Refractories

" Refractories are heat resistant materials for lining furnaces and the steel works at that time used something like 70% of all the refractories made in the country- so they were a fairish customer; and the one which I built up quite a lot during my time- was the cement industry. We had a very good product to give them what they wanted in life and from just one or two works we ended up supplying virtually every works in the country."

"A cement kiln is a long cylinder; which we have an example at Ketton, it's a long cylinder which is sloping slightly, you won't see this but it rotates slowly. It has a burner at the bottom end and it produces flames at very high temperatures and then they feed in their slurry as they call it, at the other end of the kiln, which is a sort of- at that time was always a sort of wet slurry and this went along the kiln as it rotated and there was this slope on it; it would slowly go down and then water was driven off and then it became powder and then it went through this very hot area and it made the essential cement clinker as they called it, which was then ground very finely, mixed with certain odd products to make proper cement, put into bags and then sold."

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