The Quaker manufacturers

 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 Wallis - aircraft designer

 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.

Further reading:

Morpurgo, J.E. Barnes Wallis (London: Longman, 1972)

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