Miscellaneous Manuscript and Printed Material

MS 3147/10

Miscellaneous Manuscript and Printed Material

1776 - 1896

Miscellaneous Manuscript Papers.
Under this heading will be found various manuscript papers relating to engineering and science. They include the heads of a patent bill drawn up by James Watt, manuscript copies of items such as an advertisement for Hooper’s windmill, the proposed bill to tax iron in 1806, and a catalogue of Swedish iron marks. There are also various scientific notes, for example on mensuration or on Barlow’s work on the strength of timber. The majority of these items were kept in the offices at Soho Manufactory.

The Watt Room
The curator of The Watt Room, Henry Hazleton, drew up various guides, lists and notes describing some of the items under his care, and these will be found under this heading. He also assembled various scrapbooks of historic items. Transcripts of some of the lists of contents of The Watt Room will be found in the Appendix to this list.

The Catalogue of Old Engines, c. 1895.
This misleadingly titled volume is in fact Hazleton’s guide to the portfolios of drawings that he had under his care in The Watt Room. Mis-understanding of this book and Hazleton’s work has caused much confusion since it passed to George Tangye in 1895 and thence to the Library and eventually Birmingham City Archives. The contents and the arrangement of the Catalogue are described in a separate list.

Scrapbook, c. 1892.
This book, which contains printed items, mainly relating to steam boats and steam carriages, was originally used by Henry Hazleton for notes on the engines shown in the drawings and on the letters and papers stored in The Watt Room. See the separate list for detailed information on the contents.

‘Portfolio No. 3’ – Scrapbook, 1890s.
This scrapbook from The Watt Room also contains printed items, relating to Boulton & Watt’s legal cases, Cornish mines, the copying press and so on. Most of the items are duplicates of documents elsewhere in the collection. It also originally contained other items such as agreements between Boulton and Watt which are now in the Legal Records (MS 3147/2). See the separate list for detailed information on the contents.

Large Scrapbook.
The exact origins of this book are unclear, but some of the documents pasted into it have notes in Henry Hazleton’s hand written on them. This book contains a huge number of documents that were clearly removed from bundles and pasted in. There are printed details of other engineers’ inventions and patents, steam boats, prospectuses for water works companies and the like, and pamphlets and printed addresses about the Cornish mining industry. There are notes by John Southern on the strength of timber, there are dozens of printed engine agreements, and memoranda of agreements with engine pirates and some employees.

Lists of Cornish mine engines, boat engines and James Watt & Co. patent pocket boilers, compiled by Henry Hazleton.
These lists, mostly written on glazed linen, were made for use in The Watt Room and the Catalogue of Old Engines. See the separate list for details.

Notes made by Henry Hazleton.
Miscellaneous notes made by Hazleton from various other documents in The Watt Room. The Drawings Day Book that Hazleton used for some of these notes is listed among the Production Records (MS 3147/4/146), while the drawing of Watt’s first engine that he referred to is in a bundle of papers titled ‘Papers Legal, Historical and Philosophical relating to the Invention and Progress of the Steam Engine’ in the Legal Records (MS 3147/2/24).

Lists of the contents of The Watt Room.
These two lists describe the drawings, letters and papers in The Watt Room. They were drawn up by Henry Hazleton in January and February 1895, when James Watt & Co. were going into receivership and the Foundry manager, W. Henry Darlington, was in negotiations with Samuel Timmins, George Tangye, The Science Museum in London and others about the fate of the contents of The Watt Room.

The first list, made in January, describes the drawings displayed in the eight glass cases that were mounted around the walls of the room. Almost all these drawings can be identified among the portfolios listed as the Main Series of Drawings (MS 3147/5). It also lists steam boats for which drawings existed in The Watt Room, the steam boat draught drawings in the ‘Steam Boat Box’ (now MS 3147/5/1477), and ‘Miscellaneous Early Prints, Drawings and other information,’ most of which can be identified in the collection.

The second list, made in February, records the approximate numbers of portfolios of drawings of different types of engine, packets of letters, and framed pictures and drawings. This list has been transcribed as part of the Appendix to this list.

