Britain shaped the manufacturing world. A bold assertion, but is it true? My book How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World seeks to answer this question. The next question is what happened to British manufacturing? The result of my quest to find answers to that question is in Vehicles to Vaccines. My latest book explores manufacturing places and seeks to tell How Manufacturing Shaped Britain.
Allen Clark, son of Byron Clark, was born in Massachusetts in 1898 and came to England in 1905. He attended Felsted School. In the First World War he served in the London Scottish and was wounded at Cambrai in 1917. He then joined the Royal Flying Corps.
in 1920, Byron Clark bought Plessey Limited which made tools in Marylebone in London. In 1922 Plessey obtained a contract to made crystal radio sets for Marconi and I write of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Marconi invested in Plessey, secured seats on the board and Plessey developed a business in making radio components.
Allen is remembered by his friend Patrick Hennesey, one time boss of Ford UK, as a man dedicated to searching the world for ideas which could enable Plessey to develop.
Plessey became a public company in 1937 and I write in HBSTMW of its contribution to the national effort in the Second World War. After the war, Allen was joined by his sons John and Michael.
John was educated at Harrow and Cambridge and served in the RNVR from 1944 to 1947. He then went to learn about electronics manufacturing first at Metro-Vick and then in the USA before joining Plessey.
John had a particular interest in materials such as gallium arsenide and silicon and took on the development of the semiconductor business and master minded Plessey's research into materials at its Caswell laboratories. A plant for manufacturing pure silicon was established in 1952 but the potential for solid state technology had yet to be embraced. It wasn't until 1957 that the company began manufacture of transistors. 1966 MOS integrated circuits were produced at Swindon, making Plessey the first European manufacturer of such microcircuits.
In 1951 a Communications Division was formed, with Michael Clark at its head, and a remit to catch up with its competitors in VHF and UHF equipment. Two senior managers, John Cunningham and Raymond Brown, left Plessey to form Racal.
Allen's big break came in 1961 when Plessey took over competing telephone manufacturers Ericsson Telephone Ltd and the Automatic Telephone and Electric Company. He was knighted that same year but tragically died before the transaction completed. He was succeeded by John as chairman and Michael as managing director.
In 1965 the company reorganised into five product groups: Automation, Components, Dynamics, Electronics, Telecommunications. The company went on to develop their electronics business in defence, semiconductors and computers. I write of all of this in Vehicles to Vaccines. In 1962, Plessey had 25,000 employers and this grew to 75,000 by 1980 in a number of different locations with head office at Ilford as I wrote in How Manufacturing Shaped Britain.
GEC and Plessey merged their telecoms businesses in GPT in 1988 and in 1989 Siemens and GEC purchased the remainder of Plessey. John Clark was knighted in 1971 and died in 2001. Michael was awarded a CBE and survived his brother by nine years.
Further reading:
Richie, Berry, Into the Sunrise - Plessey Company (London: James & James, 1989)
Guglielmo Marconi, from Bolognia in Italy, at the age of 22, in 1898, set up Marconi Telegraph Company in a former mill in Chelmsford: the first wireless factory in the world. His fascination was with radio waves, and he built on earlier work, by Hertz and others, for his first patent registered in England in 1897.
He was born in Italy of an Italian father and Irish mother who had eloped ten years earlier. He was brought up largely by his doting mother who loved everything British; his father was distant and disapproving. He developed a fascination with science and electricity, frowned on by his father. He was no great scholar, but an obsessive experimentalist.
Maxwell had produced a theory supporting the existence of electromagnetic waves and eight years later Hertz had carried out experiments which demonstrated the theory. All this captured the imagination of the teenage Marconi who took over his mother’s loft to replicate Hertz’s experiments and improve upon them. A number of established scientists were exploring the theory of electromagnetic waves, Marconi’s only interest was in seeing whether the waves could transmit information. He found that whilst the transmitted wave might be weak, it could control a much stronger signal and so, for example, make a sound. Further experiments increased the range of transmission.
