Rolling Billets

Painting. Rolling billets, Penistone Steel Works / EF Skinner, 1917. Oil on board; 31 x 47 cm in frame 44x60x3.5cm. Signed blc. With 1 postcard. Original for postcard no. [14], passed by censor April 26, 1917. A 34-inch rolling mill producing billets for shells from steel ingots.

The Penistone Works, depicted in this painting, concentrated on the Bessemer acid process, spring steel, general forging, tyre and axle plants and, in particular, rolling mills for rails and billets, which were remodelled during the war when the works was extended to include melting furnaces.

Perhaps influenced by the government-run War Artists’ Scheme, during World War I the steelmaker Cammell Laird & Co. commissioned Edward Skinner and two other artists to produce works depicting the company's manufacture of armaments. The two other artists were both prominent marine painters: Arthur James Wetherall Burgess (1879–1957) and Charles John de Lacy (1856–1929). Skinner created a series of 12 oil paintings. Six of these, all depicting steelworks in the Sheffield area, are now in the Science Museum Group collection. Another, ‘For King and Country’, is in the collection of the Imperial War Museums, number Art.IWM ART 6513. That painting, as well as one in the SMG collection (‘File Cutters’, number 1980-1397/6), depict women steelworkers: the exigencies of war caused a significant increase in the number of women employed in the industry, from 6,000 pre-war to 42,000 by late 1918.

The commissioned paintings were reproduced as postcards by Thomas Forman of Nottingham, with profits from their sale going to the British Red Cross. Following the war, Cammell Laird continued to use reproductions of the paintings in their publicity material. The paintings themselves hung in the company’s London office until about 1946. The current whereabouts of the other commissioned paintings is not known.