John Hughes (businessman)

John James Hughes (1814, Merthyr Tydfil, Wales — 1889, St. Petersburg, Russia) was a Welsh businessman and founder of a city in what is now Ukraine. The city was originally named Yuzovka ("Юзовка") after Hughes, ("Yuz" being a Russian or Ukrainian approximation of Hughes) but was renamed Donetsk in 1961.

His father was an engineer, head of one of the metal works in Merthyr. He started his career under his father's supervision. When he was 28, he acquired a shipyard, and by the age of 36 he owned a foundry in Newport. By the end of the 1850s he began work as an engineer at a metal-rolling factory in Millwall and eventually became executive director. In 1864 he designed a gun carriage for heavy cannons, which came to be used by the Royal Navy, as well as the navies of some other European countries.

When Hughes was 55, he moved to Russia, and in 1869 acquired a piece of land to the north of the Azov Sea from Russian statesman Viktor Kochubey [ with help of his wife who had served as a nurse in the Imperial family (according to Dmitrii I. Abrikossow, Edited by George Alexander Lensen, "Revelations of A Russian Diplomat", University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1964, p.138) ] . Immediately he started to build metal works close to the river Kalmius, at a site near the village of Alexandrovka. He also founded a "Novorussian society for coal, iron and rails production". The first pig-iron was cast there in 1872. The state-of-the-art works had 8 furnaces and was capable of a full production cycle. The land around the metal works quickly grew to become an industrial and cultural centre in the region. The population of the city founded by Hughes now exceeds 1 million.

Hughes was an engineer from Merthyr Tydfil who took up a concession from the Russian Imperial government in 1868. He built a metallurgical plant and rail producing factory. He formed the New Russia Company Limited to raise capital, and in the summer of 1870 he sailed to Russia with not only all the equipment necessary to establish the works, but also much of the skilled labour - a group of about a hundred ironworkers and miners mostly from south Wales. During the 1870s, blast furnaces were built, collieries and iron ore mines sunk, and brickworks and other facilities established to make the isolated works a self-sufficient industrial complex.

Over the next twenty years, the works prospered and expanded, first under John Hughes and then, after his death in 1889, under the management of his four sons. By the end of the nineteenth century, the works was the largest in the Russian Empire. A period of relative decline in the early years of the twentieth century was followed by expansion during the First World War, but the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 brought the Hughes family connection with the works to a close. The Hughes brothers and almost all of their foreign employees left Russia, and the works were taken over by the Bolsheviks in 1919. The town of Hughesovka was renamed first Stalino, in 1924, and then Donetsk in 1961. The works survived and prospered, and Donetsk is still a major centre of metallurgical industries.

Many of the men who accompanied John Hughes settled in Hughesovka, bringing out their wives and families. Over the years, although a Russian workforce was trained by the company, skilled workers from the United Kingdom continued to be employed, and many technical, engineering and managerial positions were filled by British (and especially Welsh) emigrants. A thriving expatriate community was established, living in good quality company housing, and provided with an English school and an Anglican church. Life could be hard, with very cold winters, hot summers, and occasional cholera epidemics, but some families remained in Hughesovka for many years. After the Bolshevik revolution, however, almost all returned to Britain, although a few stayed on, and their descendents still live in Donetsk.

Publications

* An illustrated booklet on the history of Hughesovka is published by the Glamorgan Record Office. 'Hughesovka, A Welsh Enterprise in Imperial Russia' by Susan Edwards can be purchased from the Glamorgan Record Office, The Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cathays Park, Cardiff, CF10 3NE.

References