Butterley Brick Company

The Butterley Brick Company has produced many different designed bricks over the years. Here are the ones I have found, which there are many, thus making it a very long post. If I find any more different designs, I will add them at a later date.

I first start this post with a little history of the beginnings of the Company, then a bit about each of the brickworks owned by the Company. 
A full account can be read at this link: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/records.aspx?cat=026-d503&cid=0#0

The company was found by Benjamin Outram & Francis Beresford in 1790 to extract coal & ironstone from the Butterley Estate in Ripley, Derbyshire. Originally the company was called Benjamin Outram & Co. & in 1791 William Jessop & John Wright joined the company with their ironmaking expertise. 

Benjamin Outram passed away in 1805 & the company continued under the Wright & Jessop families, changing its name to the Butterley Company in 1807. The Company owned two ironworks, one at Butterley, in the photo below & one at Codnor Park next to the "Model Village" of Ironville, where the Company built many houses for its workers. 
A monument to William Jessop (the second, who died in 1852) stands high over looking the former Ironworks at Ironville & was completed in 1857. The monument is now on private land with no public access, so I have pasted two links below, one to a photo of the monument & one to Codnor Info web site with photos & detailed information about the monument.
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2994952          
http://www.codnor.info/Monument.php

Butterley Iron Works, Ripley in 1936. 

With the foundry closing in the mid 1980's, the majority of these buildings have now been pulled down, leaving only the ones on the bend of the road. Houses have now been built on the site, to the centre left, on this photo & the A610 Ripley by-pass now runs left to right across the photo through the fields.

The Company also owned many collieries in Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire to supply coal for its foundries. 

The Company's first brickworks was built at Butterley Park in 1858, but demolished in 1873. 

Waingroves

Waingroves in 1936.

The brickworks at Waingroves, a small village near Ripley, Derbyshire was owned by the Butterley Brick Co. I have found many bricks made by this works, stamping their bricks just Waingroves or Waingroves Metallic, Waingroves Plastic or Butterley Co. Ltd/ Waingroves. 
The works was first opened in 1890 next to the pit, but never got established & was then mothballed. 
With the Company's brickworks at Codnor Park being run down & then closing around 1913/14, the Waingroves brickworks originally known as the Marehay Brickworks, was re-opened in 1913 & in production by 1915 with completely new updated plant.
The Company closed Waingroves Colliery in 1921 & then in that same year a new 18 chamber Staffordshire Kiln & chimney was built at the brickworks which was in use until September 1974. This kiln produced 400,000,000 bricks during it's lifetime. 

  © Crown Copyright. Reproduced by permission of NLS/Ordnance Survey 1900. 

I have marked the Butterley Company's Waingroves brickworks & colliery in yellow on this 1900 map. The area which I have coloured was the eventual size of the brickworks & it's clay pits when it closed. Access to the works was first via Pit Lane (solid red line) then via the green coloured road from Station Road by 1900. Then a new road was built from Peasehill (dotted red line) along the course of the old railway in more recent times, the date of which I have not been able to find. I am guessing this will have been in the 1970's after many railway lines had been axed in the Beeching Cuts in the 1960's. The blue marked brickworks in Waingroves village was owned by Charles Shelton & then his son between 1891 & 1900.

Butterley's first entry in Kelly's Trade Directory is 1925, then 1928, both recording the works as The Marehay Brickworks. This is because the works bordered onto the village of Marehay, which is now part of Ripley. It is in Kelly's 1932 edition that the works is first recorded as Waingroves. In 1955 Butterley renamed their Company Butterley & Blaby Brick Co. with Butterley acquiring the Blaby works in 1847.
In 1968 the Butterley Company was taken over by the Wiles Group, later called Hanson Trust Ltd, and then Hanson plc. This new company sold off all it's engineering interests, just leaving it's brick & building materials interests. After this takeover the Wiles Group dropped the Blaby name & all brickworks owned by the company then operated as Butterley Brick & these were at Waingroves, Blaby, Loughborough & Ambergate. Hanson when on to acquire many more brickworks in England including the London Brick Co. & several in Wales. They became the largest producer of bricks in the UK. 

