Dorset Ancestors Rotating Header Image

John Mowlem

Purbeck – Into the Quarries

“Carved by time out of a single stone” was how Thomas Hardy described Portland. Yet all of Purbeck can be regarded as a geologist’s bonanza, a chronicle of millions of years of the earth’s history set in stone. Small wonder then, that this “county within a county” should have become one of the country’s major centres for the quarrying and mining of aggregate and building stone.

The stone industry of Purbeck has been the economic mainstay of the ‘Isle’ for over 500 years. For Britain, and for the Empire through export, it has been a font of supply for several kinds of rock belonging to the Portland and Purbeck Beds. All these are part of the two uppermost-and youngest-formations of the Jurassic period, deposited between about 150 and 135 million years ago, when Dorset was sub-equatorial. The Portlandian was laid down in shallow, warm sea, which then regressed to leave a lagoon environment in which the Purbeck beds were then formed.

Although prehistoric man probably carried out very local quarrying for the stone, it was the Romans, particularly favouring the use of the decorative Purbeck Marble for their villas and tomb slabs, who first began quarrying on any significant scale. In ‘modern’ times the industry really took off during the Middle Ages; in the 17th century, too, stone was shipped from Swanage to London, where Wren employed it in re-building the capital after the Great Fire in 1666.

During the 18th and 19th centuries the Purbeck quarries reached their peak in manpower and production. It was at this time when a variety of stone used to build many of Dorset’s older cottages and homes was extracted from small local quarries now long since abandoned and overgrown. Sine transporting the stone overland was difficult and costly, the major quarries and mines were concentrated upon the coastal outcrops, where the stone could be transported away by sea.

As a focus for quarrying, nowhere else in Purbeck was more central or important than Swanage. This town became a centre for the mediaeval trade in limestone, where serious quarrying began in about 1700 and continued until the mid 19th century. This was the heyday of great stone barons, the businessmen who made their fortunes from the industry, George Burt, and John Mowlem being probably the prime movers. Swanage was built from stone in more ways than one; exports from the quarries secured its location and the prosperity of the Burt and Mowlem families. It was during this period too, that the quarry platforms in the cliff outcrops at Tilly Whim, Dancing Ledge, Winspit and Seacombe were cut.

Tilly Whim, Dancing Ledge and Winspit are all coastal quarry sites for Purbeck stone which has been used in a number of Buildings including Durlston Castle, Lulworth Castle and Swanage Town Hall.  The Tilly Whim Caves at Anvil Point are the most easterly of the coastal quarries and are thought to have originally been open-cast working which later shifted towards adit or drift-mining from galleries cut into the cliffside. A capping rock was blasted away so that the high-grade building stone, the Under Freestone, could be quarried out using wedges called “gads.” Galleries of about 3 metres by 8 metres were cut into the hillside, sometimes as far as 60 metres. To support the roof, quarrymen left pillars in the in-situ limestone or else built pillars from stone wasters. Blocks were lowered from the caves using timber derricks (whims) that loaded the stone onto lighters or barges which then trans-shipped the stone to an offshore cargo vessel in calm weather.

Similarly at Dancing Ledge Quarry, the stone was lowered to a large sloping ledge, and carried to a shipment point at the very edge. Here the trammels or ruts made by the carts or wagons, which moved the stone, can still be seen. Quarrying at Dancing Ledge ceased in 1914. Winspit is an area just below Worth Matravers on the south coast where large cliffside quarries have been opened on both sides of the valley. Stone working at Winspit began in 1719. The west quarry has a very large underground gallery, which was worked until 1953; the east quarry has square cut holes for crane positions still to be seen on the cliff top.

Seacombe is a large quarry excavated where Seacombe Bottom meets the coast. This was worked from the 18th century until 1923-31, when much investment in mechanisation took place. Stone was shipped from below the west end, and the foundations of the steam-derrick remain. Other quarries were opened between Durlstone Head and St. Aldhelm’s Head, from where the stone for the harbour walling at Ramsgate was shipped. At Durlstone, deeper beds were worked from underground “quarrs,” the stone being brought to the surface by a horse drawn capstan. There are also shallow quarrs in the country-park. In 1897 197 men were working in 58 quarrs. The last timber derrick to survive anywhere in Dorset can be seen at St. Aldhelm’s Quarry.