At the age of 21, Marconi was ready for backers to take forward his invention. His father approached the Italian Post Office, which declined. His mother took him to England where William Preece, the Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, had been experimenting with electromagnetic induction. Marconi lodged a patent application and was then introduced to Preece to whom he demonstrated his invention. A public demonstration followed in July 1896 with Morse messages sent a mile across London. Further public demonstrations followed in England and Italy. Marconi sold his patent rights to the company that bears his name receiving in exchange a controlling shareholding.
The choice of where to manufacture wireless equipment is interesting. He had experimented in London but suffered interference from the tram network. Chelmsford was far away from trams and had electrical engineers thanks to Crompton, and also factory space.
I write of the remarkable company he created in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.
The company’s long term success owed a great deal to Marconi’s commitment to excellence. The company would recruit the best talent. Here are just two outstanding examples.
Dr Eric Eastwood
Dr Eric Eastwood who was recruited by Marconi after the war to lead its work on radar. He undoubtedly enhanced the technical expertise within the company which in turn led to it being the most significant part of GEC prior to that company’s breakup. Marconi Defence Systems was the perfect fit for British Aerospace with which it merged to become BAE Systems, now a respected and successful British company.
Eric Eastwood was born in Rochdale on 12 March 1910. His father was a mill worker eventually becoming an administrator. His mother kept a shop especially during periods when his father was laid off. Eric had a brother and two sisters who with Eric moved from school to school as their father sought work. It became clear that Eric was the most intellectually gifted and so the family decided to focus their resources in his schooling at Oldham. He was by all accounts a hard working and well organised student. This paid off with first scholarships to read Physics at Manchester and then to write a PhD at Cambridge.
His first career was in teaching physics which he did at Runcorn at a school founded by Brunner and Mond. He moved from there to Liverpool and in 1941 volunteered for the RAF. It didn't take long for his particular skills to be noticed and he was transferred to 60 Group which has responsibility for running the CH (chain home) network of radar stations. His first job was the calibration of one of the stations to take account of its physical position in order to report with a degree of accuracy on the position of enemy aircraft. Eric was promoted, eventually had full command of the whole of the home radar establishments.
After the war he joined English Electric in their Research Department at Stafford then, following EE's purchase of Marconi, Eric moved to Marconi Research Laboratories at Great Baddow near Chelmsford first as Deputy Director and then as Director in 1954. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines of the vital work carried out by Eric and his colleagues both to benefit the defence of these islands but also to advance the commercial success of the Marconi company.
He eventually retired from GEC in 1981 having also served on a number of governmental and professional committees. His contribution to radar was second to none. He received many awards including that of Knight Batchelor.
F.N. Sutherland
Frederick Neil Sutherland graduated from Cambridge and went to serve as a pilot in the RNAS joining English Electric in Preston in 1922. He started on the shop floor before becoming an apprentice. He was appointed Chief Engineer in South America and General Manager in Brazil before an appointment as Managing Director of English Electric South Africa. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines how he was chosen by George Nelson to run their new acquisition, Marconi. He turned out to be the perfect man for the job. Interestingly, he followed the tradition set by Marconi’s former boss, Admiral Grant, of involving his wife in the welfare of his employees, something I had only ever seen at the Central Ordnance Depot at Greenford in the early years of the Second World War.
During his tenure the turnover of Marconi grew from £2.5 million to £50 million becoming one of our largest exporters. With him at the helm the company won the Queens Award for Exports three years running.
Further reading:
Jolly, W.P., Marconi (London: Constable, 1972)
Jones, Francis Edgar ; Eric Eastwood, 12 March 1910 - 6 October 1981. Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 1 November 1983; (29): 177–195. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.1983.0007
This book sets out to discover how manufacturing shaped this island. Why manufacturing spread across the country, how it grew, why it declined and what was left.
It is looking at manufacturing through the lens of geography.
Manufacturing transformed the places where it took place. Villages became towns because millennia earlier great forests had been buried and became rich seams of coal. Tiny seaside communities surviving on fishing witnessed the building of ever larger ships carrying cargoes of coal or wool and returning with exotic goods from the east. Waring barons found their swords replaced by guns cast from ore left in the earth’s crust. Disparate communities were linked first by sea then by Roman Road, turnpike, canal, railway, road and air. New communities formed on these links.
