Hey I'm a 2nd Yr student at Manchester Met Uni (but I'm from Sheffield) and I'm doing a creative assignment on Meadowhall and what was there before it, i.e. Dunford Hadfield's steel works. Im trying to gather some information on the topic, if anyone has any information about this topic, I would really like to hear from you!:)

Would love to hear from you!

Before the firm was called Dunford Hadfields it was just Hadfields Ltd., my late father was the Chief Chemist and he remembered the days when Sir Robert Hadfield used to arrive at the works by horse! (even before the electric trams!) When he retired he got a part time job helping out at a very small firm called Dunford and Elliott Ltd.He always used to joke about this, because when he left Hadfields the shares went down, and then Dunfords "took over" Hadfields!
Faraday produced potentially anti corrosion steels and kept the samples in a box in the Royal Institution in London. Sir Robert Hadfield had these sampled and my father analysed the samples for him, so he could write a scientific paper on it.
In the early days, church door hinges, were also analysed,-- with a view to helping to produce fatigue resistant alloys, ---and coffin nails for corrosion resistant alloys.
Hadfields was at the end of Vulcan Road, (which no longer exists) and for several years their radiography department which, due to the very thick walls, was difficult to demolish.-- so it survived for several more years as a steel castings repair shop cum radiography unit, run as a separate company. I know this because I regularly visited it as a visiting inspector. Hadfields was originally making Manganese steels for both mining equipment and railway crossings, and in earlier days they made steel plates for battle ships. Eventually they became proficient in plate for nuclear reactors etc. They also did a lot more products. I visited their Research Department when in my early teens and saw a jet engine turbine blade fractured using sound produced from an organ pipe, to test its' fatigue properties!