Phosphate Rocks Chapter 13: Stinky Miller's

Potash came to the Leith fertiliser factory from far underground, from a place that John called the North Yorkshire Sea. The mine shafts plunged down deeper than Scotland’s highest mountains would go if inverted and pushed, peak first, into the earth. 

Every day, a convoy of lorries arrived at the Leith Fertiliser Works from the North Yorkshire mine. The potash drivers were a valuable source of information on the inner workings of the Agricultural Division of Imperial Chemical Industries. News was relayed from the mouth of one working man to the ear of another. The carrier pigeons of intelligence, the same men who supplied the main Billingham site in Teesside also delivered a rich guano of gossip to the satellite factories of Aberdeen and Leith, along with lorry-loads of granular pink potash. 

The powder was transported in open wagons, driven by red-faced men with paunches and piles. Fine particles of potash blew into the broken windows of the cabs and the drivers arrived tired and filthy. Most lorries offloaded into the whalebone sheds at Leith, but a few were sent on to the smaller factory, Sandilands, in Aberdeen. 

Stinky Miller’s, as Sandilands was known locally, was much older than the Leith plant. It had opened in 1848 when the raw materials for fertiliser were blood and bone from the abattoir, spoiled fish from the trawlers, bones and guts from the fish-processing factory, and barrels of condemned offal. Life recycled. The stench from the chemical works came from the natural ingredients: the artificial fertiliser produced later was odourless. 

Except when someone in head office bought Jordanian instead of Senegalese phosphate rock. 

At Stinky Miller’s (the name stuck) the reactors were built of wood. A giant wooden barrel shovelled full of phosphate rock was sealed before adding sulphuric acid through lead pipes. Wooden paddles mixed the solid and liquid as they reacted to form superphosphate. 

As the old carpenters retired, it became harder to find young men both skilled enough to maintain the wooden vats and mixers and hardy enough to work in the oldest factory in Aberdeen. The boom of North Sea Oil, new and shiny and much better paid, created a vacuum into which the skilled and the strong disappeared. 

Over time, the potash transfers to Aberdeen became few and far between.