Funtley
| Funtley | |
|---|---|
 Funtley
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| Funtley shown within Hampshire | |
| OS grid reference | SU562082 |
| District | |
| Shire county | |
| Region | |
| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | Fareham |
| Postcode district | PO17 |
| Police | Hampshire |
| Fire | Hampshire |
| Ambulance | South Central |
| EU Parliament | South East England |
Funtley – from the Anglo-Saxon, "Funtaleg", meaning "Springs", formerly Fontley – is a village in the north of the borough of Fareham, Hampshire, England. The village originally grew from the development of a clay quarry, the clay used to make chimney pots and bricks—the famous Fareham Red. The bricks were widely used, most famously in the construction of the Royal Albert Hall in London.
Sometimes still known as 'Fontley' by locals, the village is no longer a discrete settlement owing to the post-World War II expansion of Fareham, and is now a suburb separated from the main conurbation by the M27 motorway. The brickworks are long closed, the clay quarry is now a fishing lake, and only the village's pub, The Miners Arms, survives as a testament to its former industry.
Fontley House in Iron Mill Lane was the residence of Samuel Jellicoe from about 1784 until his death in 1812. He was the partner of Henry Cort of Fontley Iron Mills, next door to the house. Cort was the inventor of the rolling mill and the puddling furnace, important for the production of iron during the Napoleonic Wars. Some of Cort's inventions were tried out at these mills.
Cort's innovation was a new process for "fining" iron. This became essential once blast furnaces were used to extract iron from its ore. The "pig" iron produced was too impure for forging (though it could be cast): fining removed the impurities. The previous method of fining used a finery hearth fuelled with charcoal. By Cort's time wood for making charcoal had long become too scarce to enable the iron industry to expand: already many blast furnaces were using coke instead of charcoal. What Cort did was to burn coal in the furnace and "puddle" his impure iron, i.e. stir it with a long rod in the hot gas of the flames. The purified iron came out as spongy mass, and had to be consolidated (shingling). Another of Cort's innovations was to use grooved rolls in a rolling mill rather than a hammer to draw the iron out into a bar. This enabled the iron to be rolled into bars with a variety of cross-sections (square, circular, etc.). These two brilliant innovations were the most important ones for the iron industry in the Industrial Revolution.
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Wikipedia