Brickmaker

Brickmaker

Stroll through St Ives town centre and admire the brickwork of over 150 listed buildings. Look closely and a fascinating detail emerges. Many bricks shared the same mould, marked by a distinct diagonal or parallel line across their surface. You'll find the whole story of bricks in St Ives, from two inch Tudor bricks to red and gault bricks. Read on to learn about the brickmaker and brickmaking in St Ives.

Mould markings, Tudor bricks and construction before bricks, all from St Ives.

Origins

The Romans brought advanced brickmaking to Britain, but the craft vanished when they left around 400 AD. For centuries, builders turned back to what was close at hand, using timber and stone.

Bricks made a comeback in the 1300s, when builders imported bricks, and then the brickmakers themselves, from Flanders. Home production started in eastern counties, where timber was in short supply but fine clay was plenty.  By the Tudor period, brickmaking was a thriving local industry. Grand homes like Hampton Court Palace demonstrated brick was no longer just a cheap alternative to stone, but a luxury choice fit for royalty.

Disaster changed the industry in the 1600s. After devastating fires swept through wooden towns, most notably the Great Fire of London in 1666, new laws banned timber for external walls, and brick became the new standard.

Training brickmakers

The secrets of the brickyard were passed down through generations of the same families. Learning the trade was a tough, lifelong journey that usually started in early childhood.

Children as young as six or seven began their working lives as pug boys or girls. Their days were spent doing the heavy, repetitive work of carrying wet clay to the moulder or taking the fragile, unbaked green bricks out to the drying flats. Through this hard labour, they learned exactly how the clay felt and how it changed in different weather.

As the children grew stronger, they became temperers, mixing the raw clay with water to get the texture just right. Only after years of this preparation, usually in their late teens, were they allowed to step up to the moulder's bench.

Brickyard moulder at Bottesford c1910.

The moulder was king of the brickyard. He would throw a lump of clay into a wooden frame, wipe away any excess with a wooden tool, and turn out a perfect brick in seconds. A master moulder worked with incredible rhythm, making up to 4,000 bricks in a twelve hour day. The job required a flawless coordination of hand and eye, an endurance that few modern workers could match, and a deep-seated pride in an exhausting craft.

The process of brickmaking

Before steam machinery arrived in the mid 1800s, brickmaking was a seasonal job that began in autumn. During November and December, workers dug out the clay and laid it in shallow beds. Winter frost, rain, and snow did the vital work of breaking down the tough clods to make them soft and usable.

In spring, the clay was tempered. Men and children treaded the wet mud barefoot, or horses walked in circles around a pug mill to grind down stones and blend the mixture.

Moulding started in May. The moulder worked at a table using one of two methods; slop moulding, where the wooden frame was dipped in water, or sand moulding, which coated the frame in fine sand to give the finished brick a textured face.

Brickmakers by Denis Dighton, 1821.

The delicate 'green' bricks were wheeled to drying flats and stacked in long rows called hacks, protected from the rain by straw or wooden hurdles. They dried in the sun and wind for three to six weeks. A sudden frost or heavy downpour could dissolve a whole month of work back into mud.

Finally, the bricks were fired. Smaller yards used temporary stacks called clamps, layered with coal dust, which smouldered for weeks and filled the neighbourhood with thick smoke. Larger yards used permanent kilns, which gave much better control over the heat to produce a harder brick.

Dangers and benefits for workers

The brickyard was a place of physical danger and relentless hardship. Working barefoot or in heavy, waterlogged boots in wet clay led to chronic rheumatism, while breathing in damp mist and coal smoke caused severe respiratory illnesses. The sheer weight of material caused spinal deformities, and young pug boys and girls carrying forty pound loads of clay on their heads often suffered stunted growth.

Children carrying clay, Illustrated London News 1871.

Clay banks could collapse without warning, burying workers alive in the pits, and unguarded machinery regularly claimed fingers and limbs. The heat from the kilns was intense, and workers risked severe burns when loading or unloading the hot bricks.

Yet the trade offered distinct benefits that drew rural families in. When farming wages were miserably low and work uncertain, a brickyard offered higher potential earnings through piece work, paying workers for every thousand bricks produced.

