John Bradley & Co

John Bradley & Co was a company established in 1800 by John Bradley at Stourbridge in the West Midlands area of England. The company developed into a large industrial concern with furnaces, ironworks and mines. Under James Foster, John Bradley's half brother, it was instrumental in bringing the first commercial steam locomotive into the Midlands area in 1829. The firm stayed under family control until the early years of the 20th century when first the mining (1913) and then the ironworks (1919) were sold off. Part of the business continued to trade under the name John Bradley & Co. (Stourbridge) Ltd until after the Second World War.

John Bradley (1769-1816) was the son of Gabriel and Mary Bradley (née Haden) of the town of Stourbridge, where they ran an iron business including Stourbridge Forge on the River Stour. After Gabriel's death in 1771, Mary married Henry Foster and had seven further children, six of whom survived infancy. The youngest of their sons was James Foster. Henry Foster died in 1793.

John Bradley founded his firm in 1800 in Stourbridge with the financial assistance of Thomas Jukes Collier, a wine merchant from Wellington. Bradley leased land by the Stourbridge Canal. where he set up a forge, a furnace and a rolling and slitting mill. The company produced wrought iron using the puddling process. In 1802 the company was set up as a partnership divided into three: one third held by John Bradley, one third by Thomas Jukes Collier and a third held in trust for the children of the late Henry Foster (John Bradley's six half-brothers and sisters). A steam engine owned by the company, Murray's Hypocycloidal Engine, built in 1805, has been preserved and is now in Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum. It is the world's third-oldest working steam engine. At this stage the company didn't make iron from ore but bought in pig iron to be turned into wrought iron at the Stourbridge Ironworks.

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