West Sussex, UK - A Stranger and a Fireback
The thing about dealing with the public is that you never know who you are talking to or dealing with. A dustman or an earl, a thief or a bishop they are all to an extent unidentifiable. Speech is a key but it is by no means infallible.
Some years ago I bought a stone sink that came out of a chimney breast in a house in South Terrace, Littlehampton. The terrace was built in the 1860s. The builders at the time had either run out of bricks or were just using reclaimed material at hand but either way they embedded the stone sink into the breast in place of bricks. The owners of the house at the time I am speaking of were removing the chimney altogether and as such called Yapton Metal Co and asked if we would be interested in the bricks and the sink. We were and bought the lot. The sink still had plaster and wall paper adhering to it as it lay in the yard. It was a jolly nice old sink I remember thinking.
A couple of weeks later a chap came into the yard and I found him examining the sink with great interest. I am always interested in other people's interests and in particular when they are interested in things that either interest me or in the case of business have turned up at the yard. I engaged him in conversation and he told me that he worked at the British Museum in the British Archaeology department and did I know that the sink there before us both was in fact 12th century? He told me he could tell by the tooling on the underside. I was intrigued, delighted and quite proud of this fact. Stone sinks then as now are not the fastest of sellers to be honest and I had not paid an awful lot for it but still it was an historical artefact and pre-dated Chaucer. He was a genial, pleasantly dressed, likeable man in probably his late thirties. We chatted away for a while until he made his goodbyes and left. Three days later the sink was stolen!
Coincidence? I'm certain it was not. Did the likeable man from the BM steal it? I don't know. Maybe he had it stolen to protect it? I don't know. All I do know is that we never saw it again. As I say, you never know who you are talking to.
Last summer I had a man come in to the yard who looked around and who then took a great interest in my collection of cast iron firebacks - I have about thirty or so at the moment. He was he told me, writing the definitive work on English firebacks and his name was Jeremy Hodgkinson and he lived in Crawley. He looked mine over while telling me about the fine collection in Anne of Cleves house in Lewes that had aided his research so much. He told many anecdotes about the research for his book and was generally fascinating. He further enlightened me on the difference between a fireback and a stove plate of which I have three. Some stove plates have flanged edges and were in fact sides of cast iron stoves with decoration on them that when dismantled or scrapped - once the innards were worn out - were used as firebacks. Another form of plate was used in what is now Belgium and the adjoining area of France and Germany, in the regions known as Wallonia and Lorraine. Here decorated cast iron plates identical to firebacks were used as partitions behind fireplaces to serve as radiators of heat into an adjoining room. They were known in France as taques de foyer and in Germany as takenplatten. Many of these found their way to Britain.
Jeremy told me of the similarity between firebacks and cast iron grave slabs which are found in many churches in the Weald and a few in the west Midlands. He says that probably the earliest graveslab made of cast iron is to be found in the parish church at Burwash in East Sussex. Anyway all of my firebacks and my three fireplates with one English exception were from the continent. The one exception was probably, he thought, of Wealden origin "of 1632 with the initials formed in a monogram and the date stamp over-pressed". He asked me if he could photograph it and include it in his book. I asked him if in return I might receive a copy of the book and rather to my astonishment he agreed. I duly received the book last October when it was published with the picture of my fireback on page 123. The book was retailing at £24.99 and I was delighted to have a copy with a covering letter outlining our bargain. In all honesty I would have let him have the picture for nothing but it goes to show nothing ventured nothing gained eh?
I have a large three and a half hundredweight fireback with a crack in it or tear as I describe it. I showed it to Jeremy who said it was German and asked if he thought my deduction about how the crack formed was correct. I described a day when the mould for this fireback in my possession was ready to receive the molten iron from the blast furnace. The mould is open backed with the decorative side downwards in the casting sand. (It is the back and edge of a fireback that tells the story: if you see angle-grinder marks you know it's modern. Sharp edges, uniform surfaces all tell of efficient modern production irrespective of how 'old' the front looks.) The back of my fireback was literally in a pitiful state pockmarked with tiny craters, runnels and a thousand imperfections. I know exactly what happened that day because something similar happened to me when I was casting art bronzes in the yard back in the 80s and 90s.
As the metal flowed that day in 1650, from the blast furnace to the moulds of which there would have been several waiting to be cast, the sky darkened ominously and black, bloated rain clouds gathered over head. The plug of the furnace is opened with a bott stick (I think it is called) and when the metal is pouring the caster wants to get all the metal into all the moulds as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Almost as soon as the mould with my fireback in was full of white hot metal the rain started. It was not just any old rain it was torrential. It may even have been hail. As it hit the back of the fireback which was rapidly cooling the fat drops of rain or hail smashed onto the hot metal and it must have hissed like five hundred geese and steamed like an old locomotive! The rain/hail created little miniature chilled areas and the hot molten metal now rapidly cooling and contracting beneath the setting skin of metal collapsed in a thousand or more mini- craters. This continued through the duration of the setting, chilling metal.
Two hundred years later the fire back started to tear and crack through the expansion and contraction caused through its use and the imperfections inherent in the metal caused through that days weather when it was created.
Jeremy liked the story. He didn't know if my scenario was correct or not, but it is.
Yapton Metal Co
Amazon: British Cast-iron Firebacks of the 16th to Mid 18th Centuries by Jeremy Hodgkinson
Story Type: Columnist
ID: 61886
Date Modified: September 23, 2011, 09:38 AM
