Émile, Éduoard, and Émile-Constant, who maintained the family’s prominence in metalworking into the following decades.

Just as the Black Country’s coal and metal industries were revolutionised by ideas first pioneered elsewhere, such as Woodsetton-born Abraham Darby’s coke experiments at Coalbrookdale, John Wilkinson’s move to Bradley, and the contributions of mechanics and engineers from near and far, in Bonehill and many like him we can trace the spread of techniques further refined and developed in the region to even more far-flung locations. Indeed, we might go so far as to imagine a genealogy of transfer of knowledge and practice to new climes and successive innovation and evolution.

Bonehill’s sons, among many other ventures, were the key investors in modernising and reopening one of Málaga, Spain’s largest iron and steel companies in the 1890s, while his successors at his La Providence manufactory were granted, in 1895, the mining concessions in Crimea and Donetsk, building a vast metal and coal complex, run by Belgian and French managers, the direct inheritors of Bonehill’s expertise. One of the employees at the Ukrainian plant during the First World War happened to be a certain Nikita Khrushchev.

Discovering Bonehill’s story has really brought home to me the global interconnectedness of our region’s history. Not just in the products made here and exported across the world but as part of an ongoing movement of people and ideas, coalescing from disparate parts, spreading out, and then re-coalescing in new forms. Over two centuries the redeployment of finance and expertise allowed extractive fossil capitalism to colonise the globe in this way, to the point where a similar, ever more urgent revolution and spread of innovation and knowledge is required to move us to a carbon-free economy.

Finding out more about another Black Country, less than 500 miles away, has also been particularly exciting. Reading accounts from nineteenth century writers and viewing the paintings and sculptures of celebrated Belgian Pays Noir artists of the 1880s and 1890s makes us acutely aware of the commonality of experience between our two, and many other, regions across the world.

I was even more inspired to read about how, like in our region, people nowadays in Wallonia are working to celebrate their industrial heritage through restoration of sites as museums and arts venues while facing similar challenges of regenerating environments scarred by mining and contamination, regenerating economies impacted by the loss of many industrial jobs, and regenerating proud and forward-looking modern identities.

It never ceases to amaze me how history always seems to draw us back to the present! I’m excited about uncovering more global links and how much we can learn through the continued exchange of experiences and ideas with similar post-industrial regions as we face the challenges of the twenty-first century.