A1-The Great North Road
The beginning of the 20th century saw a major environmental problem. Dust. The macadamized roads may have been relatively gentle on horses hooves but the new-fangled horseless carriages were kicking up the dust. As motor cars become more abundant and faster in the early 1900s the roads turned to mud in wet weather and blew up in clouds in dry. Although there had been a few small urban pavements built from asphalt blocks, as well as cobbles and wooden blocks, and short stretches of road had various bituminous preparations applied to them by hand, what was now urgently required was a method of applying tar to the gravel of long stretches of the country's roads. Foremost in tackling the dust problem was Rees Jeffreys, then Secretary of the Roads Improvement Association. He organized a competition, held in May of 1907 on the macadamized Hounslow-Staines road, of tar spreading machines and preparations of tar. A 100 guinea prize was awarded to Thomas Aitken, of Cupar, for his 'Aitken's Pneumatic Tar Sprayer' and there were several other machines that received the judges' commendations. The competition aroused national interest and over the next few years progress accelerated as more efficient tar-spreading machines and better preparations of tar were developed. Jeffreys gives an insightful account of the era in his autobiographical history of early 20th century road development, 'The King's Highway'. Writing in 1949, after a lifetime in public service related to roads, he concludes discussion of the dust problem with the following paragraph:
The important roads of Great Britain are now dustless. In reviewing my life and valuing which of its activities resulted in the 'greatest good to the greatest number' the evidence accumulates that my crusade for dustless roads takes first place. It is not only difficult, it is impossible, for the present generation to appreciate what their parents and grandparents suffered from dust and mud. Not only were houses made distressingly uncomfortable by dust, but household work was increased greatly by the mud and dust which children brought into the house on boots and clothes. The dust caused many ailments and diseases of the eyes, nose and throat. Few reforms brought so much direct benefit to the people as a whole as that which in so few years made the British roads dustless. It is interesting to see that this change was brought about mainly by the persistent propaganda and efforts of a few enthusiasts who drew little, if any, reward for the services they rendered to the community. Little or no help or encouragement was received from Parliament and the Government Departments.
Jeffreys lists a number of people and organizations in connection with tarring the roads but there is no mention of the firm Tarmac, which appears to have rewritten the history giving itself a prominent role. Here is the 'History of Tarmac' according to the company, Tarmac.
Tarmac has pioneered modern roadbuilding and grown into a major international group of companies - all from one man' s bright idea. It all began in 1901 when Britain was switching from horse-drawn traffic to the age of the motor car. Better road surfaces were obviously going to be needed.
One day Nottingham's county surveyor, by the name of Mr E Purnell Hooley, was passing a local ironworks when he noticed a patch of road was free of dust and was also unrutted by traffic. He discovered that a barrel of tar had spilled on to the road from a passing dray and, to prevent a sticky mess, the tar had been covered by waste slag from the ironworks. Hooley seized on the idea of devising a British patent for mixing tar with slag and eventually created the material he called Tarmac. However, he was a better inventor than businessman and the company he formed had trouble marketing the material. However, word of the "revolutionary" new material reached the ears of the then Wolverhampton MP, Sir Alfred Hickman, who owned a large steelworks with considerable quantities of waste slag. Sir Alfred bought the idea, moved the operation from Nottingham to Wolverhampton, and re-launched the company as Tarmac in 1905.
Fast growing Tarmac became a public company in 1913 and during the first world war, when UK roadbuilding was suspended, the company sent huge amounts of material to France to help build roads through the battlefields. After the war, Tarmac acquired slag tips and roadstone quarries and set up works around the country to meet the growing demand for "metalled" roads. It also utilized waste slag dust to start producing reinforced concrete.
The history of Britain's newest construction to services group - Carillion plc - began paradoxically almost 100 years ago. We have to look back to 1901 when, on a road near Denby ironworks in Derbyshire, the county surveyor of Nottingham - Edgar Purnell Hooley noticed a barrel of tar had burst. The spilt tar had been covered with waste slag from nearby furnaces and had, by chance, produced a remarkable dust-free, hard-wearing surface.
Hooley realised that what had originally been done by accident could be repeated purposely and within a short space of time had formed the company -Tar Macadam (Purnell Hooley's Patent) Syndicate Limited - to produce the new road surfacing material. Hooley was however a better inventor than businessman and, in 1905, the business was taken over. The new chairman was Sir Alfred Hickman - a member of the British Parliament for Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, and also owner of the largest steelworks in the area. Sir Alfred had been taken with the idea of being able to turn the vast amount of waste product from his blast furnaces into money!
