MarketHawks family
Company Profile

Hawks family

The Hawks family was one of the most powerful dynasties of the British Industrial Revolution. The Hawks owned several companies in Northern England and in the City of London all of which had the name Hawks in the company name, and which had iron manufacture and engineering, which they exported worldwide using their own ships, as their main enterprises.

Companies
The Hawks company was established by William Hawks Senior (1708 – 1755) who was a foreman smith at the iron manufactory that had been established by Sir Ambrose Crowley (1658 - 1713) at Swalwell. Hawks during the late 1740s established, along the waste ground of the river at Gateshead, a set of workshops that, when he died (at Gateshead on 23 February 1755), were inherited by his eldest son, William Hawks Junior (bapt. 1730 – d. 1810), who, with his first wife, Elizabeth Dixon, established the Hawks's industrial empire. William Junior (d. 1810) in 1770 partnered with his brother-in-law Thomas Longridge (bapt. 1751 - d. 1803) to acquire a plating forge at Beamish, County Durham, which was the first of four separate metalworking sites operated by Hawks and Longridge along Beamish Burn. By 1790, the works at Gateshead consisted of a substantial industrial complex that produced steel, anchors, heavy chains, steam-engine components, and a diversity of iron wares, that were supplied to the Board of Admiralty and were transported by the Gordon and Stanley families, the latter of whom were associated with the ordnance industry of the Weald and with the dockyards of the River Thames and of the Medway. The Hawks Company built Hawks Cottages in the 1830s in the Saltmeadows district of Gateshead for its workers. The Hawks' factories covered 44 acres by the end of the 1830s, and employed between 800 and 900 people. The poet Joseph Skipsey worked for the Hawks' Gateshead ironworks, from 1859 to 1863, until one of his children was killed in an accident at the works in 1863. The job was obtained for Skipsey by the James Thomas Clephan, who was the editor of the Whig sympathetic Gateshead Observer. The Hawks' New Greenwich ironworks at Gateshead was Newcastle's largest employer until its closure when Hawks, Crawshay, and Sons was liquidated in 1889. ==Specific Products==
Specific Products
The Vulcan The first iron boat to be built, which was a rowing boat that was named the Vulcan, was constructed, in 1821, at the Hawks's ironworks. When Sir Robert Shafto Hawks was informed of the purpose for which Samuel Tyne, the boat's inventor, had purchased iron from the Hawks company, he proffered for free the iron required for the task. Sir Robert arranged for cannons to be fired at the launch of the boat, which subsequently won races against wooden boats of the same capacity. Sir Robert Hawks financed the construction of St John's Church, Gateshead Fell. The company built the High Level Bridge over the Tyne, which consisted of 5050 tons of iron, of which George Hawks drove in the last key on 7 June 1849, was developed by the Hawks dynasty ==Notable members==
Notable members
Sir Robert Shafto Hawks (1768–1840) The armigerous Robert Shafto Hawks became the director of the Hawks company subsequent to the death of his father, of whom he was the eldest surviving son, and was knighted by the Prince Regent, in 1817, for his suppression of riots. Shafto Hawks died at 4 Clavering Place, Newcastle. There is a memorial to Robert Shafto Hawks, to his wife, and to his son The Rev. William and to his grandson David Shafto, at St Nicholas' Newcastle Cathedral. His portrait is in Shipley Art Gallery. Sir Robert in 1790 married Hannah Pembroke Akenhead (1766–1863) by whom he had two sons. Sir Robert's eldest son, The Rev. William, who was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, at which he received an L. L. B. degree, was the Vicar of St John's Church, Gateshead Fell, at the vicarage of which, Hawksbury House, which his father built, he lived. Sir Robert's younger son, David Shafto, who was blind, was a musical prodigy who when aged 9 years composed published marches for military bands, and composed Tyrolean, and Scottish, and Welsh airs. David Hawks was said to have 'a most amazing proof of musical genius and early proficiency' when he was 17 years of age, and to be a 'true musical genius'. George Hawks (1801–1863) Sir Robert's nephew George Hawks (1801 – 1863), , of Redheugh Hall, who was the armigerous eldest son of John Hawks (1770 – 1830), of Tavistock Square, Their daughter was Jane Diana Hawks (b. 1839) who married William Boyd (b. 1839) who was the eldest son of The Ven. William Boyd (1809 - 1893), of University College, Oxford, who was Archdeacon of Craven and Honorary Canon of Ripon from 1860, and the elder brother of The Ven. Charles Twining Boyd, Archdeacon of Columbo. was the son of George Hawks of Blackheath, London, (1766 - 1820), who was the brother of Sir Robert Shafto Hawks. He married the armiger Mary Elizabeth Boyd (d. 1884), who was the daughter of William Boyd Junior of the Boyd merchant banking family, which had founded the Bank of Newcastle, and who was the brother of the industrialist Edward Fenwick Boyd. Through her great-grandfather Edward Fenwick, Vicar of Kirkwhelpington, Mary Elizabeth Boyd was a descendant on multiple lines of Edward III, and a descendant of Sir Thomas Liddell, 1st Baronet, A detailed biography of Joseph Stanley Hawks can be found in Nigel Tattersfield: 'Bookplates by Beilby & Bewick', The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 1999, pp. 136–137. Mary Susannah Hawks (later Moody) (1829 -1901) Joseph Stanley Hawks and Mary Elizabeth Boyd's daughter, Mary Susannah Hawks, married Major-General Richard Clement Moody, who was the founder of British Columbia, by whom her children included Colonel Richard S. Hawks Moody (b. 1854), Captain Henry de Clervaux Moody (b. 1864), and Major George Robert Boyd Moody (b. 1868); and her grandchildren included Major Richard Charles Lowndes MC (b. 1888), and the ethnographer of Aboriginal Australia and Stonehenge archaeologist Robert Stanley Newall (b. 1884). Mary Susannah Hawks died in 1901. Richard Clement Moody named the 400-foot hill in Port Coquitlam, "Mary Hill", after his wife Mary Susannah. The Royal British Columbia Museum possesses a trove of 42 letters that were written by Mary Susannah Moody (née Hawks) from the Colony of British Columbia (1858–66) to her mother and to her sisters, Juliana Stanley Hawks (d. 1868) and Emily Stanley Hawks (d. 1865), that have been of interest to scholars of the ruling class of the British Empire. Richard Stanley Hawks Moody (1854–1930) Colonel Richard Stanley Hawks Moody was a distinguished British Army officer, and historian, and Military Knight of Windsor. ==Decline==
Decline
Hannah, Lady Hawks (d. 1863), who was the widow of Sir Robert Shafto Hawks, and her two sons, sold their third of the company, in 1840, to George Crawshay, who was a member of a prominent iron-making family of South Wales who had been bought out of his family's iron business in London by his brother William Crawshay II. The business of William Hawks Junior had been divided between his three eldest surviving sons in 1810. George Crawshay obtained a second third of the company when he acquired the shares of Joseph Stanley Hawks, who was the only surviving son of George Hawks of Blackheath (1766 - 1820). The Bedlington works were subsequently inherited by a cousin of the Hawks, Michael Longridge (1785 – 1853), who was a pioneer of railway technology, and who was an associate of Robert Stephenson, under whose superintendence were trained a generation of engineers including Sir Daniel Gooch, 1st Baronet. ==References==
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