Manufacturing places emerged close to raw materials and sources of energy. Climate and topography gathered manufacturing which thrived in local conditions. In time, as centres of population emerged, manufacturing followed to meet their every need. Inventions were pursued where skills had been nurtured.
None of this was planned, least of all two world wars which energised manufacturers across the land to war effort, leaving vast factories in their wake crying out for new uses.
Books have explored why Britain moved ahead of its great trading rivals: the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. And it did, only to be overtaken by America, Germany, and France, and replaced by developing countries. This left manufacturers stranded with factories and workforces no longer needed, leaving populations without work, steelworks replaced by supermarkets, factories by warehouses.
This book is for people who wish to understand what has happened.
Sebastian de Ferranti was born in Liverpool in 1864, the son of a photographer whose family had come from Bologna. Cesar had married Juliana the daughter of artist William Scott. Juliana, born in 1825, was a musician and had been teaching music. Their ambition for their son was in the arts, but Sebastian was fascinated by all things mechanical. He told them very early on that he would become a Manufacturing Engineer. He made models and carried out experiments. When he went to school at St Augustine's in Ramsgate he was given space in the school's kitchen to continue his experiments. He was no academic, but his father managed to secure a place for him at University College London. This was not a success, and his father's illness and consequent financial problems meant that Sebastian had to leave after only a few months in order to earn his living and keep his mother.
Ferranti’s fascination, from a very early age, was with power generation and transmission. He was convinced that power generation did not need to be located near to the user, but rather close to the source of energy used. At school in Ramsgate, he had made both an electric light and a dynamo.
He found work with Siemens Brothers as a research assistant where he worked with dynamos and lighting. He had in particular devised an improvement to the Siemens machine. One of Ferranti's father's professional acquaintances was Alfred Thompson, an electrical enthusiast. He saw huge merit in what Ferranti was doing and introduced him to a solicitor, Francis Ince. Together they formed Ferranti, Thompson Ince & Co, and Ferranti filed a patent application. By chance he met Sir William Thomson the future Lord Kelvin who was filing a patent for a similar invention. The invention was in effect shared and marketed at the Ferranti-Thomson alternator. The company received further investment from the Robert Hammond's Electric Light and Power Supply Company and some ninety-two other investors. I write of the scramble for electrical dominance in my blog piece on American manufacturers. It was a tough time for the British.
Ferranti parted company with both Hammond and Thompson and his first major project was the Grosvenor power station and then he moved on to build the first power station at Deptford in East London. I quoted in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how the power company's chairman described Ferranti's plant to the press. It was an astonishing project for anyone, let alone a young man.
Sebastian Ferranti's other passion was engineering excellence which he would achieve at the workbench with experimentation rather that at the drawing board. This was an expensive passion and caused much anxiety to Francis Ince whose focus was rather more on business. In an electrical world that was intensely competitive and in an economy that was struggling, this passion drove the company into receivership. However, the joint receivers believed in Sebastian and introduced much needed financial discipline. After two years the company was free once more.
Vincent, Sebastian's son, had seen at first hand the fall of the business and the introduction of financial discipline and when he took over he was unmoving in his commitment to financial prudence. However, the Ferranti Spirit was in his DNA and he encouraged innovation by his departmental managers. He saw the merit in diversification, but it was defence which proved the most attractive and challenging. I write of the growth of the company in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.
The third generation's leader was another Sebastian, Vincent's son, who took the chair when Sir Vincent retired in 1963 after thirty-three years with the company. It was by then large, and dispersed with a wide product range and still that Ferranti spirit. I write of the work on the company in three related sectors (Heavy Electrical Manufacturing; Radio, Television and Telecommunications; and Computers and Semiconductors) in Vehicles to Vaccinesin which I also tell of the end of this great company.
