Financiers, some who sailed near to or sometimes over the line.

 In my exploration of British manufacturing, I have come across many men whose technical expertise advanced the cause of British industry. There were also those who brought a different kind of expertise and perhaps a different outlook on life.

George Hudson - the railway king

George Hudson was one of these. He became a firm friend of George Stephenson and it was said that whilst Stephenson dreamed grand schemes for linking the country by railway, George Hudson found ways to enable such schemes, leaving to Stephenson the task of bringing them into reality.

Railway mania of which Hudson was a part was in many ways like those other kinds of financial mania - the dot com bubble, the crash that led to the credit crunch. The railways created by Stephenson had fired the imagination, so much so that groups around the country were putting together schemes for their own pet project. Those people with money to spare were only too keen to invest. Hudson and Stephenson could see that this mania needed to be tamed in order for a coherent rail net-work to emerge that served the interests of the country. This didn't mean that Hudson eschewed profit, far from it, just that he saw a bigger picture.

We need to take a step back to 1800 and the birth of George to a poor Yorkshire farming family. George was placed as an apprentice to a York grocer from which he went on to run his own grocery business. He married and fortune shone, for George unexpectedly inherited a large sum from a distant relative making him one of the wealthiest men in York. He used his new status to move into establishment circles, the Church and the Tory party. With these new connections he formed a joint-stock bank, the York Union. This led him to further contacts including Glyn's bank in London which was financing railways.

Richard Lambert, in his book The Railway King, researched his many schemes. I recount one of the first for the sake of illustration. The starting point was the London to Birmingham railway and George Stephenson's ambition for this to extend north to either Lancashire or Yorkshire ending up at his home city of Newcastle. As plans developed, the route from Birmingham to Leeds was favoured and here in stepped Hudson who argued for his home of York instead of Leeds. This plan failed to gain favour, but he did manage to secure a scheme to link York to the North Midland Railway which ran from Derby to Leeds. (The London to Birmingham line was linked to Derby via Rugby.) In time the North Midland Railway enjoyed east-west traffic, but Hudson saw on the horizon potential competition from four sequential lines linking Liverpool to Hull via Leeds. He managed to take a lease on the stretch from Leeds to Selby and promptly closed it, forcing traffic through York even though it was a longer journey. Freight could be carried on to Selby and the River Trent. Hudson had hoped to secure the railway from Selby to Hull. His failure to do so led him to re-instate the previous route by water thus crushing the owners of the Selby-Hull line. It was brutal business which caused Hudson to gather pockets of stiff competition to his schemes.

One of Hudson's York contemporaries was Joseph Rowntree who questioned the presentation of annual accounts for the North Midland and York Railway, and he asked that they should be audited. At the time it was only banks and insurance companies which required an audit, so his request was dismissed.

Lambert suggests that Hudson’s attention to four related areas brought to fruition his ambitions. First of all he sponsored individual railway projects. Second, he had to hand the means to finance them and links to brokers who could buy and sell shares to influence pricing when takeovers were required. Third, he owned land in Yorkshire which gave him status, but some of which was also useful in enabling his schemes and blocking those of competitors. The fourth strand was political at both a local and Westminster level, the latter being shepherding his favoured schemes through Parliament.

None of this was illegal, but those who lost money at his hands were naturally unforgiving and his reputation ended in tatters.

However, he was responsible for 1,450 of the 5,000 miles of railway which opened in 1849. He employed many thousands of people and enabled the cheap transport of coal which fired the industrial revolution.

Ernest Terah Hooley

Hooley’s biggest claim to fame,  or infamy, was the purchase of the Pneumatic Tyre Company for £3 million and its immediate floatation as the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company for £5 million of which the Economist of 30 July 1898 wrote:

‘On the strength of the Dunlop deal, Mr Hooley came to be regarded as the Napoleon of Finance. At his word, Capital could be created by the million and fortunes could be made as if by a magician’s wand. There have been many successful company promoters, but Mr Hooley was to eclipse them all alike, in the variety of his schemes and in the gigantic profits provided by them not only for the great financier but that everybody connected with him.’

