John Hughes founds Hughesovka

Industrial empires are not usually founded by the men who own them. They are founded, more often, by a foreman's son who has spent forty years inside the furnace shed and knows by the colour of the slag when the charge is wrong. Capital follows him because it has nowhere else to go. The drawing-room gentlemen sign the prospectus; the man who walks the casting floor signs the concession.

THE FOREMAN'S SON

John Hughes was born in 1814 in the iron village of Merthyr Tydfil, in the shadow of the Crawshay furnaces at Cyfarthfa Castle. His father was a puddler, a foreman of the puddling shed, the man who stirred the molten pig with a long iron rod until the carbon burned off and the bloom could be drawn. There was no schooling. There was the heat of the furnace at twelve, the apprenticeship at the Uskside Engineering Works at Newport at eighteen, Ebbw Vale at thirty-one, and at forty-six the chief engineer's chair at the Millwall Iron Works on the Isle of Dogs. He had taken out patents on gun-barrel casting and on the rolled armour-plate that now sheathed the ironclads of the Royal Navy. He could not write a graceful letter; he could read a blast furnace as another man reads a page.

Around him the Welsh ironmaster world, Crawshay and Guest and Vickers, kept its accounts in centuries. Russia, to that world, was a country that defaulted; the steppe was a place that swallowed men. Hughes had spent the winter of 1868 with the bound prospectus of the New Russia Company on the table beside him and the maps of the Donets Basin under his hand. The coal seams ran thick under the Kalmius. The iron ore lay within a day's haul. The Imperial government wanted rails for the new lines south and armour-plate for the Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol, and it had no works of its own that could roll either. The proposition wrote itself, if a man had the nerve to sign it.

THE EMBASSY AT LANCASTER GATE

The morning of 18 May 1869 came in clear over Hyde Park. At a little after eleven o'clock he climbed the steps of the Russian Imperial Embassy at 7 Lancaster Gate and was shown up to the reception room on the first floor. The east windows took the spring light full on the table. Three bound copies of the concession lay there in English, French and Russian, the work of six months of Foreign Office drafting and a fortnight of embassy revision. Count Pyotr Andreyevich Kotzebue, governor-general of New Russia, sat across from him; the embassy chargé and the Foreign Office man and two clerks made up the small party.

He was fifty-five. He had walked into the room with the gait of a man who had spent his life on the casting floor and now found himself, in a plain dark coat, on a Wilton carpet in Bayswater. The terms were these: a thirty-year lease on a hundred and twenty square miles of coal and ore in the Yuzovka district, a subsidy on signing, a further subsidy on the first delivery of rails, and in exchange an integrated iron-and-steel works built from nothing on the bare steppe above the Kalmius river. The pen was set out. Count Kotzebue waited.

A SECOND OF TIME ON A WILTON CARPET

Now the room was very quiet. Hughes set his hand on the first of the three copies and did not yet sign. He was running, in the half-minute granted him, the only ledger he had ever trusted, which was the one he carried in his head. Eight ships were chartered out of the Millwall dock. The blast furnace from Newport stood disassembled in the yard, its plates numbered in chalk. Eight Welsh foremen had given their word; seventy-two ironworkers had agreed to bring their families on a five-year contract at three times the Cyfarthfa wage. The London subscription had closed in March at three hundred thousand pounds. The bankers had read the Russian government's hand and found it good.

What the Welsh ironmaster establishment said was that the Russians would default within five years and the Welshmen would be stranded on the steppe with no return passage. He weighed that, in the half-minute, against the thing he knew with his hands, which was that an integrated works could be raised on empty ground in three years on Welsh method if the ore was there and the coal was there and the men were there. The Empire needed the rails. The Empire needed the plate for Sevastopol. A government that needs steel does not default on the man who can pour it. He had been forty-three years inside the furnace shed. He took up the pen.

He signed the English copy first, then the French, then the Russian, his hand steady, the signature plain and unornamented, the signature of a foreman's son. Count Kotzebue countersigned. The chargé blotted the ink. The commercial-paper subsidiaries were carried that afternoon to the Foreign Office and countersigned there before the close of business.

THE EIGHT SHIPS

From Lancaster Gate to the Sea of Azov took thirteen months. The blast furnace was struck down into its numbered plates at Newport and stowed. Boilers, rolling-mill gearing, fire-brick by the hundred ton, the whole disassembled body of an ironworks went into the holds. On 18 June 1870 the steamship Petersburg cleared the Millwall dock with the first contingent of Welsh families aboard. Seven other vessels followed across the summer. They made Taganrog on 22 July. The overland haul from the port to the concession ground on the Kalmius took ten further days on the Imperial post-road, ox-carts behind the wagons, the steppe opening out flat and treeless to the horizon under a sky the Welshmen had no word for.

The foundation stone of the number-one blast furnace was laid on 12 August 1870. The Russian-language documents called the place Yuzovka, the Russian rendering of Hughes-ovka, the town of Hughes. The Welsh letters home called it Hughesovka, and Hughesovka it remained in the company's books for half a century.

THE STEPPE

The first winter took men. The Welsh wives kept Bethesda chapel services in a long timber hut, in Welsh, with the harmonium that had come out in the hold of the second ship. The doctor was a Merthyr man. The schoolmaster taught in English and in Welsh, and after a year in Russian as well. Children were born who would never see Glamorgan. The first iron ran from the number-one furnace on 24 January 1872; Hughes was there at the tap-hole in a leather apron, and the men cheered him in Welsh, and the Russian engineers stood back, watching.

Around the works the settlement took shape in the only pattern he knew: rows of company cottages, a hospital, a fire brigade, a tea-room, a brass band. The first steel was poured in 1879. The first armour-plate for the Black Sea fleet rolled in 1881. By the late nineties the works employed thirty-five thousand men, supplied the rails of the Trans-Siberian, and was the single largest industrial enterprise of the Russian Empire. Hughes himself died of pneumonia on a business journey to St Petersburg on 17 June 1889. He was seventy-four. His four sons ran the New Russia Company from his death to the Bolshevik nationalisation of 1917.

THE NAME OUTLIVES THE MAN

The town that bore him outlived three empires. In 1924 the Soviet authorities renamed Hughesovka Stalino, and in 1961, after the de-Stalinisation, Donetsk. In each renaming the Welsh foreman's surname was lifted out of the map, the way a furnace charge is lifted out and reset. The cottages he built stood through the German occupation and the Soviet reconstruction. The Bethesda chapel did not. The cemetery of the Welsh first generation is still there, the headstones in English, half-sunk in the grass at the edge of what is now a contested city in a contested war.

Yet the shape he laid down on the steppe in the summer of 1870, the works and the rows and the school and the chapel, is the shape of the city still. The hinge moment had been the half-minute on the Wilton carpet at Lancaster Gate. The rest was the working out, in iron and coal and the lives of Welsh families and the millions who came after them, of one foreman's son's reading of a blast furnace and a government's need.

RETURN

Great industrial cities are not usually founded; they accrete, by the slow drift of capital and labour, around a seam or a harbour. Hughesovka is one of the few that was simply willed, on a date that can be named, by a man who could not write a graceful letter. The name on the map was changed twice in the twentieth century and may be changed again. What stays is the works on the Kalmius, the coal under it, and in the long grass of a Donetsk cemetery a row of Glamorgan headstones leaning slightly into the steppe wind.