The Hutchinson story .... continued): John Hutchinson died at the age of 40, acknowledged as ‘the father of Widnes’. Born in Liverpool in 1925, his parents having moved there from Durham. John Hutchinson snr, held a commission in the Royal Navy and served under Nelson in the Napoleonic Wars. He later worked as a shipping broker and Lloyd’s agent in Liverpool. John junior eventually ended up at a college in Paris where he became friendly with Andrew George Kurtz whose dad owned an alkali factory in St Helens. John jnr would eventually work at the Kurtz plant in St Helens. In 1847, at the age of just 22, John got his hands on an area of land in Widnes. He left his job in St Helens and established his first alkali factory, known as the Hutchinson Number One works. His bold venture into what was virgin territory for industrialists proved a success. The green fields and woodlands of the area fast disappeared to make way for an army of factories and a forest of chimneys belching out noxious fumes. At this time Widnes was but a collection of villages (Farnworth biggest) and hamlets, with farmhouses dotted here and there. What helped the young Hutchinson’s venture was the Irish potato famine. Tens of thousands of Irish families fled the emerald isle, arriving in Liverpool. Many heard of the opportunities available just a few miles away in Widnes. Many families made the journey on foot, in search of work. Just before Hutchinson’s arrival in Widnes the population was not much more than 2,200. By 1851 it was 3,211, many working for Hutchinson. Benjamin Disraeli had declared ‘chemicals were the foundation of a thousand other industries’ and Hutchinson was most happy to oblige. In 1855 he married Mary Elizabeth Evelyn Kinsey, herself born in Ireland, but daughter of a Cheshire family, They set up home at Appleton Lodge in Appleton Village, a house still standing in 1959. They had five children. He was a protestant, his wife a Roman Catholic. Hutchinson’s works at Woodend (West Bank) soon had a neighbour, Gossages Soap Works. In 1851, 29 years old Henry Deacon left his job at a glass company in St Helens and joined Hutchinson as works manager. The same year Deacon married Miss Emma Wade – their son Henry Wade Deacon was born in 1853. Unfortunately for Hutchinson, in that same year Deacon left his job and set up his own alkali business close by. That was to lead to a collaboration between Deacon and a Manchester businessman, Holbrook Gaskell – names that would later be associated with the creation of ICI. One of the problems for the industrial pioneers of Widnes was what to do with the huge amounts of waste materials generated by their processes. One man had bought every available acre of land where this waste could be dumped, for a fee. That man was John Hutchinson. He leased this land to his rivals so they could dump their waste materials. Once Widnes Marsh had been a luscious green area. Now it showed signs of being overwhelmed with offensive, poisonous waste, from which issued evil-smelling fumes, essentially the familiar ‘rotten egg’ smell many of us remember. Some of the poisonous waste was used for making building blocks, sort of breeze blocks. The landscape was described as an offence to ‘God and man’ and at times the land spontaneously burst into flames. Once such fire burned for 12 months, daily giving off its horrendous stench. One of the landmarks, built by Hutchinson, and still standing was the Tower Building, now home to Catalyst museum at West Bank. In the mid 1850s, with hundreds of terraced homes thrown up to cater for incoming families, diseases such as cholera and smallpox were rife in Widnes, understandable given there was no sewage system or even a water supply. People relied on wells for their water. Hutchinson built the town’s first water supply, and also installed the first gas lights. Customers paid a penny a week for their piped water supplied by Hutchinson. He even created his own gas company in Appleton, supplying piped gas to Appleton Lodge and the homes of his neighbours. Another man to join Hutchinson’s business was John Tomlinson Brunner, who later introduced his friend Ludwig Mond to Hutchinson, names that would survive in Widnes for many years, Brunner-Mond, ICI’s Mond Division (which at one time employed 33,000 people). A large area of land, still to be developed by Hutchinson, became West Bank Dock, with a private railway linked directly to the line between St Helens, Widnes and Liverpool. Hutchinson, it seems, thought of everything. Widnes was a Klondyke town, and complaints, far and wide, erupted over the smells and fumes, and damage noxious gases were causing to vegetation. It led to Hutchinson, Deacon and Gossage being summoned before a House of Lord’s committee. A procession of farmers, gardeners and doctors appeared before the committee to describe life in Widnes; wilting crops, sheep which could not be fattened, health problems. This is one description of Widnes in the 1850s….in a very few years Widnes was transformed from a pretty, sunny, riverside hamlet with quiet, sleepy ways, into a settlement of thousands of labouring me, mainly Irish, with dingy unfinished streets of hastily constructed houses, with works that were belching forth volumes of the most deleterious gases, and clouds of black smoke from chimneys of inadequate heights, with trees that stood leafless in June and hedgerows that were shrilled in May. By now Widnes had a new town centre, Newtown, with Ann Street as the main street, a pub on every corner. One correspondent wrote in the Warrington Guardian in 1864 – just 150 years ago – “The sanitary conditions of the locality known as Widnes Dock, is a menace. If this sort of things is allowed to continue we should not be surprised to find Widnes decimated” In that year of 1864, there was a long, hot summer, and hardly a house in and around West Bank, escaped sicknesses, such as deadly typhoid or smallpox, it was recorded. Unless the place is sewered the people will die of plague. Things were out of control. What was needed was organisation. That led to the creation of the Local Board, forerunner to Widnes Borough Council. Finally law and order arrived in Widnes. A boy of 11 was one of the first to appear before the newly created justices’ court. He was found guilty of stealing two pieces of soap worth tuppence from Gossage’s works. The justices sentenced him to 14 days in harsh Kirkdale Gaol in Liverpool, to be ‘well whipped’ and after his release sent to a reformatory. William Gossage himself sent a plea for mercy, urging the court to spare the lad a prison sentence. The state of Widnes, described to peers of the realm, led to the Alkali Act, finally forcing Widnes to start the process of cleaning up its act. Those pioneers, such as Hutchinson, took advantage of the fact there was nobody to oversee or control their activities, the ability to move-in and take over. Early new-Widnesians paid a heavy price for being in at the birth of England’s chemical boom town. Many of the legacies would be apparent more than a century later, many of my age will remember the slag heaps, the galligu, the multi-coloured brooks and waterways. The Latin motto embraced by Widnes Borough Council says it all…. Industria Ditat, or Industry Enriches. Hutchinson and the other pioneers created Widnes from scratch, leaving behind a town we are today proud of.
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 09:35:53 +0000
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