1/14 Hello, I’m Louise Miskell, historian and PI on the Social Worlds of Steel project @SwanseaUni. I’ve been researching the social world of the workplace and asking: How did workers cope with the hot, noisy and sometimes dangerous environment of a steelworks? #SWOS20 
2/14 Their physical experiences of work often went unrecorded in official records but oral testimony, memoir and visual material is full of sensory detail of the heat, scale, noise and danger they encountered. I’ll be using some of these sources in my talk today. #SWOS20
3/14 Steelworkers' clothing and footwear was the main interface between their body and the environment of the workplace and key to mitigating these hazards. Shoes were usually the highest cost item of workwear. The same pair, worn every day, outside work too, had to last. #SWOS20
4/14 In Britain’s early 20C iron and steel industry, injuries to feet were almost as common as to hands and could result from contact with hot or molten metal, cuts from sharp edges or crushing / bruising from heavy or falling objects #SWOS20
5/14 In her childhood memoir, Deborah Orr recalled her father bathing his injured foot after ‘a long, thin ringlet of planed-off steel, like a wood shaving but as sharp-edged as a scalpel blade…caught round John’s ankle & cut it to the bone. He’d been off work for ages’ #SWOS20
6/14 Walter Salisbury, Brymbo steelworker since 1943, recalled hot metal splashing from ladles: ‘If it went down the back of your boot you couldn’t get your boot off quick enough. I never wore nylon socks. Always wore woollen socks … nylon socks would make it worse.’ #SWOS20
7/14 Footwear could also signify the job of the wearer. Tinplate ‘doublers’ who received hot sheets of steel for folding, wore a steel-reinforced clog so that they could secure one end of the sheet on the ground with their foot while gripping the other end with tongs. #SWOS20
8/14 Early 20thC steelworkers had to provide their own workwear. Knowledge of the apparel best suited to different work tasks, and for absorbing sweat and repelling burns, passed informally from old hands to newcomers so that a kind of unofficial ‘uniform’ evolved #SWOS20
9/14 The hobnailed boots and sweat cloths of the steel melters signified their workplace identity and distinguished them from day labourers & those who did not work in close proximity to hot and molten metal, reinforcing the internal hierarchies of the workforce in steel #SWOS20
10/14 Before the advent of on-site changing, workers had to arrive for work wearing their ‘heavy nailed boots'. Patrick McGeown recalled that in Craigneuk these 'would be brightly polished. Employers had been known to engage men chiefly by the state of their boots.’ #SWOS20
11/14 For McGeown, on-site changing made steelmen invisible: 'One would be hard put to tell a young steelworker’s profession as he walks off the job today ['60s]. The melters of long ago in their heavy boots…would goggle at the good suits and silk shirts of the moderns’ #SWOS20
12/14 The generation who'd done national service repurposed army kit for the workplace. In '50s Port Talbot one worker recalled, ‘most people did go along the idea of having safety boots...In fact, I had steel toecaps on because what I was wearing were my old RAF boots.’ #SWOS20
13/14 Port Talbot introduced company-provided safety wear from the mid-50s, after a visit by SCOW managers to Bethlehem Steel in the US, where helmets, steel toecaps and gloves were the norm #SWOS20
14/14 Historians of material culture have long known that items like footwear were full of meaning for the people who wore them. I hope I have shown the potential of this approach for understanding working life & steel history. Thank you for following my presentation #SWOS20
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