John Marley (mining Engineer)
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

John Marley (11 November 1823 – 4 April 1891) was an English
mining engineer Mining engineering is the extraction of minerals from the ground. It is associated with many other disciplines, such as mineral processing, exploration, excavation, geology, metallurgy, geotechnical engineering and surveying. A mining engineer m ...
from
Darlington Darlington is a market town in the Borough of Darlington, County Durham, England. It lies on the River Skerne, west of Middlesbrough and south of Durham. Darlington had a population of 107,800 at the 2021 Census, making it a "large town" ...
who together with ironmaster John Vaughan made the "commercial discovery" of the Cleveland Ironstone Formation, the basis of the wealth of their company
Bolckow Vaughan Bolckow, Vaughan & Co., Ltd was an English steelmaking, ironmaking and mining company founded in 1864, based on the partnership since 1840 of its two founders, Henry Bolckow and John Vaughan (ironmaster), John Vaughan. The firm drove the dramat ...
and the industrial growth of
Middlesbrough Middlesbrough ( ), colloquially known as Boro, is a port town in the Borough of Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, England. Lying to the south of the River Tees, Middlesbrough forms part of the Teesside Built up area, built-up area and the Tees Va ...
.North of England Institute of Mining Engineers. Transactions Volume VI, 1857-8.
He was an effective leader of engineering operations at Bolckow Vaughan's mines and collieries. He ended his career as a wealthy independent mine-owner and president of the
North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers (NEIMME), commonly known as The Mining Institute, is a British Royal Chartered learned society and membership organisation dedicated to advancing science and technology in the N ...
(NEIMME).


Life and career

Marley was born at Middridge Grange, by
Shildon Shildon is a town and civil parish in County Durham (district), County Durham, in England. The population taken at the 2011 Census was 9,976. The town has the Locomotion Museum, due to it having the first , built in 1825, and locomotive works on ...
,
County Durham County Durham, officially simply Durham, is a ceremonial county in North East England.UK General Acts 1997 c. 23Lieutenancies Act 1997 Schedule 1(3). From legislation.gov.uk, retrieved 6 April 2022. The county borders Northumberland and Tyne an ...
, England, not far from the town of Heighington. He was educated at Denton near
Darlington Darlington is a market town in the Borough of Darlington, County Durham, England. It lies on the River Skerne, west of Middlesbrough and south of Durham. Darlington had a population of 107,800 at the 2021 Census, making it a "large town" ...
. From 1840 he served as assistant at several Durham collieries (coal mines). In 1845 he worked as a surveyor for the
Stockton and Darlington Railway The Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) was a railway company that operated in north-east England from 1825 to 1863. The world's first public railway to use steam locomotives, its first line connected coal mining, collieries near with ...
.Institution of Civil Engineers. ''Obituary'', 1891. In 1846 he became resident viewer at Woodifield Colliery, the start of his career at Bolckow & Vaughan. Over the next two decades, he became the head of engineering operations for Bolckow and Vaughan's mines and collieries, capably organising a wide range of mining operations. In 1850, Vaughan and Marley made their famous "discovery" of the main seam of Cleveland Ironstone. The existence of iron in the Cleveland hills was in fact well known, possibly since ancient times and certainly since at least 1811, as repeated attempts had been made to sell it, but without success. In 1852, Marley, then at
Bishop Auckland Bishop Auckland ( ) is a market town and civil parishes in England, civil parish at the confluence of the River Wear and the River Gaunless in County Durham, England. It is northwest of Darlington and southwest of Durham, England, Durham. M ...
, became a founding member of the
North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers (NEIMME), commonly known as The Mining Institute, is a British Royal Chartered learned society and membership organisation dedicated to advancing science and technology in the N ...
(NEIMME);NEIMME: MEMOIR OF JOHN MARLEY. BY His Son, J. W. MARLEY.
he joined the NEIMME council in 1856, giving his address as Mining Offices, Darlington. He became Vice-President in 1872. He served as President from 1888 to 1890.
/ref> In 1863, Marley discovered a deposit of rock salt at Middlesbrough while drilling for water. He resigned from Bolckow Vaughan in 1867, but continued to consult with them until 1869. In 1870, Marley became chairman of his own company, the newly registered North Brancepeth Coal Co. Ltd. It grew to include 4 collieries.
/ref>


Family

By 1881, John Marley was living at Thornfield House, Darlington with his wife Sarah, four daughters, Caroline, Florence, Ethel and Isabel, and a son, Hugh. Another son J.W. Marley wrote a posthumous biographical note about Marley for the Institution of Mining Engineers. His nephew, Thomas William Marley followed him as chairman of the North Brancepeth Coal company.