Ernest Terah Hooley was remarkable by any standards. He was the son of a Lacemaker from the Derbyshire town of Long Eaton. He began his career in his father’s business, but moved into stockbroking and, from there, into company promotion. In his ‘golden years’ he floated and made a personal fortune out of two other household names: Bovril and Schweppes. He died in 1947 in small house in College Street, Long Eaton. The obituaries tell of a man who rubbed shoulders with royalty and the good and the great of his time. They also tell of a man bankrupted more than once, and imprisoned for fraud, again, on more than one occasion. The Derby Daily Telegraph of 12 February 1947 said this:

‘From earning 30 shillings a week in his father’s lace mill, he became one of the most powerful financiers of the century, and so wealthy that it was said he owned £10 million worth of land in Great Britain. He owned Risley Hall in Derbyshire and, of more relevance to this story, developed Trafford Park Industrial Estate in Manchester, the first such estate in the country.’

Hooley features on the government insolvency service website as an example of a Victorian Scam.

Harry Lawson

‘He was probably no less scrupulous than many of the other remarkable characters who used other people’s money to amass vast fortunes for themselves in the City of London at the turn of the nineteenth century. On the credit side, those who worked for him said that he was both fair and generous. He was certainly not a greedy man who loved money for its own sake.’ ‘Bunty’ Scott-Moncrieff on H.J.Lawson

Described as ‘the crooked entrepreneur Harry Lawson’; the records do indeed show that he was prosecuted for fraud on at least two occasions (once along with Hooley). However, Lawson was perhaps the unlikely founder of British motor manufacturing, which, in turn, sowed the seeds for motor manufacturing in many countries of the world. I tell the story in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of how he founded the British Daimler company in a former mill in Coventry.

Dudley Docker

I recall from a Goon Show (a BBC radio programme of the fifties and sixties) a mocking reference to a Lady Docker. I then found that Dudley Docker had master minded the creation of MetroVick. I put two and two together and came up with the wrong answer. Dudley was the father of Bernard, the socialite husband of the renowned lady, and a wholly different man.

Dudley grandfather, Thomas, had been a Moseley brass founder. His father, Ralph, was a solicitor who amassed public appointments in and around Birmingham, so much so that he was styled as ' the Lord High Everything of his district'. These were Victorians on a upward path.

Dudley was born in 1862 at his parent's home, Paxton House, 130 South Street Smethwick. He went to King Edward VI Grammar School, but didn't excel. He joined his father's office, but left two years. In 1881 he joined his elder brother, William, in a varnish business which at that time was a good trader with strong demand from the Birmingham japanning trade. Despite challenges, the business prospered and other brothers joined.

Cricket was the passion of the Docker Brothers. Ludford, known as the Local Leviathan, joined Derbyshire Cricket Club in 1881 and became captain in 1884. Dudley joined the newly created Warwickshire club, then a second division county unlike Derbyshire. Dudley played for them for a number of seasons.

Cricket opened doors, and the business prospered further. Docker Brothers became a limited company in 1899. Dudley amassed shareholdings and directorships in a number of growing Birmingham businesses. He married well. His wife Lucy came from a well connected family and she inherited a significant sum on her father's death. Dudley and Lucy had been living next to the varnish factory, but moved Coleshill House in the Chilterns which had been built by Roger Pratt during the Rule of the Commonwealth. They had one son, Bernard.

In 1902, Dudley and two brothers became directors of one of Britain biggest combines, the Metropolitan Amalgamated Carriage and Wagon company (later known by the initials of its subsequent name Metropolitan Carriage Wagon and Finance 'MCWF') and five years later that company amalgamated with the much smaller Docker Brothers. It was Dudley who had created MCWF by persuading five largely struggling wagon companies to join it in order to achieve Efficiency.

Efficiency was the Edwardian byword. The Boer War had humiliated the nation and so there was a public desire to do better, to become 'efficient'. The amalgamation confirmed that Dudley's vision of large integrated corporations was the right way forward. GKN and Stewarts & Lloyds were others. They were is stark contrast with the defensive amalgamations in the 1890 where companies joined in legal terms, but remained isolated in practice. In the event, the longstanding inefficiencies in the railway companies proved too much of a match for Dudley whose skills lay in finance and publicity.

The MCWF merger created a stir amongst the great and good of Birmingham and Dudley's reputation was riding high. By 1910, he thought he needed a boost and explored another potential merger, this time between BSA and Daimler. He had joined the BSA board in 1906 and had seen it struggle with its young motor vehicle business. He decided that it needed motor vehicle expertise which Daimler clearly had. Again, I write about this merger in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW) but from a different source which identified further factors that made Daimler attractive: its significant land holding in Coventry. What both BSA and Daimler lacked were cash and management expertise. The merger was not a success. Dudley had created a financial structure that was complex, involving different classes of shares with different rights and, what proved crucial, a whole web of intracompany loans. Yet, Dudley still had more deals in his sights.

