Losh, Wilson and Bell

Losh, Wilson and Bell

Watercolour painting by John Bell of the Bell Ironworks under construction at Port Clarence, c. 1853
Former type	Manufacturing company
Successor	Dorman Long
Founded	1809
Founder	William Losh, Thomas Wilson, Thomas Bell
Defunct	1923 merged
Headquarters	Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England
Key people	Lowthian Bell
Products	Iron, Soda

Losh, Wilson and Bell, later Bells, Goodman, then Bells, Lightfoot and finally Bell Brothers, was a leading Northeast England manufacturing company, founded in 1809 by the partners William Losh, Thomas Wilson, and Thomas Bell.

The firm was founded at Newcastle-upon-Tyne with an ironworks and an alkali works nearby at Walker. The alkali works was the first in England to make Soda using the Leblanc process; the ironworks was the first to use Cleveland Ironstone, presaging the 1850s boom in ironmaking on Teesside.

The so-called discoverer of Cleveland Ironstone, the mining engineer John Vaughan, ran a rolling mill for the company before leaving to found the major rival firm Bolckow Vaughan. The other key figure in the company was Lowthian Bell, son of Thomas Bell; he became perhaps the best known ironmaster in England.

As Bell Brothers, the firm continued until 1931, when it was taken over by rival Dorman Long.

The company was named after William Losh, Thomas Wilson, and Thomas Bell.

William Losh (1770 Carlisle–4 August 1861, Ellison Place, Newcastle) came from a rich family that owned coal mines in Northeast England. He was educated in Hamburg, and trained in Newcastle, Sweden and France. He married Alice Wilkinson of Carlisle on 1 March 1798 at Gateshead. He was a friend of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt and a one-time business partner of rail pioneer George Stephenson. His brother James Losh was also a partner in the firm, and kept a diary recording his anxieties about the firm during the Napoleonic wars.