Whole families worked as a team. A husband might mould, his wife prepare the clay at the bench, and their children run the bricks to the drying hacks. This collective earning power helped families survive the lean winter months when the yards closed. It fostered a fierce sense of community and independence among the workers, who became known for their rough manners, heavy drinking, and absolute loyalty to one another.

Legislation

The British government introduced the Brick Tax in 1784 to help pay for the American War of Independence. Originally set at two shillings and sixpence per thousand bricks, the duty quickly rose. Because there was no standard brick size, clever brickmakers made their bricks much larger so builders needed fewer of them. The government caught on and legally standardised brick sizes to ten by five by three inches. This pushed up building costs and made affordable housing scarce until the tax was abolished in 1850.

For decades, brickyards were notorious for exploiting child labour. They evaded early factory laws because they were small, seasonal, open air operations. The Factories and Workshops Act of 1871 finally targeted them, banning the employment of girls under sixteen and boys under ten. While this changed the traditional family production system, abuses continued. In 1896, the factory inspector reported to Huntingdon Town Council that yards in St Ives were still forcing boys as young as seven and eight to work illegal hours.

As towns like St Ives grew, the choking smoke from kilns caused major legal battles. New public health laws allowed councils to take brickmakers to court for causing a nuisance, eventually forcing yards to move further outside town.

Height of brickmaking

The 1800s saw a massive expansion in the brickmaking industry, driven by the explosive growth of manufacturing towns and the arrival of the railways.

To meet this huge demand, the industry had to transform. The end of the Brick Tax in 1850 sparked a massive boom, and new steam powered machinery could stamp out thousands of bricks an hour. Huge industrial yards emerged, particularly in the Fletton area near Peterborough, where the Oxford Clay was perfect for mass producing cheap, strong bricks. By the end of the century, billions of bricks were being fired every year.

Decline of the industry

The twentieth century brought a slow, steady decline to the traditional English brickyard, mostly due to new building materials and changing architecture.

After the First World War, the urgent need for homes forced builders to find faster, cheaper methods. Concrete could be poured quickly and began to replace brick for large engineering projects, foundations, and commercial buildings. The introduction of breeze blocks also reduced the number of bricks needed for inside walls.

Small local brickyards, which relied on local clay and hand crafting, could not compete with massive, mechanised brickworks. Large operations like those at Fletton produced bricks at a fraction of the cost and sent them across country using improved rail and road networks.

One by one, small parish brick pits fell silent. Old open air drying areas rotted away, kilns were pulled down and empty clay pits filled with water, turning into quiet lakes.

Brickmaking in St Ives

St Ives sits on rich deposits of alluvial clays and brickearth along the edge of the Oxford Clay belt. Local brickmakers used these deposits to hand mould and hand fire traditional Tudor style two inch bricks. You can still see examples of these bricks in part of a wall in Westwood Road, and a remaining wall in Wellington Street. These bricks fell out of production after a 1725 Act of Parliament standardised brick thickness to two and a half inches.

The town's brickyards received a massive boost after the devastating fire of 1689 destroyed a third of St Ives, wiping out many of the oldest buildings. Wooden and thatched properties were replaced with safer brick and tile.

View of St Ives from How Hill by R Harraden, 1802.

One brickworks that benefited was located at The How, on the current site of Bermans Park, shown in the above image. Clay digging started there in the 1500s to supply material for timber framed houses. By 1728, Edmund Pettis's map showed two industrial kilns at Brick Kiln How. The site was highly prized because it had high quality clay, sat right next to the River Great Ouse for easy transport, and met the surging demand for rebuilding the town.

The yard grew rapidly during the 1700s. By the early 1800s, the surface clay used for dark red bricks ran out. Using deeper clay produced very hard, pale gault bricks, which are visible in many St Ives buildings today. In 1822, leaseholder John Margetts produced one and a quarter million bricks to build the New Bridges Causeway. Completed in just twenty three weeks, the seven hundred foot structure with fifty five arches remains the longest road causeway in the UK. At its peak, the constant carting and dense, sulphurous smoke from the open kilns shattered the peace of nearby walks along The Thicket. John Skeeles wrote in his Notes on the History of St Ives:

Naturally the working of the yard by carting, wheeling silt, coals, bricks etc. to and from the barges detracted from the pleasure of walks to The Thicket. Also the dense clouds of sulphurous smoke from the open kilns were a nuisance to the How House.