When the NEB took a stake in the Ferranti company to save it, there were voices who condemned what had become known as the ‘Ferranti spirit’. This spirit was the beating heart of this family company and was a determination to push back the boundaries of technology. In this the Ferranti company was hugely successful. Ferranti’s problem was money. The family was determined not to seek external investors for fear of the constraints they would impose. In the end it was a disastrous investment under the chairmanship of a non family member which led to its final demise.
Further reading:
Wilson, John F., Ferranti - A History - Building a Family Business, 1882-1975 (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 1999)
English towns had grown up with trades run by guilds jealous of their position and associated with the Church of England and political establishment.
Quakers and other non-conformist churches thrived in smaller growing towns and we see notable businesses emerging from that background. There was the congregationalists Titus Salt in Bradford and William Lever in Liverpool, the Quakers including John and his sons George and Richard Cadbury in Birmingham, Joseph and his son Seebohm Rowntree in York, Joseph Fry in Bristol and Cyrus Clarke in Street. I write of Abraham Darby in Telford elsewhere.
It is worth stepping back to ask the question, why? Anne Vernon suggests that the closeness of the members of the Society of Friends created a grouping as close as the old aristocracy. That many members chose to go into business she explains was probably due to many other professions being barred. Thus men who may have been successful Generals, Admirals or Surgeons turned their talents to stocking shelves and satisfying customers. She also observes that many developed interests outside their business, so British Birds or Trollope novels!
Titus Salt
Titus Salt was born in the Old Manor House in Morley in Yorkshire in 1803 son of Daniel Salt who was in business as a white cloth merchant and drysalter. Balgarnie explains that the house no longer had a manor attached. Titus was the oldest of eight children, four boys and four girls and survived them all. He attended the Dame school in Morley. In 1813, Daniel moved his family to a farm three miles from Wakefield and initially prospered with the demand from the Napoleonic wars. Titus attended school in Wakefield where he was described as steady and attentive, but not a bright pupil. Nevertheless, Titus dreamed of a career in medicine until he discovered that he fainted at the sight of blood! What else? It turned out to be work with Mr Jackson of Wakefield in the woolstapling business.
Once peace returned, so did hard times in the fields and the family moved to Bradford and the business of wool at the time when the town was taking over the production of worsted from Norwich as mechanisation began to take hold. Titus found employment first with Messrs. Rouse. Titus inherited his strength and determination from his father and his piety and concern for mankind from his mother; he spent Sundays teaching and preaching.
Bradford was thriving and with it his father’s business, so much so that he took in Titus as a partner. Titus’ reputation for fair dealing and expertise with wool attracted many customers. He travelled around the country both to buy and sell. Lincolnshire wool proved suitable for fine worsted and on a visit to Grimsby he met Caroline Whitlam whom he married. He built mills for spinning and then added weaving. His discovery of the use of alpaca wool added to the fineness of his cloth and revolutionised the Bradford wool industry.
Titus worked hard in the business. For the less fortunate of Bradford, unemployment hit and added to the misery of overcrowding and poor sanitation. Titus resolved that he must move his businesses to an uncrowded site where everything could be housed in the same place with employees having decent living conditions. This resolution became reality at Saltaire with the help of William Fairbairn.
Titus was created Baronet in 1869. He died in 1876. During his life he gave considerable sums to charity and served the Bradford community in local government.
William Lever
William was born in 1851 in Bolton into a lower middle class family in a town suffering from dreadful overcrowding. William's father was a grocer who moved into wholesale among whose range of goods included soap manufactured by a number of local firms.
Soap was very much a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. As towns became crowded and polluted more people needed to wash. Interestingly the shortage of water restricted the use of soap, but as better water supplies were installed so the demand for soap increased.
Soap had traditionally been made from combining tallow with an alkali, normally the ash from burnt bracken. Increased demand added vegetable oils to tallow and the fruits of the Le Blanc process as a substitute for bracken ash. Soap works appeared mainly near ports where vegetable oils were imported. In the northwest there were amongst others Gossage in Widnes and Crosfield in Warrington
William joined his father in the business and in due course became a salesman and successfully developed the business into nearby Wigan. His father was impressed and invited William to join him as a partner. William knew he needed to stand out from the crowd and created the trade mark ‘Sunlight’ which he applied to soap manufactured specially for Levers.