Away from the coast there have been extensive quarries in other Purbeck Beds outcropping over the high ground between Swanage and Worth Matravers, though Lychett Matravers to Acton. Purbeck Limestone is worked for aggregate in Swanworth Quarry (due for imminent closure) and Purbeck stone is still quarried in the Acton area west of Swanage, where the rock was formerly mined from underground shafts. Today good decorative stone is being extracted at Acton from open cast pits down to 10 metres. Corfe was formerly the centre for the quarrying of Purbeck Marble (which is not true marble but shelly limestone able to take a hard polish), but the trade no longer exists today.

While the stone native to the mainland has been of considerable commercial value, Portland’s limestone has probably been even more so, and not wholly for its infra-structural applications. This oolithic limestone has encased the gargantuan shells of Titanities, the largest ammonite to have inhabited British Jurassic waters, and which today is to be seen displayed in many of Portland’s garden walls. For centuries, man and nature have contributed to the island’s landscape, and there are features marking where the original landscape once stood.

Wren used Portland stone in the re-building of London, notably the new St. Paul’s, but it has also been applied in the re-construction of the capital after the destruction left by the last war. The old quarry gangs and their methods have almost entirely disappeared. The piers and jetties of the old quarries, from where stone has been shipped around the world, also have largely vanished, and some of the excavations have been infield; no derrick or crane now remains in the Portland Quarry. In Jordan Quarry the succession in the Portland Beds can be traced up to the overlying Purbeck in a sequence which the geologist can read like a book, and which reveals the climatic changes in the region 150 million years ago.

But today some of the Portland quarries have been given a new lease of life. Through a 1983 initiative begun by the specially formed Portland Sculpture Quarry Trust (PSQT) artists and sculptors have been coming to Portland to work creatively in response to the quarry environment. The Trust aims to forge links between the artists and the lives of the masons working in stone, enabling them to share and exchange knowledge and skills, rather than undertaking public commissions for works. This project has fostered much working collaboration over the years, including the creation of Britain’s first Sculpture Quarry in the now regenerated Tout Quarry. Works produced here include Anthony Gormley’s ‘Still Falling.’ and ‘Falling Fossil’ by Stephen Marsden. PSQT is further extending access through workshops. Since 1983 the experience of the Trust has been as appreciation of the importance of the personal aspects of people’s lives and their relationship to the landscape.

Happily, after decades of decline in Portland and Purbeck, something of the old landscape is making a comeback. Abandoned quarries and older sites are being restored to their pre-extractive agricultural state, often with no trace of the former activity in evidence. While the industrial landscape on Portland is being revitalised, in Purbeck nature is re-claiming the traces of an industry, which ranged from prehistoric bell-pits, through opencast excavations and thence gallery mining, to mechanisation and decline.

John Mowlem

Many people will have noticed the name Mowlem on the side of heavy construction machinery without giving a thought to the story behind the name. But this business of international renown had, as had so many others, very lowly beginnings: with a man born in an ancient cottage at Carrants Court, Swanage on October 12th, 1788. John Mowlem was one of six children; four of who were boys, born to a general store keeper whose name was also John.

By the early 1800’s when he would have been in his early teens, young John joined his three other brothers at work in the Tilly Whim Purbeck stone quarry. These were the days when child labour for farms and industries was universal because it was cheap. But by 1812 the effect of the recession caused by the long naval war with France had hit the Purbeck quarries, and Tilly Whim closed.

During these years it is believed that Mowlem came under the tutelage of Dr. Andrew Bell, Rector of Swanage from 1801 to 1809 and a learned schoolmaster, though the younger John’s education came mainly through the experience of his working life. Another milestone for Mowlem came in 1804, when Henry Manwell, a son of a friend of John Mowlem senior, left Swanage to go to work as a stone cutter in Portsmouth, but not before suggesting that his son John could find employment in the same industry in the Isle of Wight.

