Manchester's 19th century tool makers

Manchester's booming cotton industry with its demands on mechanisation was the obvious place for an ambitious engineer to pursue his business. Much later it was where Ferranti and Fairey explored computerised machine tools. The image is of Ferranti's first computer.

One early engineer was Richard Roberts who moved back to Manchester after a spell with Henry Maudslay in London. He was a man with no financial resource and so he needed backers whom he found in the persons of Hill, Sharp and Wilkinson. The first significant Manchester venture was to explore an American patent for a power loom. Roberts was charged with finding a better design which he did and some 4,000 examples were sold. Key to the production of this volume, large by the standards of the day, was the invention of machine tools which could reproduce parts to common specification. We are talking about items such as gears which for which Roberts had produced a gear cutting tool. Although a man without much formal education, Roberts joined the Manchester Lit & Phil Society and more importantly championed the Manchester Mechanics Institute whose progeny can be traced to the world renowned University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. His most celebrated invention was a self-acting spinning mule which clearly caused him a wrestle of conscience. Skilled spinners were on strike and their Masters saw in a self-acting spinning mule a way to by-pass that human input. Roberts at first declined but eventually relented. I write in HBSTMW how the bicycle was conceived from ideas developed in the sewing machine. A perhaps similar cross-fertilisation of ideas can also be seen in Roberts as he turned his attention to railway locomotives and finally to steam ships. Throughout a key theme was the making of machines to produce the parts needed for his inventions. Many of the ideas can be traced back to what Roberts learnt through his time with Maudslay, however Roberts is rightly acclaimed as the father of production engineering.

Joseph Whitworth had also spent time with Maudslay, certainly building on his own passion for precision. He exhibited with gusto at the Great Exhibtion bringing to Hyde Park some twenty-six machine tools. He may well have been one of those shaken by what he saw of American manufacturing, what had been regarded as second rate was actually very good, so much so that he set out for the States to see for himself. He came back fired up with a mission to pursue excellence and to encourage it in others. One outcome was the universal standard for screws making them freely interchangeable. The second was about education where he found himself keenly aware that Britain lagged far behind. British engineers were trained on the job and so lacked the academic backing enjoyed by the French and Germans. He wasn’t alone. In many, if not most large, British towns men of thought had gathered together in Lit and Phil Societies to explore together a wide range of subjects including science, something eschewed by English universities. Of equal importance, like Roberts, Whitworth championed Mechanics Institutes where all were welcomed to improve their skills. I have written elsewhere about the impact of war on manufacturing and I suspect that it was the Crimean war that inspired Whitworth to turn his hand to armour. I wrote in HBSTMW of William Armstrong’s success with better big guns, where he pipped both Whitworth and Brunel at the post. Whitworth was not one to be beaten and designed a rifle employing a hexagonal bullet, a weapon far more accurate than the existing Enfield. It proved too much for the War Office to adopt, but was used nonetheless widely and to lethal effect.

James Naysmith on his return to Manchester from his time with Maudslay developed or exploited a particular talent for attracting wealthy backers. He started off in a small rented workshop making models and parts for textile machinery. With financial help from Holbrook Gaskell and Henry Garnett he built at Patricroft the Bridgewater Foundry which had on site all that was required for large scale machinery manufacture. A product list from the time exists and reveals a remarkable array of machine tools. What is the more remarkable is their size; they were capable of machining parts for very big pieces of equipment. In 1843, Naysmith was granted a patent for his steam hammer which he then exploited for the period of the patent and made himself into a multimillionaire (in current money).

William Muir worked as foreman at Whitworths after his time with Maudslays but then he set up William Muir & Co and quietly built a major business supplying excellent machine tools around the world. Muir's business was built first on the manufacture of a railway ticket machine and then a letter copier. He exhibited at the Great Exhibition winning a prize. He then probably secured additional backing and set up at the Britannia Works where he began to produce heavy machine tools. This business thrived and was taken on by his son in partnership with the Garnett brothers and continued trading until the 1930s.

One not obviously connected with Maudslay was William Fairburn who began his engineering career in partnership in 1817 but then branched out on his own account with a focus on the ironwork in mills. From there he moved to ship building both in Manchester and on the Thames. He developed a large export trade in Turkey, Russia and Sweden but his crowning glory was in the steam-powered woollen mills of Titus Salt at Saltaire near Bradford.

