Darley Firebrick Company Pty Ltd

Firebricks, comparitively have never been produced in quantity in Victoria.  Only a few companies produced them.  Other than Darley, there were the Ordish Fire Brick Company in Dandenong, the Australian Gas Retort & Fire Brick Manufacturing Co of South Yarra and Hoffman Brick & Potteries in Northcote.

A firebrick is made to withstand high temperatures.  They are fired at a higher temperature than ordinary bricks and are used in areas where an ordinary brick would not endure, such as inside kilns and furnaces, potteries, foundaries and smelting furnaces.  They also have greater insulating properties.  They are also used where exposure to chemicals is also a factor.  

Darley is now a suburb about 2 miles (3.2km) north of Bacchus Marsh, now a feeder area for Melbourne.  In the early 1900s, it was well out into the country west of Melbourne and had been a stopping point on the way to Ballarat.  The area is geologically divers, having deposits of coal, as well as clay deposits, suitable for brick making.  First recorded brick makers there were Thomas Akers (1848-1928) and William Thomas Wittick.  In partnership, they established the Darley Firebrick Company in 1893 on Bald Hill, Darley.  Thomas had arrived from Coventry in England.  He married Mary Ann Worthy in 1873 and they went on to have 15 children.  William Thomas Wittick (1857-1939) was born in Richmond, Victoria.  He married Hannah Barton in 1876.  They had 10 children.  William died in Sunshine and is buried at Bacchus Marsh.  William’s grand son later became the Manager at Darley.

The Darley Fire Brick Company had a second part in the outer Melbourne area of Montrose.  This began in 1904 when David Mitchell, (1829-1916) father of Dame Nellie Melba purchased 10 acres of land from James Walker, a brick maker who began making bricks, including firebricks in Montrose in 1898.   James Walker had been making fire bricks at Montrose, as well as ordinary house bricks.  David took a controlling interest in the Darley Fire Brick Company in 1898.  They used rectangular downdraught kilns to make their bricks.  Among many other notable Melbourne buildings, David built the Exhibition Buildings in the Carlton Gardens, the only surviving example of 19^th C exhibition buildings in the world.

  

This land was on the corner of Montrose and Cambridge roads, (Lots 35b & C).  The works were situated on a small creek that flowed parallel to Cambridge Road and eventually into Olinda Creek.  David arrived in Melbourne aboard the ship “Anna” on the 6^th of April 1852.  He worked as a mason and builder as well as spending time on the Bendigo goldfields.  In 1856 he married Isabella Dow, daughter of James Dow, an engineer at Langlands foundry, South Melbourne.  (A Fitter at Langlands, Herbert Austin, later returned to England to begin the Austin car company.) 

David was quite a businessman.  In 1859 he had a brick making company in Burnley Street and in 1874 and later became a shareholder in the Builders Lime and Cement Company.  In 1890, he and his partner R.D. Langley began a Portland Cement factory at Burnley using kaolin from Lilydale.  In 1878 he purchased Cave Hill Farm at Lilydale and started excavating limestone from the property.  The “Darley Firebrick Company Pty Ltd” was formally begun on the 9^th of May 1898.  David Mitchell was the majority shareholder.

The works then had an output capacity of 82,000 bricks per week produced in a bottle kiln and three downdraught kilns.  They would go on to produce over 100 different shapes and sizes of refractory bricks and tiles.

This article from the local newspaper at the time, describes the works much better than I could.

