Hay Mills wire works (Webster & Horsfall)

History

A mill on the Cole

Hay Mill stood on the River Cole, east of Birmingham, in the old parish of Yardley. It belonged to Hay Hall and was at first a corn mill. By the seventeenth century it ground blades, and in 1820 it was described as a blade mill that could be turned to corn or paper. Between 1836 and 1840 it was held by William Deakin, who may have made gun barrels or bayonets.

Wire comes to Hay Mills

Soon after that the tenants were ‘Smith and Horsfall’ and James Horsfall, a music-wire maker. Horsfall, a wire-drawer from Digbeth, had demolished the old mill and built new works about 100 metres to the north, including a new wire-drawing mill. In 1853 he patented a heat treatment that made steel wire much stronger. In 1855 he went into partnership with the Websters of Penns Mill, Sutton Coldfield, the most famous wire-makers in the country, and in 1859 their production moved from Penns to Hay Mills. When Baron Dickinson Webster died in 1860, Webster & Horsfall was Horsfall’s.

Wire for the ocean

The same spot, then and now

1888–1913

Today

In May 1864 the firm won the contract for the armouring wire of the new Atlantic telegraph cable: 1,600 tons, due within about a year. A great shop, seventy to eighty yards square, was built or enlarged for the job. A report of 1866 describes men each tending a drum as the wire was drawn down through dies from one size to the next, then tested at 1,000 pounds. Ten of these wires were wound spirally round the cable’s core. Hay Mills drew about 30,000 miles in all.

The 1865 cable was lost in mid-Atlantic, partly because broken flakes of armouring wire pierced its insulation. The firm still got the repeat order for 1866, using a softer, galvanised wire. That year the Great Eastern laid the new cable and recovered the old one. At Christmas 1866 Horsfall’s workers gave him a case of samples of the 1858, 1865 and 1866 cables, which the company still owns.

A works village

Horsfall built a community round his works. In 1860 he gave a schoolroom for his workers’ children beside the river and built a row of cottages on the Fordrough. The schoolroom became a chapel in 1863, and a new schoolroom was built next to it. In 1873–74 he built St Cyprian’s Church, designed by Frank Barlow Osborn, partly over the old mill race, using the chapel as its chancel. A mortuary chapel for his daughter, Mary Elizabeth Simms, followed in 1877. The district took its name from the mill and grew into the suburb of Hay Mills.

Ropes, springs and war

In the 1880s Latch & Batchelor, a wire-rope firm in which Horsfall’s son Henry was involved, was set up on part of the site to make Telford Batchelor’s locked-coil rope. The two firms merged in 1895 and separated again in 1955. In the twentieth century the works turned to spring wire. In the First World War it made fuse-spring wire for shells and cable for mines, aircraft and balloons, and in the Second it was hit several times by bombs. Webster & Horsfall still draws wire at Hay Mills today.

What happened here?

James Horsfall drew wire here from the mid-nineteenth century; Webster & Horsfall made the armouring wire for the 1865 and 1866 Atlantic telegraph cables; Horsfall built a school, cottages and St Cyprian’s Church for his workers; Latch & Batchelor made wire rope on part of the site from 1884.