He saw that the opportunities which electrical engineering presented were being pursued by the Americans (General Electric and Westinghouse) and the Germans (Siemens and AEG), but not so the British. Here Ferranti and other British companies may have taken issue. In Dudley's view there were three options: create relationships with the Americans or Germans or join a multinational combination. What ever route, the result had to be big.

In the wake of the First World War, the Board of Vickers, the armaments company, could see that their near total commitment to war materiel made them vulnerable, and diversification was the order of the day. I wrote in HBSTMW the story of how Dudley Docker persuaded Douglas Vickers that railway rolling stock and electrical engineering were the coming industries. Vickers and MCWF both invested in the company that would become Metropolitan Vickers to buy British Westinghouse. It was a complex transaction that made Dudley a good deal of money and left Vickers with a combination they couldn't manage. I wrote of its unravelling in HBSTMW.

Dudley Docker went on to advise on international trust arrangements and to chair the first meeting of the General Committee of the Federation of British Industries which would become the CBI. He was an influencer, a deal maker, a publicist, but not a manager. That would be left to people like Ronald Weeks.

Further reading:

• Lambert, Richard S.,The Railway King - 1800-1871 - A Study of George Hudson and the business morals of the time (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1934)
• Davenport-Hines, R.P.T., Dudley Docker - the Life and Times of a Trade Warrior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)

London as a manufacturing place

Was London a manufacturing anomaly ? There were no raw materials, no coal and the weather didn't favour weaving. Yet, it was the centre of power. The rich wanted beautiful things and Londoners made them. Skills emerged and developed, which attracted more skills. Above all it was the major port.

The Thames offered a wonderful entry and exit point for London and had done since Roman times. In spite of a massive growth in the volume of trade, the 'legal docks' had remained largely as they had been in the time of Elizabeth I - a stretch of quays between London Bridge and the Tower of London, although a further area of river frontage on the south bank had been added and ships were often unloaded by lightermen whilst at anchor in the centre of the river.

The dock area was extended and trade boomed. The city and its surroundings attracted a vast variety of commercial activity.

A striking feature of this monster city in 1700 was its newness. In September 1666 some three-fifths of the City of London had been destroyed in the Great Fire. The losses were immense – 13,200 houses were burned to the ground and so were most of the great public buildings, including St Paul’s Cathedral and eighty-seven parish churches. Rebuilding the housing took well into the 1670s. The public buildings took longer – St Paul’s was not considered finished till 1711. Rebuilding was at a much-reduced density – some parish churches and livery company halls were never replaced and only around 9,000 houses filled the place of those lost. No more the narrow streets with closely packed thatched dwellings. We can thank Christopher Wren for the fine stone churches built in the classical style that can still be seen amongst the glass and steel of the 21st century city.

By 1700 it had a population estimated at 575,00 which grew to 900,000 a century later. It was by far the largest urban area in Britain having attracted migrants from neighbouring rural areas in search of work. In these early days inner London overlapped to the East and to the South.

As London grew, the banks of the Thames filled with manufacturing businesses attracted by the ease of receiving raw materials and dispatching finished goods. The docks would welcome ships arriving with cargoes from just about all over the world; ships too would leave with finished goods destined for lucrative overseas markets. The label ‘Made in London’ carried a cache the world over. It had been and still was a busy and diversified place with saw-mills, lead-smelting, paint and varnish works, iron and brass foundries and ships stores, chain and anchor works and sack, bag and canvas factories.

Much later, Joseph Rank saw the vast quantity of grain imports coming through London docks and saw the opportunity for flour mills which he built by the river. These worked alongside huge warehouses and markets. London had cornered world trade, for example Australian wool was shipped to London for onward sale. The domination in trade was mirrored and amplified in banking and finance where London took an unassailable lead until 1914.

The 18th century and earlier

Inner London

Where it all began with trade. Wool and silk occupied many Londoners as did clock-making and furniture. England’s population in 1651 is estimated at 5 million and mid-century nearly one fifth of the working population was employed in the manufacture of woollen cloth. London was by far the largest centre of population and so attracted a good share of the industry. Follow this link to discover more.

