R.E. Crompton - pioneer of electrical engineering

 The Cromptons were a wealthy Yorkshire family with extensive estates and the young Crompton grew up knowing he was destined for career in the army or diplomatic service. It was a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851 that gave young Crompton then aged six quite different ideas. He had travelled to London on a railway train pulled by six steam engines. To add to this were Daniel Gooch's broad gauge Lord of the Isles and Thomas Crampton's Liverpool. He had caught the steam bug and set about making his own steam road vehicle the Bluebell. As is the way with invention, this first iteration failed.

Crompton was gazetted as an ensign in the 3rd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade was was sent out to India. Steam followed him for he saw how painfully slow transport was in India, but also how good the roads were. The answer was a vehicle called the Primer with rubber tyres. This simply did not have the power and, if it did, the tyres slipped. So back to the drawing board and Ransome, Sims and Head of Orwell Works in Ipswich. The result was the Chenab pulling an omnibus capable of seating 130 people. In the event the payload was Crompton's new wife and an entourage to provide for the every need of the Chenab. The journey was astonishing for the time, being all the way to Wolverhampton. Apart from the length of the journey, it became known for the first recorded instance of car sickness.

As I write in my blog on Chelmsford, it was this East Anglian town that brought Crompton to electricity for which he is best known. The route, though, was circuitous. Two cousin had bough the Stanton Ironworks in the Erewash Valley and were keen to begin production of iron pipes. They engaged R.E. Crompton to manage the project to bring the works into use. The timescale was such that 24 hour working was required and this needed lighting. Crompton had heard of the work of the French Gamme with rudimentary dynamo and arc lamp. This proved effective and Crompton went on to develop it as I tell in the blog.

So much of invention seems to be about collaboration. Crompton was contacted by Joseph Swan of Newcastle and he visited to be met with a bright display of incandescent comprising a filament suspended in a vacuum within a glass globe. The two men went on to collaborate on lighting installations in a number of great houses. An interesting aside was the birth of the trade of wiring contractors said to have taking up the slack from bell hangers. Another collaboration was with the Swiss engineer Sulzer, whose name also appears when British Railways moved away from steam to diesel electric. With Crompton it was in the context of power transmission where Sulzer had used some of Crompton's dynamos to generate electricity to power electric motors.

Crompton secured his first large scale contract in Vienna which had suffered dreadful fires in its opera house and theatres from defective gas lighting. Electricity was the answer and Crompton installed Crompton-Willans generating sets to provide DC power at 400 volts taken down to 100 volts for the swan incandescent bulbs. From this success he provided power for the new Kensington Court Estate, again using DC. At this time, as I wrote in my blog on Edison, AC was becoming increasingly used including by Ferranti at Deptford. Nonetheless for lighting DC remained more reliable to a few decades to come.

A home laboratory is clearly what everyone needs and Crompton one at his Kensington home where he would explore electricity alongside Faraday and Kelvin.

Crompton was not one to be confined to particular areas of engineering. He was a keen cyclist and turned his attention to the improvement of road surfaces.

In his final years he advocated a national electricity grid to allow the population to spread out across the country reducing overcrowding in industrial areas. Surely we can see the need for this now with the north south divide.

Further reading:

L.T.C. Rolt, Great Engineers (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1962)

John and Charlotte Guest - GKN

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. John was succeeded by his son Thomas and in turn by his grandson also John. The iron works prospered. I tell the story of the iron works in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

In 1848 Dowlais ironworks only just survived disaster when it very nearly failed to renew the lease of the land on which the works were built. The death of Sir John four years later could also have been the end, but for his remarkable wife, Charlotte, some twenty-seven years his junior.

The GKN: Brief History of the Company tells how ‘she knew the business inside out, having immersed herself in it to support and advise her husband. She had drawn up the monthly accounts, been involved in planning, and learned the principles of iron production’.

