Hughes · 1869
John Hughes founds Hughesovka
On the morning of 18 May 1869 the Merthyr Tydfil ironmaster John Hughes, fifty-five years old, then chief engineer of the Millwall Iron Works on the Isle of Dogs in east London, signed at the Russian Imperial Embassy at Lancaster Gate a concession agreement with Count Pyotr Andreyevich Kotzebue, governor-general of New Russia, granting the New Russia Company a thirty-year lease on coal-and-iron-ore deposits in the Donets Basin of southern Ukraine and a commission to build the first integrated iron-and-steel works in the Russian Empire. Hughes was the son of a Cyfarthfa Castle furnace foreman; he had risen through the Welsh ironmasters' world without formal schooling and had taken the Millwall position on the strength of patented improvements to gun-barrel casting and naval armour-plate manufacture. He sailed for the Sea of Azov in June 1870 with eight ships, a hundred Welsh ironworkers and their families, and the disassembled components of a complete blast furnace. The settlement he founded that summer on the empty steppe above the Kalmius river became, within thirty years, the city of Hughesovka (later Stalino, later Donetsk), the industrial-and-coalmining capital of southern Russia and (in modern terms) the contested centre of the Donbas at the heart of the 2014-onwards Russo-Ukrainian war.
It is shortly after eleven on the morning of 18 May 1869, in the upstairs reception room of the Russian Imperial Embassy at 7 Lancaster Gate, on the north side of Hyde Park, in the London spring light through the east windows. He is fifty-five years old. He is John Hughes, born in the Cyfarthfa ironworks village of Merthyr Tydfil in 1814, son of John Hughes the elder (a foreman puddler at the Cyfarthfa Castle furnaces of the Crawshay family) and Jane. He had no formal schooling. He had taken his apprenticeship at the Cyfarthfa puddling-furnace at twelve, had moved to the Uskside Engineering Works at Newport in 1832, to the Ebbw Vale Iron Works in 1845, and to the Millwall Iron Works on the Isle of Dogs in 1860 as chief engineer.
On the table in front of him are the bound concession papers in three copies (English, French and Russian), drafted by the Foreign Office Russia-desk over the previous six months and finalised at the Russian Embassy across the previous fortnight. The concession grants the New Russia Company (the joint-stock company Hughes had floated in March 1869 on a London subscription of three hundred thousand pounds) a thirty-year lease on the coal-and-iron-ore deposits of about a hundred and twenty square miles of the Yuzovka district on the Kalmius river, north of the Sea of Azov, in exchange for the construction of an integrated iron-and-steel works producing armour-plate and rails for the Russian Imperial Railways at the new Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol. Count Pyotr Kotzebue, governor-general of New Russia, sits across the table. The British Foreign Office representative, the Russian Embassy chargé and two clerks complete the small party.
He thinks: the concession is the contract of the rest of my life. The fifty-five years to date have been the Welsh ironworks apprenticeship. The next twenty years will be the construction of an integrated iron-and-steel works from a single furnace on empty steppe. The senior English ironmaster establishment cannot see the proposition. Crawshay, Guest, Vickers, all of them think the Russian government will default on the concession within five years and the Welsh workers I take with me will be stranded on the steppe with no return passage.
He thinks: I have the capital. I have the eight ships. I have the disassembled blast furnace from Newport. I have the eight Welsh foremen, the seventy-two Welsh ironworkers, the families on the working assumption of a five-year contract at three times their Cyfarthfa wages. I have the principle that an integrated iron-and-steel works can be built on empty ground in three years on Welsh-ironmaster method.
He thinks: the Russian government will not default. The Russian Empire needs the steel for the rails and the armour-plate for the Black Sea fleet. The Russian government has paid the New Russia Company a substantial subsidy on signing and a further subsidy on first delivery. The contract is, in the judgement of my London bankers and my Newport-and-Welsh ironworkers, sound.
He signs the concession papers across all three copies in the presence of Count Kotzebue and the Embassy chargé. He countersigns the commercial-paper subsidiary documents at the Foreign Office office that afternoon. He sails from the Millwall dock on the Isle of Dogs on the steam-ship Petersburg on 18 June 1870 with the first contingent of Welsh-ironworker families. They reach the port of Taganrog on the Sea of Azov on 22 July 1870. The small steppe-overland journey from Taganrog to the concession-area on the Kalmius river takes a further ten days on the Imperial Russian post-road system. The small first foundation-stone of the blast furnace is laid on 12 August 1870.
The settlement is named Yuzovka (the Russian rendering of Hughes-ovka, John Hughes's town) in the Russian-Imperial-government documents of the period and Hughesovka in the English-and-Welsh-language records that the New Russia Company sends home to London across the 1870s and 1880s working years. The first iron is poured on 24 January 1872 from the number-one blast furnace, the first steel in 1879, and the first armour-plate for the Russian Imperial Navy at Sevastopol in 1881. By 1900 the Hughesovka steel-works is the largest single industrial enterprise in the Russian Empire, the employer of about thirty-five thousand workers, and the iron-and-steel-supply foundation of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Imperial Russian Black Sea fleet. John Hughes himself dies of pneumonia on a small business-trip to St Petersburg on 17 June 1889 at seventy-four; the New Russia Company is run by his sons across the 1889 to 1917 working period. The small Hughesovka town is renamed Stalino in 1924 on the Stalin-Soviet renaming-of-cities programme, then Donetsk in 1961 on the post-Stalin de-Stalinisation reversal. It is, in the 2020s working contested-Donbas conflict, the capital of the Russian-occupied Donetsk-People's-Republic separatist administration and one of the principal contested cities of the post-2014 Russo-Ukrainian war.