Dublin manufacturing history

Dublin had been the main route for the export of the island’s textiles. At nearby Prosperous in 1780 Sir Robert Brooke attempted to set up a cotton manufacturing industry. At one time he employed 4,000 people but the business collapsed after four years. Cotton and linen manufacture continued elsewhere but never on the same scale.

At the time of partition in the 1920s, the Free State had many fewer manufacturing jobs that the much smaller Five Counties; it was reckoned that the north had one and a half times the jobs in the south. As to the south, something like half were in Dublin and two thirds were in food, drink, tobacco, textiles, clothing and footwear. Guinness was the largest employer and indeed at one time the largest brewery in the world. Chemicals featured to some degree, but this was mainly the fertiliser producer Gouldings in Cork given the overwhelmingly agricultural nature of the economy.

In the period following partition, the Free State imposed tariffs on imports and this persuaded a number of British companies to establish factories in the south. Lever Brothers were already there, as was the Ford Motor Company. New arrivals included Rowntree and Macintosh confectionary and Players and Wills cigarettes.

Metal related industries made up 15% of Ireland's manufacturing employment. Looking back to the eighteenth century, Richard Turner had been one of the true iron masters. He created the iron structure for the glass houses at the Botanical Gardens in Belfast and the Palm House at Kew in London. In 1902 Scotsman, David Frame, revived the Hammond Lane Foundry and this went on to become part of the Irish Steel Company.

The Scottish link was repeated in shipbuilding. William McMillan worked his way up from being an apprentice at Lobnitz in Renfrew and then a plater at Feling & Ferguson in Paisley before moving to Dublin in 1901 as manager at the Dublin Docks Company which had been set up by two Scots, John Smellie and Walter Scott. During his time, he worked on many ships including the Muirchu launched as Helga II in 1908 as a fisheries protection vessel. The ships built were generally coasters, tugs land barges. William left the Dublin Docks Company in 1913; its yard would later being taken on by Vickers Ireland whose principal business was the manufacture of iron barges for inland waterways to transport barrels of Guinness amongst other goods.

William set up the Ringsend Dockyard Company in 1913 in three graving docks and there repaired ships. In 1916 they built their first ship, the 62ft steam tug Zoe for the British India Steam Navigation Company for service in the East African port of Mombasa. Other tugs followed. In 1918 William expanded to become Dublin Shipbuilders. This company built coasters, but struggled financially. One of its ships served in Duneden in New Zealand, another was completed by Henry Robb of Edinburgh. The comany survived during difficult times until 1928 when it became part of Ringsend Dockyard (Dublin) Ltd. Interestingly one of the shareholders was the Leith shipbuilder Henry Robb. Another was George N Jacob whose company would achieve fame for its Cream Crackers. The company's main business was the manufacture of iron motorised barges which became known as McMillans, considered better than the Vickers competitors. By 1938, Ringsend Dockyard (Dublin) was the last remaining steel shipbuilder in Dublin, Vickers having closed. One of its first roles during the Emergency (as the Second World War was known in the Free State) was to refit the Muirchu to become the flag ship of the Irish Navy. William died in 1938 having become one of Dublin's signifcant businessmen.

Scottish born John Boyd Dunlop, whilst living in Belfast, developed the pneumatic tyre which both greatly improved the comfort of riding a bicycle but also its speed. With Harvey du Cross, he set up, in 1888, what would become the Pneumatic Tyre Company. It began producing tyres in Dublin but then moved to Coventry.

Jacobs set up in Dublin in 1852 and became the city's biggest employer after Guinness. They built a factory in Liverpool in 1914 which eventually became part of Associated Busicuits. The Dublin business became part of Irish Biscuits.

Dublin's story after partition is not strictly part of this study although it is appropriate to note the prosperity of the capital as a member of the European Union.

Further reading:

• Pat Sweeney, Liffey Ships and Shipbuilding (Cork: Mercer Press, 2010)
• I am grateful to William McMillan's grandson, Russell Arthurton, for his research

 

Merthyr Tydfil manufacturing history

 In 1759, in Dowlais near Merthyr Tydfil, an iron works was founded by a group of iron masters. Eight years later, John Guest joined the company as works manager. Guest would later join with Keen and Nettlefold in what became one of Britain’s largest industrial companies, GKN.

The Dowlais Iron Works, under Sir John Guest, was said to be the greatest ironworks in the world in the mid nineteenth century, employing some 7,000 people. I wrote of its story in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. It wasn't alone in the Merthyr area, the Cyfarthfa Iron Works was a close rival until Dowlais powered ahead in the 1860s and 1870s. There were in all eight major iron works on the northern boundary of the South Wales coal field including Tredegar, Hirwaun, Penydarren and Ebbw Vale.