The company was moved to Wolverhampton and re-named Tarmac - a name that would eventually become part of the English language and used the world over. The initial business was supplying road surfacing materials but soon customers were asking Tarmac to lay the material and then actually build the roads….. and so the company developed a construction operation.
And the good people of Whitstable, on their website, give us this account: Tarmacadam was first used in England in the 1830s, when roadbuilders in Nottingham blended coal tar (a byproduct of town gasworks) and `macadam' (graded stones), spread the resultant hot, sticky mixture over a stone foundation, and dressed the surface with sand. Stones bound together with bitumen instead of coal tar - a product that eventually became known as asphalt - were also used for some roadbuilding schemes in the 19th century. Nevertheless, most roadbuilders continued to surface their roads with gravel, crushed stones and waterbound grit until well into the 20th century. `Tarmac' and bitumen-coated roadstone became more widely used when the suction effect of fast motor vehicles' rubber tyres started to reduce water-bound road surfaces to clouds of fine dust!
Kent's first `blacktop' roads were built following the publication of Kent County Council's `Joscelyne Report' in 1903. The KCC appointed D. Joscelyne, formerly Chief Engineer and Secretary to the Public Works Department of the Government of Bengal, to head an independent enquiry into the management and maintenance of the county's roads. Joscelyne reported that most of the laying and rolling of fresh stone was done in the winter. The advantage of this was that water was more readily available - although heavy rain affected the lasting quality of the new surface, and the traction engines that hauled the stone wagons caused further damage. Joscelyne noted: "The heavy engines grind up the surface ... often destroying some of it altogether. The motor cars and cycles, by their rapid impact, loosen the surface wherever it is not perfectly smooth ... they also disturb and scatter the binding material of the road surface, thus leaving the road still more susceptible to the combined effects of the weather and the wear of heavy traffic ... the fact must be faced that motor power has come to stay."
In the summer of 1903 the KCC laid an experimental stretch of tarred road at Farningham. This was followed in 1905 and 1906 by dust-laying experiments in which `painting' road surfaces with tar proved to be the most effective remedy. In 1907 a KCC contractor applied two coats of tar to a few main roads (at a cost of 1/2d a square yard!) and in 1908 the KCC bought its own tar spraying equipment. By 1911 the council was spending nearly £30,000 a year on tar spraying and on repairing its roads with bitumen, pitch and tar.
The Farningham experiment was followed by trials and tests in which tarmacadam was used instead of waterbound macadam to rebuild road surfaces. In the years immediately before the First World War the County Surveyor, Henry Maybury, reported that local roadbuilding materials were not strong enough to withstand the increasing volume and speed of motor traffic, and that the passing of `light cars' was accompanied by `a shower of flints.' Granite was imported at great cost from outside the county to create stronger surfaces, only to crumble under the assault of the anti-skid studs that motorists were now fitting to their tyres; the studs `cut right through the granite surface, leaving saucer-shaped holes which are extremely difficult to repair.'
In 1913 Maybury declared: "The waterbound-system of repairs will have to be discarded in favour of bituminous grouting or similar treatment." Public transport aggravated the situation. In1914 H.T. Chapman, Maybury's successor, reported that before motor omnibuses became popular, waterbound granite macadam or flint could be used to keep roads in good condition, but now they had to be strengthened and surfaced with bituminously bound material at twice the cost - "Anyone travelling over roads that have not recently been specially surfaced can tell at once that they are passing over a `bus route' by the waviness, corrugations and deep holes."
Kent became one of the pioneer counties in the extensive tarring of roads, the KCC's use of `tarmac' increasing twelvefold (from 2,728 tons to 31,905 tons a year) 1910 and 1913. When road maintenance and construction returned to normal levels after the war, waterbound granite was soon discarded almost entirely in favour of `tarmac.' For a time this was produced at the KCC's own plants - those that served east Kent were at Faversham and Pegwell Bay - but in the early 1930s privately owned plants, such as the one at Whitstable Harbour, became the council's suppliers.
For a thorough treatment of the development of road tar, see Tar Roads by Hughes et. al..
Lincolnshire
©Biff Vernon 2002, 2003