Beyer and Peacock built railway locomotives in Openshaw. Charles Beyer had been chief engineer at Sharp, Roberts & Co and and Richard Peacock had spent time with both GWR and the Manchester & Sheffield railway. Together with scot Henry Robertson they developed a business that in a little over a century manufactured some 8,000 locomotives for railways around the world. One of their most famed though was for the Metropolitan railway in London (the early Tube).

Further reading

• Alan Kidd, Manchester (Keele: Rayburn Publishing, 1993)

Coventry on the cusp of the twentieth century

Coventry was a city of engineering skills honed on watchmaking and it attracted first bicycle makers and then the first motor vehicle companies.

Two grandsons of the pioneer machine tool maker Henry Maudslay set up in the city: Cyril Maudslay with the Maudslay Motor Company which later joined with AEC and Reginald Maudslay with his Standard Motor company which later joined with Triumph. By then Maudslay Sons & Field was ending its life having moved from machine tools to marine engines both of which it had manufactured to great acclaim. London was a centre of engineering although much had gravitated to Manchester with the demands of an increasingly mechanised textile industry. London also had a long history of shipbuilding hence the direction of Maudslay's move away from machine tools.

Another major London manufacturer of marine engines was John Penn which company attracted a young William Hillman as an apprentice. Hillman moved back to his native Leicester where he went into partnership with William Herbert making first sewings machines and then bicycles as the Premier Company. William Herbert's younger brother was Alfred who, following an apprenticeship with Jessop in Leicester, set up in partnership before moving to Coventry as managing director of a new machine tool company, Alfred Herbert Ltd, with William Herbert as chairman.

I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how other subsequently great names gathered in Coventry: Harry Lawson, Louis Coatelin, Thomas Humber and well as William Hillman and the Maudslays. The boom in bicycles attracted American tool makers which scooped the market. Coventry was thus the obvious place for a rebirth of the British machine tool industry and Alfred Herbert was ready to lead the charge. I tell Herbert's subsequent story in Vehicles to Vaccines.

In the first part of the twentieth century, Alfred Herbert steadily built his business on the back of bicycles but when war broke out Herberts like all machine tool makers around the country faced massive demands. I wrote in my book Ordnance how Alfred Herbert was one of the industrialists - the men of push and go - who stepped forward to help Lloyd George in the war effort, in Herbert's case as Director of Machine Tools. I also wrote in Ordnance of the challenges facing manufacturing in terms of the loss of skilled men to the army. Unskilled men and women were brought into the factories and trained in specific tasks. Management then had the challenge of organising the flow of work in a way that it could be done satisfactorily with these more basic skill levels. They did not always succeed as evidenced by the number of 'duds' amongst shells supplied to the western front. Companies did go to extraordinary efforts to meet the challenge, but in the end the gap between supply and demand was met by imports from the USA. A huge quantity of armaments were imported and so these machine tools merely added to the list. It would however give the Americans a further foothold in British markets.

For Herberts and Coventry, the end of the war meant first a frenzy of activity but then the reality sunk in. The industry had grown to meet war demand and now had to shrink back to peacetime levels. Yet the world was changing and manufacturers sought different and more economical ways of doing things; the tried and tested no longer worked. For Herberts the challenge was to decide which machines to produce and how much to invest in new designs. In their book Alfred Herbert and the British Machine Tool Industry, Roger Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis suggest that Sir Alfred found it hard to set a clear direction. There was also the issue of factored machines, which I discuss in Vehicles to Vaccines, which gave Herberts the option to source the more advanced machinery from third parties and so avoid both the cost of investment and the risk of failure.

You can read a fuller account of Coventry manufacturing by following this link and something on the earlier history of machine tools in this link.

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London's 19th century tool makers

For the Machine tools of various kinds had been used around the world for centuries; there is some evidence of a lathe being used in China in the middle of the second millennium before the Common Era. A paucity of records make it difficult to reach back to clear examples much further than 1700. The importance of machine tools is clear; they were fundamental to industrialisation, Winston Churchill is quoted as saying, in the context of production for the Second World War, that they were 'the ganglion nerve centre of the whole [of] supply’.

Guns at COD Greenford in WW2

The eighteenth century saw the first burst of industrialisation through mechanisation with Thomas Newcomen and his steam-engine. These were made of metal and so harder to work by hand than the wood used on most of the early machinery for textile spinning and weaving. There was thus an incentive to find ways of employing something more than manpower. In William Steeds' History of Machine Tools 1700-1910, the author points us to the process of gun-boring such that the barrel would be cast with a removable core but would then need to be worked to achieve a smooth inner surface. The same principle could be applied to small cylinders of a steam engine, although Steeds points out that once work was needed on Watts improved steam-engine, greater accuracy was demanded and a more accurate version of the boring machine produced.

