Bronze Age Gold from Wales

Oil on canvas portrait of John James Hughes (1814-1889), ironmaster. Signed and dated bottom right. Framed.

John James Hughes (1814 – 17 June 1889) was a Welsh engineer, businessman and founder of the city of Donetsk. The village was originally named Yuzovka after Hughes, ("Yuz" being a Ukrainian approximation of Hughes), formally becoming a town in May 1917. In 1924, it was renamed Stalino (‘Steel Town’) and, in 1961, the name was changed to Donetsk.

Hughes was the son of the Chief Engineer at Cyfarthfa Ironworks. He worked at Cyfarthfa, and also at Abernant. He later became manager of the Uskside Foundry and Engineering Works in Newport,

In 1858 Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s final project, the S.S. Great Eastern was being constructed at John Scott Russell’s Iron and Shipping Works. Although this ship was revolutionary in terms of size and design, it being the largest ship ever constructed up to that time, the project was too ambitious and bankrupted John Russell.

Russell’s ironworks was taken over as the Millwall Ironworks with John Hughes as director. This ironworks became one of the largest concerns of its type in the world making iron cladding for the Royal Navy as well as other navies. Hughes being given much of the credit for this success.

When markets around the world fell during the ‘Great Panic’ of 1866, the works went into receivership, however it was re-established, and Hughes became manager.

At 56 years of age in 1868 Hughes accepted a concession from the Imperial Russian Government to develop a metal works and, in the summer of 1870, at the age of 55, he moved to Ukraine. He sailed with eight ships, with all the equipment necessary to establish a metal works and a group of about a hundred ironworkers and coal miners mostly from Wales.

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 four of his six sons. From a remote corner of the Ukrainian steppe a small initial settlement became a city of 50,000 with workers pouring in from Russia. Hughes ensured that the new town was equipped with hospitals, good workers’ housing, and schools.

Apparently, Hughes couldn't write and could only read capital letters, so he relied on his sons to do any paperwork.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the works were the largest in the Russian Empire, producing 74% of all Russian iron by 1913.

There is a monument to John Hughes in modern Donetsk and the portrait is illustrated on a postage stamp issued by the Donetsk People’s Republic in 2021.

In 2021 the Manic Street Preachers wrote an instrumental, ‘Dreaming a City (Hughesovska)’ based on the story of John Hughes and the city he created.

Hughes died at the Angleterre Hotel, on 17 June 1889 during a business trip to Saint Petersburg. His body was repatriated to the UK for burial beside his wife at West Norwood Cemetery.

Hughes married Elizabeth Lewis when he was still in Newport, and they went on to have eight children, all born in Newport. Although six of his sons moved to Donbas to help run the business, Elizabeth stayed in London, only seeing her husband during his infrequent visits to the UK.

His sons and their families continued to run the works until forced out during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.