Alfred was as extraordinary as Bismarck, a spidery, stick-thin, neurotic, pointy-faced, hypochondriacal crank who wore a shabby red toupee and was obsessed with steel, technology and weirdly the smell of horse manure. When his father died in 1826, Alfred, then aged fourteen, brought up ‘with the fear of total ruin’, inherited the works, travelling to Yorkshire to spy on the making of Britain’s finest Sheffield steel. On his return, barely sleeping, constantly ill – ‘I celebrate my birthday in my own way, last year with cough medicine, this one with enemas’ – he single-handedly propelled Krupp:
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