Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
wash-mill into pits, where it remains until by evaporation and settlement it has
attained a proper degree of consistency. The clay is then mixed with sufficient
sand to diminish the labour of rubbing the bricks to gauge, the proportion vary-
ing according to the quality of the clay, but often being equal to that of the clay.
Gwilt (1888, 526) records:
The Red bricks derive their colour from the nature of the soil whereof they are
composed, which is generally very pure. The best of them are used for cutting-
bricks, and are called red rubbers … The Fareham Reds are noted bricks.
The Ballingdon or Ewell deep black rubbing and building brick, probably so ren-
dered by manganese, are soft in make and dead in colour.
There is no naturally occurring brickearth or clay that will fire black rubbers,
so deliberate adulteration of the clay was most likely out of a need for use in
fashionable polychromatic work.
The yellow, or white, coloured bricks capable of being cut and rubbed were
the malm cutters out of the London stock range, or from the calcareous clay
reserves in parts of Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk where,
as stated earlier, they were known as 'Clippers'. Some were calcareous Cowley,
Essex, Kent and Surrey bricks, such as those mentioned in
The Building News
of
8th May (1896, 667):
The Brockham Brick Company have some good samples of rubber, machine-
pressed, and Gault facing bricks.
The malm or marl cutters, as referred to amongst brickmakers and bricklayers,
were reserved for gauged enrichments. By 1850, however, the naturally fine,
calcareous, malm clay was all but exhausted, so London Stock brickmakers had
to specially prepare, wash, and strain their material in a creative process that
became known as 'malming'; hence this definition of Malm cutters by Frost &
Boughton (1954, 3):
…are a good uniform brick, light yellow in colour, made from a specially pre-
pared clay, and are of a uniform texture throughout …. Malm cutters or rubbers
(seconds) are inferior to first-class malms … in respect to colour which is not uni-
form as in the former case.
London building supply merchants trading out of riverside wharves were
advertising malm cutters and rubbers in publications such as
The Builder.
In 1853 these included Henry Dodd and Co. of Hoxton Brickfields, and a
Mr Benjamin Gough. In 1858 Charles Richardson (later A. & W.T. Richardson)