Waingroves brickworks closed in June 2006 with the loss of 63 jobs. The site is recorded of being put up for sale to build houses on in 2010, but this must have fell through, as I went in November 2012, finding that there was nothing left standing of the works & it was being used as a stock yard containing hundreds of thousands if not millions of bricks owned by the Heidelberg Cement Group who took over the Hanson Group in 2007 & still operated their brick division as Hanson. The next change was in 2015 when Hanson Brick was sold to Forterra. Out of all the local brickworks owned by Butterley over the years, only the Kirton Works in Nottinghamshire still survives today under Forterra.   

This one has a crown & two flags in the centre. With another one of these flag bricks turning up, the reverse of which is stamped Waingroves Metallic & the dated 1938. It is unknown what the flags represent as George VI was crowned in 1937. 

Waingroves brick celebrating George VI's coronation in 1937.

1937, 38 & 39 dated Waingroves Metallic bricks. The 1938 brick has the flags on the reverse. I found out from someone who worked in the offices at Waingroves, that there was a display in the reception of the different designs of bricks & there were several with dates stamped in them. The date just represented the year they were made. Wouldn't I liked to have seen that display !   

Butterley gained Limited status in 1888, so these next five bricks were made after that date.

More examples from Waingroves.

Although these next three bricks do not have Ltd on them, the style of the frog suggests that they we made between 1910 & 1970, as they are similar to other bricks found which can be dated to that period.

With this W brick turning up locally there's a good chance it was made at the Waingroves works. Frank Lawson also found one of these bricks in Derbyshire.

Codnor Park

  © Crown Copyright. Reproduced by permission of Ordnance Survey 1900. 

This map dated 1900 shows the Coach Road Brickworks at Codnor Park, Ironville, which opened in 1890 producing 598,545 bricks in it's first full year. I have not found any bricks with Codnor Park on, but the ones with just Butterley Co. may have been made there. The search is still on !  
In 1894 Butterley sold 600,000 bricks to the New Hucknall Colliery Co. at Hucknall Huthwaite, near Sutton in Ashfield from Codnor Park for use at their colliery sites.
Bricks made at the works up to 1897 were produced in clamp kilns & in 1902 £3,500 was spent by Mr. Leslie Wright to modernise the works.
The works was managed by an elderly Joseph Cook & by 1907 production at the works had dropped & plans were put forward to build new Hoffman Kilns, but was never carried out. So Butterley's Coach Road Brickworks closed & was demolished  around 1913/14, with the 20 men employed there being transferred to Waingroves. 
The area to the right of the brickworks on this map, now has houses of modern day Codnor Park built on it & the former brickworks is open farmland.

I have a reference that Butterley had operated a brickworks on this site as early as 1830, but the works shown on the 1900 map above opened in 1890.

A postcard showing Butterley's Codnor Park Brickworks on Coach Road courtesy of Peter Ludlam.

Ariel photograph of Butterley's Codnor Park Iron Works in 1936.

If you look on the 1900 map above, the location of the Iron Works in relationship to the brickworks was just off the right hand side of the map, were it says Codnor Park Station. All this area is now open grass land.

Kirkby & Ollerton

I have a reference to the Company producing blue bricks. With this the only one I have found, being made at Kirkby. 

Butterley had established a brickworks at Kirkby in 1890 together with the sinking of the Summit pit in 1887. It was in 1919 that the company then relocated their Kirkby brickworks to the Sutton side of the pit. Butterley also opened their Ollerton brickworks in 1919 with the works being in full production by 1925. 
Kirkby produced 165,000 bricks per week in its first full year at this new works in 1921. Output for 1936 was Kirkby & Ollerton, 15 million bricks & Waingroves 13 million bricks.

I have these trade directory listings for the Kirkby & Ollerton works. In Kelly's 1922 & 25 editions the listing is Butterley Co. Ltd. Kirkby Works, East Kirkby, Nottm. Then in Kelly's 1928, 32, 36 & 41 editions the listing is for both the Kirkby & Ollerton works.

