Chairman Brian Idoine welcomed 59 members and 34 visitors to the meeting, and after the usual reminders re safety and mobile ’phones, he said the Christmas Meal will be on 12 December with the cost remaining at £18.50. Menus will be available at the October meeting. Brian then welcomed Paul Luter whose talk was entitled ‘Iron and Coal Masters of South Staffs Coalfield’, from the late 1760s-1900s.

These men, the area and the industries formed, as Paul reminded the audience at the beginning of his talk, the catalyst of the Industrial Revolution.

The other element in that phenomenon was geology and the brook systems providing power for early small-scale enterprises before the 1700s and, later, far greater ones.

John Wilkinson, was the pre-eminent ‘King of the Ironmasters’ (though a predecessor has lately been discovered: Joseph Firmstone ‘the father of the South Staffs iron industry’).

Wilkinson’s Bradley furnace dated from 1772. Many others followed with a particular concentration in the Bilston area and his collaboration with Boulton and Watt with their steam engine was especially notable. Many forges were constructed; the stimulus of wars in Europe and the demand for munitions, the development of the canal system and, later, the railways, the growth of the coal industry together produced a new iron age.

Other names came, made their contribution and went: John Gibbons, Samuel Fereday, Richard Smith (who married Fereday’s daughter and became manager of Lord Ward’s mines and furnaces in l836).

There were periods of bust, notably in the l840s, as well as boom, but the quality of products from companies such as Cochrane’s (at Woodside), Hingley’s (Netherton) and, pre-eminently, Round Oak (a model ironworks opened in l855) was outstanding.

The coal side of the talk was necessarily more brief (under pressure of time) but its development runs parallel to that of iron, producing the Black Country as we and the wider world, came to know it.

Brian thanked Paul for a most informative talk, the audience showing their appreciation in the usual way.