HENRY Bolckow, a German accountant, sowed the seeds of Teesside's steel industry when he formed a partnership with ironworks manager John Vaughan, in 1839.

The pair bought land near Middlesbrough's Commercial Street from Joseph Pease, of Darlington, and started an ironworks.

They intended using Middlesbrough's new status as a coal port and by the end of 1831, 151,000 tons of coal had been shipped through the town from the surrounding Durham coalfields. In that year, Middlesbrough was still a very new settlement - only 154 people were registered as living there.

In 1841, Bolckow and Vaughan established the town's first rolling mills and puddling furnaces and afterwards took up residence at a house on the corner of Lower Gosford Street.

Bolckow went on to build his own residence, Marton Hall, on the Marton Estate, which is now Stewart Park.

He built Brackenhoe Hall, on Ladgate Lane, which his nephew Carl Ferdinand Henry Bolckow inherited