Pirates, Sugar and Stone: The Carlton Bank Alum Works

Some industrial stories begin with a balance sheet. This one begins with a privateer’s cannon.

The alum works at Carlton Bank, gorged out of the Cleveland Hills, has a history that stretches from the Caribbean to the Cleveland coast. It is, when you look closely, a rather splendid tale of sea dogs, sugar barons, and ruthless business dealings dressed up as polite commerce.

George Young recorded in 1817 that the works was thought to have been built by a Captain Prissick around 1680, though a later date is more likely. The manor of Carlton had only passed to Christopher Prissick in 1695-6, conveyed by the Bruce family — Lord Elgin, no less. So where did Prissick find the money? The answer likely involves the exploitation of enslaved people on Caribbean sugar plantations, albeit indirectly.

On 10th December 1689, Christopher Prissick was granted Letters of Marque, licensing him as a privateer against the French — which is to say, the Crown handed him a piece of paper and told him he could plunder, within reason. His ship, the Bridge Towne, weighed 300 tons, carried twenty-eight guns, and had a crew of thirty-six. She was, by any measure, not a vessel for quiet coastal fishing.

It was during his Caribbean adventures that Prissick met Sarah Codrington, daughter of Christopher Codrington — one of the most powerful sugar barons in the British West Indies. They married in Barbados in 1691. One imagines the wedding was rather well catered.

Here is where the story makes a tenuous leap.Traditional uses of alum were for tanning, medicines, and as a mordant for fixing dye into cloth, however, there is a suggestion it may have been used in refining the syrup from sugar cane. Stokesley-born Prissick, fresh from the Caribbean with useful contacts and, in all probability, considerable wealth from privateering, was perfectly placed to recognise the potential of alum and sell it straight back to the very sugar trade he had married into. Carlton Bank was not merely an industrial venture. It was a business plan with a family connection.

When Prissick died in 1717, his will left the alum works to his son Codrington John, while his wife Sarah received one eighth of the net profits. The inventory taken at that time confirmed a fully operational works. Sarah, however, soon found herself in the crosshairs of the Duke of Buckinghamshire and Normanby, owner of the rival Mulgrave works, who offered her £500 per year for twenty-one years to shut Carlton down entirely. Whether one calls this sound business or sharp practice rather depends on which side of the negotiating table one is sitting.

The works changed hands and managers several times over the following decades. By 1736, only four works remained active — Sandsend, Loftus, Boulby, and Carlton — and these four formed a cartel to limit production, Carlton being assigned a quota of 240 tons. Industrial cartels are not, it turns out, a modern invention.

The works finally closed around 1774-75, by which time a certain Sir George Colebrooke had been interfering in the alum industry to notably disastrous effect. Whether Carlton was a casualty of his meddling, the source leaves hanging — tantalisingly — as a question worth asking.

The suggestion that Prissick used his Barbadian connections to export Carlton alum is purely speculative. There seems, frustratingly, to be no evidence whatsoever that alum was used in the processing of sugar cane or that it was a major import into the West Indies. There is at least one modern scientific study, from Kenya, which investigated the effect of incorporating alum as a coagulant during clarification of raw sugar¹Kimatu, Benard M., Abdul K. Faraj, and Symon M. Mahungu. “Effect of Incorporating Alum in Cane Juice Clarification Efficiency and Sucrose Losses.” International Journal of Food Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2015, pp. 61–77. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293620484_Effect_of_incorporating_alum_in_cane_juice_clarification_efficiency_and_sucrose_losses. This does not show that alum was used in sugar processing in the 1690s. However, it does confirm that the underlying chemistry is sound — alum genuinely does work as a clarifying agent in cane juice processing, so its use in that context is a perfectly reasonable historical hypothesis rather than an eccentric one.

More research is needed to establish whether there was actually a market for alum in the West Indies during the seventeenth century. But it makes a good story.

Source: Appleton, Peter. The Alum Folk. 2023. Boroughgate Books. Carlton Bank. Pp 3-7.

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  Kimatu, Benard M., Abdul K. Faraj, and Symon M. Mahungu. “Effect of Incorporating Alum in Cane Juice Clarification Efficiency and Sucrose Losses.” International Journal of Food Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2015, pp. 61–77. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293620484_Effect_of_incorporating_alum_in_cane_juice_clarification_efficiency_and_sucrose_losses