Philip Hamlyn Williams - my history of British Manufacturing

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

Coming soon - How Manufacturing Shaped Britain

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.

Monday, August 17, 2026

The Ferranti Spirit

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 Vaccines in 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.

Monday, August 10, 2026

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.