Giants of British Manufacturing

 If I look at the years from the start of the Industrial Revolution up to the Festival of Britain, I can draw up a list a relatively well known names of the movers and shakers of British Manufacturing. Indeed I have written about them in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World  

Looking at the years since then, I have found names perhaps not as well known, many of which I remember from years gone by, but whose efforts and talents shine out.

Kelvin Bray was managing director of Ruston Gas Turbines (and its successors) for a quarter of a century. The company manufactured gas turbines which would be used by 80% of the world’s oil industry. Kelvin was a Grammar School boy who unusually for the time won a scholarship to Kings College, Cambridge. He went on to work on the development of the gas turbine from Frank Whittle’s jet engine. The company, now under the ownership of Siemens, continues to manufacture gas turbines in Lincoln for world markets. The image is of Bray and his colleagues receiving the MacRobert award.

John Harvey-Jones of ICI had the job of rebuilding the chemical giant after the recession of the seventies. His approach was to allow one thousand flowers to bloom knowing that that way the successes of the future would be found. Affirmation of his approach is perhaps found in ICI’s offspring Astra-Zeneca and its lifesaving Covid vaccine. The ICI bureaucracy remained to be tackled later.

David McMurtry at Renishaw in 1973 invented a touch-trigger probe to meet an inspection requirement of the Olympus engine which powered Concorde. His company, Renishaw plc, has since grown into a major international force leading amongst much else additive manufacturing - the 3D printing of complex components.

William Weir of Weir Group was not only a member of the founding family of the company that bears his name, but he led that company through challenging times and then wrote a very personal account of its history. William Weir was the grandson of the company’s founder and worked in the business from 1954 until he relinquished the post of chairman.

Arnold Weinstock at GEC made money. He took over both AEC and EE and created a massively strong company. He was followed by George Simpson who made fatal decisions in the dot com boom which led to the end of what was then GEC Marconi. The company’s defence interests then combined with the rump of the British aircraft industry and the remnants of the Royal Ordnance factories to become the highly successful defence manufacturer BAE Systems  

Oliver Littleton, at AEI which manufactured the first jet engines, wrestled with the impossible task of bringing together long standing rivals, British Westinghouse and British Thompson Houston. 

George Nelson of English Electric was a truly energetic entrepreneur. English Electric would manufacture iconic aircraft and railway locomotives, as well as giving birth to ICL, not least because Nelson had had the wisdom to buy Marconi.

Jules Thorn was the driving force behind Thorn Electric making television widely available and forming the powerhouse of Thorn EMI  

George Turnbull was a gifted manager and engineer who had served his time with Standard Triumph. Following the creation of BLMC, he was asked by Donald Stokes to tackle the underperformance of Austin-Morris. He was successful and Austin-Morris was producing half of the profits of the group. His reward was to tackle the Leyland truck and bus business, once more with success. On the reorganisation of the BL group in 1973, Turnbull was passed over for the role of deputy CEO and so the expectation of becoming CEO in due course. He left, and took up the challenge of creating a world class motor company out of the Korean Hyundai. Success followed him once more. For BLMC the story would be less promising.

Sir John Parker studied naval architecture and mechanical engineering at Belfast College of Technology and at Queen’s University Belfast also learning on the job at Harland and Wolff. His first management role was at Austin Pickersgill after which he returned to Harlands as CEO from 1983 to 1993. He then moved to Babcock International from 1994 to 2000 first as CEO and then also as chairman. In his first stint at Harland, he championed the introduction of computers. At Babcock he transformed a revered but troubled engineering company into one focused on naval shipbuilding and repair

Dr Richard Beeching is remembered for closing a great many stations and miles of track. What he also did was to modernise the railways in its management of its workforce, in containerising freight and improving the experience of the traveller with more comfortable trains.

Joe Bamford created and his son developed a massive fiercely independent but private company. In terms of size and privacy they might rank alongside Ineos and Tata. They have a passion for engineering innovation.

Anita Roddick founded the Body Shop which championed women, sought natural ingredients, demanded fair trade and refused animal testing.

Laura Ashley was born in Dowlais, Glamorgan in 1925, moved to London, but was evacuated back to Wales during the war. She trained as a secretary and worked first in the War Office and then for the Women’s Institute and it was their exhibition at the V&A which inspired her to try her hand at fabric printing in her Pimlico basement kitchen. From this beginning, she and her husband Bernard created a fashion following counter to the swinging sixties trend, and which espoused something altogether more homely.