"Discovery"


History and geology

Iron has been worked in Cleveland on a small scale since before Roman times. The Cleveland Ironstone Formation consists of seams of marine
ironstone Ironstone is a sedimentary rock, either deposited directly as a ferruginous sediment or created by chemical replacement, that contains a substantial proportion of an iron ore compound from which iron (Fe) can be smelted commercially. Not to be c ...
alternating with
shale Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock formed from mud that is a mix of flakes of Clay mineral, clay minerals (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g., Kaolinite, kaolin, aluminium, Al2Silicon, Si2Oxygen, O5(hydroxide, OH)4) and tiny f ...
and
siltstone Siltstone, also known as aleurolite, is a clastic sedimentary rock that is composed mostly of silt. It is a form of mudrock with a low clay mineral content, which can be distinguished from shale by its lack of fissility. Although its permeabil ...
, of Lower Jurassic age.Tvrigs.org.uk: Cleveland Ironstone Formation
The Cleveland Ironstone Formation represents the Middle Lias or Upper
Pliensbachian The Pliensbachian is an age of the geologic timescale and stage in the stratigraphic column. It is part of the Early or Lower Jurassic Epoch or Series and spans the time between 192.9 ±0.3 Ma and 184.2 ±0.3 Ma (million years ago). The Plie ...
-Domerian. Two
Ammonite Ammonoids are extinct, (typically) coiled-shelled cephalopods comprising the subclass Ammonoidea. They are more closely related to living octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish (which comprise the clade Coleoidea) than they are to nautiluses (family N ...
zones (rock layers identified by particular fossils) are (largely) included: those indexed by '' Pleuroceras spinatum'' and '' Amaltheus margaritatus''.


Legend

The local newspaper ''
The Northern Echo ''The Northern Echo'' is a regional daily morning newspaper based in the town of Darlington in North East England, serving mainly southern County Durham and northern Yorkshire. The paper covers national as well as regional news. In 2007, its the ...
'' records the legend of Marley's discovery: "Legend has it that on June 8, 1850, the two men were out shooting rabbits in the Cleveland Hills. Marley tripped over a burrow. As he sprawled down the hole, his hand landed on the purest ironstone he had ever seen. "Eureka!" he shouted." The ''Echo'' at once adds "This does the men a disservice."The Northern Echo. ''From the Cleveland Hills to India''. Chris Lloyd. 16 December 2009.
Retrieved 11 March 2012.


