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Winteringham’s earliest houses were built of the local stone, and
these two shops in West End are examples of this.
But bricks and tiles were also manufactured in the village for a
very long time, and evidence such as the clay pits in the aptly named ‘Old Brick Fields’ showed they had been used before the middle of the 19th century.
There were three brickworks in the village by the latter part of the
nineteenth century - Suttons, Slaters and one half a mile west of Ferriby Sluice - but this last one was washed away, together with two cottages belonging to it, by the Humber.
In White’s 1842 Directory, the William Marshall is listed not just
as the village butcher, but also the brickmaker too. He sold his brick-making business in 1857, and we assume that he then concentrated on butchery.
George Button, and then his son Harold were brickmakers too,
but after they finished, that was the end of brick manufacture in Winteringham.
It was not, though, the end of Winteringham clay as a building
material. In 1938, Eastwoods opened their cement factory, utilising the chalk from the hill above South Ferriby which was transported to the works by overhead cableway, and clay from Winteringham Ings where the plant was built. The factory chimney, at 232 feet could be seen for many miles distant.
The cement was named “Eastwoods Humber Cement” and was manufactured using a ‘wet’ process. Eastwoods owned three other cement factories -
Barrington in Cambridgeshire, Chinnor in Oxfordshire and Lewes in Sussex, plus two subsidiaries overseas, a brick-making business and a builders merchants’.
There was a narrow-gauge railway running out into the clay fields, which was
powered by diesel locomotives, and fed by dredgers.
In 1967, after the factory had been acquired by Rugby Portland Cement, the new
plant was built, changing over to a dry process, and fed with chalk by a less-romantic, though doubtless more efficient conveyor belt.
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