CHAPTER XlHI 
CLEVELAND IRON AND STEEL 
Ix addition to the general reference to manufacturing 
firms on the North-east Coast made in Chapter XII, 
something must be said in more detail about the great 
companies now carrying on what is known as the Cleveland 
iron and steel trade, which have absorbed most of the 
lesser firms. Bolckow Vaughan & Co. takes the first 
place, inasmuch as Ferdinand Bolckow, a naturalised 
Mecklenburger who had made money in the grain trade in 
Newcastle, and John Vaughan, the discoverers in 1850 of 
the principal Eston vein of Cleveland ore, were the founders 
in 1841 of the Cleveland industry as we know it and of 
this firm, which rapidly took the lead in the Cleveland 
metallurgical world. Impressed by the possibilities of 
Middlesbrough, they had put up an iron foundry and 
rolling-mills, and had afterwards built a blast furnace at 
Witton, to use the ore found in the coal measures. Then 
came the discovery of Cleveland ore already described. 
In the year 1864 the private firm was registered as a 
limited company, with a capital of [2,500,000 and the 
support of shareholders from Lancashire and other districts. 
The first Chairman was Ferdinand Bolckow. After him 
came his nephew Carl Bolckow, and then Henry Davis 
Pochin, whose grandson, the Hon. Henry Duncan McLaren, 
C.B.E., is one of the present Directors of the Company. 
He was succeeded in the Chair by Henry Lee, E. Windsor 
Richards and Sir J. E. Johnson-Ferguson, Bart., whose 
son, Colonel E. A. Johnson-Ferguson, is another of the 
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