A  Brief  History of the Backbarrow Blue Mills 

The site of the Whitewater Hotel at Backbarrow has been an industrial site since Tudor times. In those days there were three corn mills on the site controlled by the monks of Cartmel Priory.  Later a Fulling mill and a paper mill also occupied the site and in the 19^th century came the notorious cotton mill.  After the cotton mill closed a woollen mill occupied the site for a short time and this was followed by the Blue Mill or to give its correct title, the Lancashire Ultramarine works, which later became Reckitt's Colours Ltd.  The Ainsworth cotton mill was gutted by fire in 1868, the same year the Furness Railway opened the branch line from Ulverston to Lakeside. The cotton mill was refurbished and re-equipped with new machines, but the owners did not reopen because they had spare capacity in other mills in Lancashire. The buildings then stood empty until a consortium of partners decided to manufacture Ultramarine.

What is Ultramarine?  In its natural state Ultramarine blue was made from a gemstone mined in Tibet called Lapis Lazuli.  The eastern Roman Empire "Byzantium" used the gemstone to make Artist colour by grinding the lapis lazuli down to fine powder and mixing it with oils to make vivid blue artist paint.  The Saracen's invaded Byzantium and the population fled before the invaders across the Mediterranean, taking with them precious paintings with vivid blue colours, which we in the west had never seen the like of.

 The governments of France, Germany, Belgium and Britain offered a prize for the first person to come up with a synthetic process for manufacturing Ultramarine, (the name by the way roughly translated simply means the blue from across the sea). A French man named Guimet came up with the formula and won the prize. Factories were set up in France, Belgium and Germany, and at that time Reckitt's of Hull bought blue from Germany, then they decided to manufacture their own and hired a German expert named Johannes Eggersoff and brought him to England to help them set up their Ultramarine factory in Hull.

 A team of local businessmen proposed to manufacture Ultramarine blue pigment at Backbarrow. This consisted of a firm of local chemists and a chemical dealer who went to Hull and hired Johannes Eggerstoff to help them set up an ultramarine process in the old redundant cotton mill buildings at Backbarrow, acquiring the buildings in 1890. The demand for blue had taken off as it was no longer just an artist colour.  It was used extensively in the laundry business, having great bleaching properties.   Blue was also used for paint colour, for colouring wall paper and linoleum, for colouring plastic and for cosmetics, for purifying sugar, and colouring bank notes. Local people used blue on bee or nettle stings.

 The basic Ultramarine Process

The basic ingredients are China Clay, Sulphur, Soda Ash and a little pitch. These are ground and mixed in a dry Ball mill, like the one now on show outside the Whitewater Hotel.   The Ball mill was made of rolled steel about 12 feet long and eight feet in diameter which was filled to about one third of its capacity with stone balls about three inches in diameter. The ingredients were loaded into the mill that rotated at about thirty revolutions a minute, the mixture falling and tumbling amongst the stone balls was ground and mixed into a fine grey powder. The mixture was offloaded from the ball mill and then loaded by hand into crucibles which were stacked in Kilns and fired at a temperature of 300 deg centigrade turning the mixture into Raw Ultramarine Blue.

 The refining processing

Refining was carried out in what is now the area of the main block of the Whitewater Hotel. Step one was to grind the raw blue into pea size lumps using a belt driven finger crusher located on level four.  The ground raw blue was mixed in large vat of hot water to leach out the unwanted impurities. This blue slurry was then filtered and the filtered water containing the impurity "Glovers Salt" was then dumped into the river Leven.  Glovers salt is a very effective laxative!  Once free from impurities the blue was loaded into one of four wet ball mills which ground it down to separate all the basic shades of blue that were be required for blending later. This wet grinding was done using one of five wet ball mills similar in design to the dry ball mill previously mentioned, but this time the ball millstones were only about one inch in diameter.

 Once offloaded from the wet mill the blue in suspension of water had to be separated into the various shades, this separating being done using a settling process. The pure blue slurry was pumped onto the first of many settling tanks which were made from Galvanised mild steel each measuring about 12 feet long 6 feet wide and three feet deep.  The slurry was allowed to settle in tank one for three hours, transferred into tank two and allowed to settle for four hours and then pumped into tank three and allowed to settle for five hours and so on until no further blue could settle.  The remainder was removed from the water using centrifugal force.

 After settling, tank one contained a layer of very dark blue about two inches thick. Tank two contained a layer about one and a half inches thick and a shade lighter. Tank three had a layer about one inch thick a shade lighter still and so on,  each subsequent tank containing a thinner layer of blue getting progressively lighter in colour.  The next step was to dig out the blue from the settling tanks and load into hot air driers to dry.  Each shade of blue had to be kept in store until a customer order had to be prepared.  The order was filled by blending different shades of blue to meet the customer requirement.  Bulk orders were shipped in either paper sacks of one hundred weight (50 Kilos), ply wood drums, again I cwt, or steel drums of two and a half hundredweight.  Much of the product was packed into small cartons for export all over the world, but a great deal went to the Indian sub-continent to destinations like  Madras, Calcuta, Bombay, Karachi, and Chittagon, using product brand names like  Robin, Destree, and Sea Gull.   Cartons were of one ounce, one and one eighth ounce, thirty grams and one kilo.

 The works closed in 1982, not because of lack of business but because it would be far too costly to bring these very old premises up to the required standard to meet the new safety and environmental legislation.

 Ron Mein