Hawks family

The Hawks family (c.1750 – 1889) was one of the most notable industrial dynasties on Tyneside in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its main enterprises were iron manufacture and engineering. The firm reached its apogee in the early Victorian period, when it employed over 2000 and its reputation for engineering and bridge building was worldwide, and to which the striking High Level Bridge across the Tyne stands as monument. Until its closure in 1889 the family's New Greenwich ironworks at Gateshead was the town's largest employer, and several members of the family firm were prominent in local politics.

Foundation

The Hawks firm was established by William Hawks (1708–1755) who worked at the iron manufactory established by Ambrose Crowley (1658–1713) at Swalwell. In the late 1740s Hawks established a set of workshops on waste ground along the river foreshore at Gateshead. When Hawks died at Gateshead on 23 February 1755, the works passed to the eldest son, William Hawks (bap. 1730, d. 1810); he and his first wife, Elizabeth Dixon established the Hawks' industrial empire.William (d.1810) formed a partnership with Thomas Longridge (bap. 1751, d. 1803) in 1770 and shortly afterwards acquired a plating forge was acquired at Beamish, co. Durham, the first of four separate metalworking sites operated by Hawks and Longridge along Beamish Burn. A forge at Lumley, co. Durham, was occupied by the firm in the mid-1780s and in the late 1780s slitting and rolling mills on the River Blyth in the modern county of Northumberland were taken on.^[1]

By the 1790s the works at Gateshead comprised a substantial industrial complex, now producing steel, anchors, heavy chains, and steam-engine components, as well as a great diversity of smaller iron wares. The supply of ironware to the Navy Board became a speciality. The firm's products were shipped via Hawks's London partners, the Gordon and Stanley families, the latter of whom had links to the old ordnance industry of the Weald and the naval yards of the Thames and Medway.^[2]

Height

The estate of William Hawks was assessed at ‘under £30,000’ at his death at Gateshead on 4 December 1810, when the works in the north-east passed to his surviving sons: George Hawks (1766–1820) of Blackheath, Sir Robert Shafto Hawks (1768–1840), and John Hawks (1770–1830) The Hawks works covered 44 acres by the end of the 1830s, supporting a workforce of between 800 and 900. The Bedlington works passed eventually to a cousin of the Hawkses, Michael Longridge (1785–1853), a pioneer of railway technology and an associate of Robert Stephenson, under whose superintendence the works became a training ground for a generation of celebrated engineers; including Sir Daniel Gooch.^[3]

Politics

Robert Shafto Hawks was knighted in 1817 for his role in suppressing riots in the winter of that year. His nephew and successor as head of the firm, George Hawks (1801–1863), was a political notable in a more liberal vein, a key local supporter of Sir William Hutt, Gateshead's free-trade MP after 1841, and he served as mayor of the borough in 1836, 1848, and 1849. His home at Redheugh Hall became one of the organizing centres of Liberalism in the north east.

Robert Shafto's Hawks's brother, Joseph Hawks, JP DL of Jesmond House, Newcastle upon Tyne,^[4] was a prominent merchant banker of Newcastle upon Tyne. His wife, Mary Elizabeth Boyd, was the daughter of William Boyd, Banker, of Bunfield Priory, Gloucester, and Newcastle upon Tyne.^[5] who was the 3rd great-grandson of Francis Liddell, second son of Sir Thomas Liddell, 1st Baronet, Mayor of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and his second wife, Frances Forster.^[6]

Joseph's daughter, Mary, married Richard Clement Moody, the first Governor of the Falkland Islands and founder of the Colony of British Columbia (1858–66). Richard Clement Moody named the 400-foot hill in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, "Mary Hill" after his wife, Mary. However, Mary Moody disliked the nascent colony of British Columbia, and described living their as 'roughing it in the bush' relative to living in England.^[7] The Royal British Columbia Museum possesses a trove of 42 letters written by Mary Moody from various colonies of the British Empire, mostly from the Colony of British Columbia (1858–66), to her mother and her sister, Emily Hawks, in England.^[8] Mary Moody was highly literate, having been tutored in literature, penmanship, and French, and her letters have been of great interest to scholars studying the perspective of the English ruling class in the colonies of the British Empire.^[9][10]

Hannah, Lady Hawks (d. 1863), the widow of Sir Robert Shafto Hawks, and her two sons—the one blind, the other destined for the church—sold their shares in 1840 to George Crawshay a member of the great iron-making family of south Wales, who had himself recently been bought out of his family's iron merchanting business in London by his brother William Crawshay II. The business developed by William Hawks had been divided between his three eldest surviving sons in 1810. When he was able to acquire the shares of Joseph Hawks, the only surviving son of George Hawks of Blackheath, he captured a second.

Decline

The dominant influence over the firm of Hawks, Crawshay & Sons in its last years was George Crawshay (1821–1896), the son of George Crawshay and his wife, Like George Hawks, George Crawshay became a considerable political figure in the north-east. It may be that he devoted too much of his time to his political pursuits, however, for by the 1870s and 1880s the overcrowded Gateshead site, home to a great diversity of processes and product lines, compared unfavourably with the more streamlined and specialized engineering yards established along the Tyne by entrepreneurs such as Sir William Armstrong. In 1889 New Greenwich was suddenly closed. The circumstances surrounding the closure remain somewhat mysterious, for the firm's creditors were paid in full (and the company's archive destroyed).^[11]

References