Facebook post #027 (Aug 2020)
My grandad’s grandad, Daniel Lambert, was a schoolmaster who was apparently an accomplished rower who liked to hobnob with the opera stars of the day. He worked at a British School (pic9) (as opposed to a C of E National School), which focused on the ‘labouring and manufacturing classes’. However, he appears to have deliberately distanced himself from his own working class family. And rumour has it that he was fired for still being in bed in the schoolhouse when the school inspector showed up one day!
The Lamberts may have originally been flemish weavers but by the C18 ours were from the Shrewsbury area (pic8). Long ago, when I first found the paper record which showed that the family living in Horsehay, Shropshire, it conjured up the image of a rural idyll. Wrong! Horsehay was actually an early centre of the industrial revolution. Abram Darby II, builder of The Iron Bridge (pic3), sited his blast furnaces there (pic6 is of the nearby Bedlam Furnace).
Update: Abram funded the village school, and I think Daniel stayed on as a teaching assistant, and then a teacher (see Daniel’s page for more).
Our Jesse (Daniel’s father) had one of the toughest and most skilled jobs of the era, that of an iron puddler (pic5). He produced malleable iron by perpetually stirring and raking molten iron at a controlled temperature until the globs of iron was as heavy as he could lift. Those who survived the back-breaking work, the heat and the fumes generally succumbed to eye problems. The job was never successfully mechanised.
Jesse’s father may have been at the small foundry at the estate of the extraordinary house of Pitchford Hall (pic1), which I visited last year. Some of their iron was used in the ancestor of the sky scraper – Ditherington Flax Mill (pic2). One of Jesse’s nieces was a domestic servant in the great manager’s house, Dale House (pic4), overlooking the world famous Coalbrookdale Works (the biggest in the world when it made the fountain in pic7 for the Great Exhibition). Horsehay carried on making bridges and cranes, for export all over the world, right into the nuclear age.
The photos are mine, other than that of the puddling process, and the archive photo of the school.