Accordingly and soon after, Mowlem threw up his job in the Purbeck Quarry with the original intention of finding a job in London. About this move there is a romantic story of how, with little more than his sack of tools, John persuaded a local captain to grant him a free berth on his vessel. But Mowlem’s nephew George Burt later noted that John did not go directly to London but stopped off at the Isle of Wight. Here, at the Norris Castle Quarry, he found his first job outside of Dorset.

After he had been at work in the Norris Castle Quarry for some while Mowlem was spotted by James Wyatt, an architect who recommended him to Henry Westmancott, one of two brothers in charge of running a masonry and sculpture workshop for the Government Masons Department in London. Following up this recommendation Mowlem left the Isle of Wight and moved into lodgings adjacent to the Westmancott’s in Mount Street, near to the site of the shared workshop in Pimlico.

It was during these earliest years in London, sometime in the first decade of the 19th century, that Henry Manwell’s sister Susannah visited her brother, by then living in London and working as the rate collector for St. Marylebone. Inevitably this brought her into contact with John Mowlem, to whom she soon found herself attracted, and in 1812 he and Susannah were married. That year Robert Burt, long a friend of John’s married Susannah’s sister Letty in Swanage Church.

At this time the Government masons works had contracts for work at Greenwich and Kensington Palaces, the Royal Mews and Somerset House. For all these contracts in the capital Mowlem was made foreman over all the workers in 1816. He was later to record that he was put over men “..old enough to be my father.” But despite the promotion, Mowlem did not hold his boss in any high esteem. Indeed, he said of Westmancott that he was a hard niggardly taskmaster who paid him only punitive wages. He further wrote that the only virtues he (Westmancott) possessed, which he made a point of emulating were punctuality and cleanliness.

Mowlem left the Westmancott’s works in 1822 to found his own company with only about £100 capital, though he was much helped by several friends including MacAdam, who pioneered pitched road surfacing. Initially the company had much to do with the paving of roads, but as soon as he was solvent Mowlem took out a lease on a wharf in Pimlico basin, on the site later occupied by Victoria Station. It was to these works that the contractor imported Purbeck Limestone, York Sandstone, and Aberdeen Granite for many of the London landmarks we know today. With the help of his brother-in-law Henry, Mowlem next moved his office and yard to Paddington Wharf, then known as Little Venice.

Two of John’s brothers James and Joseph also went into business of their own in London, leaving Robert the only one of the brothers never to leave Swanage. Then in 1853 George Burt, who had mastered the craft of masonry in the Swanage Quarry, went into partnership with Mowlem in the capital. A third, a Yorkshireman called Joseph Freeman then joined the two men to form a company, which then operated under the name Mowlem, Burt and Freeman. Freeman married Elizabeth Burt, George’s sister in 1839.

Shortly before 1840 the company began work on its first major contract: re-paving Blackfriars Bridge with a Telford pavement of Granite setts. This was the first such pavement of its kind, and the contract specified that a delay in completion would incur a heavy penalty with no stage payments. But a shortfall in the supply of the granite led Mowlem to purchase another quarry on Guernsey. It was therefore Burt and Freeman who were left to manage the business during the time that Mowlem was overseeing the shipping of the rock from the Channel Island. Following the success of the undertaking Mowlem went on to re-pave London Bridge and the Strand.

But Mowlem was considering retirement before 1838, when he would have been 50. He is often regarded, together with Burt and William Morton Pitt, as one of the three gentlemen of Swanage. Morton Pitt was a wealthy entrepreneur and Dorset MP who had built Belvedere, a seven-room house in Swanage for which Mowlem made a failed purchase bid of £260. A Chancery sale took place at the Royal Victoria Hotel in 1838 and included the hotel itself, the Quay, Seymer Place, Sentry Field, the Watch and Preventative Station, Durlston Quarries and Whitecliff Farm. Mowlem moved into 2, Victoria Terrace, a road named after the future Queen who, when a Princess, made a brief stay at the hotel Pitt had developed and which was itself re-named after her.

Between 1858 and 1860 Mowlem bought the estate now occupied by most of Swanage north of the brook and extending to Ulwell. During these years he played a part in the construction of the town’s first pier (now gone) and the granite memorial on the seafront to King Alfred. In 1862 he added a memorial to Prince Albert and founded the Mowlem Institute, now the Mowlem Theatre.

