Plessey father and sons

 Allen Clark, son of Byron Clark, was born in Massachusetts in 1898 and came to England in 1905. He attended Felsted School. In the First World War he served in the London Scottish and was wounded at Cambrai in 1917. He then joined the Royal Flying Corps.

in 1920, Byron Clark bought Plessey Limited which made tools in Marylebone in London. In 1922 Plessey obtained a contract to made crystal radio sets for Marconi and I write of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Marconi invested in Plessey, secured seats on the board and Plessey developed a business in making radio components.

Allen is remembered by his friend Patrick Hennesey, one time boss of Ford UK, as a man dedicated to searching the world for ideas which could enable Plessey to develop.

Plessey became a public company in 1937 and I write in HBSTMW of its contribution to the national effort in the Second World War. After the war, Allen was joined by his sons John and Michael.

John was educated at Harrow and Cambridge and served in the RNVR from 1944 to 1947. He then went to learn about electronics manufacturing first at Metro-Vick and then in the USA before joining Plessey.

John had a particular interest in materials such as gallium arsenide and silicon and took on the development of the semiconductor business and master minded Plessey's research into materials at its Caswell laboratories. A plant for manufacturing pure silicon was established in 1952 but the potential for solid state technology had yet to be embraced. It wasn't until 1957 that the company began manufacture of transistors. 1966 MOS integrated circuits were produced at Swindon, making Plessey the first European manufacturer of such microcircuits.

In 1951 a Communications Division was formed, with Michael Clark at its head, and a remit to catch up with its competitors in VHF and UHF equipment. Two senior managers, John Cunningham and Raymond Brown, left Plessey to form Racal.

Allen's big break came in 1961 when Plessey took over competing telephone manufacturers Ericsson Telephone Ltd and the Automatic Telephone and Electric Company. He was knighted that same year but tragically died before the transaction completed. He was succeeded by John as chairman and Michael as managing director.

In 1965 the company reorganised into five product groups: Automation, Components, Dynamics, Electronics, Telecommunications. The company went on to develop their electronics business in defence, semiconductors and computers. I write of all of this in Vehicles to Vaccines. In 1962, Plessey had 25,000 employers and this grew to 75,000 by 1980 in a number of different locations with head office at Ilford as I wrote in How Manufacturing Shaped Britain.

GEC and Plessey merged their telecoms businesses in GPT in 1988 and in 1989 Siemens and GEC purchased the remainder of Plessey. John Clark was knighted in 1971 and died in 2001. Michael was awarded a CBE and survived his brother by nine years.

Further reading:

Richie, Berry, Into the Sunrise - Plessey Company (London: James & James, 1989)

Marconi and notable successors

Guglielmo Marconi, from Bolognia in Italy, at the age of 22, in 1898, set up Marconi Telegraph Company in a former mill in Chelmsford: the first wireless factory in the world. His fascination was with radio waves, and he built on earlier work, by Hertz and others, for his first patent registered in England in 1897.

He was born in Italy of an Italian father and Irish mother who had eloped ten years earlier. He was brought up largely by his doting mother who loved everything British; his father was distant and disapproving. He developed a fascination with science and electricity, frowned on by his father. He was no great scholar, but an obsessive experimentalist.

Maxwell had produced a theory supporting the existence of electromagnetic waves and eight years later Hertz had carried out experiments which demonstrated the theory. All this captured the imagination of the teenage Marconi who took over his mother’s loft to replicate Hertz’s experiments and improve upon them. A number of established scientists were exploring the theory of electromagnetic waves, Marconi’s only interest was in seeing whether the waves could transmit information. He found that whilst the transmitted wave might be weak, it could control a much stronger signal and so, for example, make a sound. Further experiments increased the range of transmission.

At the age of 21, Marconi was ready for backers to take forward his invention. His father approached the Italian Post Office, which declined. His mother took him to England where William Preece, the Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, had been experimenting with electromagnetic induction. Marconi lodged a patent application and was then introduced to Preece to whom he demonstrated his invention. A public demonstration followed in July 1896 with Morse messages sent a mile across London. Further public demonstrations followed in England and Italy. Marconi sold his patent rights to the company that bears his name receiving in exchange a controlling shareholding.

The choice of where to manufacture wireless equipment is interesting. He had experimented in London but suffered interference from the tram network. Chelmsford was far away from trams and had electrical engineers thanks to Crompton, and also factory space.

I write of the remarkable company he created in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

The company’s long term success owed a great deal to Marconi’s commitment to excellence. The company would recruit the best talent. Here are just two outstanding examples.

Dr Eric Eastwood

Dr Eric Eastwood who was recruited by Marconi after the war to lead its work on radar. He undoubtedly enhanced the technical expertise within the company which in turn led to it being the most significant part of GEC prior to that company’s breakup. Marconi Defence Systems was the perfect fit for British Aerospace with which it merged to become BAE Systems, now a respected and successful British company.

Eric Eastwood was born in Rochdale on 12 March 1910. His father was a mill worker eventually becoming an administrator. His mother kept a shop especially during periods when his father was laid off. Eric had a brother and two sisters who with Eric moved from school to school as their father sought work. It became clear that Eric was the most intellectually gifted and so the family decided to focus their resources in his schooling at Oldham. He was by all accounts a hard working and well organised student. This paid off with first scholarships to read Physics at Manchester and then to write a PhD at Cambridge.

His first career was in teaching physics which he did at Runcorn at a school founded by Brunner and Mond. He moved from there to Liverpool and in 1941 volunteered for the RAF. It didn't take long for his particular skills to be noticed and he was transferred to 60 Group which has responsibility for running the CH (chain home) network of radar stations. His first job was the calibration of one of the stations to take account of its physical position in order to report with a degree of accuracy on the position of enemy aircraft. Eric was promoted, eventually had full command of the whole of the home radar establishments.

After the war he joined English Electric in their Research Department at Stafford then, following EE's purchase of Marconi, Eric moved to Marconi Research Laboratories at Great Baddow near Chelmsford first as Deputy Director and then as Director in 1954. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines of the vital work carried out by Eric and his colleagues both to benefit the defence of these islands but also to advance the commercial success of the Marconi company.

He eventually retired from GEC in 1981 having also served on a number of governmental and professional committees. His contribution to radar was second to none. He received many awards including that of Knight Batchelor.

F.N. Sutherland

Frederick Neil Sutherland graduated from Cambridge and went to serve as a pilot in the RNAS joining English Electric in Preston in 1922. He started on the shop floor before becoming an apprentice. He was appointed Chief Engineer in South America and General Manager in Brazil before an appointment as Managing Director of English Electric South Africa. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines how he was chosen by George Nelson to run their new acquisition, Marconi. He turned out to be the perfect man for the job. Interestingly, he followed the tradition set by Marconi’s former boss, Admiral Grant, of involving his wife in the welfare of his employees, something I had only ever seen at the Central Ordnance Depot at Greenford in the early years of the Second World War.

During his tenure the turnover of Marconi grew from £2.5 million to £50 million becoming one of our largest exporters. With him at the helm the company won the Queens Award for Exports three years running.

Further reading:

• Jolly, W.P., Marconi (London: Constable, 1972)
• Jones, Francis Edgar ; Eric Eastwood, 12 March 1910 - 6 October 1981. Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 1 November 1983; (29): 177–195. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.1983.0007

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.