Cement Seal, Portland, Knight, Bevan & Sturge, Image & Found by Awing.
Found near St Austell, Cornwall. Size 25mm/18mm.
PORTLAND CEMENT around outer perimeter of circular indent, Pyramid at centre with TRADE MARK PYRAMID printed on it's three borders.
KNIGHT? BEVAN & STURGE ? LONDON on other side
From Discover Gravesham:-
"Hive Lane was originally the drive to a large house and grounds called Hive House.....The estate was sold by auction in 1838 and purchased by Thomas Sturge, who in 1853 built the Knight Bevan and Sturge cement mill on part of the property."
The Trade Mark does not match the seal images but they are obviously based on it. The image was sourced from Dylan Moore's Cement Kilns and he has this to say about the kiln known as Beavans at Northfleet, Kent:-
"Ownership:
1853-1900 Knight, Bevan and Sturge
1900-1970 APCM (Blue Circle)
This plant was the fifth on the Thames, and became second only to Swanscombe in size during the 19th and early 20th century. It is reasonable to consider its launch as a “spoiler” orchestrated by William Aspdin when he fell out with his partners at Robins. Thomas Sturge was a prominent shipping owner at Northfleet, and his son was installed as an engineer at Robins in 1851. Bevans was subsequently erected on identical lines on what was previously a brickfield immediately adjacent to Robins on the east. Aspdin then left them to it. Sturge’s local influence allowed the plant to secure a huge swathe of chalk land to the south, boxing in the Robins reserves.
The plant seems to have made little attempt to innovate in the pre-APCM period, using wet process bottle kilns throughout, with some 3 Ha of slurry backs and drying flats. In 1864 there were 17 kilns, making 500 t/week, and by 1900 the number had risen to 89, making 2650 t/week. Approximately half these were demolished in 1900 to make way for the rotary kilns and the rest were decommissioned by 1912. The plant was the second largest (after Swanscombe) in the new combine and, with ample reserves, it was earmarked for expansion. Rotary kiln installation followed immediately after the formation of APCM. The original rotary kilns were up-rated around 1909, but were cleared in 1922 to make way for much larger kilns, the largest APCM installation of the time, in the 1920s. Because of the plant’s cramped site, the up-rate could only be accomplished by complete shutdown and demolition of the previous kilns, which took five years, and necessitated desperate measures on the part of Blue Circle to maintain supply, with many mothballed static kilns being reinstated in the Thames/Medway area. For a short time after the uprate, Bevans was the largest UK plant, and kilns A1-A3 were the largest in Britain until overtaken by Johnsons A6 and A7 in 1929. With massive raw material reserves, the plant remained one of Blue Circle’s base-load operations for forty years. Kiln B1 was modified for semi-wet process with a Davis preheater in 1957, but this was relatively unsuccessful, and shut down in 1967. The rest of the plant shut down in 1970, with much of the cement handling and wharfage kept in use, incorporated into the adjacent Northfleet site.
The plant never had any rail link, and used the river for most of its transportation, maintaining the best deep water jetty on the south bank. One of the Robins kilns of the 1870s (and not an earlier Aspdin kiln as claimed), much restored, is available for view and is a scheduled building. The most recent (late 1950s) kiln stack remained until demolished as part of the Northfleet clearance on 31/1/2010."
