A chance find which has turned up among my family's papers – a furious letter about defective bottles. No idea how it ended up in a solicitor's offices in Middlesbrough …
On Thursday 23 July 1835, a young man called John Latimer Nichol dashed off an angry letter to a Mr John Jobling of Seaton Sluice, the busy little port close to the village of Hartley in Northumberland.
John Latimer Nichol was a 28 year old merchant, born in Gateshead and working in the City of London. Among their other business ventures, he and his father Anthony Nichol were in partnership with Ingleby Thomas Miller from Shincliffe, Co Durham as Nichol & Miller, bottle merchants in London. New stock for their warehouses was shipped in bottle sloops to their premises at Dowgate Wharf on the Thames, near today's Cannon Street Station. There was a booming market for bottles in the capital.
Nichol & Miller's bottles came from the North East, where the vast majority of glassmaking was carried out – there were bottleworks on the Rivers Tyne and Wear and the Northumbrian coast, supplying customers across the world.
The region had all the advantages of cheap coal for the furnaces (glassmaking was a very convenient sideline for colliery owners) together with established shipping routes and easy availability of raw materials. In 1790, the North East mostly made wine and claret bottles but when, during the 1820s, bottled beer began to be exported to hot climates, the manufacturers began to produce beer bottles.
It's possible that Nichol & Miller dealt exclusively with the bottleworks at the bustling seaport of Seaton Sluice, acting as their London outlet.
John Jobling, who would soon receive this angry letter, came from a family that was of very considerable importance in Seaton Sluice. He was the son of James Jobling who, in partnership with John Carr, had been running the Hartley coalmines since 1809. They had prospered and, besides their collieries, brewery and malt kilns, Mr Jobling and Mr Carr had taken over the Hartley Bottleworks in 1820.
The works had been founded at Seaton Sluice by Thomas Delaval in 1763 and had swiftly grown into a huge concern – production had reached 1,740,000 bottles a year by 1777. The following year, the first of three cone-shaped bottle houses was built to replace the old square buildings, their more powerful draught enabling more efficient furnaces. There would be six of them eventually, dominating the skyline for the next 150 years and useful as sea marks to sailors.
In 1835 John Jobling was agent for the bottleworks of Messrs John Carr & Company. Aged 42 and unmarried, he lived with his widowed mother and spinster sisters at the large, thatched Jacobean house called Seaton Lodge.
This was originally the home of the Delaval family and was later occupied by the Delavals' land agent. It was a picturesque old house, described in John Robinson's
Illustrated Handbook to the Rivers Tyne, Blyth, & Wansbeck in 1894 in glowing terms – this was 22 years after the bottleworks and its smoky chimneys stopped work:
The situation of the house is all that can be desired, sheltered on all sides from the storms of the coast, the views from its windows up the charming dene, the sheet of water flowing in front of its terraced walks; while behind is one of those old fashioned gardens which delight the eye of all lovers of romantic landscape gardening.
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| Seaton Lodge from A History of Northumberland 1893 |
John Latimer Nichol wrote in such haste that his handwriting is a scrawl and he made a mistake with the date, giving it as 23 June 1835. (It looks as though a later hand, possibly that of John Jobling himself, has corrected this to 23 July). The letter was posted that very day and is marked
Z
JY 23
1835
He had just returned from a meeting with an important customer, who had sent for him to explain why they wouldn't be buying from Nichol & Miller in future. John Latimer Nichol couldn't blame him. He had been shown the product of one of his major rivals, and the difference in quality between Jobling's bottles and those bought from Cookson & Coulthard of South Shields was all too obvious. Jobling's goods were not only inferior in colour and finish, but they were noticeably lighter and they gave way "at the shoulder". John Latimer Nichol wrote bitterly,
It is of little use our holding a stock of bottles which is only saleable till Mr Coombs or Mr Coulthard walk in & shew theirs
This was the third large business house whose custom they had lost and he wasn't going to order from Seaton Sluice again unless John Jobling could assure him that they would match the quality of bottles from
Cooksons of South Shields and from Ridleys of Newcastle.
He asked John Jobling to meet his father Anthony Nichol in Newcastle to see
if some thing cannot be done to meet our opponents in this matter for I have no fancy for carrying on my business at a rivals sufferances
This is John Latimer Nichol's letter – in some places I have had to make a guess at a word, and I've marked this with square brackets.
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