Extra special best best: Black country iron puddling and wrought iron manufacture in the nineteenth century

This paper examines a unique document, the pocket book of a worker at Noah Hingley and Sons' ironworks at Netherton, near Dudley. This book (in a private collection) records the ingredients for the different types of puddled iron produced by the firm during the years 1891-1893. Hingleys were famous for their chains and anchors, and prided themselves on the superior tensile strength and anticorrosion properties of their wrought-iron chains and cables. The notebook makes it clear that differentiation between 'best', 'best best' and other grades took place at the puddling stage rather than during subsequent forging; many of the mixtures described can be associated with different grades advertised by Hingleys at the time.