The British in India

 The Indian sub continent was home to some of the world's great civilisations and was part of the most powerful empires. We need think only of the Mughals, but long before that Ashoka and the ideas of peaceful kingship in Buddhism. The country was populous and land was well used in agriculture. It is large, and peoples from different parts are quite distinct in language and culture. It is a place of great art; Indian textiles were the envy of the world, but so too many other crafts. The Silk Road ran across the top of the sub continent and so it is hardly surprising that influences from east and west filtered through.

As I explain in this link British merchants saw their counterparts in other countries taking the lead in international trade and they persuaded ElizabethI that England should follow suit.

The East India Company, founded in 1599, competed with companies from other European nations for full control of the overall governance of India with the objective first of trade. In order to do this it recruited 'sound men' educated later at Haileybury. Alongside civilians, the company had a small army of Englishmen educated at Addiscombe. There were exceptions, the Bombay Burmah Trading Company had a tradition of taking graduates from Kings College, Cambridge. Nepotism was the order of the day, and David Gilmour in his highly readable The British in India traces many generations of families who went out to serve. The word Service is important for to many it was a vocation. To others it was an opportunity to amass a fortune, although probably as many lost fortunes. The British upper middle class featured widely, sending second or third sons. Many families made their homes in India although much of the subcontinent failed to offer anything like comfort to young wives. Unlike Africa, there was no push for settlers nor any strong missionary activity. Nevertheless those who did come believed that their culture was superior and should be adopted. In the nineteenth century much changed and the scope for making fortunes all but disappeared.

David Gilmour makes a number of fundamental points. It was all about trade. When the East India Company arrived they established factories (as opposed to manu-factories) in a number of coastal areas which were staffed by 'factors' who would buy and sell with the local princes. The British were not alone, traders from France, Denmark and Holland also set up factories; Bombay was established on land leased from the Portuguese. There was relative harmony, broken perhaps by the old rivalry between the British and the French when the latter took Madras in 1746 and occupied it albeit briefly. No country brought large numbers of people, even in the bigger centres of population Europeans would be counted in the hundreds; no country brought many soldiers; there may have been for example British officers but most of the other ranks would be Indian. This changed, but only to a degree after the Rebellion in 1857.

The Great Rebellion or First War of Independence, or Indian Mutiny as the British Press preferred, was viciously cruel on both sides. The East India Company had its own army paid from its trading profits and reinforcements were sent from the UK. Kanpur was the place of a massacre of hundreds of British men, women and children, and the retaliation which followed saw the British killing everyone who was suspected of being a rebel. The rebellion was eventually quashed, the East India Company abolished and India became part of the Empire with an Indian Civil Service ‘whose high-minded and disinterested ethos was very different from that which had prevailed before’. There was an Indian Army with a high proportion of British troops and a Viceroy answerable to the new post of Secretary of State for India. Thus began a new chapter in Anglo-Indian relations.

In terms of manufacture, Kanpur (Cawnpure) became, with the coming of the railway in 1859, the 'Manchester of the East'. I wrote of this in my book, MacRoberts Reply.

Gilmour suggests that rather more Scots came to India to carry on business than did the English and he wonders whether their more appropriate university curriculum helped. As I have noted elsewhere, the English universities, essentially Oxford and Cambridge, were wedded to the classics whereas business requires engineering and accounting skills amongst many others. Most of British business in India was under the control of managing agencies. The largest was Tata founded by a Parsi family; the next four were Scottish: Andrew Yule, Inchcape, James Finlay and Burn & Co. Those men involved in business were known as boxwallahs. Gilmour explains that the word Wallah means man and the prefix describes what he does. The 'box' would contain samples of what he had to sell, and the term was stretched to encompass a much bigger business world. British India was hounded by class distinctions based both on birth and occupation. Boxwallahs and manufacturers were looked down upon by the ruling elite as they were in England. In many ways this echoed the Hindu cast system.

In terms of businesses, there were minerals to extract and engineers in the Kolar Gold Field in southern India were Cornish, the tinplate company was run by Welshmen. Tata Iron and Steel at Jamshepur employed men from just about every European nation. Tea planting was a substantial business, coffee was also grown but proved a difficult crop. Jute was important and here the skills came from Dundee which town imported the Indian crop. In time British factories were established in India to process the jute. Edward Parry, a Welshman, founded Parry's brewery which was the most famous trading company in the south of India. Edward Dyer from Devon ran an even larger brewery company in Simla, Rawalpindi and Mandalay. Later, Hodgsons produced India pale ale and Parry’s, Naval Gin. The coming of ice factories in 1878 was welcomed with open arms.

Burmah Oil and the Assam Oil companies began production in the 1890s. In Burmah, teak was big business with MacGregors as the major company. George Orwell, whose parents were born in Bengal, wrote of this in Burmese Days. John Maxwell established his plantation of Indigo Blue near Kanpur and this was big business in Bengal until synthetic indigo was produced in Germany, along with aniline dyes. Other raw materials included rubber and cinchona for quinine, lac and shellac for gramophone records, and Opium.

Gilmour's book focuses on many aspects of the lives the British people who went out to India. There was much sport and of course the British brought cricket to the subcontinent. The current primacy of Indian cricket is perhaps an example of the colonised becoming the coloniser Indian cricket. Tata surely is another.

Homes for the British were often substantial bungalows, but furniture tended to be sparse given the ravages of insect infestation. Some would have English furniture copied by local craftsmen. For much domestic equipment there was mail order and the Army and Navy Stores in Calcutta and Bombay. Ceiling fans were introduced after the First World War manufactured by Crompton Parkinson and GEC. By the time of the Second World War they were being manufactured locally.

India had produced fine cotton since ancient times. The demand for cotton fabrics in East Africa grew such that a trade began in slaves from Africa to pick cotton for princes in India. Britain had long been a market for Indian cotton fabrics and I tell elsewhere of the rise of Lancashire using raw cotton from the New World. As the grip of the East India Company weakened with legislation passed in 1813 the import of finished cotton goods was restricted and the import of Indian raw cotton into Britain was encouraged; India was to be the customer for finished British goods and the provider of raw materials, principally cotton. Manchester merchants continued to import raw cotton from America, but the American civil war created a cotton famine and renewed attention turned to the cotton growers of India.

The next logical step was to bring the mechanised cotton mill to India and import firstly yarn and then finished cloth into England. The first such mill was set up in 1818 but it was not until the 1850s that mills set up in Bombay, Broach and Ahmedabad were to become successful. The very early mills were powered by water, but steam provided by British manufacturers took over. Some mills were British owned, but increasingly Parsi merchants took hold of the industry; they had previously been significant growers and exporters of raw cotton. Early on it was yarn that was produced but soon both spinning and weaving were undertaken by such companies as the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Mill and the Oriental Spinning and Weaving Company. The Empress Mill at Nagpur set up by the Tata family in 1877 was the largest to date. Further mills followed in Calcutta. By 1890, India was exporting 170 million pounds of cotton twist and yarn a year.

Goods and people travelling from England to India first went by sailing ship down the coast of Africa round the cape and on to Madagascar before crossing the Indian ocean. The trip was long and hazardous. Ships could be blown off course and reach south America before re-setting course to the west. Sailing ships seldom survived serious storms and if they did there was the danger of pirates and then the enemies of the British state: Portugal, France or Holland. We look to shipyards on the Thames for these 'East Indiamen' as these ships were known. The coming of steam eliminated the wind enemy and speeded the journey; for passengers there came the alternative of passage by ship to the eastern end of the Mediterranean and then overland to another ship on the Red Sea for the onward journey. Later the Suez Canal would further shorten the journey. The problem now was refreshing supplies of coal for the engines. Welsh coal would be shipped to coaling ports. I offer my father's description of the process in Port Said on his way to trade in East Africa in my book Dunkirk to D Day. Of the ships, Maudslay Sons and Field on the Thames built steam powered iron hulled ships for the East India Company as did yards on the Clyde. I tell the story of a Dublin yard supplying a ship to the East India Company. India was getting everywhere.

Coal was to become essential to industry in India and the first coal mine was sunk in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, but produced coal of an inferior quality to that shipped from Britain. In 1808, the Court of Directors of the British India Company seeing the cost of coal imports suggested that Ordnance Works should be shifted to Britain. I explore below the extent of Ordnance work then in India. In relation to coal mining, the government employed a mining engineer, William Jones, to carry out a full survey. He found a rich seem of coal at Raniganj. He failed to make a success, but laid the foundation for Indian coal mining. The coal from the Raniganj mines had to be transported by river 150 miles to Calcutta; however the river Damodar was only navigable for 10 weeks of the years and so coal had to be stored on the river bank to await shipment. The constant sunshine evaporated tar and coal-oil so reducing its burning quality. Coal was later discovered closer to Calcutta and the coming of the railways addressed the problem of transport.

The coming of the railways brings into the story two branches of the army: engineers and sappers for it was military engineers who largely built the railways and also the canal and drainage schemes. They also put on the architect hat, designing a great many buildings borrowing British styles. In 1853, the first railway line was opened running from Bombay to Thana by the Great Peninsula Railway. Others followed and by 1859 the East India Railway had received from Britain 77 locomotives, 228 coaches and 848 freight wagons. In 1895 the first locomotive was wholly built in India at Ajmer Works. Of British manufacturers, the Metropolitan Railway Carriage and Wagon Company Ltd in particular falls to be mentioned.

Fundamental to railways was the production of iron and steel. I have already noted the Jamshedpur steel works which was founded by the Tata family in 1907. Before this the first blast furnace in India was set up at Kulti in 1870. Subsequently the Ordnance Factory Board established the Metal and Steel Factory in Calcutta in 1872. Before any of these, bulk steel was shipped largely from Britain, although India did have long tradition of making fine steel. I noted elsewhere that iron works in Stockton cast rails for the Indian rail system. Examples of such rail stamped 'Stockton 1891' were re-used in the single track railway in what was Persia.

The Army in India was part British and part Indian and its predecessors had long since set up their own supply arrangements. The manufacture of Ordnance, that is arms and other equipment, for the Indian army, goes back to the early days of the East India Company with the making of gunpowder from saltpetre which was in plentiful supply. In the eighteenth century, brass cannon were cast and later cannon cast from iron. Rifles were imported until the early twentieth century, given the precision demanded by modern rifle design. Saddlery was made in Cawnpore as was army clothing: John Stewart's harness and saddle factory was supplying all the leather equipment of the British armies in Asia. For a long time army vehicles were also imported. There were Ordnance factories in all the major centres and their successors have now become a major force in the Indian economy. I write on Ordnance supply in the Second World War in Dunkirk to D Day when my father was sent out to review arrangements for a possible land war against Japan.

As with Africa, a good number of British companies established a significant presence in India. Today, several much loved British brands have found new homes there: BSA and Royal Enfield to name but two.

Further reading

• David Gilmour, The British in India (Allen Lane, 2018)
• Ray, Indrajit, and Krishna Paul. “BEGINNINGS OF COAL INDUSTRY IN BENGAL.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 61, 2000, pp. 836–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44148157. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.
• Sahoo, Rajib Lochan. “INDIAN COTTON MILLS AND THE BRITISH ECONOMIC POLICY, 1854-1894".” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 76, 2015, pp. 356–67. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44156602. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.
• https://victorianweb.org/technology/railways/india/chronology
• Young, H. A. “THE INDIAN ORDNANCE FACTORIES AND INDIAN INDUSTRIES.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol. 72, no. 3715, 1924, pp. 175–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41356452. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.

The Scramble for Africa

 In any search for significant British manufacturing places, the continent of Africa figures for good or mainly evil. It had the resource that the Industrial Revolution needed but also that for which the developed world hungered. Thus any account of British manufacturing cannot ignore what was long known as the dark continent, not least since that is where our ancestors came from.

I have long had a book on my shelves titled The Scramble for Africa. In it Thomas Pakenham takes his reader through a dreadful story on so many levels. Yet, Europe's relationship with the continent does go back much further than his essentially nineteenth century account.

With the Ottoman empire controlling the Mediterranean, Spain (Christopher Columbus 1492) went west, but Portugal (Vasco da Gama 1498) headed east following the coast of Africa and round the cape up to Madagascar and across the Indian ocean. The Portuguese claimed possession of Angola on the west coast and Mozambique in the East. (I write of my father's experience of trading in Mozambique in the early twentieth century in my book Dunkirk to D Day. He bartered 'Manchester goods' for ground nuts and mealies.)

Soon after da Gama, the Portuguese were trading brass for ivory in vast quantities; the country known as the Cote d'Ivoire was so named with good reason. The Nigerians were taking a little of the brass and rolling it flat to take finely drawn images - one such is one of the one hundred objects Neil MacGregor chose for his History of the World. The evidence is of mutual respect with no hint of racism which would come later with the slave trade.

The first slaves were taken to America in 1619 – there followed a trade in human beings who would be rounded up by African chiefs and sold to European traders to transport to the sugar and cotton plantations of the New World. Some twelve million people were traded in this way in unbelievable horror. In the context of British manufacturing we have to accept that the labour which slavery provided was fundamental to the supply of cotton which was a key raw material of the industrial revolution. I should note in passing that each of Spain, Portugal, the Dutch, the Ottomans and indeed Africans traded slaves alongside the British.

Pakenham starts his story in 1876 with Queen Victoria's nephew, Leopold II of Belgium, who believed that the Belgians would benefit from an empire; after all it was not only the Portuguese: the Spanish had South America, the British had India and America, the Dutch has the East Indies and the French not only America but interests in Indo-China. Leopold had been inspired by the stories of exploration of Livingstone and Stanley. He cast his initiative as philanthropic with Stanley as his explorer.

Pakenham's account is long and detailed, but I think there are threads which can be drawn. Exploration of the dark continent was not to be undertaken lightly; it was dangerous and demanding. The account written by Stanley of the hardships of exploration one might have thought would be enough to discourage all but the brave; yet there were brave men.

Britain, France and Germany were jostling for position in Europe and their ambitions spread to the dark continent. Germany had not been interested in imperial expansion until Bismark had a change of heart, but after that they were well into the scramble. The Dutch in the shape of the Boers were already in the south.

The role of the Ottomans is significant since they gained control of a good portion of north east Africa. Sudan was under the rule of a Muslim emperor.

The other role sometimes forgotten was that of the Africans themselves. Pakenham paints a picture of great diversity of both groups and their leaders - some three thousand tribes. Some lived in temperate and beautiful places enjoying a peaceful existence. There were some large towns with the ruling class living in some luxury. There was art as evidenced by the Nigerian brass plate with finely drawn images. For others it was dessert, swamp or rain forrest. Many were involved in trading ivory, but also slaves. Some, like the Zulus, made disciplined soldiers, others were cannibals. Of these some were obscenely cruel whilst others ate their dead for essential food. Cruelty abounded. Time and again men, women and children would run in terror from fellow African slave traders. Pakenham notes in particular Uganda where the same trait of cruelty was evident well into the twentieth century.

Cruelty was not the sole preserve of the Africans. The actions of members of the European nations were carefully covered up, but, when exposed, rank in evil alongside those of the dominant African tribes but on an even larger scale.

There is a philanthropic strand with missionary activity at its heart. Many in Europe had been sickened by the slave trade and saw it their duty to civilise the 'pagan' Africans. This they did with the spirit of the Reformation: Protestant and Catholic in sometimes violent opposition.

The British succeeded in passing legislation abolishing the slave trade in their territories in the early nineteenth century. The focus of the trade moved east to Sudan which was split between Ottoman and native Africa; the Ottomans had murdered General Gordon in the siege of Khartoum and the Mahadists controlled Sudan. Thirteen years later, of which I write much more below, Egypt under British advisory rule invaded under General Kitchener and slaughtered 12,000 Mahadists at Omdurman. These were but two of many bloody battles.

What I find particularly interesting is the key role taken by British commerce. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how trade had driven exploration. The idea was that a charter company along the lines of the East India Company could gain trade for Britain without cost to the exchequer. Initially it worked to a degree, but, as the competing governments gained more and more imperialist ambitions, there was more at stake and the governments took over. In Britain this coincided with the arrival of Joseph Chamberlain at the Colonial Office.

So we have The Imperial British African Company (previously the British East Africa Company) in East Africa set up by Sir William Mackinnon. Mackinnon was a man inspired by Livingstone and who shared his belief that the task of developing Africa had the three strands of Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation. For Mackinnon, Christianity came first and he wrestled with the discordance of this with the growing capitalism. Commerce mattered too, for Mackinnon also ran one of the largest shipping lines, later to become Inchcape, amongst many commercial enterprises. His company was to develop trade in East Africa. It had an ambition to build a railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. The Duke of Sutherland was among the directors and I have photograph of my father on Mombasa railway station in 1908 with the Duke's son the Marquis of Stafford whom my father had met by chance on the ship out from England.

The collapse of Barings bank made financing the railway increasingly difficult so much so that the company ran out of money and, after much blood was shed, the territory fell to the protection of the British government. British East Africa comprised Uganda and what would become Kenya.

In the south, there was gold and diamonds for explorers. Companies to emerge which are still in evidence today included De Beers and Consolidated Goldfields, in both of which Cecil Rhodes had a significant interest. His Charter Company (British South African Company) led the push north into what became Rhodesia and then further into copper rich Northern Rhodesia which became Zambia.

In the west, Sir George Goldie's National African Company (later known as the Royal Niger Company and United Africa Company) led expansion. Goldie was the youngest son of an old Isle of Man family and very much a free spirit. The battle was for the palm oil and ivory trade on the Niger and the French under Pierre Brazza proved stiff competition. The conflict linked to the control of the upper Nile and the influence it could have on Egypt where the British and French uncomfortably shared control.

In a sense King Leopold was another commercial participant even though he avowed philanthropic principles. The Congo was rich in wild rubber and as road transport took off so too did the demand for rubber from the likes of Dunlop. The Congo had become profitable.

Overriding all of this were competing ambitions. The British, led really by Rhodes, imagined an Africa which could be crossed from north to south without leaving territory coloured pink on the map. Then the French looked to do the same, but from East to West. Italians wanted influence in Ethiopia and the Germans in South West and East Africa. The Portuguese were already there in Mozambique and Angola.

The flea in the ointment were the Sudanese Mahdists with their Dervish warriors and here we come to Kitchener, Obduman and revenge for the murder of Gordon. The script remains the same, the French and British advancing to the upper Nile, the French from their lands in the west, the British and Egyptians from the north ; their mutual enemy the Mahadists.

For the British it was technology that triumphed: the Sudan military railway built by Percy Girouard who would be Director General of Munitions Supply in the First World War. The building of the railway as the army advanced was a triumph; workshops were set up at Wadi Halfa on the Nile in Sudan. Less so the locomotives, so Rhodes sent heavy engines from the south and others were imported from America. Then the weapons: the newly invented Maxim machine gun (1884) made in London. In 1888, the Lee-Metford Rifle was developed, combining the rifled-bore developed by William Ellis Metford with the bolt action and detachable magazine of James Paris Lee. This rifle succeeded the Martini Henry all made by the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield. The Lee-Medford was in turn superseded by the Lee-Enfield, designed in 1895. Rifles were also provided by the Birmingham Small Arms Factory. Howitzers made in Woolwich and gun boats steaming up the Nile added to the extraordinary arsenal. The Dervishes had spears and obsolete slow firing Remingtons.

The result was victory for Kitchener who then put his large force face to face with the very small French force also competing for control of the Upper Nile. Eventually the French politicians relented leaving the British in control of the vast expanse between Lake Victoria and the Mediterranean.

A small statistic intrigued me. Kitchener’s steam ships could make the journey back to Britain in sixteen days; it had taken Kitchener two and a half years to get from Cairo, albeit that he was building a railway as he went!

Now it was the turn of the British to suffer from inefficient lines of supply. The Boers in the Transvaal had Mauser rifles from Germany and French De Bange artillery, but were thought to be no match for the British. How wrong! This was war as it would haunt the twentieth century. Kitchener joined the British, but even he made no quick difference.

Pakenham observes that twenty years of struggle until then had cost comparatively few British lives (but many African), but in South Africa angry Boer farmers armed with the latest German rifles gave the British army a taste of the emerging world. As witness, a young Winston Churchill reported on the war.

The formal war, strongly supported by the British gold mining interests in Johannesburg, ended with the British as victors, but the Boers would not give in. There followed a commando war with attacks on British supply columns and retaliatory raids on Boer farmers. Kitchener saw that the raids weren’t working and began a process of enclosing groups of Boers behind barbed wire fences policed by armed Africans who had no love for their Boer masters. This process developed into camps where mainly women and children were crowded together with restricted rations; disease became rife. The British press reported to an horrified public on these ‘concentration’ camps. It was horrific, but a fraction of whites died compared to many thousands of Africans during the Struggle. Eventually the Boers relented, but victory had a sour taste. Countless Africans continued to suffer. It was not only Africans, the gold mines recruited Chinese coolies who lived and worked as slaves, for Africans now rejected mining because of its low wages. The Chinese problem occupied the British press and the Under Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill.

The Congo remained in Leopold’s hands and paid for grand projects in Belgium. It soon became apparent that rubber was being collected by slave labour. But worse was the treatment of the slaves and the canabalism of many of the indigenous masters. Disease spread and the population shrank. The French, in their part of the Congo, piggybacked on the abuse and eventually saw a monetary return for years of effort. A report of the situation by Roger Casement sent shockwaves through Britain. Yet, neither France nor Germany wished to rock the boat. The Germans had more pressing issues.

German West Africa witnessed rebellion against the white occupiers. The solution was cruel oppression; if the rebels couldn’t be beaten on the battlefield they would be driven into the Kalahari desert to die from thirst, disease and starvation. Similarly in East Africa, the local tribes rebelled believing they were protected by 'medicine'. They pulled up the cotton crop, which they were being force to grow, and at first succeeded. Reinforcements arrived and the rebels discovered that their medicine was ineffective. Starvation by the destruction of crops proved a better and crueller weapon than the Mausers. Such was the destruction that inhabited and farmed areas reverted to being the home of wild animals.

Rebellion now spread to the French Congo and Pierre Brazza was sent back to report. He died whilst on his mission, but evidence of cruelty hit the Paris newspapers. The British now faced challenges in Nigeria, the government having bought out Goldie. More atrocities were reported.

Churchill visited East Africa in 1907 and wrote columns for the Strand Magazine, boyish articles of adventure. These, I suspect caught my father’s imagination. Churchill found in Kenya white settlers determined to dominate the Africans; yet, in Uganda a Black Country was developing into Livingstone’s vision.

Leopold eventually sold the Congo to the Belgian government, but left the country largely ungoverned. It was rich not only in rubber, but also copper and rare metals. South Africa gained independence but shocked the British by electing a Boer to lead the Transvaal allowing a colour bar throughout the new country.

The Second World War took the former German colonies and portioned them out. After the war the Gold Coast discovered new riches as the world developed an appetite for cocoa. This was the first country to gain independence, as Ghana. There followed the ‘wind of change’ as former colonies gained independence from their former masters. British influence was kept alive by radio. There is an anecdote of a Deltic engine being used in Somalia to power BBC World Service radio transmissions into the African continent. Such was the size of the radio valves used that, when the ‘pips’ were broadcast, the roar of the engine could be heard for miles across the desert.

The powers may have gone, but commercial enterprises remained. In the south De Beers Diamonds and Consolidated Goldfields continue to meet the world’s demands. In sub saharan Africa it was Tiny Rowlands' Lonrho (London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Company Limited). Zambia and Zaire (the former Congo) have rich reserves of copper and rare metals which were exploited by RTZ which had been mining there since 1929, and many others including Konkola Copper Mines.

In my research for both How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines, many British companies had significant operations in Africa.

In the mid 1930s, investigations had been made to assess the possibility of setting up industrial production in Kenya to remove the necessity of importing so many manufactured goods. The place chosen, Nakuru, was conveniently located on the Kenyan communication system both for the collection of raw materials and distribution of finished goods. With the coming of the Second World War and the entry of the Italians in 1940, Nakuru was mobilised to produce what was needed to defend the northern frontier. There was a tannery capable of producing five tons of leather a month, a whole plant for the manufacture of blankets, shoe machinery and a soap plant.

I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how Lever Brothers had acquired the Niger Company in 1920 to secure supplies of palm oil and how in 1929 the Niger company merged with the African and Eastern Trade Corporation Ltd, to form The United Africa Company Ltd. Perhaps in parallel with the initiative in East Africa, from the late thirties through the war and into the late forties, the UAC shifted its focus from providing African countries with what they needed to setting up local manufacturing

These examples barely scratch the surface. Now much of Africa has now fallen to the commercial influence of the Chinese.

Further reading

Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991)

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Washington, Peterlee and Newton Aycliffe manufacturing history

In the late forties the New Towns initiative got under way with the objective of providing housing to those made homeless by enemy bombing or whose housing was seriously substandard. They were also aimed at addressing the unemployment arising from the closure of coal mines. The residential areas were to be combined with industrial estates to provide local employment but also with the necessary social infrastructure.

Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee came in the first phase in 1947 and 1948. Washington would follow in 1964. Washington comprised Chester le Street and fifteen villages, some existing and some new. Aycliffe (the word Newton was added later) was located within ten miles of each of Bishops Auckland, Darlington and Shildon. Peterlee was originally to be called Easington but was renamed after the miners leader Peter Lee.

Washington coming later than the early new towns had an updated employment agenda. The coal mines were closing, ship building was in decline as was related heavy engineering. Washington would seek lighter new industries to complement what was already present plus a good proportion of service industry.

The larger companies already in Washington were Newalls which provided insulation for shipping and Cooks Iron Foundry. With the first of the new town's industrial estates, Tube Products and Calders followed. Turner and Newall as it became had purchased the Washington Chemical Company which had exhibited at the Great Exhibition and had deep roots in the town.

The Dutch Philips were one of the first overseas manufacturers to come to Washington and were a mainstay until closure in 2003. The image is of the exterior of the Philips Factory (With thanks to Tyne & Wear Museums Reference: 5417/240). The Japanese JATCO which manufactures transmission established a plant in Washington to support the main Nissan plant nearby. It is now part of the North East Automotive Alliance with a focus on the transition to EV. BAE Systems manufacture sub components in a former Dunlop factory which had originally been built for Avon Rubber. Timex followed with a state of the art factory; as with a number of other industries, what was in demand in the sixties became the victim of technological development. The same was true of the RCA record pressing factory. Both closed.

Hitachi looked to build a plant to manufacture televisions. I wrote in Vehicles to Vaccines about the role of the Japanese in this sector. For Washington and the North East there would have been clear benefit in a large manufacturer supplying a growing market. The British television manufacturers disagreed and lobbied the government to block the investment. They succeeded and after much work and expenditure Hitachi went away. As I note below the company did eventually gain a foothold in the North East.

Newton Aycliffe had at its heart a major Royal Ordnance Factory which had filled shells in the Second World War. In 1946 the government persuaded the British Bakelite company to move to the former Royal Ordnance factory in this area of high unemployment. The company began producing PVC by batch processing using old machinery but, as demand grew, it invested in new equipment, initially from the British company Francis Shaw Ltd. In the early sixties, Bakelite merged with British Xylonite jointly owned by Union Carbide and Distillers. The factory, known as Hydro Polymers, became part of Ineos in 2008.

EBAC is the only British manufacturer of washing machines and it also makes Heat Pumps, Dryers, Dehumidifiers and ventilation equipment at the factory they set up in Newton Aycliffe.

Newton Aycliffe is home now to Hitachi Europe, one of the few remaining UK railway locomotive works, and the government owned semiconductor plant, Octric. The Second World War Royal Ordnance engineering factory at Birtley was nearby and the town is now home to Komatsu (UK) manufacturing medium sized diggers.

Peterlee is home to a large Caterpillar factory employing robot technology. It also hosts the North East Enterprise Park and other companies in the Nissan supply chain.

Further reading

Stephen Holley, Washington: Quicker by Quango - The History of Washington New Town 1964-1983 (Stevenage: Publications for Companies, 1983)

 

Stockton manufacturing history

 The town prospered with the opening of the Stockton to Darlington railway opening up the South Durham coal field to sea going vessels especially when the line was extended to Middlesbrough.

Stockton’s early industry was timber, both imported and exported. However, it was iron that would fire the prosperity of the town. We can trace the Bowesfield Steel Company to Dorman Long and the building of the great steel bridges not least that over Sydney harbour. Two engineering companies of significant technological importance were Head Wrightson and Whessoe. The latter was based in Darlington but the former had its origin in the Teasdale Ironworks at nearby Thornaby-on-Tees. The connectivity of manufacturing is perhaps evidenced by the fact that Arthur Head had been apprenticed to Ransome and Sims in Ipswich and Thomas Wrightson has been trained at Armstrong’s in Newcastle. Their company grew to supply the world with blast furnace and steel works plant, constructional iron and steel, pit head gears, picking belts, tipplers elevators, coal crushers, disintegrators and general colliery and mining plant. It went on to be part of the early nuclear industry as I wrote in Vehicles to Vaccines, as indeed did Whessoe.

Another strand of iron working came through William Ashmore who, at his Hope Iron Works, manufactured Gas Holders (the remains of some can still be seen by the Oval cricket ground and near the railway line from St Pancras), Boilers and Bridges. In time, Ashmore was joined by R.S. Benson and Edward Pease who invented the telescopic gas holder. The company became the Power Gas Corporation of which Ludwig Mond took control in 1901. Power Gas and Head Wrightson later became part of Davy International and then Trafalgar House.

The South Durham Iron and Steel company produced a large proportion of the plates used in Newcastle shipbuilding as well as in Stockton’s own industries. One of these was to produce enormous pipes, 30ft in length and 96 inches in diameter welded by a water-gas process.

There were many other iron works which did not decline until the old staples were hit in the mid interwar years. Iron works in Stockton cast rails for the Indian rail system. Examples of such rail stamped 'Stockton 1891' were re-used in the single track railway in what was Persia.

One possibly unsung hero was John Walker who invented the friction match. It was said that Michael Faraday visited Stockton to meet the inventor and to encourage production which Walker declined.

Further reading:

• Robert Woodhouse, Stockton Past (Chichester: Phillimore, 1994)
• Tom Sowler, A History of the Town and Borough of Stockton-on-Tees (Teeside Museums and Art Galleries, 1972)

Stockport manufacturing history

 Stockport was a cotton town which perhaps embraced progress more readily than some others. Traditional spinning and weaving would take place in people's home. With mechanisation, Mills would be built but then demolished when new processes came in which demanded more or different space. In 1851, the textile industry employed half the working population. In the second half of the century it was said that Stockport was building mills on a ‘monumental scale’ and many of these along the Ashton canal which provided fuel and raw materials and took away the finished product. Among many others two families come to be mentioned. The Gregs, whose father built Quarry Bank Mill in Styal, and the Houldsworths whose mill is a classic example of great industrial architecture; it was designed by architects AH Stott. It also offered a more efficient configuration and was in effect a double mill with a central section housing the steam power used by a factory on either side.

Stockport had become, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great centre for power loom weaving. Manufacturers often carried on both spinning and weaving until weaving became concentrated on East Lancashire. Stockport shifted its efforts to spinning and embraced the spinning of cotton waste and doubling (spinning two or more yarns together to produce greater strength). Spinners also adopted the ring frame which worked much faster than the mule.

In the mid nineteenth century the weaving of silk was taken on in a number of mills to supply the manufacturers of Macclesfield until, with a downturn in demand, Macclesfield took over all their weaving. The weaving of wool had been done for many years as a cottage industry. This too was explored in the mill context with two mills in production until 1939. A further innovation falls to be mentioned. As mills got bigger they did of course cost more and a number of companies adopted a joint stock status following the lead of Oldham.

What was successful was hat making. The mid nineteenth century saw a fashion move from silk hats to those made from felt. Here, Stockport companies such as Christys and Battersbsy stepped in and in the last thirty years of the century employment grew ten fold. Stockport manufacturers embraced the latest American machinery and prospered until fashions changed once more.

Engineering followed textiles with manufacturers of the ring frame and power looms. They also made machinery for hat making. Cravens manufactured cranes, Simon-Carves made mining equipment and Lancashire boilers were built at the Wellington boiler works.

With the coming of the First World War, National Aircraft Factory No 2 was built in the town and run by Crossley. The associated airstrip was also used by Avro from their Woodford factory. Later Fairey manufactured aircraft in the Second World War in nearby Heaton Chapel. The company moved to wheeled armoured vehicles and now operates as KNDS UK.

Further reading:

Peter Arrowsmith, Stockport - A History (Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, 1997)

Runcorn and Widnes manufacturing history

 These towns facing each other over the Mersey share an industrial history of chemicals manufacturing. They were joined by a transporter bridge in 1905 which was replaced by the arched Jubilee Bridge in 1961.

The opening of the Bridgewater canal in 1776 kick started industry in Runcorn. Two large soap and alkali works (Hazlehurst and the Runcorn Soap and Alkali Company) were destined to grow throughout the nineteenth century, particularly with advances in science in mid century. Proximity to the sea and canals encouraged shipbuilding and the presence of minerals underground enabled lead and copper mining.

The opening of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1895 further improved the connectivity of the town and the Castner-Kellner company (which later became part of ICI) began using the electrolytic process from which both caustic soda, bleaching powder, chlorine and hydrogen were extracted. The Hazlehurst soap business was bought by United Alkali, of which I say more below, who then sold to Lever Brothers (later Unilever) adding to their soap business. The town became home to British Dyestuffs also later part of ICI which located the headquarters of their Mond heavy chemicals division there.

ICI's Fluor produced fluorocarbons, used as refrigerants in air-conditioning systems in cars and homes, at sites in Runcorn, Japan and Louisiana. The company's Chlor's Runcorn site dated back to 1800s and the first industrial production of chlorine. Since then, regulations had tightened and the market had wilted, leaving a plant full of ageing and poorly maintained equipment. One comparison is quite eye opening. Its enormous cell room took as much electricity as the whole city of Liverpool. Both companies together with Crosfield of Warrington were bought by Ineos.

A river, a ford and a sunny south slope were the attractions of the place that became Widnes. What was a pretty village came to be a major chemical town through the initiative of John Hutchinson when the cost became prohibitive of taking raw materials (salt) from Northwich in Cheshire to St Helens where there was coal to produce soda and the potassium chlorate and bleaching powder. Widnes had local supplies of coal, easier access to the Cheshire salt fields abundant land and good communications by canal and railway. Hutchinson was joined by Gossage, making washing soda by the Leblanc process, and it was not long before huge amounts of sulphur infested chemical waste was being dumped on the Widnes wet lands. It was a German immigrant Ludwig Mond, a friend of John Brunner who worked with Hutchinson, who discovered a process capable of removing half of the waste sulphur. Soon this was widely adopted. Henry Deacon who had been working with Hutchinson formed a partnership with Gaskell to make sulphuric acid and ammonia soda used in the less polluting Solvay process with a bi-product of calcium chloride.

The pollution from the chemical works combined with inadequate sanitation led to Wides being called 'the dirtiest ugliest town in England'. The growth in population was boosted by immigration from Ireland of people fleeing the famine. The poor living conditions led to men seeking solace in alcohol and the town gained bad reputation which disappeared into memory as the town was improved.

United Alkali was formed by the merger of forty-eight alkali producers including fourteen from Widnes with the remainder based in St Helens, Tyneside, Scotland and Ireland. Old polluting plants were closed. United Alkali became part of ICI. Brunner and Mond joined together in 1873 but at Winnington near Northwich in Cheshire producing soda-ash for the cotton industry also using the ammonia soda process.

In Wides, John William Towers joined Hutchinson's laboratory in 1872. He then joined the Atlas Chemical Works set up by James Hargreaves and Thomas Robinson to exploit the salt-cake process and Towers went on to produce scientific apparatus for the chemical industry. Further chemical companies set up plants: Alumina Ltd, Peter Spence & Sons and Barium Chemicals. I write more about the consolidation of the chemical industry in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Andrew Poulson came from Wigan in 1869 to the Widnes foundry and took charge of the moulding department producing cast iron pillars which were used in pier construction amongst others, and segments for lining the London underground. The town, like others around, had copper foundries including Thomas Bolton's Mersey Copper Works producing copper rods and plates for locomotives and also rollers for calico printing; later it would supply the electrical industry. British Insulated and Helsby Cables was nearby and became part of BICC. High Speed Alloys was established in the town to produce special grades of steel, it was part of a merger of some eighteen similar businesses. Bell's Poilite and Everite Company manufactured asbestos cement of corrugated roofing.

The First World War made great demands on the chemical manufacturers and iron and steel works, the latter including for masts for Marconi Radio. The twenties saw consolidation of the chemical industry with the formation of ICI. Albright & Wilson set up on the site of the former Musgrave Works and Fisons took control of Vickers Fertiliser.

In the Second World War the Central Laboratory in Widnes carried out research into Uranium in support of the nuclear bomb project. The production of artificial rubber for insulation was undertaken and the metal works made Bailey Bridges.

In the post war world, Widnes industries focused on chemicals, asbestos and gelatine for sweets,

Runcorn was designated a New Town in 1964 and attracted General Motors which then closed in 1991, Sigmatex (carbon fibre textiles) Héroux-Devtek (aircraft landing gear), Whitford (speciality coatings), Teva (pharmaceuticals), and Fresenius Kabi (medical products). Diageo also maintains a packaging plant in Runcorn. Runcorn and Widnes became part of Halton Borough Council in 1974.

Further reading:

• https://www.millbank.com/blog/chemicals-north-west-past-present-future
• Charles Nickson, History of Runcorn (London: Mackie and Co, 1887)
• George E. Diggle, A History of Widnes (Corporation of Wides, 1961)

Camborne and Redruth manufacturing history - Cornish Mining

 Mining in this central part of Cornwall had been going on long before the Christian era with miners from what would become northwest France. There is evidence of the use of Cornish tin on bronze found in the Mediterranean exported from St Michael's Mount. The image is of early mining in northwest Cornwall.

The eighteenth century saw an acceleration in mining with the coming of the industrial revolution.

'The spot we are at is the most disagreeable in the whole county. The face of the earth is broken up in ten thousand heaps of rubbish, and there is scarce a tree to be seen.'

So wrote Mrs Watt to Mrs Boulton in 1777 when her husband was supervising the installation of one of his steam engines to pump water from a mine that was becoming inoperable. Samuel Smiles wrote of this in his contemporary account of Boulton & Watt noting that the engineer faced technical challenges, but also stubborn resistance from the Cornish. I explored in my post on St Austell the issue of mines flooded with water.

Another challenge for the mines was that of transporting ore from the rock face to places where it could be smelted. Here Janet Thomas, in her book The Wheels Went Round - the Story of Camborne Town, brings in the name Trevithick. By 1803 he had designed a tram engine which was being used in Wales and was introduced to transport ore between Portreath and Poldice. Trevithick also provided machinery for lifting the ore to to the mouth of the mine.

The area between Redruth and Camborne had from early times concentrated on the mining of copper, and production increased as, in the eighteenth century, the industrial revolution got underway. The metal workers of Birmingham were demanding more and more copper and the mine owners were all too happy to oblige. As elsewhere in the revolution, the workers missed out on good fortune and suffered dreadful working conditions and poverty for their families. Mechanisation into the nineteenth century went a small way to improve their lot with better ventilation and dust suppression of which I write more below. The first part of the nineteenth century saw a boom in production and by mid century Cornwall was supplying three quarters of the copper used in the world and half of the tin. This was big business.

In Redruth, William Murdock worked at supervising the installation of Boulton & Watt steam engines. In the evenings he experimented with the use of gas emitted from coal. He discovered that it could produce a bright light and from that he devised a scheme whereby his house could be lit by this gas. This demonstration convinced his employers of the viability of the process and he was commissioned to install gas lighting in their Soho works in Birmingham.

In Camborne, it was the Holman brothers which established a business in 1839 with a foundry capable of repairing massive beam engines. There followed a dust suppressing drill delivering a water spray to the drill bit; this became known as the Cornish Rock Drill. In the late nineteenth century they were manufacturing beam engines and by the twentieth century added compressors, pumping and winding engines; electricity took over from steam power. In its heyday, they were employing 3,000 men and women in Camborne and taking on 100 apprentices each year. The Camborne School of Mines was founded in 1888.

Notwithstanding technical developments, the world was not moving in Cornwall's favour, with better mining prospects, not so much gold in California, but copper in South Australia and Lead in Illinois. This triggered emigration of miners and their families and ensured that Cornish accents were heard wherever mines were being sunk.

For Holmans, the spread of mining to other parts of the world very simply meant first exports and then the establishment of Holman plants overseas. In 1961 the company had 2,500 employees and seven years later, under the encouragement of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, merged with Broom & Wade of High Wycombe to become International Compressed Air, later CompAir with headquarters in Slough.

South Crofty mine is being redeveloped by Cornish Metals.

Further reading:

• Janet Thomas, The Wheels Went Round - the Story of Camborne Town (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran,1987)
• Samuel Smiles, Lives of Boulton & Watt (Stoud: Nonsuch Publishing, 2007 originally published 1865)
• https://cornishstory.com/2021/02/10/holman-echoes-of-an-age/

St Austell manufacturing history

 St Austell on the south coast of Cornwall nestled among the mountains of the moon, or so it looked from the back of my mum's cottage. This belay a far more muscular past; St Austell with other parts of Cornwall provided the raw material for much of Britain's industrial revolution. The mountains were of course spoil heaps from china clay extraction; much earlier the mounds would be the waste from tin and copper mining. There is evidence of tin and copper working in Cornwall from the Bronze Age; not unreasonable given that bronze is an alloy of the two metals.

Early tin mining in Cornwall was near the surface and never below a level at which a build up of water in the mine could not drain into the sea. In time attempts were made to pump water using water wheels and so enabling deeper digging. The mines would sometimes run out under the sea and miners told stories of hearing the sound of waves above them.

Queen Elizabeth I introduced German miners to work new copper mines and George I encouraged more Germans given their experience of working in deep mines with hard rock.

Thomas Newcomen made the vital breakthrough of the invention of the atmospheric steam powered pump which meant that mines could go even deeper. The first was introduced into the Polgooth mine near St Austell which at one time employed 2,000 people. Mine owner, Charles Rashleigh, built the harbour at Charlestown enabling the shipping of copper ore to be smelted in South Wales. Tin was smelted locally.

The steam engines of Boulton and Watt were introduced to reduce costs as the price of tin and copper fell. I write more about these in my blog on Camborne. There were boom times - 1856-1864 for tin, but by the end of the century other countries were undercutting Cornish produce and miners emigrated in large numbers to mineral rich places including India.

For St Austell, the existing trade of mining kaolin was to restore prosperity and prolong it for a good number of decades. The Chinese had for a thousand years or more manufactured porcelain of a whiteness and hardness far superior to any English pottery. The secret to their process was closely guarded until Marco Polo brought details back to Europe. In Cornwall it was a Kingsbridge chemist by the name of Cookworthy who in 1746 found clay and and stone deposits near St Austell and an industry was born. Josiah Wedgwood experimented with a Watt steam engine to extract the kaolin by means of pumping water and then sieving and drying. Wedgwood was joined by Minton and Spode in acquiring interests in china clay and stone setts. In time a large number of small concerns were busily occupied in supplying a market hungry for porcelain.

As was the way with industrialisation, small concerns joined others to become bigger, culminating in 1919 with the formation of English China Clays. By this time science had made its presence felt and more advanced technology was introduced: electricity in place of steam, centrifugal pumps and power hoses. The port of Par had been built and enabled the export of a million tonnes a year. The production of kaolin leaves a residue of fine sand which can either be dumped or used. ECC bought two companies which became Selleck Nichols and Williams which manufactured prefabricated industrial buildings from precast concrete using the waste sand. Kaolin wasn't only being used for making porcelain, it was part of paper making and an illicit use was to whiten flour.

In 1999 English China Clays was bought by the French Imerys which now has interests in other extractive industries across the UK:

• Kaolin is still produced in Cornwall with a reserach laboratory at Par
• Ball clay is extracted in Devon around Newton Abbot and Wareham in Dorset
• Calcium carbonate is extracted at Stoke on Trent, Lostock in Cheshire and Beverley in Yorkshire
• Calcium aluminate is extracted at Thurrock in Kent

Further reading:

Cyril Bunn, The Book of St Austell (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1978)

Plymouth manufacturing history

 Set on the western approaches, Plymouth was in many ways Britain's door to the wider world. It was from Plymouth that so many of our adventurers sailed: Sir Francis Drake to the Pacific, the Pilgrim Fathers to America, James Cook to Australia and Charles Darwin to the Galapagos. I have written separately about our adventurers and explore in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World their role in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.

In the later seventeenth century the city became home to a Royal Dock known now as Devonport. The docks built many hundreds of ships and maintained the fleet. In the nineteenth century it was subject to a major extension to allow for larger ships, also the Royal William Victualling Yard was built. The Great Western Railway was linked to the docks. A regular domestic service to Brittany began. The Royal Dockyard in 1912 employed 12,000 civilians. The biggest vessel ever constructed in Devonport was the 30,600 ton Warspite launched in 1913.

Other industries arrived. Isaac Reckitt took over a Plymouth factory in 1905 and made Robin starch and washing powders. Bryant and May experimented making lucifer matches. Their factory burnt down and they moved to London to make Swan Vestas. Lever Brothers developed a presence in the city by buying soap companies.

War time bombing left Plymouth with gaping wounds and the great task of reconstruction began as early as 1942. Reckitts had been bombed and decided to concentrate their activity in Hull. Companies were encouraged to set up: C&J Clark, Slumberland mattresses and Browne & Sharpe machine tools arrived in the fifties. Tecalemit were in production by 1948 as were Berketex dress makers.

Plymouth attracted electronics companies. It is home to Plessey Semiconductors. Bush Television built a factory in Plymouth to expand on its west London premises. BAE Systems have a Systems and Equipment establishment in the city.

A good number of American owned companies have bases in Plymouth and work in life sciences, composites and other technologies. Mars Wrigley make gum in the original Wrigley factory. You can read more detail in this link to research carried out by students in Plymouth.

Burts Crisps was founded in 1999 by Richard and Linda Burt with premises in Kingsbridge. They moved to a bigger factory in Plymouth in 2006.

Kawasaki Precision Machinery has been making hydraulic equipment in Plymouth for 25 years.

The work of the former Royal Dockyard has now been passed to Babcock International at Devonport and Rosyth. Princess Yachts were founded in 1965 and manufacture high class yachts sailed the world over

Further reading:

Crispin Gill, Plymouth - A New History (Devon Books, 1993)

I wanted to explore British manufacturing history geographically, having looked at it chronologically and by sector in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. 

Follow this link to a list of the places I have explored to date.