The large 2-storey wooden -buildings, and iron and brick chimney shaft, erected by the above company about 2 miles to the north of Bacchus Marsh, fill a conspicuous place in the landscape, and when the lengthy brick-drying sheds are roofed in the " factory" appearance will be very marked. In addition, there will be 1 or 2 large kilns. It will be 2 or 3 months yet before everything is in working order to make bricks.  Wonderful progress has been made in a short time under the practical supervision of Mr. William Emslie, a right trusty manager for many years for Mr. David Mitchell, of Cave hill, Lilydale, the well-known agriculturalist, dairy farmer, cement manufacturer, contractor, &c., and famed also as being the father of Madame Melba.  A great quantity of cement concrete and brick foundation work has been put in, which is not very noticeable now that the wooden buildings cover them. The principal building is 34ft. x 24ft, and 20ft. high, and it has an upper floor to receive the pulverized clay. The lower floor will contain the pug mill and brick-making machinery, very little of which is yet on the ground. At the upper side of this building, to wards the clay pit, and with a floor 4ft. higher, is the Chillean mill shed, 23 x 19, and 16ft. high. Here a very massive Chillean mill, 9ft. in diameter, and with 2 iron rollers weighing 2 tons each, will pulverize the blended material (the proportions of which are a trade secret) of which the bricks will be composed. The clay will be received above the mill in a hopper, to the mouth of which trucks will run on an up and down tramway from the clay pit, part of the distance being bridged by a timber staging, or viaduct. The bed-plate for the Chillean mill is in position, on a substantial concrete foundation, and all the working parts are lying round ready for erecting. The mill will dry crush', all the material put into it, and the product will be taken by elevators to the upper floor above the pug mill, where 90 tons can be stored, under cover, the object being to keep the stuff dry until it is." tempered" in the pug mill, and otherwise prepared for the brick moulding, and pressing.  Elevated water tanks will supply the sprinklers, or whatever methods of applying the water is used,and a shaft is being sunk to obtain this indispensable fluid. It is down 106ft, in very hard conglomerate, and water has not yet been got, but the work will be persevered with. The shaft is substantially slabbed all the way down. At right angles to the 2 sheds (which are practically 1 shed) containing the machinery, are the engine house and boiler house, side by side. The engine is a horizontal one, 25 h.p, and the boiler is 20 ft. long by 54-ft. diameter. The boiler, with a 55ft. chimney, is built in and all ready for work. The engine bed is ready, but the engine it self is lying outside the building. The boiler house is 30 x 10, and 11ft. high. The engine house 24 x 13, and 13ft. high. A brick drying shed, 180ft. long, and 34ft. wide, joins end on to the boiler house.  At the further end of this shedthe brick-burning kilons will be erected. The first 1 is to have 5 fires, and will be 32ft. x 40ft., and 20ft. high. The plant is capable of turning out 15,000 bricks per day, and a large number of men will be employed. It is said that the demand for fire bricks in Melbourne amounts to about 50,000 per week, half of which are imported at present, but it is claimed for the Darley bricks that they will supersede the imported ones. They have given tests, with imperfect puddling, 40 per cent, better than expected. The supply of clay is believed to be what is termed "practically unlimited."  The company, which consists of 5 shareholders, of whom Mr. David Mitchell is chairman, has an area of 15 acres, all of which is believed to contain the very purest and best fire clay. At the pit or quarry opened up by Mr. W. T. Wittick, one of the shareholders, there is a " face" showing 7ft of ordinary brick-making clay and gravel, then 10 ft. of the best and purest fire-clay. A shaft underfoot has disclosed 2 more seams-3,ft. and 2,ft., with gravel clays in between, and the shaft sunk further away from the hill side to get water has gone through a 35ft. seam of fireclay. Such immense seams are seldom met with. Mr. Wittick has burnt about 100,000 firebricks from the clay, all of which found ready sale. He has now got capitalists to take up the venture, and the amount of money they have spent upon developing it, and the still larger amount yet to be spent, be sides the working capital required, all give agreeable proof to this district, at any rate, that they have every faith in their good works.  If the output is as extensive and as profitable as everyone hopes it will be, there is every prospect of the Railway Department running a light line from the Bacchus Marsh station yard to the boundary of the Company's property. The surveyed line is there now, having been surveyed as part of the projected railway to Coimadai and Bullengarook.  We repeat what we have frequently stated-namely, that the best hopes for Bacchus Marsh development lie in this northerly direction, and it is very gratifying to find such a man as Mr. David Mitchell putting his ability, energy, and capital into what may be called the head debouchure of that large and much undervalued region.

Bacchus Marsh Express, 18 January 1902. P3

In 1982, the company changed its name to Darley Refractories Pty Ltd following its purchase of the South Yarra Firebrick Company, making it the sole producer of firebricks in Victoria.