Reading Steeds' history two points in particular shine out. Machine tools of whatever kind were subjected to continuous improvement including by the men whom I refer to below. As important was the fact that much of the improvement crossed national borders. A good deal started in Britain but then ideas were taken up and improved upon in the USA, France and Germany and indeed others among the growing number of industrialised nations. I noted this international flavour when exploring 'who else shaped the manufacturing world'.

Looking in a little more detail at Steeds' book, he identifies a number of different classes of machine tool: lathes including those for cutting screws, gun-boring/cylinder-boring machines, drilling machines, planers (to achieve a flat surface), milling machines. gear-cutting machines, slotting machines, shaping machines, milling machines and grinding machines. Henry Maudslay, of whom I write below, would have added the sliding-rest to hold the item being worked on. In looking at the names Steeds mentions, there are well known American engineers: Brown & Sharpe, Pratt & Whitney and Ingersoll; and companies I wrote about in Vehicles to Vaccines in terms of their influence in the second half of the twentieth century: Alfred Herbert, Charles Churchill and William Asquith. Writing about the Crewe Railway Works which brought in many machine tools in the 1860s and 1870s, the point is made that for British industry as a whole would embrace machine tools in the 1890s. This was before the birth of the motor industry which would be accompanied by these three British tools makers in particular.

I have made the point elsewhere in my writing on manufacturing that war provides an almost essential stimulus. So it was at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich that a young boy, Henry Maudslay, began to learn his trade. His father was a storeman, but young Henry had other ideas. He began as a powder monkey filling cartridges and progressed to the carpenters shop and then, because he showed more interest in metal working, the smithy. He would become, in the eyes of the celebrated Manchester engineer William Fairburn, 'one of the six engineers who completely dominated the profession between 1790 and 1830, the year before he died. The other five were John Rennie, Thomas Telford, James Watt, Joseph Bramah and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Henry took the skills he had garnered at Woolwich and took up employment with Joseph Bramah who had been looking for someone skilled enough to make the locks he was designing. In 1797, Henry set up his own smithy off Oxford Street, moving first to Cavendish Square and then to Lambeth in 1810. The ending of the Napoleonic wars resulted in a temporary set back in demand but then the business thrived as a partnership which included Henry's son and Joshua Field trading as Maudslay, Sons and Field. An early project was to produce machines to manufacture ship's pulley blocks to the design of Marc Brunel. Much, but not all of what, Maudslay did was about creating machines to do with consistent precision what would take a skilled man may hours.

Maudslay had his share of patents not least for his table engine which took the idea of the steam engine and made it compact but also reducing the number of parts needed. This leads to one of Maudslay's great legacies: the manufacturing process was as important as the invention itself. In this his insistence on the use of sliding rests in his workshop ensured consistency. They all enabled accuracy, the other great legacy. Within the context of his workshop he encouraged standardisation, for example, of screws, something taken even further by Whitworth in Manchester. Maudslay's work on screws enabled greater accuracy of measurement by the bench micrometer.

Henry Maudslay was working at the cusp of a dramatic change from craft skills to engineering process and London was the place to be with a large and growing population and with access to the Midlands via the Grand Junction Canal. Working in London at the same time were Joseph Bramah, John Penn the ship builder, John Rennie a Scot who had trained as a millwright but was principally a civil engineer as was Telford.

Many other engineers, at that time almost all self-taught, were seeking improvement. Some may have served apprenticeship, others a period of working with more experienced men. They were referred to as journeymen and indeed they embarked on journeys around the country to learn new skills. London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was becoming a magnet for people from largely rural areas looking for work. My forebears were among them and like many arrived at Charing Cross to seek their fortune in my family's case as wax and tallow chandlers. Journeymen engineers were perhaps rather more focused and set their sights not on Charing Cross but on Maudslay's works over the river at Lambeth.

In a fascinating book, Henry Maudslay and the Pioneers of the Machine Age, editors John Cantrell and Gillian Cookson draw together chapters on those engineers who learnt their trade from Maudslay.

Richard Roberts was a Welshman who picked up skills as a turner in Staffordshire before finding work in Manchester. It was still the time of the Napoleonic wars and militia officers were seeking him. He therefore made his way to London in the hope of anonymity. This he achieved and he also found his way to Maudslay's works. He spent two years with Maudslay improving his skills as a turner and fitter but also expanding his general educuation. With the defeat of Napoleon he returned to Manchester and I continue his story in my blog piece on Manchester engineers, where he immersed himself in machinery for the textile industry.

