AS Teesside’s steel industry crumbles into dust, there could be no more heartbreaking contrast than with the picture almost exactly 100 years ago.

But first let us go back much further. In 1069 William the Conqueror marched north to subdue the most rebellious part of his new kingdom – what is now Yorkshire. And no resistance was stronger than that by the people in the county’s North-East corner.

The Conqueror subdued them in a great battle on the south bank of the Tees estuary. Legend has it that marching back southwards he got lost in a snowstorm on the North York Moors. Hence the valley name ‘Bilsdale’.

Now fast forward 900 years. In 1919 a writer observed: “The marsh is now reclaimed and great steelworks have risen where the Yorkshire folk made their stand.”

Yes, it’s Redcar, now, tragically, the scene of the Teesside steel industry’s last stand.

The writer who noted the works in their full majesty was one Capt W. J. Weston, MA, BSc. In the North Riding volume of the Cambridge County Geography series he waxed long and eloquently about the iron and steel trade.

Like the present North Yorkshire, the North Riding was chiefly a rural county. Weston’s volume pays full attention to its agriculture and the booming tourism of Scarborough. Many of today’s scenic highlights – Whitby, Roseberry Topping, Muker, Rievaulx Abbey - are pictured. But the Teesside industrial strip earns generous treatment.

Weston hails it “a wonderful region, a small area but in which half the population of the Riding lives.” Middlesbrough, he says, was “an industrial triumph,” while the South Gare breakwater represented “the best example that can be found of the active co-operation of man and nature.”

From the port were exported not only “huge quantities” of pig iron, the chief commodity, but also “steel rails, bridge work, machines, steel plates and so on.” Weston noted that Japanese ships that regularly visited the port were built “from plates and girders made in Middlesbrough.”

He reports that about 25 per cent of all exports went to “our Indian Empire,” where. “Yorkshire rails, locomotives, telegraph wire and bridges are helping Englishmen to make that vast country more serviceable…”

Of the blastfurnaces Weston concedes: “they may not be picturesque.” Nevertheless he devotes two pages to explaining how they operate. He concludes: “In the interests of economy the furnace must run without stoppage for eight or ten years.” But he notes improvements by which two thirds less fuel were needed now compared with 1851, the birth of the industry.

In a Roll of Honour, Weston proceeds beyond the likes of Capt Cook and Teesdale’s John Wycliffe, first translator of the Bible into English, to “the modern captains of industry who have made Middlesbrough renowned.” Bolkow and Vaughan of course, Sir Lowthian Bell, and not omitting “Gilchrist and Thomas, who showed that the Cleveland ore, though containing phosphorous, could be made into excellent steel.”

Precisely where? Chiefly Middlesbrough but Weston adds: “Furnaces are in blast also at South Bank, Thornaby, Redcar and as far south as Skinningrove.”

Of Redcar in particular he observes: “The iron industry is rapidly developing. There are already four blast furnaces at West Coatham.” That’s as near as damn-it to the present, now-doomed Redcar steelworks. End of an era. Never more true.