1947 saw the Company lose its Kirkby brickworks & pit through Nationalisation to the Government. 

More can be read about Butterley's brickworks in my dedicated Kirkby post. 
http://eastmidlandsnamedbricks.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/butterley-ncb-kirkby-brickworks-kirkby.html

This 1936 photo shows Ollerton Brickworks in the foreground with the housing of New Ollerton in the centre of the photo. The site of the former brickworks & it's surrounding area has now been restored as a green space with the planting of trees & is called Ollerton Pit Wood. Ollerton Colliery to the left of the village is now the home to a Tesco store, head offices of Centre Parcs & an eco industrial estate.

Photo by MF courtesy of the Simon Patterson Collection.

This example has Rustic in raised letters & will refer to the bricks finish.

In November 1956 the Company relocate their Ollerton brickworks to nearby Kirton, using a new type of Hoffman Kiln with the latest technology, another new kiln was added in 1960. As no bricks have been found stamped Butterley Kirton, I am taking it that they continued to stamp their bricks Ollerton or they had moved over to produce wire cut bricks.

I have a reference with the downturn for bricks, that the works closed in 2008 with a stock pile to last three years, but I have recently found out that this works is still in production (2014) & being operated by Hanson/Heidelberg Cement Group & may have only been mothballed until there was the need for bricks once more. As of 2017 this works is now owned by Forterra. This company was originally called Lone Star Funds who purchased Hanson Brick from Heidelberg in March 2015, with Lone Star Funds then re-branding to Forterra in October 2015.

Butterley & Blaby

In 1947 with the Company losing their Kirkby brickworks & pit to the Government through Nationalisation, they decided to expand brick production in that year, with the purchase of the brickworks at Ambergate which had been owned by Edwin Glossop and the Blaby Brick & Tile Works in Leicestershire. These two works were merged into the group in 1955, when they renamed the Company Butterley & Blaby Brick Co. Ltd. 
Hence the B & B Waingroves brick above. I have not found any B & B Ambergate or Blaby yet, only the Butterley Ambergate below which may have been made before the name change in 1955.

Butterley & Blaby Brick Co. Ltd. Ambergate Brickworks in the 1960's.

The Ambergate works closed in 1970, with the site in 1973 being then used by Mr. Chapman for his skip hire business. The old works was then demolished around 1998, being replaced with modern designed houses.

Butterley Salterwood

Salterwood Brickworks near Denby, just north of Derby was purchased by the Company & was in production in 1957, at first producing engineering bricks. New plant was then installed by the newly formed Butterley & Blaby Co. to produce Aglite blocks. Date of it's closure is unknown.

The brickworks had belonged to the Denby Iron & Coal Co. which had operated a colliery & brickworks there since 1920. Negotiations with the Butterley Co. had been started as early as 1950 by T. W. Ward owner of D.I.&C. Co. to sell his company to them. Ward offered two brickworks to Butterley, but one was rejected as it was too far away from Butterley's base & the purchase of Salterwood was delayed because the freehold of the land was owned by Captain Patrick Drury-Lowe, who's forebears had owned most of the land in the Denby area.

Further Acquisitions

Gilbert Tucker & Son, brick & tile manufacturers of Loughborough was acquired in 1964, remaining open until 1967 & liquidated in 1979.

In 1968 the company was taken over by the Wiles Group, later called Hanson Trust Ltd, then Hanson plc. Also in that year, Norman Wright, a director & descendant of the Wright family which started the Company in 1791, retired ending his family's continued association with the Company.

With the sale of the engineering side of the business in 1969, the Company concentrated on the brick making side of the business & was renamed as Butterley Building Materials Ltd. 

The Company expanded again when it acquired several more brickworks in the 1970’s & 80’s which including the National Star Group, the Castle Brick Co., the London Brick Co. & the Midland Brick Co. a subsidiary of the National Coal Board which included local brickworks at Whitwick, Welbeck and Desford.  

