Lancashire Smiths in Sweden

Abstract

Barbro Bursell's doctoral thesis deals with the Lancashire smiths at Ramnas Bruk in Vastrnanland: it is a study in ethnology, with an emphasis on industrial anthropology, and in this field it represents a relatively new trend, according to the author without true predecessors though she has clearly benefited from the extensive work of the economic historians of the Swedish iron industry. The smiths at Ramnas Bruk were interesting as the last representatives of the well-known Swedish charcoal iron industry: the book is a local study, concentrating on the years 1885-1925, and it deals with a labour aristocracy (in English they called themselves 'the Clog Nobility'). There were approximately thirty Lancashire smiths at Ramnas; as this works accounted for about 2.5-3.0 per cent of the Lancashire steel manufactured in Sweden, there can never have been many more than a thousand smiths of the type described here. The men were merely a small remnant and the works something of a relic, for the Lancashire forge was increasingly superseded by the advance of the new ingot steel process. Lancashire steel was produced for the last time in Sweden at Ramnas in May 1964.