Hitchin manufacturing history

Hitchin is a product of its soil which is a rich loam and so ideal for growing cereals but, even more so, herbs especially lavender. The undulating countryside also offers excellent pasture for sheep. A benign climate and adequate water supply completes the picture.

For centuries there had been water mills on the river Hiz with the business of grinding grain into flour. It was a good business with a regular market. The range of cereals grown attracted dealers looking not only for bread flour but for seeds yielding oil and cattle feed, and oats for malting for the London breweries. The arrival of the railways in the mid nineteenth century encouraged the building of a new corn exchange and dealers came from as far afield as Liverpool.

In the sixteenth century, lavender plants were brought from Italy, where they grow wild, and it was found that Hitchin's soil and climate were perfect for the plant. The flowers from the lavender plant are processed and distilled to produce fragrant lavender oil for use in toiletries. There were a number of firms in the town growing and processing lavender but the largest, Perks & Llewellen, caught my eye because Perks was my mother's family name. Perks & Llewellen were successful and supplied a growing market in the nineteenth century.

If lavender and a range of cereals could be grown, what else? The answer came from a young man who, attracted by the advances in science in the nineteenth century, became apprenticed to a pharmaceutical chemist. The young man with William Ransom and he was born and bred Hitchin; the pharmaceutical chemist was in Birmingham then thriving with busy factories. In 1846 William returned to Hitchin and set up his own business. He grew medicinal plants on the family farm: Henbane, Wild Lettuce and Belladonna. Other plants, he imported from as far away a Syria. He grew lavender but not in competition with Perks & Llewellen concentrating rather on its medicinal properties. William died in 1914 and the firm was continued by his son who also took over the growing of lavender for toiletries when Perks & Llewelyn closed down. Ransom Naturals became a public company in 1969 and now grows its plants near St Ives in Huntingdonshire. It has become renowned for its natural products.

In common with many towns in agricultural areas, Hitchin had its engineers. One, Ralph E. Sanders & Son, were carriage builders, cycle manufacturers and motor car engineers. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how Harry Ricardo had praised Lanchester for producing a car that was not simply a motorised carriage. Sanders built motorised carriages in their workshop alongside carriages designed to be drawn by a horse. To me this goes a long way to explain the early car manufacturing process whereby the chassis and engine would be manufactured and a coach built body added to satisfy the particular requirements of the customer. As the motor car was made in increasing numbers and standardised forms, Sanders' business shrank although it continued as a garage until 1979.

John Whiting was a fellmonger, not unlike my own family who were fellmongers in Wheatley just to the south of Oxford and I wrote about this in my biography of my great great uncle William Smith Williams, Charlotte Bronte's Devotee. Alan Fleck and Helen Poole describe the business of fellmongers in their book Old Hitchin. It is about the hides of sheep and how they are cleaned and softened prior to tanning. They suggest that Hitchin hides may well have been used for parchment and I make that assumption for my family's business given their proximity to Oxford and its colleges. In the case of Hitchin it was fine hides used in book binding which began with the partnership of GW Russell and Henry Featherstone which took over the business from Whiting. In 1886 GW Russell & Son was formed and in 1949 it took over E&J Richardson of Newcastle and so secured the sole manufacturing rights for fine book-binding leather. The firm made the leather for the late Queen's Bible at her Coronation in 1953. The business, Russell Fine Leathers, continues in Hitchin and also in Suffolk.

Further reading:

Alan Fleck and Helen Poole, Old Hitchin (Chichester: Phillimore, 1999)