East London

Docklands and the East End. Trade needed ships and London built many. When I think of shipbuilding, I see in my minds eye the North-East or the Clyde. Yet, Thames shipyards, including four Naval Dockyards, built many thousands of ships over four centuries. We can think of East Indiamen setting sail for the spices of the east, or whalers, but more-so mail steamers, wherries and tea clippers. It was said that standing on Greenwich Hill you could see hundreds of yards stretching west to Chiswick and east towards the sea. With men like Maudslay, Thames yards were ahead of the game with steam power until the proximity of raw materials passed the advantage further north. Along with ships, London made armaments at Woolwich. Follow this link to discover more and this link to the Thames shipbuilders.

South London

Tanning by the Thames created a stink. Tanning took place in Bermondsey. The River Neckinger provided the water for the tanning pits. Slaughterhouses provided a constant supply of hides and there was ample oak bark for the tanning process. There were busy cobblers and cordwainers throughout; the cordwainers in particular were very protective of their craft. It was this trade that suffered as Northampton attracted London retailers by lower prices through lower wages. Flour and beer nourished the population. Huguenots produced more fine silk. Follow this link to discover more.

19th and 20th century

East London

With yet more trade, the docks expanded. Furniture making spread with the influx of skilled Jewish makers. The area around Shoreditch and the western end of Bethnal Green became in the words of Gerry White ‘something approaching one giant factory’. Other industries gathered further along the Thames. Read more in this link.

South London

Engineers made a bee-line for Lambeth to learn from the pioneer machine-tool maker, Henry Maudslay. In his book, London: A History, Francis Sheppard observes that ‘by the end of the eighteenth century, London had more steam engines than Lancashire’. Pharmaceuticals transformed lives, much loved toys delighted generations and the Stanley knife! The Lines Brothers factory at Merton was at one time the largest toy factory in the world. Read more in this link.

Inner London

Pianos were made in Islington. Mornington Crescent was home to the 'Black Cat' Carreras cigarettes factory built in an Egyptian style and later sold to Rothmans which manufactured in Darlington. Benson & Hedges were made in Oxford Street before production moved to Ballymena. Lambert and Butler were produced in Drury Lane. There were bicycle makers in Holborn and jewellers around Fitzrovia. Holborn was also home to George Kent and his household equipment including his famous knife cleaner. Burroughs Wellcome set up offices in Snow Hill, Holborn in the late 19th century. and then many of the basic needs of life. Many of the new industries were born in Inner London before they moved out to pastures new. Read more in this link.

North London

Manufacturing moved north from Inner London and there developed a raft of different industries from electronics to aircraft, furniture to motor components. Brimsdown, Enfield was the former home of the Edison Swan Laboratory. Joseph Swan moved from Newcastle where he developed the incandescent lamp and joined with the American Thomas Edison in exploiting their invention at Ponders End in 1886. They manufactured under the Mazda brand. I write of Edison in this blog. Working with him, Ambrose Fleming invented the first thermionic valve, a diode, from which the development of wireless grew. Also in Brimsdown was Cosmos, valve manufacturers. Read more in this link.

West London

American companies flocked to Western Avenue and the Great West Road. Our iconic aircraft were built in Kingston and then radar to spot their enemies. Addlestone became home to Plessey Radar after its takeover of Decca in the mid sixties. The marine radar part of the Decca was taken over by Racal and they had a manufacturing presence in New Maldon. New Malden is also home to BAE Systems visualisation, experimentation, and design. Sunbeam Talbot made motor cars in Ladbroke Hall (post image) Read more in this link.

Postscript

In his London in the Twentieth Century, a phrase from Jerry White stuck in my mind. ‘From the middle of the sixties London’s manufacturing industry virtually bled away, along with the port that fed it.’ He offers some telling figures: between 1959 and 1974 London lost 38% of its manufacturing jobs so by 1996 only 10% of the London workforce was employed in manufacturing.' A good deal of manufacturing moved to the north, east, west and south of London and in due course out to Metroland and into the South East.

Joseph, Harry and Oliver Lucas

 Joseph Lucas was born in 1834, lived in Hockley, Birmingham and worked in tin, manufacturing lamps for ships and the new world of photography. In 1855, his wife gave birth to a son, Harry, who at the age of sixteen joined his father in the business.