List of Contents of The Watt Room, 1895 [?].
This slim volume is the only document relating to The Watt Room that is not in Henry Hazleton’s hand. The fact that it includes Hazleton’s lists of engines described above (MS 3147/10/11) suggests that it dates from after Hazleton’s time. It was almost certainly compiled by George Tangye or one of his employees, either as an inventory just before or after the contents of The Watt Room were transferred to Tangye’s Cornwall Works, or as a shelf list. The fact that the description of the contents of some of the cupboards matches those on Hazleton’s list suggests it was an inventory taken at Soho Foundry. Despite the fact that it is not strictly a document created by James Watt & Co. it has been kept with the other Watt Room material as it records Henry Hazleton’s arrangement. A transcript can be found in the Appendix to this list.

Printed Pamphlets, Booklets, Journals, Acts etc.
Under this heading will be found a wide variety of printed material collected by the firm for reference. There are acts of Parliament, descriptions of steam engines, pamphlets on trade and industry, Dutch pamphlets describing Boulton & Watt engines in Holland, and several historical pamphlets and articles collected by the firm in the latter part of the 19th century. Authors include George Rennie, Joseph Whitworth and William Congreve. There are also a few copies of Knott’s Enlarged Birmingham Almanack and Commerical Intelligencer which were mounted on the office wall.

Newspaper Cuttings.
These cuttings all date from the latter part of the 19th century, and were collected by W. Henry Darlington. They include a small notebook of cuttings of newspaper reports and articles on James Watt & Co.’s bankruptcy, the closure of Soho Foundry and its sale to W. & T. Avery.

Catalogues of Sales and Auctions at Aston Hall, Soho Mint and Soho Foundry.
Under this heading will be found sale catalogues for the auction at Aston Hall in 1849 following James Watt Jr.’s death the previous year, and a catalogue of the sale of Soho Mint when it was sold by Matthew Piers Watt Boulton in 1850. There is also a complete set of catalogues for all the sales of the premises, plant and machinery, tools etc. of Soho Foundry after James Watt & Co. went into receivership in 1895. The final sale, of tools and machinery, took place in May 1896. The catalogue of 21 May 1895 (MS 3147/10/77) contains a large coloured plan of the Foundry. The sale of ‘Soho Curios’ of September 1895 (10/78) probably never took place, as the majority of the items were bought by George Tangye following his previous purchase of the contents of The Watt Room. Letters between Samuel Timmins, George Tangye and Samuel Timmins about this sale will be found among the material added to the collection by Tangye (MS 3147/31).

The Miscellaneous Manuscript and Printed Material consists in the main of one-off and individual items that were not part of any series of records. These items have been grouped together as follows:

Miscellaneous Manuscript Papers
The Watt Room
Printed Pamphlets, Booklets, Journals, Acts etc.
Newspaper Cuttings
Catalogues of Sales and Auctions at Aston Hall and Soho

More detailed information on each series is given in the Description field, while reference numbers and covering dates of the actual records, and a list of the old reference numbers will be found in the pdf of the full series list attached. Item level lists are available in the searchroom of Birmingham Archives and Heritage.

3 volumes, 7 boxes

There are no restrictions on access to or use of the Miscellaneous Manuscript and Printed Material. However fragile items or those in a poor state of repair may not be served at the discretion of the Duty Archivist.

The records listed here are various manuscript and printed items created or collected by Boulton & Watt and their successor firms. These records relate to steam engines and engineering, but they are not records of actual steam engine production or the day-to-day administration of the firm.

Boulton & Watt and their successor firms collected material that was useful or interesting to them for their business activities. These included various manuscript papers on science and engineering, and a large number of printed pamplets, articles and journals. These items were kept for reference in the offices at Soho Manufactory.

In the latter part of the 19th century the firm, then called James Watt & Co., began to take a great interest in its own history. The driving force behind this was the manager of Soho Foundry, W. Henry Darlington.1 Historical pamphlets and newspaper cuttings, particularly relating to James Watt and William Murdock, were collected, and in the early 1890s the firm established its own museum and repository for historical records at Soho Foundry known as The Watt Room, or occasionally The Boulton & Watt Room. A large volume of records and drawings (which now form the core of the Boulton & Watt Archive) and various artefacts were placed in The Watt Room, and their care and arrangement was entrusted to Henry Hazleton, one of the firm?s draughtsmen. Various lists and papers were drawn up relating to The Watt Room, and they will be found here. Some of the lists of contents of The Watt Room have been transcribed in an Appendix to this list.

When James Watt & Co. went bankrupt in 1895, various auctions of the firm?s premises, tools, machinery and other items were held. Darlington and Hazleton collected a set of the catalogues from these auctions and passed them to George Tangye, the Birmingham engineer who bought the contents of The Watt Room.