Commercial reality

The discovery was no serendipitous accident. Marley was asked by his employer, John Vaughan, co-founder of the company
Bolckow Vaughan Bolckow, Vaughan & Co., Ltd was an English steelmaking, ironmaking and mining company founded in 1864, based on the partnership since 1840 of its two founders, Henry Bolckow and John Vaughan (ironmaster), John Vaughan. The firm drove the dramat ...
to study the geology of
Cleveland Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–U.S. maritime border and approximately west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania st ...
, to help him locate a profitably thick seam of ironstone, conveniently close to Middlesbrough. Bolckow Vaughan had already in 1848 "collected and shipped to Middlesbrough several thousand tons found on the coast between Redcar and Skinningrove"; Vaughan guessed that the same thick seams including the main bed might be found inland, in the Eston and Upleatham hills near the railway. On 8 June 1850, Marley and Vaughan walked the coast to survey it for workable iron ore, expecting to find places where they could "bore" down to find useful amounts. They discovered seams of the ironstone running from the North Yorkshire coast at Staithes inland to the Eston Hills, outcropping at the surface. This find was swiftly exploited, and
Middlesbrough Middlesbrough ( ), colloquially known as Boro, is a port town in the Borough of Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, England. Lying to the south of the River Tees, Middlesbrough forms part of the Teesside Built up area, built-up area and the Tees Va ...
grew very rapidly to support the new ironworks developed by Bolckow Vaughan and others in the area. The main ironstone seam (see illustration) in the Eston Hills is 16 feet thick. Marley is recorded as doubting "whether the Romans or the Monks f Rievaulxever smelted any part of the main bed of ironstone, which has in recent years proved such a source of wealth to the North, because in the various remains of slag and refuse left by them in
Bilsdale Bilsdale is a Dale (landform), dale in the western part of the North York Moors in North Yorkshire, England. The head of the dale is at Hasty Bank, and the dale extends south to meet Rye Dale near Hawnby. The dale is the valley of the River ...
, Bransdale, Rosedale, Furnace House in Fryupdale, Rievaulx Abbey, and other places, no traces of the main seam of ironstone have been found, although 'dogger band' (or thin clay bands of ironstone) and 'nodules' have been so found along with the charcoal and slag." Marley described his discovery as follows: "Mr. Vaughan and myself, having gone to examine the hills for the most suitable place for boring, we decided to ascend to the east, adjoining Sir J. H. Lowther's grounds, and so walk along to Lady Hewley's grounds on the west. In ascending the hill in Mr. C. Dryden's grounds, we picked up two or three small pieces of ironstone. We, therefore, continued our ascent until we came to a quarry hole, from whence this ironstone had been taken for roads, and next, on entering Sir J. H. Lowther's grounds to the west, a solid rock of ironstone was lying bare, upwards of sixteen feet thick."Jeans, 1875, pages 80–81 The legend about the rabbit-hole did have some basis in reality: the many rabbit and fox holes provided the prospecting geologists with samples of the underlying rock (away from surface exposures of the geology at natural cliffs) at intervals along the ironstone outcrop. Marley stated "I need scarcely say that, having once found this bed, we had no difficulty in following the outcrop in going westward, without any boring, as the rabbit and fox holes therein were plentiful as we went." The commercial benefit of the "discovery" was simple: the ironstone was exposed at the surface, "which rendered boring unnecessary." The rock could simply be quarried, and rolled in tramway wagons down to a 2-mile extension of the railway. The rate of growth of ironstone production was prodigious. In 1850, just 4,000 tons of Cleveland Ironstone were extracted. The railway extension opened on 6 January 1851, and in that year, 187,950 tons were extracted. In 1857, Marley published a paper in the ''Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers'' on the Cleveland Ironstone, which begins: "To the members of this Institute, this ironstone cannot but be an interesting subject, whether they be mining engineers, coal owners, iron masters, or simply a part of the public personally disinterested, as I believe that nothing has been discovered, within the last twenty years, having so direct an influence on the landed, railway, and mineral wealth, in the North of England, on the South Durham coal field, and on the iron trade generally, as the discovery and application of this large ironstone district."Marley, 1857. Marley continued: "I suppose it may now be taken as an admitted fact, that the prosperity or depression of the iron and coal trades regulates, in a very material degree, the prosperity or depression of nearly all other commercial pursuits in the same locality." Marley was correct. In 1864, just 14 years after the discovery of the rich source of ironstone, Bolckow, Vaughan and Company Ltd was registered with capital of £2,500,000, making it the largest company ever formed up to that time.Durham Mining Museum: Bolckow, Vaughan & Co. Ltd.
/ref>Pitts, 2007. Middlesbrough more than doubled in population from 7600 in 1851 to 19,000 in 1861, and then doubled again to 40,000 in 1871, driven by the iron industry.


References


Sources

* Anon
''Obituary. John Marley, 1823–1891''
Minutes of the Proceedings, Institution of Civil Engineers, Vol. 105, 1891, 308–311. * Jeans, James Stephen.
Pioneers of the Cleveland Iron Trade
'. H.G. Reid, Middlesbrough-on-Tees. 1875. * Marley, John.
Cleveland Ironstone. Outline Of The Main Or Thick Stratified Bed, Its Discovery, Application, And Results, In Connection With The Iron-Works In The North Of England
' Transactions of the North of England Institute of Mining Engineers, Vol. V, 1857, 165-223. * Marley, John. '
On the Discovery of Rock Salt in the New Red Sandstone at Middlesbrough
'' Transactions of the North of England Institute of Mining Engineers, Vol. XIII, 1863, 17-24. * Marley, J.W.
Memoir Of John Marley. By His Son, J. W. Marley
'. Transactions of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, Vol. 41, 1891–92, 28-30. * Pitts, Marianne.
How are the mighty fallen: Bolckow Vaughan Co. Ltd. 1864–1929
'. April 2007.


External links

*

* ttp://www.mininginstitute.org.uk/ North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers (NEIMME)
Cleveland Ironstone Mining Museum




(Cleveland Ironstone geology with photographs and diagrams)
'A Century in Stone' film by Craig Hornby featuring dramatisation of Vaughan and Marley's discovery at Eston
{{DEFAULTSORT:Marley, John 1823 births 1891 deaths British geologists People from Heighington, County Durham English mining engineers People from Shildon