1985 saw the Company change its name again to the Butterley Brick Co. Ltd. encompassing all of its latest acquisitions.

In May 2007, Hanson Building Materials Group accepted a takeover offer of £7.8 billion pounds from Heidelberg Cement of Germany who continued to run it as Hanson Brick. As previously wrote Hanson Brick changed hands in 2015 & is now called Forterra. 

Update 7.9.16.

I have recently been contacted by Ron Young who first sent me this message :- Hi Martyn, I’ve just come across your pages about brickworks and found what’s on them to be interesting, mainly as I worked in the “clay industry” from about 1965 to 2008, firstly for Genefax/GRStein’s and then later for Butterley/Hanson/Heidelburg, all of the time in the various laboratories. I’m one of those (like you) who always takes a look at walls when they’re being demolished/falling down “just in case” Take care, Ron Young.

After replying to Ron & asking if he had visited Penmorfa's brick website, he sent me a more detailed account of his time in the clay industry & it details the many works which Butterley Hanson acquired which I thought would be a good addition to the post. 

Hi Martyn, I have used the Penmorfa site fairly often as it’s got loads of interesting things on it. Seeing the opening picture with the Adamantine brick on it always brings back memories as Genefax owned Chas Davidson. We still made Adamantine in the late ‘70’s (along with Obsidianite, Alumantine and Hysilyn). I had to go over there for a week on a couple of occasions when their lab technician was otherwise engaged. Then I spent about 2 years up at Allens works, Hipperholme, where they made Selfrac insulation. I was there at the time when they were making a changeover from using polystyrene beads + sawdust to purely sawdust to produce the porosity in the insulation bricks. I believe that parts of that factory still stands.

I also had a couple of years down at Genefax (or as it then was GR Stein) Ambegate works (actually in Bullbridge), from where I was made redundant on 1980.

In 1981 I started with Butterley brick in the lab of their Kirton works, where I worked until 2008, when I got early retirement/redundancy.

That job entailed us having to visit various works from Leicester (Heather, Blaby, Desford), Wales (Caernarfon, Lane End (Buckley), Buttington and Merthyr Tydfil) In later years, Butterley became Hanson Brick and acquired LBC, who had their own lab, but we also took on responsibility for Hastings brickworks, Clockhouse, Claughton (Lancaster) and three works owned by Wilkinson’s at Elland.

Fortunately, we had a driver who went round to the various works on a regular basis to collect routine samples. I enjoyed it most when the various works were either developing a new product or moving into a new part of the quarry as that often entailed me or one of my colleagues going to the site to take samples for analysis. Even a complaint could be fun – seeing the customer’s face when I could demonstrate that the scum or efflorescence on their bricks could be cleaned off easily was a satisfaction, and I got a chance to visit Summerlee Museum at Coatbridge when they had some scum on the plinth header’s that had been made down at Thurcroft.

So, as you can see, I’ve enjoyed most of my time in the clay industry !!  Ron.

Many thanks Ron for your interesting account, Martyn.

Updated 14.6.21.

Photo by Muriel Thomson.

I have recently been contacted by Muriel Thomson who works at Avoch Primary School near Fortrose in the Scottish Highlands requesting info when the Auchinlea brickworks & quarry closed. Many Auchinlea bricks were found (example above) by contractors while they were digging foundations for the school's new extension. Muriel informed me the Auchinlea brickworks was taken over by Butterley Building Materials Ltd. in 1973, a fact I was totally unaware of, so I checked out Mark Cranston's Scottish Brickworks site & found Mark had written a lengthy account of the several brickworks which had operated in Auchinlea, but he had not found the final closure date of this last works operated by Butterley. After contacting Mark he did a new search of old newspapers, resulting him finding it closed in the Spring of 1977. Muriel asked if this brick could be dated to when it was made, but my best guess from the shape of the frog was anytime after 1920. Muriel tells me this brick is going to be put in a Time Capsule together with the school children's written accounts of the brickworks, so when it's dug up in say 50 years time the brick's story can be retold. Mark's article on the Auchinlea bricks can be read here.