David Napier came from a family which had worked with metal for generations. His grandfather Robert expanded their family smithy to become involved in the mechanisation of calico printing on the Clyde. Robert was succeeded by his son John who took advantage of the new Forth & Clyde canal to obtain pig iron from the Carron foundry near Falkirk for the family business now trading in Dumbarton. Robert's third son also Robert became smith and armourer to the Duke of Argyll at Inveraray where David was born in 1788 although Robert remained a partner in the family business which David joined as an apprentice in 1805. By 1814 David was working in London with Maudslay. He stayed there for two years before beginning his exploration into printing presses as employer, partner and finally on his own account. Importantly he worked with the parliamentary printer, Thomas Hansard, and produced the very successful Nay-Peer press for printing playing cards and banknotes as well as other high quality print. He also produced machines, the Imperial and Double Imperial, for newspaper printing. From this Napier went on to produce precision instruments and also skilled work for the Board of Ordnance. Their works were also in Lambeth.

Joseph Clement was born in Westmorland in 1779 and worked first as a slater before moving to metal work mainly on looms first in Glasgow and then Aberdeen when he attended courses on Natural philosophy at Marischal College. He moved to London in 1813 and worked for Alexander Galloway, a successful manufacturer less concerned with technical excellence that Braham to which he moved before joining Maudslay as chief draughtsman. In 1817 he set up on his own earning a reputation as both an excellent draughtsman and maker of fine machinery. He worked for Charles Babbage on the latter's Difference Engine but the two fell out over charges. Joseph Whitworth spent some time with Clement after leaving Maudslay and further honed his precision skills.

Joseph Whitworth was born in 1803 in Stockport son of a loom frame maker. In 1821 he became a mechanic with Crighton & Co, Manchester textile machine manufacturers. He left for London in search of self improvement and joined Maudslay working alongside the latter's most skilled me. Whitworth left Maudslay in 1828 to join Joseph Clement before returning to Manchester but with a mission for precision. He knew Tootal, William Fairburn, Charles Beyer (Peacock) and William Muir. I tell more of Whitworth in my blog on Manchester tool makers.

James Naysmith joined Maudslay for the last two years of the latter's life. There is a suggestion that Naysmith's father had had friendly dealings with Maudslay. There were though other reasons why Naysmith may have been welcomed. James was born and brought up in Edinburgh and had not excelled at school; class sizes of 200 are quoted and may well have contributed. James though was the son of an engineer who happily taught him drawing. Friends of his father, also involved in engineering taught him practical skills. These were not wasted for James soon became an accomplished model maker. These models included small steam engines which he would sell at £10 time which was put to good use in paying for his attendance at lectures on a wide variety of subjects. By 1829 when he travelled to London to join Maudslay he was already 888888. He left Maudslay's company in 1831 and returned to Manchester via a further spell in Edinburgh. I continue his story in my Manchester blog.

William Muir was another Scot and was apprenticed in Kilmarnock. He went on from there to Glasgow before heading to London where he joined Maudslay's firm only months after the the death of the founder. Muir carried out generally supervisory roles whilst refining his skills in machine making. He was with Maudslay's for five years and let to join another London engineering before moving to Manchester as foreman in Whitworth's.

As for Maudslay, they moved their focus to marine engineering and traded successfully and with technical distinction until challenging finances led to their closure at the turn of the century. A fourth generation of Maudslay (RW Maudslay) moved to Coventry to set up the Maudslay Motor Co in 1903.

Of significance to machine tools, Charles Churchill had from 1865 begun importing American machine tools. In their book Alfred Herbert Ltd and the British Machine Tool Industry, 1887-1983, authors Roger Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis first look back at the passage of the nineteenth century and see as the century progressed an increased penetration of the British market by American machine tool manufacturers. In particular when the British economy start to boom in the 1890s with bicycle manufacture the demand for machine tools outstripped British supply. There were also doubts on the quality and appropriateness on British machines as well as overcapacity in the US which spurred American salesmen in the direction of Europe and Britain in particular.

The man who took up the machine tool mantle from Maudslay was Alfred Herbert and I tell his story in this link to Coventry where he set up.

Further reading:

• William Steeds, A History of Machine Tools 1700-1910 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969)
• Henry Maudslay and the Pioneers of the Machine Age, John Cantrell and Gillian Cookson (eds.) (Stroud: Tempus, 2002)

Swindon manufacturing history

Swindon would become one of the great 19th century railway towns, but at the end of the 18th century it was a place largely passed by.