It was the invention and growing ownership of bicycles that caught Harry's attention; this was surely an area of growth on which he and his father should devote their resources. Although without much formal education, Harry grasped the essentials of business.

He knew that sustainable businesses are built on quality products and this led to the famous King of the Road lamp. He was not alone supplying the bicycle trade, and competitors offered cheaper but poorer products. He addressed this by introducing a cheaper but still high quality lamp, the Lucas 90 Plus, whilst keeping the King of the Road for the discerning cyclist.

He understood that products ordered needed to be delivered on time. Here came a clash with his father who was a much more impetuous man who would be so taken over by the thrill of winning an order that he would promise the earth and offer prices with little consideration of cost. Harry kept pulling him into line.

Cash is king, and Harry understood this. It was a constant struggle for the business to have enough cash resource to expand to meet demand as well as manufacturing to fulfil orders.

Roy Church tells how Harry wrestled with finances as he focused on cash flow and just how difficult it was for a young company to grow. Yet, they acquired additional premises in 1895 and, as the work force grew, mercifully so did demand, and profits began to come through in handsome numbers – some £23,000 per year on average in the three years to 1897 when the partnership became Joseph Lucas Limited.

Harry's son, Oliver was born in 1892 and attended King Edward's school, on leaving which he joined his father in the business. During the war he would invent the OL daylight signalling lamp.

Joseph Lucas died in 1902.

Harry Lucas was quick to see the opportunities of moving into lighting and starting motor cars. There were of course others keen to enter this promising market. Roy Church mentions Rotax in Willesden in north-west London, and the larger C.A. Vandervell (CAV) in Acton in west London in which Herbert Austin held debentures.

The First World War presented challenges to the company. A major problem of which I write in my book Ordnance was that the War Office had specified Bosch Magnetos for their vehicles. The components industry pre-war had been content with this, and the ability of British companies to supply magnetos was strictly limited. One company in particular, Thomson Bennett, rose to the challenge. Harry Lucas pounced when, in 1914, the opportunity arose to purchase it. This was going to prove of massive value to Lucas in the years to come, not least in the person of Peter Bennett.

Harry was growing old and Oliver Lucas was not ready to take over; the time had come for Peter Bennett to take the tiller. He became joint managing director with Harry in 1920 and then with Oliver in 1923. Harry died in 1939.

Lucas were growing their business in a number of very focused ways. They accepted offers by smaller component manufacturers to buy their businesses, and then, a little later, agreed to buy their two larger competitors, Rotax and CAV when the latter experienced harsh trading conditions in the mid 1920s. The expanded company focussed individual parts of the business in three locations: Birmingham, Acton and Willesden. At the same time, the company was researching solutions to technical problems, such as the magneto, dynamo and starter motor.

Marketing was key and this was where Oliver stepped in. He developed good relationships with William Morris and many others. He embraced vital aspects of manufacturing. He was as interested in the manufacturing process as in the product and so achieved great economies. Above all he was committed to what we now know as life-long learning. He encouraged his managers to learn from each other and from other companies. He espoused relationships with academia including financing a chair, the Lucas Professor of Production Engineering, at the University of Birmingham.

He carried out vital research into the development and large scale manufacture of fuel injection pumps which made possible the growth of the heavy vehicle industry. During the Second World War as Director of Research and Development at the Ministry of Supply, he led the overhauling the design and production of the Cruiser tank. Tragically he died young in 1948.

I write of the growth of Lucas in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and of its considerable contribution to the national effort in the Second World War in both HBSTMW and War on Wheels, Peter Bennett had been knighted in 1941 and had made his own significant contribution in a number of senior positions in the Ministry of Supply, including Director of Tanks and Vehicles. Following the death of Oliver Lucas, Peter Bennett was joined as joint managing director by Bertram Waring. He became Member of Parliament for Edgbaston in 1940 and became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minster of Labour in 1951-52. He was made a peer in 1953 and died in 1957.

I write of the later development of Lucas Industries in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Further reading:

• Nockolds, Harold, Lucas The First Hundred Years (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1978)
• Church, Roy A. “Innovation, Monopoly, and the Supply of Vehicle Components in Britain, 1880-1930: The Growth of Joseph Lucas Ltd.” The Business History Review, vol. 52, no. 2, 1978, pp. 226–49. JSTOR, https://doi-org.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/10.2307/3113036. Accessed 26 Aug. 2026.

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