Mowlem passed his retirement by watching the coast from an observatory on the roof of the house and by starting a famous diary, which he kept for the rest of his life. Burt meanwhile took full charge of Mowlem’s company in 1844 and undertook an ambitious landscaping project in what is today Durlston Park. This included the estate’s castle and The Great Globe, a massive 40-ton stone ball made in the Mowlem works and shipped to Durlston in 15 segments. Here the monument was set up on a platform just below the castle.

John Mowlen died in 1868, ten years before his company would become involved in electrifying the tramways, including the work of building the Northumberland Avenue Tramway, so beginning the long association of the name Mowlem with today’s transport infrastructure. In recent times Mowlem’s company also built the Dorchester by-pass, the new London Bridge, the Vickers Tower on Milbank, London Airport, and roads and docks, sewers and tunnels.

Dr. Andrew Bell

In 1801 a young Episcopalian minister from Scotland was appointed Rector of Swanage on a stipend of £240 a year. He was the Reverend Andrew Bell, and his incumbency at this popular resort of the future was one of unprecedented philanthropy and innovation. As Rector of Swanage Bell energetically set up benefit societies, social clubs and even a small cottage industry for plaiting straw. He arranged for every child in his parish to be inoculated against smallpox, a great contagious scourge of the 19th century. And this minister had a considerable influence on the young John Mowlem, the master mason of Swanage and founder of the international construction company of that name.

But Andrew Bell will probably be remembered for one thing above all others: as the inventor of the method of elementary education known as the Madras System, after the state in India where it was conceived. The Madras System was a legacy of a past period of colonial servitude in Bell’s life, but by the time of his death it would be adopted across much of Britain. Several educationalists even sought Bell’s advice about how they could implement the system themselves, including Joseph Lancaster, an opportunist businessman and rival. Lancaster, however, infuriated Bell when the latter discovered that he was passing off the Madras System as his own conception. At one point Bell took two years leave of absence from the church to concentrate on disseminating his educational method more widely. Eventually he had 13 day schools and three Sunday schools using the system in Dorset, but would by no means neglect to further the provision of education in his Scottish home town.

Dr Bell would devote only about a decade of his life to the spiritual and material wants and needs of the Swanage people, yet he had no leanings towards an ecclesiastical career until he was 32. Before then he was something of a maverick, a speculator in New World cash-cropping, and while his life in holy orders was a resounding success the same would not be said for his business interests or his marriage, which ended acrimoniously in divorce after only six years.

But the single-mindedness so indicative of his character throughout his life doubtless showed itself early. Born in St. Andrews, Fife, on 27th of March 1753, Andrew Bell was the son of a barber/wigmaker-cum-horologist who in the latter capacity was responsible for regulating the clock of St. Andrews University and making scientific instruments for the physics (then National Philosophy) faculty. Andrew was first educated at the grammar school where mathematics was his greatest strength and languages his greatest weakness. However, during these early schooldays he was the subject of bullying from older boys, an experience that would instil in this future educationalist a lifelong abhorrence of corporal punishment. Bell’s proficiency in maths led him, at 16, to matriculation at the United College of St Salvatore & St Leonard’s in St. Andrews University. Here he studied for four years, but there is no evidence that he graduated at the end of this time. However, it was common in those days for graduates not to undertake a formal graduation ceremony.

So with his sound academic background Bell sailed from Glasgow in 1774 to take up a post as a tutor to tobacco plantation owners in Virginia, though not without “moonlighting” as a tobacco trader with a good sense of business. In 1779 Bell was engaged as tutor to the sons of a Virginia planter Carter Braxton, but with the colony in a politically unsettled state in the aftermath of the War of Independence Bell returned to Britain two years later with the Braxton Boys, so that their education could be finished. During the voyage however, their ship was grounded on an island near Nova Scotia by a storm for a time before they could be rescued, whereupon they eventually reached London in June. But Bell’s charges were not inclined to stay on the right side of the law, and after two years he returned to St Andrews to eke out a meagre living by running a small private school.

