A working blacksmith... in Croydon
Addington Forge is still smiting away
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Until the advent of the car—and even for a while after it—the blacksmith was a fixture of pretty much every town and village. There was far more agricultural industry, meaning tools and machinery had to be crafted and maintained. Horses—used for shifting farm machinery as well as getting people from A to B—constantly needed shoes making and mending by blacksmiths and farriers. The sound of “clank, clank, clank” must’ve pierced everyday life.
Croydon was especially blacksmith/farrier heavy. In the 18th century tens of thousands of horse-pulled carriages were passing through on their way to trendy destinations like Brighton, and you can imagine that—as well as everything else that needed blacksmithing in the town—a fair few battered horseshoes and wheels were in need of servicing.
Until relatively recently there was a Blacksmith Arms on Croydon’s South End—on the site where a blacksmith previously smote1 his anvil overlooking the chocka London-Brighton road. In 1808, a blacksmith by the name of William Bignell, who worked on Croydon’s Coombe Lane, appeared in an advert for ‘Lynch’s Celebrated Botanic Embrocation and Vegetable Extract’: “I was afflicted with an inflammatory rheumatism…” goes the endorsement, “that I could hardly crawl with crutches… till advised to try your Embrocation and Vegetable Extract, when, to the astonishment of my friends, I was so far recovered in three days, as to be able to walk without my crutches, and in a few more applications was entirely cured.”
While the blacksmith was often seen as a trusted pillar of the community (I vaguely remember a League of Gentleman radio sketch in which the local blacksmith spouts sage, poetic advice) not all were good ‘uns. A Croydon Times article from October 1924 described a young West Croydon blacksmith, who hit, bit and kicked a local bobby (see image above). Smithies were still stirring up trouble in 1949; a Croydon Times piece from that year features another young blacksmith who police said had been a “source of trouble since he arrived in the town.” I guess it’s not ideal if your source of trouble happens to be armed with a red hot poker and massive great hammer.
By this time, of course, the career of the blacksmith was already sliding toward obsoleteness, and in today’s Croydon, all the blacksmiths have long gone.
All, that is, except one.