John Gibbons

John Gibbons (1777-18 August 1851) was a South Staffordshire ironmaster and art patron. Career John was one of three sons of Thomas Gibbons(1730–1813) of The Oaks, Tettenhall, Wolverhampton. The three brothers, John, Benjamin and Thomas, inherited their father's iron making businesses after his death in 1813 running them as a set of interlocking partnerships. In 1816 a banking side of the business failed bringing the iron business down as well. During the 1820s the brothers built three new furnaces at the Corbyn's Hall Colliery and Ironworks and also worked together at the Ketley works near Dudley. They were early adopters of J. B. Neilson's patent hot-blast technology when it became widely available in the mid-1830s, but there was little they could do to overcome the declining competitiveness of south Staffordshire as a pig iron-producing region, in the face of competition from the Scottish and Cleveland iron industries in the middle of the nineteenth century. The family's problems in the iron trade were for a long time compensated for by the resilience of their coal interests. The long-established Gibbons habit of buying land stood them in good stead, for it furnished them with a good deal of mineral-rich real estate in south Staffordshire. The Corbyn's Hall estate proved a consistent source of wealth in this respect. John proved to be the most technically adept of the brothers, publishing two short works on industrial practice: Practical Remarks on the Construction of the Staffordshire Blast Furnace (1839) and Practical remarks on the use of the cinder pig in the puddling furnaces, and on the management of the forge and mill (1844).