Michael Perrin was an ICI chemist who had been involved first with the discovery of polythene and then with the nuclear bomb project. He moved out of research into a more managerial role in which he excelled. He was appointed chairman of the Wellcome Foundation in 1953. Research was key. He championed the company’s investment, whilst at the same time distributing millions to the Wellcome Trust for medical projects.

These are just some of my selection of post war manufacturing heroes; there are many more most of whom are unsung.

Further reading: Vehicles to Vaccines

Celebrating 600,000 post visits with some English History

In the England of pre-history, so in the bronze and iron ages, settlements and hill forts emerged in a lightly populated landscape of farmsteads in a largely forested land. 

The country was divided into tribal areas with some fifteen emerging in the century before the Roman invasion as the most powerful, each under the rule of a king. The most significant, Catuvellauni under king Cunobelinus (brought to life for us by Shakespeare in his play Cymbeline) was north of the Thames with its capital at Verulamium (St Albans).

We have to thank the Romans for the names. In relation to the history there is the account of Julius Caesar who invaded in 57 BC and the earlier account of a Greek trader, Pytheas, who visited in 325 BC.

Back to kingdoms, there were then the Dumnonii in the south west, the Cantii of Kent and the Brigantes in the northern part of the country, and other smaller tribes. In very general terms those living in the west are thought to have come from the western coast of Spain and France and those in the east from north west Europe. Homo sapiens as a whole originated in Africa.

The southern part of the country was a place of arable farming and cattle with small enclosed fields. The north and west was more likely pasture for sheep, which had come to the island in around 3,000 BC with people migrating from the near east. Clothing was made of wool, and wheat was the staple diet. There is evidence of tin and copper mining in Cornwall, and mining elsewhere for iron and lead. Tin had been mined in Cornwall since 1,300 BC. There were probably ancient settlements in Leicester, Lincoln, Cambridge, Colchester, Rochester and Canterbury. Thatcham near Reading in Berkshire also has evidence of early settlement.

Places were linked. The Icknield Way ran from Buckinghamshire to Norfolk with lanes linking farmsteads. The Pilgrim way linked Canterbury and Winchester. Ermine Street became the Great North Road. The Fosse Way linked Lincoln with Oxfordshire, and Watling Street, Canterbury with St Albans running through London which then was probably no larger. When the Romans came at first they simply improved the existing routes.

The Romans invaded twice: in 57 BC and 43 AD but there is evidence of earlier and contemporaneous trade with Rome. Colchester was where the Romans made their first capital. Over the next 350 years they set about creating a more organised country. Using the iron age structure, they built forts and connecting roads up to Hadrian’s Wall. Wooden dwellings were replaced by stone villas with under floor heating, plumbing and glass windows. Read about Roman building in this link. The farmsteads would have blacksmiths, workers in bronze and kilns to fire pottery.

Industrial sites emerged such as the potteries in Castor near Peterborough, later known at the Nene Valley potteries. Agriculture was boosted: East Anglia was drained and became a 'bread basket', along with Salisbury plain. Castor became a major Roman centre for East Anglian agriculture. England as whole became a net exporter of grain. Other centres of pottery making were found in Yorkshire and the Isle of Wight. Coal was used for working iron which was found from the coast of Kent to the banks of the Wye.

The principal Roman export was iron and there is evidence of large iron works in the Weald and in particular around Hasting. Roads were built from London through the Weald to each of Hastings, Brighton and Newhaven to facilitate transport to and from the capital and the coast for onward transport by sea.

The Roman military presence was over one hundred thousand soldiers. Forts were built at Chester and York and close to the present Newcastle and Manchester, the latter name derived from Mamucio, in Latin 'a hill shaped like a breast'. There were garrison towns at Lincoln and Gloucester. London was capital of the south and York of the north.

The Romans stamped their mark. As with all empires, religion was a key part of governing and the Romans decided to rid themselves of Druids who were part of the native religion. The decisive battle took place at Anglesey. I mention this because it illustrates the stretch of Roman power and may well have given them access to yet more metals, this time copper. All this happened before Christianity became the religion of Rome although there are indications that the new religion was spreading.

The first Roman stamp of Christianity came with the Emperor Constantine who both dictated that it would be the empire's religion and came to York to be proclaimed emperor. England was prosperous, but controlled. The lot of the common man remained grim.

Empires come and go and Rome went, leaving England to its own devices. Without the Roman ruling class, the market for Nene Valley pottery collapsed and for the next thousand years or so pottery was hand made. Villas fell vacant; one has been found repurposed as a metal workshop.