Exploring further, it is clear that Charlotte was a colourful character. Her grandson, the Earl of Bessborough, published extracts from her diaries from which it can be seen that Charlotte was the daughter of the ninth Earl of Lindsey and had had a troubled childhood. She met Josiah John Best when she was twenty one and married him after a courtship of only three months.

They were shunned by society. Charlotte’s response was to devote her time to supporting her husband in his business, in having ten children and in mastering the Welsh language, to the extent that her translation of The Mabinigiori is lauded to this day. She also was not one to allow society to have its own way. She and her husband bought a fashionable house in London and an estate in Dorset. With her support, Josiah John became MP for Merthyr. Following his death, Charlotte ran the business for three years during difficult times when industrial unrest was rife. She built a strong management team to support he son Lord Wimbourne who would take over the running of the company. She married the family’s tutor Charles Schrieber in 1855.

The Guest family passed the batten when they decided to sell the iron works. In 1834, in Birmingham, John Nettlefold had opened a woodscrew mill. And in 1856, just down the road, Arthur Keen had founded the Patent Nut & Bolt Company (PNB) with his American partner, Francis Watkins, and which had become a major manufacturer of fasteners.’

Keen was not only an engineer, he was a director of the Birmingham and Midland Bank, and it was through this connection that the name Guest re-enters the story. Keen had heard that Lord Wimborne, now head of the Guest family, was looking to sell Dowlais ironworks and, whilst PNB was many times smaller, Keen made an approached and a deal was done for the purchase for £1.5 million. The Press were intrigued. The South Wales Daily News of 20 July 1900 observed the good value to the purchaser adding “As to Guest, Keen & Co, I look on it as a second Consett; repetition of the Nut and Bolt; an industrialist at the top of the list”. Keen had done well, and a year later he added Nettlefold, making the company we now know as Guest, Keen and Nettlefold.8 In 1905, GKN was Britain’s 15th largest company and even now a leading defence contractor.

Further reading

Edgar Jones, A History of GKN, (London: Macmillan).

Ronald Weeks - two world wars, Pilkington and Vickers

 It is chilling to think that many of those men born in the 1890s would serve through two world wars (if they survived) and could also be part of the step change in British manufacturing witnessed in the twentieth century. Ronald Weeks was one such man. He was the first Director-General of Army Equipment in the Second World War and had been and would be an innovative manufacturer.

He was the son of a Durham mining engineer. The family had been farmers in County Durham for many decades. Ronald went from school in Durham down to Charterhouse in Surrey and then to Cambridge, where he was an exceptional student. He was one of the first Cambridge graduates to pursue a career in industry.

In 1914, he was commissioned in the Prince of Wales’s Volunteers and later gained a regular commission in the Rifle Brigade where he gained a reputation for leadership and initiative in battle. He was awarded an MC in January 1917, a DSO in January 1918, a Bar to the MC in July 1918 and the Croix de Guerre as well as being mentioned in despatches. He ended the war as a major in the Rifle Brigade.

He then worked at Pilkingtons becoming the first non-family director. In the 1930s, he was part of Management Research Group No.1 with Seebohm Rowntree, exploring the management issues which were presented by companies growing ever larger.

In the Second World War he rose to have responsibility for army equipment as Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff. I explore this more in Dunkirk to D Day

After the war he joined Vickers as chairman of English Steel where he negotiated first its nationalisation and then its denationalisation. He became executive chairman of Vickers, a massive job. He held the chair through a time of radical change when Vickers had been brave enough to invest in a new plant at Tinsley Park in Sheffield in the period between nationalisations when other steel makers held back. They also grappled with the transition from major arms manufacturer to manufacture of everything from aircraft (the Viscount) to computers (Powers Samas)

J.D. Scott, writing The History of Vickers, recognised in Weeks something quite special. He writes ‘by the end of the Second World War, Weeks’ brilliance as an administrator had become recognised as something of a phenomenon. If his career and his personality had been designed for the chairmanship of Vickers they would have differed very little from the actuality’.

Further reading:

J.D. Scott, Vickers - A History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962)