Isle of Wight manufacturing history

 King Harold stationed his navy off the Isle of Wight to fend off the fleet of William the Conqueror. The attack was delayed by bad weather for three months and the fleet returned to port. William attacked at Hastings and the rest is history. The island had been a centre for pottery in Roman times. Shipbuilding and the sea were in its DNA

Samuel White shipbuilding based at Cowes originated at Broadstairs but moved to the island in 1802. The company built frigates and other vessels for the Royal Navy. It also built seaplanes before the First World War.

In the Second World War the island became famous for being the terminal for the PLUTO pipeline of which I wrote in War on Wheels.

The island has many smaller shipbuilding and repairing yards and remains at the heart of the yachting world. Clare Lallow built Morning Cloud for Edward Heath.

The seaplane originated across the Solent at Pemberton-Billing in Southampton. For the island it was Saunders-Roe which developed the aircraft eventually becoming involved in Helicopters and hovercraft which Christopher Cockerel invented on the Solent. I write more on Saunders-Roe in Vehicles to Vaccines.

In 1964 Decca built a factory to manufacture radar for non marine applications. Group Captain Edward Fennessy had worked in radar during the Second World War and then became managing director of Decca Navigation as they developed systems for both military and civil use. The Cowes factory was later owned by Plessey, then GEC and is now part of BAE Systems.

In the sixties Britten-Norman began manufacturing small aircraft near Bembridge. Production moved abroad but recently returned to the island.

Skills in shipbuilding and aircraft production are perfectly suited to the design and manufacture of wind turbine blades. Vestas manufacture wind turbine blades just outside Cowes.

Basingstoke manufacturing history

 Basingstoke was a small Hampshire market town with a history of wool and then malting. The industrial revolution arrived in the form of Wallis's foundry which produced farm equipment and in time powered threshing machines. The town had already been linked to the Thames via the Basingstoke canal and Wey navigation. Railways arrived between 1840 and 1854 and could have brought railway workshops but for the town's resistance. These went instead to Eastleigh.

In 1856 Thomas Burberry noticed that the coats that shepherds wore tended not to soak up rain and he concluded that this must be because of the natural oil in fleeces. He took the idea and began manufacturing coats that also did not absorb rain. This was a product of the process he invented to produce woollen material called gabardine. Coats made of this were, and indeed are, sold under his name. Some half a million were worn as trench coats by British troops in the First World War. The Basingstoke factories closed in 1959 but production continues in Castleford In Yorkshire.

John Isaac Thornycroft of Chiswick built ships and in the later nineteenth century built a vertical steam engine to power a wheeled wagon. In the early twentieth century he moved this activity to Basingstoke and developed petrol engines capable of powering trucks. In 1905 the company produced a bus with capacity for 36 passengers. In the First World War the company supplied 5,000 'J' type trucks for various uses including having an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back. Further buses and trucks were developed and in the Second World War Thornycroft again provided many heavy vehicles. The company joined Leyland in 1962 with specialist vehicles going to Scammells in Watford. The Basingstoke factory was sold to the American axle manufacturer, the Eaton Corporation, and now manufactures power solutions.

In 1960 Basingstoke was designated as a London over-spill town and this required new housing but also employment. The companies which chose to set up in Basingstoke included the British fork lift truck maker, Lansing Bagnall, Honeywell, Thermo-Fisher, De La Rue, Albright International and the AA.

Paper maker Wiggins Teape had their headquarters in the town. The predecessor partnerships were founded in Aldgate in the eighteenth century. Gateway House was opened in 1977 by which time the Group had mills across the UK and around the world. It later merged with the French Arjo but was forced into administration in 2021 partly as a result of rising gas prices.

At nearby Laverstoke Henry Portal set up his second paper mill in the early eighteenth century. It began printing bank notes for the Bank of England. The company bought the Bathford mill in Bath in 1970.

