The works in Yuzovka, now Donetsk. Archive photo, early 1900s
Retired metal merchant, Anthony Lipmann, illuminates trading for the young entering the world of metals.
Sheffield and Donetsk ̶ more in common than you think
My godfather was deeply drawn to skips. If he happened to see one, he was over the top, turning over rubble and old carpets in search of pickings. And with the treasure he built furniture which he called ‘Skippendale’ as well as handmade books bound with insulating wire, shelves constructed with discarded planks, and artwork painted onto wallpaper rolls.
The Americans call this dumpster diving.
UK metal yards tend to give me similar excitement. Inspecting segregated scraps in bays or staring at pyramids of twisted metal is like a drug to me.
Last week, I went north with a new Ukrainian employee to help her understand our business. ‘What better than a trip to Sheffield?’, I thought. To explain where we were going, I said, ‘I’m going to show you the Donetsk of the UK!’
Returning home later that day, I checked what I had said and discovered there was more to the Donetsk story than I thought. Donetsk, for reason of its steel production is rightly twinned with Sheffield, but what I did not know was that Donetsk was established by a Welshman! Named John Hughes (1814-1889), he was a successful iron maker at the Millwall Iron Foundry where he made the iron cladding for the wooden ships of the British Navy. When this had come to the notice of the Tsar, Hughes was requested to fortify the battlements of Kronstadt (now Kaliningrad) on the Baltic. Through this, Hughes came to hear about the unexploited Steppe in the Donbas rich with all the ingredients for iron-making – coal, iron ore, and water.
In 1869 Hughes set off from Wales with a hundred fellow Welshmen – coal miners, iron makers, and their families – as well as eight ships of equipment. He took everything required to live and develop ironmaking. Arriving at Taganrog on the coast, this hardware was drawn a hundred miles across the snow by ox trains. (A trip that one hundred and fifty years later, before the present war, might take two and a half hours by road).
The settlement was named Yuzovka (Hughesovka) after John Hughes and later re-christened Stalino (steel town) before its present incarnation as Donetsk. As it happened, the first renaming occurred around the time ‘Stalin’ (real name: Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) came to power. Local leaders considered it politic that Stalin should think the town was named after him.
Hughes and his descendants stayed right up until The Revolution and then left. He had taken a patrician attitude, founding a hospital, schools, and an ale house. But in post-revolution times, it was known as a frontier town, rife with crime, drinking and poverty. During the Holodomor it was abject.
Our new employee comes from Kyiv, and studied at the Antonov University, connected to the famous aero-maker renowned for its production of the largest heavy-lift aircraft in the world – the AN-225 Mriya (dream) destroyed early in the present war. But how better to explain the thrill of deciphering the value in a pile of sheet and plate, or understanding the transformative processes of metal making, than by trailing round the yards of Sheffield?
‘Sheffield is not what it was’, I’ve often heard people say, when referring to Sheffield’s once indelible synonymity with metal. How wrong!
I exhorted our new student, therefore, not be distracted by the sight of the new Next and Ikea stores, or Carluccio Restaurant, in Sheffield’s Meadowhall, or the new warehouses off the Attercliffe Road.
When I got back into the car a few hours later, we’d done so much yard-stomping there were metal turnings and splinters glinting in the foot well. Behind the red brick, razor-wired, walls in the so-called poorer areas, metal traders know it is only snobbery that prevents the outsider from understanding the usefulness of the work being carried out behind these steel gates and alarms.
Our new employee was given the type of Sheffield welcome wherever we went that could bend metal. We saw such things as scrap of directionally solidified turbine blades and how they should be treated for reverting. We looked at casting scraps, noting the difference between cast and wrought materials, how to recognise spillings and their purpose in blends; incoming titanium scrap turnings and solids, the processes required to crush and degrease, how charges are made up, watched the open-hearth induction furnace doing its work, and listened as hot poured metal cracked and creaked in its moulds as it cooled and solidified.
Soon we hope our new metal-merchant-in-the-making will pick up the turns of phrase rich in colour and descriptive of work that make Sheffield the cultural centre of the metal trade.
It won’t be long perhaps, before she’s enjoying seeing solid pieces of metal stirred into a pot and thinking of getting bladdered with her mates in the evening.
It’s a long way from today’s Donetsk – but, suddenly, when you think of the Hughes story, not as far as one thought. Who knows that Sheffield United Football Club known as ‘The Blades’ is, by deduction, twinned in some way with ‘Shakhtar Donestk’ which means the ‘Donetsk Miners’.
It makes what is presently taking place there seem so much closer.
By Anthony Lipmann
