The modern steel industry is just a hundred years old. When Henry Bessemer read his famous paper at Cheltenham in September 1856 he had solved, admittedly, the engineering rather than the metallurgical problems of steel-making in a converter. Within three years enough progress had been made on these metallurgical problems to make steel commercially in the Bessemer converter. Less than ten years later the open-hearth process was also producing steel in Britain. These innovations took place during a period of unprecedented prosperity when profits were high for both industry and agriculture.

We are to examine the social origins of steel manufacturers over a century during which, in broad terms, the industry and the British economy descended from a peak of leadership at which Britain was truly the workshop of the world. During the years of the so-called ‘Great Depression’ in the last quarter of the century the American and German steel industries were beginning to challenge British leadership. Although the new century opened with a burst of deceptive prosperity, heightened by the First World War, the inter-war years reduced the British industry to a state of severe crisis as world demand shrank and basic steel, of which Britain was only just becoming a major producer, claimed more and more of existing markets.