The time came for him to take manufacturing in-house and he took a six years lease on the soap works of Wainwright, Winser & Company in Warrington. Winser and Wainwright turned out to be even more valuable than the works. Winser was a chemist and added a vital technical input. Wainwright was a soap boiler and he and his sons became the heart of the soap boiling expertise. The premises in Warrington soon became too small and so new site was needed. This was Port Sunlight between the Mersey and the Birkenhead to Chester railway. There was Bromborough Pool to receive cargoes and plenty of space for the soap works, a village for his employees with enough held in reserve for expansion.
In 1918-1919, William Lever bought the Scottish islands of Lewis and Harris and wished to support their fishing industry. This he did by giving it a clearer route to market by founding the MacFisheries chain of high street fishmongers.
In 1917, William became Baron Leverhulmne and five years later Viscount Leverhulmne. William died in 1925 and by his will created the Leverhulmne Trust which now funds a great deal of research.
The Lever Brothers business continued to grow and in 1930 combined with the Dutch Margarine Unie creating Unilever.
John, George and Richard Cadbury
The Cadbury family traces its origins to Somerset from where Richard Tapper Cadbury born in 1768 to Joel and Sarah travelled to Gloucester to be apprenticed as a draper and then to Birmingham where he started business in partnership as a draper. Joel was a woolcomber who had joined the Society of Friends
John was Richard's third son and was sent to Leeds to learn the tea trade. John returned to Birmingham and in 1824 set up as a Tea dealer and Coffee roaster. There is evidence of him trading also in cocoa. In time the cocoa business grew and he was selling a number of cocoa based products. He moved premises and began further processing of the cocoa bean extracting cocoa butter and adding sugar and other ingredients. John was an energetic man devoted to his Faith which extended to the Temperence movement. Like his father, he played his part in the Birmingham community with particular concern for the less well off. He was by any standards a good employer. In 1847, he joined with his elder brother, Benjamin Head Cadbury, in the form Cadbury Brothers which moved to yet larger premises on Bridge Street. Seven years later the business opened its first London office at 148 1/2 Fenchurch Street.
In 1855, John Cadbury's second wife, Candia, died leaving John bereft. He contracted rheumatic fever and went into decline taking the business with him. As fortune would have it, his sons Richard and George although young at 25 and 21 respectively took over the running of the business. Their commitment to sound business ethics is evidenced by their agreement to close the business should it at any time become unable to pay its creditors in full. There is a further link to Quaker communities for George worked for a time in Rowntrees in York.
It took five years of reducing losses, which they financed themselves, to turn the business round. They invested further in mechanisation, buying the latest machine from Holland which enabled them to make Cocoa Essence which proved popular. Yet more popular was pure unadulterated cocoa; 'if customers wanted to add sugar they could quite well add it themselves'.
It wasn’t until 1878 that they moved production to Bourneville, four miles from the city centre, conceived as a place where employees could live near their work, but away from the overcrowding of the city. As George Cadbury put it, “no man ought to be condemned to live where a rose cannot grow”. John Cadbury had become interested in the Model Parish Mission whose object it was to establish a parish without drinking facilities and having 'Model Schools, Villas, cottages, Farms, Allotments and Factory. For the Cadburys this took form at Bourneville. Just as an aside, its seems that many of the Cadburys had been cricket lovers; the fine pavilion at Bourneville is thus an appropriate memorial.
Joseph Rowntree
Joseph Rowntree was born in 1836, son of a York grocer and Sarah Stephenson of Manchester. The shop on the Pavement flourished. Joseph's father, also Joseph, took on apprentices who lived with the family above the shop. It was an extended family who would pursue hobbies and read widely. The family had been Quakers for generations and with this came a community. Joseph and his brother were educated at home until age eleven when they went to the Society of Friends school where Joseph blossomed. In early teenage, Joseph and his brother were taken by their father to Ireland where they witnessed the horrors of the famine, an image that would stay with Joseph for life. He would later make a study of the conditions of the poor in Britain.