Transport was an issue for Merthyr, as iron had to be taken by horse to the port at Cardiff. In 1804, Richard Trevithic made the first steam locomotive for use on a tramway at Penydarren iron works. In time a canal was built and this was followed by a railway, vastly improving journey times. Dowlais supplied rails for the Great Western Railway, iron for Brunel's SS Great Britain built at Bristol and cannon balls for the Board of Ordnance.

Steel came to Dowlais earlier than many other iron works with the adoption of the Bessemer process making Merthyr at one time the leading steel making district in the world. The district also produced many of the great steel engineers who would take their skills elsewhere.

Merthyr suffered as other areas had access to better quality ore demanded by new processes.The Dowlais works closed in 1936 with production moving to Llanwern, combined with that of Baldwins and I write of these combinations in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Hoover manufactured cleaners in Merthyr.

Further reading:

• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)

Swansea manufacturing history

 Swansea at the mouth of the Tawe was recognised as a natural harbour by Norse pirates and came into its own with the discovery of bituminous coal which, from the sixteenth century, it was exporting by sea to other parts of Britain and further afield. In 1913 at its peak South Wales produced 56 million tons of coal.

Local deposits made Swansea and its surrounding area the principal place for smelting copper, which from the eighteenth century was much in demand from Birmingham's brass industry. Matthew Boulton and others formed the Rose Copper Company with a smelter on the banks of the Tawe. In time copper ore was brought by sea from Cornwall and Anglesea as well as from overseas to be smelted using the Welsh process and Welsh coal. In 1845, Swansea was producing 55% of the world's copper. Copper was joined by lead and zinc.

Tinplate was, though, what made Swansea's name. Locally produced iron would be dipped in locally mined tin. Tin was also brought in from Cornwall. In 1831, William Llewellyn had founded the Aberdulais Tinplate Company where iron ingots were rolled into flat plates and a thin protective layer of tin attached. It was one of hundreds of tin mills which grew up around the country. Tin was readily available, easy to work and very effective in coating iron and steel to prevent rust.

With the advent of steel, the iron ore local to Swansea had too high a phosphorous content (a problem also found elsewhere) and so ore was sourced from further east. William Siemens was determined to see his method of steel making, as opposed to that of Bessemer, embraced. The tin platers were reluctant and so Siemens set up his own state of the art plant at Landore. It proved successful for tin plate and gradually more plants took on the Siemens system. Swansea went from strength to strength in tin plate production.

Continuous strip mills were introduced alongside electroplating allowing a very thin coating of expensive tin. Demand grew as more and more food stuffs were packaged in tin cans.The producers of South Wales at one time provided three quarters of Britain's production with much going to the USA.

The coming of central heating created a demand for anthracite coal which was in plentiful supply around Swansea and which had proved less suitable for smelting. This provided a much needed boost to the economy.

Swansea had become a town long before Cardiff and residential development ran west along the shore with industry along the banks of Tawe running north. There were hundreds of small copper smelters most of which closed when the industry was consolidated. Balchin's introduction to his book has a vivid description of what remained: 'one of the most concentrated areas of industrial dereliction, desolation and decay in Britain.' Alongside this, the city has long been a cultural and intellectual centre.

I write about the consolidation of the steel industry in Vehicles to Vaccines and this brought about the Steel Company of Wales. This new company embraced amongst others the major tin plate producer Richard Thomas with plants at Velindre and Trostre and built a massive continuous process steel plant at nearby Port Talbot. This complex produced most of Britain's sheet steel and all its tin plate.

Copper production had suffered as other countries came on stream. The same became true of tin plating. Nonetheless Swansea attracted a wide spread of metal and other industries.

Alcoa Manufacturing and British Aluminium produced cast and sheet aluminium as well as wire. Borg-Warner from the USA produced car transmissions. Also from the USA, Jefferson Chemicals produced morpholine for making rubber and Piperazine for pig and poultry feed additives. B.P. refined oil and manufactured chemicals and 3M made tape products. Imperial Metal Industries produced Titanium and Zirconium alloy. International Nickel produced nickel and Imperial Smelting (about which I write more in the context of Bristol) produced zinc and lead. Smiths Industries made watches and Ford UK, rear axles. Mettoy built a factory at Fforestfach to manufacture Corgi toys. In the seventies Morgan Crucible relocated its electric motor brush manufacturing from Battersea.

A programme of development attracted other SMEs, but more and more the economy of Swansea became dominated by service industries. It boast a university with its own wafer fab for semiconductors.

Further reading:

• Swansea and its Region, W.G.V. Balchin ed. (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1971)
• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)