Further reading:

Anne Hawker, The Story of Basingstoke (Newbury: Local Heritage Books, 1984)

Southampton manufacturing history

 Southampton was one of the great English ports first identified as so used in Roman times. The port was later ravaged by the Vikings. Henry V, having won the battle of Agincourt, set about building a navy to defeat the French. His largest ship the Grace Dieu was built in Southampton. The port grew as the benefit of Agincourt flowed in terms of comparative peace and the taking of Normandy. With the shift in opponents from Spain to France, Portsmouth became the primary naval port and Southampton was called upon to supplement its ship building resources as needed. It later prospered with yards for smaller ships and yachts.

Southampton as a port thrived with deliveries of coal from the Tyne. In time it added imports and exports to and from the empire. The nearby oil refinery at Fawley is run by Esso. It has long handled imports of timber and chemicals.

The city is now forever associated with ocean going liners taking their mix of passengers to the new world. We can think of the Titanic, but many more. The Southampton story started much smaller, although P&O made the port its home from the early nineteenth century. It was the years following Waterloo and the defeat of Napoleon that the peaceful and pleasurable use of the sea took off. Steam was fundamental and it was smaller steam packets that busied themselves in the Solent crossing to the Isle of Wight and taking trippers round the island. Bigger vessels also made regular trips to the Channel Islands. The coming of the railway in 1840 opened up Southampton to the growing London population and steam packets prospered. It was then that Southampton really featured in trans Atlantic travel, although the Thames still held on to much passenger and freight business. P&O moved back to London, but Cunard White Star took its place in Southampton. In the 1930s P&O moved back to Southampton.

The Chiswick based shipbuilding company owned by John Thornycroft moved to Woolston Southampton in 1900 and continued their manufacture of specialist naval vessels in the yard built by T.L. Oswald of Sunderland in 1870. During the Second World War they built seventeen destroyers, torpedo boats, mine sweepers and landing-craft and numerous other craft. In 1968 they amalgamated with Gosport-based Vospers to form Vosper Thornycroft. Harland & Wolff had a ship repair operation in Southampton from 1907 until 1973 when it was sold to Vosper Thornycroft. The ship building activity of the company is now part of BAE Systems Maritime based in Portsmouth.

Ship building also focused on yachts. Camper and Nicholson, founded at Gosport, but with a yard in Southampton, built Gypsy Moth IV for Sir Francis Chichester for his single handed journey around the globe. Oyster at Hythe and also Wroxham in Norfolk build and manage super yachts. Moody founded in Swanwick in 1827 made world class yachts until 2007 when the company was sold to the German Hanse Yachts.

The city became home to aircraft manufacture at the time when take off and landing on the sea was seen as more convenient than building land based air-ports. The company that championed this just outside Southampton was Pemberton-Billing Ltd, later named Supermarine and later still bought by Vickers. My mother included in her diaries (transcribed in my book Dunkirk to D Day) her account of travelling in a flying boat in the Second World War.

At Woolston, Supermarine in the thirties designed Spitfires and built their fuselages, the remainder being subcontracted to other aircraft manufacturers around the country. Avro had built aircraft at Hamble in the First World War. The site was subsequently used by Hawker Siddeley Aviation for their advanced training aircraft.

In electronics, Phillips (formerly Mullard) made integrated circuits in their Southampton factory. BAE Systems manufacture radar with its Digital Intelligence unit on the Isle of Wight and Combat Management Systems at Portsmouth. They were building on the legacy of Marconi whose experiments on the Solent resulted in wireless radio as I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Southampton has been the recipient of inward investment from Pirelli with their cable works, Goodyear Tyres, Ford Motor Company, IBM, Apple and GE of America. BAT has made cigarettes in Southampton since 1912, but now the focus has shifted to non-combustible nicotine products.

As elsewhere, Southampton major employers are now in the service industries

Further reading:

A. Temple Patterson, Southampton - a biography (London: Macmillan, 1970)