No 6042The Engines
Beyer, Peacock next door
The other Gorton builder: how Richard Peacock left the railway's works to found Beyer, Peacock and Company at Gorton Foundry, and what the two works meant to each other.
Entered by Walter Emmott · checked by Nell Dewsnap · 580 words · about 3 min on the bench ·
Gorton held two locomotive works, not one. Beside the railway's own shops stood Gorton Foundry, the home of Beyer, Peacock and Company, one of the great export builders of the steam age. The two works were neighbours, rivals and relations, because the man who founded the second had run the first.
The man who chose the site twice
Richard Peacock was the locomotive man the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester Railway sent to find ground for its works in the 1840s, and he chose the flat field at Openshaw. A few years later he chose the district again, this time for himself. In 1854 he left the railway's service and, with the German engineer Charles Beyer, founded Beyer, Peacock and Company on land at Gorton Foundry, a short walk from the works he had just built. The site's choice was no accident: the railway works had made the district, and the new firm meant to use everything the district now contained.
The export builder
Where the railway's shops built for one company, the foundry built for the world. Beyer, Peacock made its name on articulated locomotives and export engines, the Garrats that worked from Africa to Australia, and on the solid British classes the home railways ordered between their own works' jobs. The foundry's product book is a different kind of record from the Tank's: not the story of one railway's muscle but the story of Manchester selling locomotives by the shipload.
The two works as neighbours
The men moved between the two. Skills learned on the Tank's benches were worth wages at the foundry's, and vice versa, and the roll call of either place reads like a directory of the other's trades. To Openshaw the difference between the works mattered less than the fact of them: between the railway's shops and the foundry, Gorton was a place where a boy could reasonably expect to spend his life building engines, and thousands did.
The parallel ends
The two works ended within sight of each other's end, too. The railway's works closed in 1963; Beyer, Peacock followed in 1966, after a century in which it had built for most of the railways on earth. Two endings on one street is the industrial history of Manchester in a single paragraph.
The foundry's own book
Beyer, Peacock kept a product book of its own, and reading the two side by side is the fairest test of what a works was. The railway's shops knew their engines intimately because they also repaired them for decades; the foundry knew its engines at arm's length, shipped out to railways it would never visit. One was a works written in maintenance entries, the other a works written in shipping lists, and Openshaw held both within a few streets. The men who moved between them carried the district's real curriculum: whatever the drawing office on either side of the wall needed hands for that year.
The foundry and the works also shared a subtler inheritance: the men, the suppliers, the pubs where wages were spent and the streets where apprentices grew up. Two companies, one district, and a shared century of making engines is the whole of what this entry records.
The entry, checked
The foundry's founding date, its founders and its specialities rest on the company's record in Grace's Guide and the standard history, in the sources below.
