A man of stainless character

This year the steel city is preparing to honour one of its greatest men. Michael Hickling reports.

Harry Brearley was an original, a one-off from a unique mould. He discovered something while he was actually looking for something else and it changed the world – stainless steel.

But first he invented himself. The products that eventually flowed from the resourceful hands and brain of this scientist and industrialist became known in every household. Yet he had never been to university nor had any business training. Incredibly, he had never even been to school properly.

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His career flourished because he always remained his own man and had a ferocious capacity for work. His method was to progress one step at a time and then only after the next move had been verified by his own tests, observations and judgement.

That’s the pragmatic side of the man. But sketch out his personal story and you have the makings of a plot for one of those massive three-decker Victorian novels by George Gissing.

Indeed Harry, a man of broad sympathies and imagination, did consider a career as a writer but rejected the idea because it was too insecure. In outline, here was a boy from nowhere, virtually starving on Sheffield’s streets, who went to work at the age of 12.

Young Brearley rose up the ladder of one of Sheffield’s greatest steelmakers and eventually found himself in charge of a steelworks they owned in Riga in Latvia, then part of Russia.

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It was 1905 and the Russian revolution kicked off not long after Harry took over. The steelworks were torn by strife – hit-men turned up on the site and murdered the foreman and the workforce was riven by strikes and intrigue. Harry, a socialist who believed skilled workers knew better than the masters when it came to workplace decision making, found it a bruising experience.

He came back in Sheffield in 1907 and in the year before the First World War he discovered how to make stainless steel – an invention which his employers promptly pooh-poohed.

They saw no value in it and the story went round that Harry was the inventor of “the knife that will not cut”. When they did see the light and the money that was to be made from Harry’s new material, they fought tooth and nail for years to deny him his fair share.

Some people are born with a silver spoon. Harry’s was base metal. Indeed there seem to have been hardly any spoons at all in the house of Jane Brearley. She and her steelworker husband John were already bringing up seven children in a house in a backyard off Spital Street when John was born on the 18 February, 1871. The couple were to have nine offspring all told and their house has since been lost under a Tesco.

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Harry’s beginnings were not so much humble as desperate. But his early life experiences turn upside down the notion that your early environment forms the adult.

The evidence comes in Harry’s own words in a letter which he wrote to his son Leo and which grew into an autobiography which he titled Knotted String.

By this date, the start of 1929, he was a self-made success and maybe he was looking back through rose-tinted glasses. But the stark facts of his early home life are clear enough in what Harry wrote.

“The house would be less than 12ft sq. How we lived I don’t know, and I have no idea how my mother managed to keep us reasonably clean...

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“I cared less than nothing about going to school but I was enchanted by the crowded interest in the surrounding streets... I learned many things in those early days which left no room in my mind for school lessons. I learned how to transfer horse beans from the grain warehouse to my pocket, I had good teeth and I enjoyed eating them..

“The boys at Woodside [School] were a ragamuffin lot. I remember going to school in a smock made from fine sacking; harding I think the stuff was called. I have no idea how I learned to read. There were no books at home.

“I first began to work at Marsland’s Clog Shop, the most ill-fitting child that ever started to earn something of his own living.”

Harry had three jobs before the authorities discovered he was working illegally: 12 was below the minimum age required by the Factory Act. But his account of working as a cellar lad in a crucible steel making reveals astute observations.

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“The cellar lad begins at once to know the properties of the materials with which he has to work and to accept responsibility for an appreciable part of the furnace tools... The correction for these shortcomings, and indeed for every other which can be fathered on the lad, is to cuff him with a wet handbag.

“There are two outstanding things a cellar lad learns. One is to do as he is told; the wet handbag treatment takes care of that part of his education. He also notices that the men he works for and amongst are different. To fetch ale was not a great job but I noticed it was not always the man drinking least ale who was most able to do his job, most agreeable in his manners or most generous in his disposition...To look at things from other people’s points of view, to see how circumstances affect conduct, to avoid jumping to hasty conclusions of what is right and what is wrong, and generally to get agreeable impressions of people who seem to have unconventional weaknesses may be part of a boy’s experiences amongst grown men...”