Without the power of Rome, the Picts and Scots could cross Hadrian's Wall and the Irish, the Irish sea, and play havoc with the peace, but so too could rival English tribes. The English ruling class cried for help and it came from the Saxons. They were violent, but later settled and became part of English life. Disaster, though, was waiting, with the first of the plagues that may well have killed over half of the indigenous population.

Anglo-Saxon Britain was a still land of villages and hamlets with wooden dwellings; larger dwellings, some of stone, were for royalty and aristocracy. Winchester was the capital, also known as Camelot, with its king, Arthur. There were towns dating back to the Roman occupation and indeed the iron age; we can think of Colchester, St Albans, Durham, Canterbury, Exeter. An 'English' language crept into the choice of names and those places to which the English peasantry fled gained the prefix or suffix 'wal', so Wales but also Cornwall, Waltham, Walsall.

Rome's next invasion was as the Church of Rome and its emissary St Augustine. Here Peter Ackroyd sees the firming up of the structure and geography of English society. We have the Saxon cathedrals, bishops and dioceses, and a king with the Christian God on his side.

Norsemen from Norway and Denmark were the next to disturb the peace, but they eventually created a more coherent nation making and trading things. The invading Norwegians first attacked Christian communities as acts of revenge against Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire for their destruction of Norse religious shrines. The invaders were violent and sent fear echoing throughout the land, so much so that the Anglo-Saxons and their people gathered together more and more in walled towns. The Norse conquered the kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia. In time more Norse people arrived in the east of England to settle. York became a Norse town with a bustling economy of metal and textile workers.

The next battle was for Wessex under King Alfred of the cakes myth, and Alfred won, but did a deal with the Danish king; the Danes and Saxons were after all probably closer than either was to the indigenous English. The Danelaw took hold in the east of the country and the towns of Leicester, Lincoln, Stamford, Derby and Leicester became the Burghs of the Danelaw. The most prosperous counties were Lincolnshire, Suffolk and Norfolk. Once again language attaches to names and we have the suffix 'by', so Whitby, Grimsby and, indeed, Derby. Other towns followed as Boroughs as they became known.

Alfred set about defending the southern and western part of the country. He matched the pattern of the Danelaw by making sure that there were Burghs within twenty miles of where people lived in which they could seek refuge. We can think of Winchester and Bath. In particular, he ensured that there were Burghs strategically placed on rivers and around the coast; we can think of Wallingford and Cricklade. These built on existing Roman and iron age settlements and formed the pattern of the urban England we now know. Alfred, who was regarded as the king of the Anglo-Saxons, complemented his land defences with the creation of a Navy.

His son, Edward, built on his conquests by taking Nottingham, Derby and Lincoln, and, by the tenth century, his descendent, Athelstan, defeated the Danes at York and Dublin and subdued Scotland. He was truly the king of England and styled himself the King of all Britannia. He is buried in Malmesbury Abbey. He had created the nation of Britain with its structure of shires, towns and parishes. Small Saxon churches could be found in each community where people would meet as well as pray. Land became the mark of power with landowners, known as thegns, owning and farming land. The countryside was worked by them and their slaves or serfs regarded as chattels attached to land along with cattle.

Towns in contrast were populated largely by free people owing loyalty only to the king. These towns prospered and became places of small scale industry and trade. In Canterbury for example there is evidence of pottery and metal work, glass making and leatherwork. Lincoln and Norwich had populations of 6,000, with London and York rather larger. York and Dublin continued to thrive as trading centres as they had under the Danes. At the close of the tenth century England was prosperous and at peace under a line of Anglo-Saxon kings with a map that would be recognisable today.

The tenth century saw the arrival of Benedictine monks from France. They created a Church organised around minsters and so we have names with the suffix minster: Kidderminster, Axminster and Westminster. These minsters sent out missions across the land. This was probably the time of great Saxon churches.

Nothing lasts. The wealth of England once more attracted the Danes who were first paid off by Ethelred from his substantial tax revenues, then came the bloody reign of Canute, with links to Scandanavia and Normandy, who commanded the whole of Britain.

William the Conqueror came to an island attracted by its wealth, its connections with his own Normandy and because king Harold was neither secure on his throne nor free from further Danish attack. As every child knows William conquered the English in 1066 and he set about stamping the Norman mark on the country. He built castles to impose control on the population and towns grew round them. He added new cathedrals of stone to make it clear that God was on his side. We can think of Lincoln, Salisbury, Norwich, Durham, York, Chester, Canterbury, Lichfield, Carlisle, Worcester, Winchester, Gloucester, Ely and Exeter. In time stone bridges were built and roads improved and more towns were protected by stone walls. Blacksmiths were in demand to provide tools for hundreds of stonemasons, to say nothing of weapons - these were violent years. William built what became known as the feudal system on the existing Anglo-Saxon structures, except that now inheritance went to the eldest male child. Women became owned. Philippa Gregory has written a fascinating book exploring the place of women in history.