Ordnance Survey map of the How Brickworks, St Ives, 1886.

The 1886 map above shows the brickworks expanding eastward. The business closed in 1888 when the best local clay ran out and massive, industrial brickworks offered unbeatable competition. By 1891, the site was cleared for cattle grazing, became a golf course in 1923, and eventually turned into today's peaceful country park. You can still spot the remains of an old kiln as a hollowed out area on the right of the Thicket Path when walking away from St Ives.

Another major operation was John Saint and Sons brickworks, located where Compass Point Business Park and the Aldi supermarket stand today. This was an extensive site with large excavation pits, drying sheds, and permanent kilns. The clay here produced a sturdy, reliable brick used for local railway works, cottages, and factories. The company also built houses.

Ordnance Survey map of John Saint and Sons Brickworks, 1900.

The Brickmaker's Arms pub was built right beside the yard in 1889. At the time, this was considered well out of town, sitting in Needingworth Parish. Since St Ives town centre already had plenty of pubs, building one specifically to serve Saint and Sons' workers shows just how big the operation was. The brickworks closed in 1917 as the clay ran out, and the pub was demolished after closing in 1932. The main pit where clay was dug, shown in the 1900 map above, is still visible today from Somersham Road as large pond.

Not all local brickmakers played by the rules. In 1845, St Ives baker and brickmaker Thomas Harris appeared in court for tax fraud. He was caught hiding bricks taxable under the Brick Tax beneath stacks of tax-exempt drainage bricks. Despite his foreman trying to blame the workers, Harris was fined one hundred and fifty pounds, sixteen thousand pounds today.

Evidence of even older yards still lingers in St Ives. In Church Street, residents regularly dig up large pieces of slag in their gardens, evidence that brickmaking once took place at that location.

Brickmaking workers

The Hard family were brickmaking workers from St Ives. Like many others in the trade, they were Hard by name and hard by nature.

In 1845, Daniel Hard appeared in the Priory Road courtroom charged with assaulting a hairdresser named George Smith, which resulted in a fine. Daniel found himself in trouble again in 1863, when he ended up in gaol for twenty one days after swearing at staff while trying to get an overnight stay at St Ives Workhouse.

William Hard worked as both a brickmaker and the publican of the Brickmaker's Arms. He had been with John Saint and Sons for twenty eight years when disaster struck in 1897. William was operating a brick moulding machine when clay stuck in the blades. Instead of using the proper tool to clear it, he tried to push the clay in with his foot. His leg was drawn into the machinery and ripped off. Carried home to the pub, Dr Grove administered chloroform and amputated the rest of William's limb. Sadly, he died from shock a few hours later, aged forty seven.

Alexander Kirby was another local brickyard worker who lived in poverty and regularly fell foul of the law. In 1846, the twenty year old failed to turn up at the Priory Road court to answer charges of damaging a can and walking out on his job. He had promised to make one hundred and fifty thousand bricks for master brickmaker Lot Piot. Kirby managed to avoid prison by promising to mend his ways, and was let off with a fine of nineteen shillings, about one hundred pounds today.

In 1855, Alexander was back in court for beating his mother. His ten year old brother had originally called the constable, but once in the courtroom, the brother denied the whole thing. The case was paused so the mother and sister could be brought in, and Alexander was sent straight to prison. Free for just a month, he was hauled back to court for assault in a pub, where the magistrates described him as a savage tempered man and fined him two pounds and ten shillings.

Alexander married Mary Ann Bott of St Ives in 1856. Five years later, he was fined one pound for assaulting her. He got a taste of his own medicine in 1866 when two men appeared in court for assaulting Alexander.

In 1867, Alexander and his brother were ordered to pay for their mother's care in the St Ives Workhouse. A month later, his wife went looking for Alexander in the local pubs late on a Sunday night. When he finally stumbled home, Alexander thanked his wife for her trouble; he beat her about the head and face in a brutal manner, and knocked her down stairs. The court sentenced him to twenty one days of hard labour. He died the following year, aged forty two.