Harry found menial work in a steelworks laboratory where his contact with the new chemist in charge, called James Taylor, was to be a life-changer. “I was still but twelve years of age and, therefore, very impressionable. The first day spent with James Taylor left an impression I shall never forget. I had not been in a laboratory before...

“During the second week Taylor asked me what I read and I said the Boys of England, the Boys Comic Journal and Jack Harkaway. He appeared not to have heard of these papers and I noticed no smile of recognition or approval when I produced copies for his inspection. He offered me a copy of Roscoe’s Chemistry.

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“Eventually, and in the first place for a reason I cannot make clear to myself, I worked diligently at whatever books Taylor suggested to me. The first was The Irish National Arithmetic. With this book I began at simple addition and worked to the end... After a year with Taylor I understood arithmetic and could manipulate its processes as easily and intimately as I could handle a peg-top.

“Nearly everything I did or attempted to do seems to have roots running back to Taylor... He had ideas about economics, education, social welfare, politics, literature and general science and I took everything he said for gospel.”

Harry went to Bible class at the Sunday school as a way of meeting a young woman called Nellie who was to become his wife. But it was also a hot-bed of ideas from young working class men with exciting radical views on social change.

He decided to be an analyst but lacking any kind of training became an autodidact. “I read for six hours every day. I was so poor that I had to provide a week’s lunches out of eighteen pence. A brown loaf and dates costing three pence halfpenny would serve for two days, but when funds were low I would buy a pennyworth of wheat and take a walk whilst I ate it.

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“By the time I was 25 I was married and living in a cottage on the edge of the Derbyshire moors for which we paid a weekly rent of three shillings and sixpence... We disappeared from home one morning, without warning, and were married at a register office… we lived chiefly on bread, baked onions and apple pie...

“I was in love with my work and could think of few better things than the privilege of living to continue it.”

In May, 1912, Harry visited a small arms factory to study erosion in rifle barrels. He began trials with low-carbon, high chromium steels and found those with 24 per cent carbon and 12.8 per chromium cent to be most promising. They were also found to be resistant to vinegar and other food acids like lemon juice.

He thought his employers, Firth’s, would see the possibilities this offered, not for rifle barrels but knives and forks. Instead they rubbished the idea. “From the end of 1913 onwards I lost no opportunity of urging the usefulness of this steel for cutlery purposes. Some of the steel was ultimately sent to two Sheffield cutlers for making into blades. I know that after several months the steel was reported to be useless for cutler purposes on account of difficulties in forging, grinding, and hardening.”

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“Rustless” was the term used for this steel formula until a Mr Stuart, the cutlery manager at RF Mosley, another Sheffield manufacturer, came up with the more memorable “stainless”.

Harry was getting nowhere with his own employer and took matters into his own hands. He bought a quantity of the steel from them and “part of this steel was made into knives, which were distributed, generally in odd ones, among my friends and Mr Stuart’s, with the request that they should be returned if by contact with any kind of food, fruit, or condiment, they could be stained or caused to rust. Not a single knife failed at this test…

“So far as the initial use of stainless steel is concerned, Mosley’s are the firm to whom credit is due…”

Harry resigned from his job. “I left Firth’s feeling that I had been wronged…I am not generally regarded as a quarrelsome person, and if I have had to adopt a fighting attitude it has been in self defence and in defence of those associated with me; also, maybe, in protection of other young men who may find themselves similarly at variance with powerful manufacturing interests.”

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A judge in America, who later had to rule on a challenge in Pittsburg to Harry’s American stainless steel patent, concluded, “No-one could see Mr Brearley without being persuaded of his absolute integrity and the moderation of his claims”.

Harry was presented with the Freedom of the City of Sheffield in 1939 and died in 1948 but not before he had set up the Freshgate Trust Foundation. It has since paid out more than £2m at current rates to hundreds of charitable groups in South Yorkshire.

Perry Else, one of the trustees, who is a lecturer at Hallam University, has been one of the leaders of a group organising events to celebrate Harry’s stainless steel discovery. It begins on February 16 with Designed to Shine, an exhibition at the Sheffield Millennium Gallery followed by a year-long events programme.

“There’s no-one left who knew him,” says Perry Else. “His son followed his own path. There is a grandson in Australia. He is too ill to travel for the celebration but a great niece is coming.”

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