DavyMarkham - Markham & Co Ltd

DavyMarkham DavyMarkham traces its origins back to the Sheffield firm of Davy Brothers and the Chesterfield based company of Markham & Co Ltd.

In 1872, The Hardwick Colliery Company placed an order with the Victoria Foundry, run by William Oliver, for the construction of two large winding engines.
William Oliver had run a successful operation from the 1850's onwards, at first in partnership with his father John, and after the latter's death in 1862 as sole owner, from the Victoria Foundry premises at what was formerly Shepley's Yard.

Oliver relocated to a Greenfield site at Broad Oaks Meadows on the south-eastern edge of Chesterfield, bounded by the River Rother. This move, and the subsequent establishment of the Broad Oaks Foundry, mark the beginnings of what later became Markham & Co Ltd.

In 1885 a slump in the coal and iron trades, coupled with massive overheads on the new factory and equipment, fatally undermined the firm. The following year William Oliver had to call in the receivers, and in 1889 the foundry was sold to industrialist Charles Paxton Markham as Markham & Co. Ltd.

At its peak, prior to the Second World War, a thousand men worked for the company. Markham's primary customers were the large number of collieries in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire that created much of the wealth of their respective counties. For these clients the firm constructed winding and haulage gear on a massive scale. It was C P M's proud boast that one-fifth of all British coal was brought to the surface by Markham winders, and there seems little reason to doubt his claim.

Contacts were made in South Africa which resulted in the production of twenty winders for use in the gold mines during the period 1927-37, which meant regular work for many at a time of economic depression. By 1948 the company had supplied over two hundred steam and electric winding machines for home and export use, including an immense drum for South Africa which had a diameter of thirty-four feet, far outstripping the twenty-seven foot drum which had caused William Oliver to look for new premises.

Early in the twentieth century Markham built and supplied tunnelling equipment for the construction of London's Underground, the Mersey Tunnel, and during the 1930s in the Moscow Underground. Post-war productions would include tunnelling shields for the Dartford Tunnel under the River Thames.

C. P. Markham died in 1926. In the year prior to his death he had reconstituted his firm as part of the Staveley Coal & Iron Company, thus ensuring its future.

The new agreement gave Markham a licence to build water turbines to Bovings designs, and added another lucrative string to their bow.

By 1937 the firm had changed ownership again, Staveley selling out to John Brown & Co, Ltd, but the works continued operations as before. With the outbreak of war in 1939, the workers at Broad Oaks found themselves involved in a series of different, but equally varied tasks.

In 1948 the varied work carried out at Broad Oaks included haulage gears, rolling mills and equipment, steel girders, large steel-framed buildings, light alloy extrusion presses, spun cast iron plant, blast furnace plant, large iron castings and research equipment in addition to the turbine and tunnelling operations.

George Ison found himself working for the Admiralty at Haslar on behalf of the firm, putting together the Portsmouth water cavitation tunnel, where model ships were tested in a huge tank half a mile in length.

What didn't the men at Markham make in those days? Winding engines were sent to Rose Deep in Australia, complete with a new braking system designed in-house. Markham also built the refuelling machine for the AGR (Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor) at Windscale. Then there was the huge six hundred ton road deck Markham built as a substitute roadway to keep the traffic running while the Jubilee Line of the London Underground line was being extended.

Later on, in the 1980s, the company would manufacture four bulb turbine runners - the largest made at the time - for the prestigious Vidalia project on the Mississippi River in Lousiana. A big tunnelling contract was secured for the drainage system in Mexico City in 1967.

In 1986 John Brown & Co Ltd. became part of the Trafalgar House Group, but this situation did not last for long. By 1996 Trafalgar House were bought out by the Norwegian group Kvaerner Brug.

In 1984 they made a full-face hard-rock tunnelling machine which was capable of boring through granite, for use in Lodigiani, Italy. A few years later, in 1987, they secured a contract worth £15 million when in partnership with rock tunnelling specialists Robbins of America they constructed two full-face tunnel boring machines for the driving of the Channel Tunnel from the English side. One of the most prestigious projects ever undertaken by the firm, it involved the construction of two monstrous tunnelling machines, each weighing 1300 tonnes. Fitted with tungsten-tipped picks, the machines were capable of cutting a tunnel 8.36 metres in diameter and installing behind them a segmented concrete lining 0.38 metres thick.

Their final job, a tunnelling shield for Manapouri hydro-electric scheme in New Zealand, was the largest they had ever made, bigger even than the huge Channel Tunnel machines.

In 1998 the Broad Oaks works was closed, some of the workforce transferred to the former Davy United site, now DavyMarkham, in Sheffield.

Over 130 years of Markham’s design, manufacturing and installation expertise is now part of the DavyMarkham portfolio.