Ditherington Flax Mill - A Short History - Part One

Ditherington Flax Mill and Maltings - The First Part of A Short History of the Buildings and the Site.

The Textile Industry and the Beynon Brothers

In the late 1700’s Shrewsbury had a very long tradition of textile finishing and trading, dating back to the great medieval trade in Welsh wool bound for the markets of northern Europe.
Amongst the most prosperous wool merchants were the brothers Thomas and Benjamin Benyon, who lived in fashionable Quarry Place and had warehouses in Shrewsbury.

New Ventures, New Players

John Marshall [+]
A portrait of John Marshall, the pioneer of flax spinning.

However, the patterns of trade in wool were changing, the role of Shrewsbury was shrinking (the last open wool market in Shrewsbury on traditional lines was held in 1797) and the Benyons had decided to diversify into the linen business, for which flax is the raw material. In 1793 they established a partnership with John Marshall of Leeds, who had pioneered the mechanisation of flax spinning and rapidly became the leading figure in the industry.
The new partnership initially invested in mills in Leeds, completing their second mill in 1795. Following a serious fire at this new mill in 1796, the Benyons and Marshall decided to build a mill in Shrewsbury, and took Charles Bage of Shrewsbury into a new partnership.

The New Partnership builds a Mill

Bage was primarily a surveyor, but also in business as a wine merchant, and was one of the brilliant circle of scientific engineers, industrialists and intellectuals, that gave the county its technological cutting edge. The new partnership therefore combined Marshall’s flax spinning expertise and management skills, the Benyons’ capital and standing, and Bage’s innovative design skills and contacts.
In 1797 Benyon, Bage and Marshall built their new mill on open land just outside Shrewsbury’s northern outskirts at Ditherington, next to the newly constructed Shrewsbury Canal, which linked the county town to the East Shropshire coalfields, and which opened fully in that year.

A Pioneering Design

Ditherington Flax Mill was immediately famed for its ‘fireproof construction’. Other mills had just started to use cast iron columns, notably William Strutt’s mills at Derby and Belper where brick vaults spanned between protected timber beams.
However at Ditherington, Bage devised a complete iron frame for the first time. He was able to design scientifically, using information on the strength of cast iron established by William Reynolds’ recent experiments for Thomas Telford’s Longdon-on-Tern aqueduct on the Shrewsbury Canal.

The New Technology

The frame members were cast at William Hazeldine’s new foundry in Shrewsbury, an operation that rapidly established a reputation for quality, and that became Telford’s supplier of choice for his major bridge components at the Menai Straits and elsewhere.
Slender cast iron columns of cruciform section support cast iron beams of an inverted Y section running across the building at each floor level. Shallow brick vaults span between these beams to form the floors, and the frame is completed by wrought iron tie bars running lengthways along the building to bind it together.

The Early Years of the Flax Mill

The flax business thrived and the site developed rapidly in its first years. In 1804 Marshall bought out the Benyons and Bage, who went ahead to build their own iron framed flax mills (now long demolished except for a fragment) elsewhere in the town.
By 1805 the Ditherington site included an iron framed flax warehouse built in that year, a timber framed ‘hackling block’ for preparing the raw flax, a packing warehouse, a dyehouse and accompanying stove house, and a stables and smithy. The first apprentice house and the clerks’ house were in St Michael’s Street, just to the south.
All of these buildings were built of locally fired ‘great bricks’ – unusually proportioned bricks needing only three courses per foot (300mm) of height rather than the usual four, apparently produced to minimise the impact of the brick tax, which was paid per brick.

Early Developments

In 1811 the original hackling block burned down (its timber frame proving to be a false economy) and was rebuilt to Charles Bage’s design as the present iron framed Cross Mill, on a slightly different plan.
In the Flax Warehouse and Cross Mill frames there are some subtle improvements in the jointing arrangements between the beams and the columns, as Bage developed his original idea.
The buildings were first lit by gas from their own gasworks in 1811– nine years before the town’s first gas lights.
In 1812 the present apprentice house was built, by when there were over 400 employees, many of them children.