Hawks family

Foundation

The Hawks company was established by William Hawks (1708–1755) who worked for Sir Ambrose Crowley, Sheriff of London. In the late 1740s Hawks established a set of workshops on waste ground along the river foreshore at Gateshead. When Hawks died at Gateshead on 23 February 1755, the works passed to the eldest son, William Hawks (bap. 1730, d. 1810); he and his first wife, Elizabeth Dixon established the Hawks' industrial empire.William (d.1810) formed a partnership with Thomas Longridge (bap. 1751, d. 1803) in 1770 and shortly afterwards acquired a plating forge was acquired at Beamish, co. Durham, the first of four separate metalworking sites operated by Hawks and Longridge along Beamish Burn. A forge at Lumley, co. Durham, was occupied by the firm in the mid-1780s and in the late 1780s slitting and rolling mills on the River Blyth in the modern county of Northumberland were taken on.

Height

By the 1790s the works at Gateshead comprised a substantial industrial complex, now producing steel, anchors, heavy chains, and steam-engine components, as well as a great diversity of smaller iron wares. The supply of ironware to the Board of Admiralty became a speciality. The firm's products were shipped via Hawks's London partners, the Gordon and Stanley families, the latter of whom had links to the old ordnance industry of the Weald and the naval yards of the Thames and Medway. The family also owned the Bedlington Ironworks during this period. The company built Hawks Cottages in the 1830s in the Saltmeadows district of Gateshead for its workers. On 4 December 1810, the estate and works of William Hawks passed to his surviving sons: George Hawks (1766–1820) of Blackheath, Sir Robert Shafto Hawks (1768–1840), and John Hawks (1770–1830) The Hawks works covered 44 acres by the end of the 1830s, supporting a workforce of between 800 and 900. At the time of the visit of the British Association to Newcastle in 1863, it employed 1500 people and owned 92 marine engines and 58 land engines, together constituting of 5000 horse power, and 33 puddling furnaces. The family's New Greenwich ironworks at Gateshead was the town's largest employer until its closure in mysterious circumstances in 1889.

Works

The first iron boat ever built, a rowing boat named the Vulcan, was constructed in 1821 on the Tyne at the Hawks's ironworks. When Sir Robert Shafto Hawks was informed of the purpose for which Samuel Tyne, the boat's inventor, did purchase iron from the Hawks company, he proffered all the iron required for the task free of charge. Sir Robert arranged for cannons to be fired at the launch of the boat, which subsequently won races against wooden boats of the same capacity. However, on Ascension Day, 1826, when, laden with 12 persons including the rowers of the Vulcan, a boat accompanying the Mayor's barge down the river was hit by a steam vessel, two of the Vulcan's rowers were killed and the Vulcan was subsequently abandoned.

Circa 1842, the Hawks firm erected a cast iron bridge at York, which spans the river Ouse in one arch of 172 feet in width. They also reconstructed the Rowland Burdon (died 1838) iron bridge at Sunderland. which consists of a single arch of a width of 237 feet span. They constructed the wrought iron gates for the Northumberland Docks and the iron lighthouses at Gunfleet, Harwich, and Calais and the iron pier at Madras. It also built bridges in Constantinople. Sir Robert financed the construction of St John's Church, Gateshead Fell. The company built High Level Bridge over the Tyne was constituted of 5050 tons of iron. George Hawks, Mayor of Gateshead, (see below) drove in the last key of the structure on 7 June 1849. The bridge was opened by Queen Victoria later that year.

It produced ironclad warships and other materials for the Royal Navy to exponential profits during the Napoleonic Wars and completed several large contracts for the East India Company It also built paddle steamers and hydraulic dredgers.

The family developed also developed areas of London, including Pembroke Square, Kensington.

Sir Robert Shafto Hawks (1768-1840)

Robert Shafto Hawks took over the directorship of the firm following the death of his father. He was knighted by the Prince Regent in 1817 for his role in suppressing riots in the winter of that year. He is commemorated in Newcastle Cathedral and his portrait hangs in Shipley Art Gallery. Sir Robert married Hannah Pembroke Akenhead (1766 - 1863) in 1790 and had two sons. One son, William, entered the church. Sir Robert and Lady Hannah's blind son, David, was a musical prodigy who composed and published marches for military bands at 9 years old. He later specialized in the composition of Tyrolean, Scottish, and Welsh airs. He was described as showing 'a most amazing proof of musical genius and early proficiency' when 17 years of age and as a 'true musical genius'.

George Hawks (1801-1863)

Sir Robert's nephew George Hawks (1801–1863) JP DL of Redheugh Hall succeeded him as head of the firm. George was a political liberal vein, a key local supporter of Sir William Hutt, Gateshead's free-trade MP after 1841, who campaigned to have him knighted. George Hawks served as the first Mayor of Gateshead in 1836, 1848, and 1849. His home at Redheugh Hall became one of the organizing centres of Liberalism in the north east.

Joseph Hawks (1791-1873)

Sir Robert's nephew Joseph Hawks, JP DL, of Jesmond House, Newcastle upon Tyne, was a merchant banker who served as Sheriff of Newcastle. He married Mary Elizabeth Boyd, daughter of William Boyd, merchant banker of the prominent Boyd merchant banking family that founded the bank of Newcastle. Mary Boyd's brother was industrialist Edward Fenwick Boyd. William Boyd was a descendant of Sir Francis Liddell, the second son of Sir Thomas Liddell, 1st Baronet, whose family monopolized the government of the North of England in the 16th and 17th centuries, and his second wife, Frances Forster, previously wife of Nicholas Forster of Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland, and daughter of Sir William Chaytor of Croft, who was a direct descendant of the House of Plantagenet and Charlemagne and whose wife, Frances Bellingham, was a direct descendant of Edward III.

Mary Hawks, later Moody (b.1829)

Joseph's daughter, Mary Susannah Hawks, married Richard Clement Moody, the founder of British Columbia. Her 13 children included Josephine 'Zeffie' Moody, who married Arthur Newall, son of Robert Stirling Newall, a close business associate of the Hawks family, Colonel Richard Stanley Hawks Moody, and Colonel Henry de Clervaulx Moody, who was named after the House of Clervaulx, also spelled Clervaux, via whom his mother descended from the House of Plantagenet and Charlemagne. Richard Clement Moody named the 400-foot hill in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, "Mary Hill" after his wife, Mary. The Royal British Columbia Museum possesses a trove of 42 letters written by Mary Moody from various colonies of the British Empire, mostly from the Colony of British Columbia (1858–66), to her mother and her sister, Emily Hawks, in England. Mary Moody was highly literate, having been tutored in literature, penmanship, and French, and her letters have been of great interest to scholars studying the perspective of the English ruling class in the colonies of the British Empire.

Richard Stanley Hawks Moody (1854-1930)

Colonel Richard Stanley Hawks Moody CB was a distinguished officer of the British Army.

Decline

Hannah, Lady Hawks (d. 1863), the widow of Sir Robert Shafto Hawks, and her two sons sold their shares in 1840 to George Crawshay a member of the great iron-making family of south Wales, who had himself recently been bought out of his family's iron merchanting business in London by his brother William Crawshay II. The business developed by William Hawks had been divided between his three eldest surviving sons in 1810. When he was able to acquire the shares of Joseph Hawks, the only surviving son of George Hawks of Blackheath, he captured a second. The Bedlington works passed eventually to a cousin of the Hawkses, Michael Longridge (1785–1853), a pioneer of railway technology and an associate of Robert Stephenson, under whose superintendence the works became a training ground for a generation of celebrated engineers; including Sir Daniel Gooch.

The dominant influence over the firm of Hawks, Crawshay & Sons in its last years was George Crawshay (1821–1896), the son of George Crawshay and his wife, Like George Hawks, George Crawshay became a considerable political figure in the north-east. It may be that he devoted too much of his time to his political pursuits, however, for by the 1870s and 1880s the overcrowded Gateshead site, home to a great diversity of processes and product lines, compared unfavourably with the more streamlined and specialized engineering yards established along the Tyne by entrepreneurs such as William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong. In 1889 New Greenwich was suddenly closed. The circumstances surrounding the closure remain somewhat mysterious, for the firm's creditors were paid in full (and the company's archive destroyed).