In due course Joseph began to work in the shop and learn the secrets of the grocery trade. When Joseph was 23 his father died and he and his brother John took over the running of the business. Joseph also married Julia Seebohm from Bradford, they had one daughter. Tragically Julia died only three years later. Joseph married again and he and Antoinette had a son, John, a daughter and another son Benjamin Seebohm (always known as Seebohm) followed. On the birth of his first son, Joseph left the grocery business and joined his younger brother Henry in the Cocoa, Chocolate and Chicory Works.
Joseph brought his management skills to the chocolate business. Life was hard, but by the 1880s the business now called Rowntree had 200 employees and had introduced a French product of crystallised gums. Joseph also had contact with Cadbury and learnt of their Dutch machinery for chocolate making. Other companies were beginning to advertise, but Joseph was disinclined. His brother died leaving Joseph in sole charge. Joseph cared passionately about the welfare of his employees and ensured that this policy continued when growth required a move to larger premises.
I tell the later story of Rowntree in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World the role his son, Seebohm, played in developing management practice.
People in trade were looked down upon. The world had been different before the industrial revolution where the Merchant Companies had been respected. The coming of the mills changed all this; owners exploited their workers and the owners were regarded as something less than equals by those with old money. Rowntree was committed to his employees and concerned for the wider world and that was what mattered.
In 1904 Joseph set up three trusts:
The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust
The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (originally the Joseph Rowntree Village Trust)
The village trust owned the land bought for the new village of New Earswick which Joseph conceived as a mixed community, but with a proportion of houses affordable by low paid workers. He strove for good conditions and amenities. L.E. Waddilove's book One Man's Vision tells the story.
Joseph died in 1925.
Joseph Fry
Joseph Fry was born into a Quaker family in Wiltshire in 1728 and arrived in Bristol in 1753 setting up as an apothecary. He sold cocoa beans for their medicinal value and as an alternative to alcohol. In time, he employed a water powered roller to crush the beans into a powder which could be added to water as a drink. Joseph died in 1787 and the business was taken over by his widow Anne and their son Joseph. They made further innovations including switching from water power to a Watt steam engine capable to producing a finer powder; a roasting machine followed. In the mid nineteenth century he combined cocoa powder with sugar and cocoa oil to produce a chocolate bar. In the 1820s, Frys accounted for 40% of the cocoa imported into Britain.
Fry and Cadbury merged in 1918, but it was only in the first decade of the twentieth century that Cadbury's sales had exceeded those of Fry.
The Fry family became involved in import of cocoa in the mid eighteenth century. Cocoa beans at that time were sourced from the Caribbean and so grown by slave labour. There is however no evidence that the Frys owned slaves. The same appears to be true of Rowntree. Slavery did of course also feature in tobacco and sugar, but most of all cotton.
Cyrus Clark
Cyrus Clark was born in 1801 son of a Quaker farmer. In 1821 he entered a partnership with Arthur Clothier as tanners, fellmongers and woolstaplers. Four years later Clothier took the tanning business leaving the remainder with Cyrus. He and his brother James became known for sheepskin rugs. From this base, using offcuts, they made sheepskin slippers known as Brown Petersburghs. By 1842, they had become popular, achieving sales of 1,000 a week. All this was done, without a factory, by outworkers.
In 1863, Cryus and James passed the business to James's youngest son William who continued to run the business with a Quaker ethos. Times were hard and William knew he had to move to factory based machine production. This he did with the help of the Quaker community. Clarks played their part and contributed generously to the Street community where the factory was set up. They provided schooling for their younger employees.
The company thrived and was passed down the generations. The 1950s proved to be the boom time with some 15 factories being added to the Street production capacity.