Kennett and Avon canal 

The canals changed this as the ambitious link between the Thames and the Avon was debated. What became the Kennet and Avon canal was the southern link through the Vale of Pewsey. A northern route branched north near Melksham and made its way between Calne and Chippenham to pass close to Swindon on its way up to Abingdon on the Thames. Later. the north Wiltshire canal would link from Swindon to the Thames and Severn canal at Cirencester.

From next to nothing, Swindon had become an ‘epicentre’, well nearly. The impact though was real with a big drop in the price of coal from the Somerset coal fields and access to hungry urban areas for the agricultural produce of north Wiltshire farmers.

No sooner was all of this in place than Isambard Kingdom Brunel was appointed chief engineer of the yet to be built Great Western Railway. Debate followed but the route adopted would pass through Swindon after Didcot and before Chippenham and the Box tunnel through to Bath and Bristol. A little later a line would snake north west from Swindon through to Cheltenham.

A few lines of text belie the task. 1840 was in the middle of one of the 19th century’s downward economic cycles. Many railways were being built, but they were mostly short runs linking towns and neighbouring coalfields. The longer routes (The Grand Junction and the London Birmingham) were massive undertakings involving great financial risk. The GWR was no different, especially with the cost and complexity of the Box tunnel. Nevertheless it was built and opened to traffic.

The new line would need a repair workshop. John Chandler, in his Swindon - History and Guide, tells the story. Swindon was simply not suitable: it had an inadequate water supply and really no skilled labour. Surely Bristol would be better, closer to coal and with an already large population. Daniel Gooch had been appointed to create the workshops and he argued for Swindon. There were those who suggested that local landowners may have sought to influence him. Other factors also came into play. Land was available at Swindon by merging with Cheltenham railway. Swindon was also at that point along the route where a change of engine would be needed to take on the challenge of the route through the Box tunnel.

There was still no money until the idea emerged of a station at Swindon offering refreshment to passengers as the engines were changed. This resulted in grand three storey station buildings constructed along with a village of railway houses all at the builder’s expense in return for the profits from the station. Anecdotes suggest that the quality of refreshment was not great and that prices were on the steep side - perhaps nothing changes.

The building of the workshops began during the economic downturn, but by the time of the railway mania that followed, locomotives were not only being repaired but new ones were being built. The GWR had opted for a broad gauge railway in contrast to the narrow gauge adopted elsewhere. This had the advantage that locomotives could be bigger and more powerful - in 1846 a locomotive, the Great Western, could pull a full passenger train at 60 mph over a long distance. The emphasis on power and speed is born out by the contrasting comments on the Crewe works.

In terms of employee numbers, Chandler quotes 400 for 1843 growing to 1800 by 1847, but then shrinking back to 600. Towards the end of the century, tough economic conditions gave way to better times and employee numbers climbed to 11,500. Alongside a better economy, the GWR had diversified and expanded its routes. Crucially it had moved over to the new standard gauge in 1892. Possibly more important it had added a large carriage works in 1865 and was producing rolling stock built to the highest standards of luxury. Magnificent locomotives were built including the legendary Castles, Kings, Granges, Manors and Halls classes. The works expanded in area eventually covering 326 acres including 79 acres roofed over. Even in 1846 the engine shop could accommodate 36 locomotives in a building in the shape of a stable with separate stalls.

Swindon was ever more dependent on the railway with some 80% of adults males employed there. Clothing factories were attracted by the corresponding availability of female labour: Compton employed 1,000 including the manufacture of GWR uniforms.

Employment at the GWR works grew to 14,369 in 1925 but then begun its decline to 10,000 until 1960, 5000 in 1967 and just over 1,000 before it closed in 1986. I write about the massive changes in the post war railways in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Swindon attracted other industries. It became home to a Pressed Steel factory which continues to supply bodies for the Mini. The Vickers site in Swindon first produced Spitfires in the Second World War and then was used for experimental projects. The site was then taken by Honda for their UK production base. It is currently being redeveloped once more. Plessey opened a factory in Swindon during the Second World War to meet demand from the MOD. The company also managed a number of shadow factories. The Swindon factory later specialised in hydraulics and a further factory was built at Cheney Manor in 1957 to manufacture transistors. RA Lister built a factory to manufacture farm equipment and diesel engines to add capacity to its main base at Dursley.

Further reading:

• John Chandler, Swindon - History and Guide (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992)
• Michael A. Howell, Bygone Swindon (Chichester: Phillimore)
• You can read more in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines