Cradley Heath in England's Black Country hand-forged much of the world's chain, from ships' anchor cable made by gangs of men to small chain hammered by thousands of women in backyard shops. In 1910 around 800 of those women, organised by Mary Macarthur, won a ten-week strike that roughly doubled their pay under Britain's first minimum-wage law. Machine-welded chain then took the trade anyway; the last hand shops closed in the decades after the Second World War.
Hand chainmaker no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1500 – 1850
The forge at the economy's centre
Pre-industrial economies ran on wrought iron, and the smith was its retail interface: ships, mills, coaches, farms and armies all ended at somebody's anvil. The trade specialised and stratified — anchor smiths, chainmakers, nailers, farriers, whitesmiths — and master smiths of ornamental iron, like Jean Tijou at St Paul's Cathedral, worked at the level of court artists. In the American colonies the blacksmith was often the first tradesman a new settlement recruited; in the Black Country of England, whole districts forged nothing but nails or chain, a hand industry employing tens of thousands.
What else was happening then
1856
Bessemer makes steel industrial
Henry Bessemer's converter, announced in 1856, blows air through molten iron to make cheap steel by the ton. Combined with rolling mills and drop forges, it moves metalworking decisively from the anvil to the factory: within decades, nails, chain, tools and hardware — the smith's bread and butter — are machine-made.
1908
The Model T empties the smithy
The US census counted well over 200,000 blacksmiths in 1910, most of them shoeing horses and repairing wagons. The automobile removed the horse from working life within a generation, and by mid-century the American village smithy was effectively extinct — a collapse repeated across the industrial world.
1973
The artist-blacksmith revival
The Artist-Blacksmith's Association of North America (ABANA) is founded at a gathering in Lumpkin, Georgia, in 1973, followed by the British Artist Blacksmiths Association in 1978. A trade that industry had discarded reorganises itself around design, sculpture and heritage restoration — the modern profession.
Where that work lives now
The trade that made every other trade's tools — from Hittite iron and guild forges to the artist-blacksmiths who brought the anvil back in the twenty-first century.
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