Further reading:
Balgarnie, Robert, Sir Titus Salt, Baronet, his life and its lessons (London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1878)
Vernon, Anne, A Quaker Business Man - the Life of Joseph Rowntree 1836-1925 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958)
Wilson, Charles, The History of Unilever part 1 (London: Cassell & Company, 1954)
The website Quakers in the World
Williams, Iola A., The Firm of Cadbury 1831-1931 (London: Constable and Co Ltd, 1931)
Barnes was the second son of Charles and Edith, born in 1887 in Ripley in Derbyshire where his father had an unsuccessful medical practice and where his mother longed to be home in Woolwich. The family soon moved to New Cross where a third child, Anne, was born and where Charles contracted polio. He soldiered on in spite of losing the use of a leg and managed modest success.
Barnes and his brother John were fortunate at being accepted by Christ’s Hospital school. This public school accepted pupils on the basis of need and, in view of Charles’ disability, welcomed the boys. John would pursue classical studies with distinction. For Barnes, fortune had anticipated his arrival by the involvement of the eccentric Professor Armstrong who championed science in schools. In Barnes’ day this found tangible expression in Dr Browne as science master.
As I have written elsewhere, science was a second class citizen, but Browne encourage Barnes who delighted in the subject and also modern languages. The time came for Barnes to leave and his father decided that there were not funds sufficient for Barnes to follow his brother to university. Barnes took but failed London matriculation and so had to look for work.
This came at the Thames Engineering Works which built engines for the Thames Shipbuilding Company. Barnes was bored, there being insufficient work. He had however fallen in love with ships and in 1908 moved to Cowes and indentures with John Samuel White shipbuilders.
I have written elsewhere of the key position of Vickers in the defence of the nation. This company and others were busy increasing the size of the Navy. The Germans, however, had begun serious work on Zeppelins. Vickers had already dabbled unsuccessfully, attracting criticism from an employee, H.B. Pratt whom Vickers had let go and who came to work alongside Barnes. With the start of the First World War, the Admiralty had a change of heart and instructed Vickers to follow Germany’s lead; Pratt was re-engaged and with him Barnes Wallis.
Wallis’s biographer J.E. Morpurgo sets out in embarrassing detail that politics and maladministration that surrounded the British zeppelin programme. Pratt and Wallis worked secretly on design, whilst Vickers at Barrow found endless reasons to slow their progress. The army would have nothing to do zeppelins and so it was left to the Navy, only part of which had any enthusiasm. On top of this both Pratt and Wallis deeply resented the blocking of repeated attempts by them to join up. As the war progressed so too did aeroplanes in which Pratt and Wallis had little involvement. It was four years of frustration.
The coming of peace saw no new enthusiasm for airships, but Vickers decided to hedge their bets and keep on a retainer Wallis who was then the country’s foremost designer. Wallis took the opportunity to take the degree which he had so wanted to take after leaving school. Alongside this academic achievement, he discovered that he had a gift in communication. His voice was delightful and he could engage an audience on many subjects. Over the coming years his technical papers too proved clear and compelling.
Over the next ten years the airship programme staggered forward as, with changes in government, the involvement of Vickers was brought into question. The Vickers programme of what became airship R100 at Holden in Yorkshire was joined by a government sponsored R101 at Cardington near Bedford. Instead of collaboration, there was fierce rivalry not from Wallis or his right hand man Neville Shute Norway but from their superiors. Wallis did manage to focus on the project and taught himself and the wider aeronautical engineering community a huge amount about flight. In this, the work of Lanchester comes to mind.
A key area which would hold Wallis in good stead in the forthcoming war years to come was geodetic construction, a latticework (show in the image) tightly covered with cloth. It was said that the ability of the Wellington bombers to return safely to base in spite of severe damage was the result of the inherent stability offered by the design. There were other technical advances: the use of alloys and the design of fuel tanks, to name but two.
Following the successful flight of the R100 to Canada, the R101 suffered a catastrophic crash in France only seven hours into its maiden flight to India. So much store had been placed in the project by an eager public, that the crash was met by widespread mourning, not least from Wallis. The airship programme came to a halt.
The ten years of the programme has taught Wallis and his colleagues a massive amount. For Wallis it had also seen his marriage to his much younger cousin Molly and the beginning of their family life together.