It was at this point that Bell considered studying for the priesthood, but with the Church of England, since he was an Episcopalian. His first living following ordination was at Leith Episcopalian Chapel under a one-year contract. The St Andrews MP, George Dempster, approached Bell with the proposition of a lecture tour to Calcutta teaching science. The newly-appointed minister duly accepted the offer and sailed for Calcutta in 1787, but stopped off on route at Madras. Here Bell decided to stay and give a brief course of lectures, but when appointed as Chaplain to four regiments, he decided to abandon going on to Calcutta.

In 1789 Bell was asked to take over running the Madras Male Orphan Asylum, an orphanage-school for the bastard sons of soldiers and native women. Struck by the great inadequacy of the teaching methods at the asylum, Bell was instead impressed by an open-air school where the pupils were being taught their letters by inscribing them in sand. But his employees, embittered by his forthright manner, were obstructive in Bell’s plans to improve the methods of education. Bell then introduced sand-trays into his school instead of books, but the move was not approved by the master and ushers either. In desperation Bell then instructed a boy called Jonnie Frisken in his lessons, teaching the eight year-old to teach even younger children. This led to the school being segregated into classes where boys could be masters, pupils and sometimes both, and Bell found that this way the children had no learning difficulties. But the school master and two ushers were so disgusted with the method that they left Bell to continue running a school going from strength to strength.

The Madras climate however, proved so indifferent to Bell’s health that in 1796, though much praised for his work, he returned to England. Here he immediately prepared a report on the asylum, then another report in the summer of the following year setting out the operation of the Madras System, i.e. in which all but the youngest children could hold pupil-teacher status. All lessons were taught and learnt by rote. A boy “master” teaching young children a lesson after learning it himself. The 1797 report was circulated to all important figures in the Church and Government. Child education would now be Bell’s consuming passion for the rest of his days.

Funded from his own pocket and with some outside support, Bell opened a few charity schools putting his system into use. It was then in 1801 he came to Swanage and as Rector involved himself in the parish and Sunday school (soon converted to the MS.) Soon Mrs Sarah Trimmer, a religious pamphlet writer, was writing to Bell desiring his opinion of Joseph Lancaster and at the same time extolling Bell’s system above that of his rival. She was convinced Lancaster had merely improved Bell’s system, while basically plagiarising it. Bell, after persistent entreaties from Sarah to come to London to organise a campaign against Lancaster and his method, eventually did so in 1807, staying there a month.

Once in the capital, Bell set up a charity school in Whitechapel with the assistance of two or those who had been involved in running the Swanage Sunday school. Realising it had become impossible to undertake his parochial duties at Swanage, Bell obtained a special licence from his Bishop in May1807 for two years leave of absence. As new schools were opened Lewis Warren, a teenage boy who had been assisting at the Swanage Sunday school, undertook their organisation in the West Midlands. On the expiry of the first two years Bell realised he would have to relinquish the Swanage living entirely.

In 1811 Bell was appointed advisor and sponsor for the newly formed Society for the Education of the Children of the Poor, and the Church versus non-denominational education schism came to public attention. Raised to a pitch of ire, Lancaster came out into the open and even declared in an article that he alone invented the Madras System, that all other claimants (presumably including Bell) were counterfeiters and impostors! The feud wasn’t to be defused until 1818, when Quaker friends sent Lancaster to America to disseminate the blunders of his system there. The organisers of his society then gave Bell the authority to travel the country as an inspector of his schools. He also travelled and lectured on the continent for some years, before ill-health forced his return to England.

On his return Bell retired to Cheltenham, where he revived his aim of furthering education in St Andrews. He acquired two properties in South Street for a school, and in 1831 established a fund of £120,000 to finance the building of a Grammar and English School. Under the terms of Bell’s will his estate at Egmore was left in the hands of Trustees who were supposed to set up another Madras School at Cupor, in Fife.

But the trustees, in defiance of his wishes, instead spent the money on projects to build an observatory, provide a dispensary and improve public water supply. Nor would the educationalist-cleric live to see his school finished. Dr Andrew Bell died on 27th of January 1832, just ten weeks before the foundation stone was laid, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.