A power house of British electrical engineering, Stafford was of course a shire town but one that was soon outgrown by other towns in its county. One reason was that the man road route following the course of the Trent by-passed it. When the canals came they too passed it by until a passage was created by dredging the river Sow and adding an canalised section.
The tradespeople of Stafford carried on the common trades, but slowly a larger group emerged whose business was making shoes. The wearing of shoes had become more common in London, the growing industrial towns and the colonies and so a strengthening demand developed for Stafford's shoe makers. In his book Stafford Past, Roy Lewis suggests that one name drew ahead of the field, that of William Horton. In many ways like Manchester cotton merchants, he had a network of outworkers for whom his workshop would cut the leather for soles and uppers and the outworkers would stitch them and return them to him for payment and the next batch of leather. At one time he is said to have had one thousand outworkers. Finished shoes would be despatched by canal to the growing urban areas. The Napoleonic wars boosted demand but then competition from the lower paid Northampton shoe makers attracted trade away.
Railways did not pass Stafford by, rather the town became something of a hub for Staffordshire's part in the growing rail network. Workshops were set up and successive stations built. More significantly the town embraced massive marshalling yards where wagons arrived and were despatched right around the country. Not surprisingly locomotive manufacture took hold and W.G. Bagnall emerged as a leader.
As with the other shoe towns, the advent of American sewing machines for shoes led first to strikes as men refused to work on machine stitched leather. In time, as elsewhere, machines became a fixture along with factory production. Stafford's factories found themselves specialising in women's shoes and the firm Lotus became the best known of Stafford's factories. As elsewhere, foreign competition shrank the workforce to one or two specialised factories.
Supporting the shoe making trade, there emerged a cohort of manufacturers of the equipment needed to make shoes but also the packaging, laces and polish the wearer would need. The British United Shoe Machinery Company was set up by its American counterpart and took over the shoe related business of W.H. Dorman. This company would move into motor vehicles with the Redbridge Motor Works and aero engines with Adams. In the First World War they developed the interrupter gear that enabled machines guns to fire between the blades of a spinning propeller. After the war, the company built its first diesel engines. In 1959 it acquired W.G Bagnall and two years later became part of the English Electric. Later still it would join with Perkins diesels of Peterborough.
At the start of the twentieth century, Stafford attracted the British Siemens Brithers whose premises at Woolwich were becoming too small to house both its cable manufacture and its business of dynamos and electric motors. It was these latter two which Siemens moved to Stafford. Siemens Dynamo works later joined the group of companies which in 1919 formed English Electric. I write of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.
Roy Lewis writes of the arrival in 1930 of George Nelson as managing director of English Electric and how he encouraged its growth in a very hands on way, his home being through a garden gate in the factory fencing. The Second World War saw the factory produce tanks, bombs and a range of electrical equipment. In 1960 the company opened a new transformer factory and in 1968 merged with GEC. I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines. In 2015 the Stafford Grid and Power businesses became part of the American General Electric, now GE Vernova, which is working on high voltage transmission for the transition to net zero.
Stafford was also home to British Reinforced Concrete Engineering Company and in the Stafford Salt and Alkali Company.
Further reading
- Roy Lewis, Stafford Past (Chichester: Phillimore, 1997)
- J.D. Scott, Siemens Brothers 1858-1958 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958) [printed by Jarrold in Norwich]