For Vickers, the end of the programme removed a barrier to Wallis joining Vickers Aviation, which after all had an enviable record with the Vimy. Wallis came with a glowing reputation and immediately impressed Pierson, the Chief Designer at Weybridge. A similar relationship with Mitchell who joined Vickers with Supermarine presented a greater challenge. A third relationship with chief test pilot Mutt Summers bore fruit from the start.
Key to the Vickers later success was Sir Robert McLean who believed in giving talent the resource and opportunity it needed despite the insistence of government that war was unthinkable. Vickers had been vilified after the First World War and government was for ever cautious of its relationship with the foremost arms manufacturer.
Wallis went about the design task alongside Pierson with total dedication. He allowed himself time for exercise but hid behind the masque of theVictorian father in his remoteness from his children leaving Molly to carry the family.
Wallis’s first design was for a biplane to meet Air Ministry specifications. Its crash made way for the monoplane with geodetic construction that Wallis favoured. McClean argued for it successful with the RAF hierarchy and the Wellesley was conceived. Such was the speed with which technology advanced that its successor the Wellington was conceived as soon as the Wellesley was born. Then politics reared their ugly head once more with the Air Ministry set on Handley Page’s Hampden. McClean argued long and hard and the Wellesley performed far ahead of specification. The Vickers board was desperate to nurture a good relationship with the Ministry and so McClean was forced to resign. Wallis’s champion had gone and the Ministry had set itself against geodetic construction.
With the coming of war, the Wellington was needed and Wallis was kept busy with modifications. He achieved both high altitude (40,000ft) and long distance. He had though a longer term project to crush Germany’s might: very large penetrating bombs. The old guard were reluctant to move away from the model of bombers as artillery in the air and fighters as airborne cavalry. Wallis saw a wholly new role in heavy targeted bombing. He designed a very large bomber capable of carrying such a bomb. He researched explosives and bomb casings. He mapped Germany’s industries and particular ways of attacking each. The Air Ministry wouldn’t listen and he had no McClean to bang his drum. The Ministry chose the Lancaster with its conventional construction designed by Roy Chadwick at Avro. There was a further issue which gave the Ministry concern, bomb aiming was simply insufficiently accurate for precision bombing.
The arrival of Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Aircraft Production offered a chink of light for the heavy bomb. Wallis’s paper entitled Method of Attack slowly garnered support and found expression in a newly formed Air Attacks on Dams Committee.
The story of the Dam Busters raid is well known. Less well known to me certainly was the attitudes of Bomber Harris, Charles Craven (Managing Director of Vickers) and Lord Cherwell (Lindemann, the scientist on whom Churchill relied). Taking Cherwell first, he simply couldn’t see the importance of the dams. Then Harris didn’t believe that pin point accuracy possible and so favoured blanket bombing. Craven like his predecessors was determined not to upset the Air Ministry. There was one further point I hadn’t picked up, Wallis had conceived a spherical bomb which would bounce like a Tudor canon ball on its way to hit a man-of-war. Small test models proved highly successful and were warmly welcomed by the Navy who adopted them to be dropped from de Havilland Mosquitoes. For a full size bomb the powers that be said a sphere would take too much scarce steel and hence the cylindrical version that actually destroyed the dams.
Wallis and his team went on to produce the Tallboy, a bomb designed to set off an earthquake reaction close to a highly defended rocket emplacement. In the event before the Tallboy could be used, the rockets were redeployed to mobile sites. Nevertheless the Tallboy was used, including in the successful attack of the Tirpitz. The other big bomb, the Grand Slam, was used to devastating effect in the final push into Germany.
After the war, Wallis remained with Vickers at Weybridge with a free ranging remit. He used this first to continue his exploration of aerodynamics with the Wild Goose glider which was launched from a trolley and then radio controlled using only wing moderation. The other was the Swallow, a rocket using a swing wing arrangement. In the American F111, it is possible to see the influence of the Wild Goose which Wallis had taken to the USA. The Swallow came into being as a possible swing-wing successor to the Valiant and influenced the design of the V Bombers.
It was not until 1968 that Wallis contribution to aviation was acknowledged with a knighthood. Wallis died in 1979 but had never really gave up inventing.
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