Kings come and kings go, but often it was others whose influence shows itself in the story of this country. Thus, in the twelfth century an invasion took place which would have much greater significance: the order of Cistercian monks crossed from France. They set about cultivating the land and showed themselves particularly skilled at sheep husbandry: they became the most significant woolgrowers in the land. Spinning and weaving were in the national DNA with spindles being commonly found by archaeologists.

During the reigns of the Norman kings, towns begin to appear either as a place a battle was fought or where an abbey was founded or castle built. We can think of Peterborough, Devizes, Boston, Bishop's Lynn, St Ives, Stratford-upon-Avon, Thame, Northampton, Windsor, Tewkesbury. Hull gained a town wall built of brick. The first windmill was constructed in Yorkshire in 1185.

King Henry II (1154-1189) is viewed as responsible for the codification of Common Law although it was as much a country that was becoming good at administering itself. So we have the law of contract. Oxford was recognised as a place of legal learning. Some forty-nine new towns were created with the principal objective of encouraging markets and hence economic activity. Scarborough was designated a Royal Borough, Leeds was expanded from a small village by the local landowner. Baldock is an interesting story. It was founded by the Knights Templar as the English Baghdad in the hope of creating a vibrant market.

Some towns were becoming known for what they produced, so Colchester and russet cloth, Coventry and soap. From the evidence of archaeological finds, our medieval forbears seem to have been obsessed with security, so there would have been locksmiths. Towns gathered wheelwrights, cartwrights, cordwainers, cobblers, as well as bakers, carpenters, sawyers, millers, brewers and, of course, mason and carpenters. In time, each would gather in a guild which eventually would meet in a guildhall. Towns were taking shape.

The reigns of Richard (1189-1199) and John (1199-1216) were damaging to the economy, since so much wealth was directed at unproductive warfare. These ended with the Magna Carta which would temper the power of kings.

Henry III (1216-1272) is not regarded as a great king, but his long reign was largely peaceful although disturbed at its end by the rebellion led by Simon de Montfort. Henry rebuilt Westminster Abbey. Agriculture thrived, churches were built in the early gothic style, the population grew, exports trebled largely of wool to France - there were eight million sheep and five million people. More towns came to be known for their product: Lincoln for cloth (dyed green or scarlet), Grimsby for fish, Gloucester for iron and Corfe for marble.

Edward I (1272-1307) was as warlike as his father had been peaceful. His foes were the French as he sought to retake his estates and then Wales, and Scotland with William Wallace. All this cost money and taxation was vicious. Wool was taxed and farmers and their workers impoverished. The population grew to six million by 1300 and the country was struggling.

As a sea-faring nation, ports were important. London first, but then Kings Lynn, which gained prominence in the thirteenth century with exports to the countries of the Hanseatic league, and later Bristol, Liverpool and Hull. To these can be added the naval ports: Plymouth, Portsmouth and Rochester, Chatham, Woolwich and Tilbury.

Edward II (1307-1327) was less successful and the country suffered. His son Edward III (1327-1377) regained some prestige, but his country suffered from the Black Death decimating the population thereby causing chaos for society. His Hundred Years War against France proved expensive for the population especially the wool merchants - it was the major product of the economy. He rebuilt Windsor Castle and restored English prestige. By the end of his reign the first mechanical clock was made in England and the first crane stood on the docks. The English language was taking shape with Chaucer and Wycliffe. Particularly English architecture appeared in the simple Perpendicular style as used on Gloucester cathedral. Trade was in the hands of English merchants. For example wool exports by English merchants from Hull had been only 4% in 1275 by 1330 it was 90%. England was becoming a nation.

Richard II succeeded Edward but suffered from rebellion not least the so called Peasants Revolt triggered by the burden on the poor from the Black Death and the king’s constant demands for more taxation. This was not a prosperous country and with a weak king was ripe for challenge which came from Henry Bolingbroke and his house of Lancaster. As Henry IV he too didn’t prosper, this was left to his son Henry V.

We all know of the battle of Agincourt; what I didn’t realise was the organisation that went in equipping the invasion for in the army there were foot soldiers, fletchers, bowyers, carpenters, priests, surgeons, gunners, engineers and 15,000 horses. The fighting force amounted to 8,000 men most of whom were archers using their weapon to devastating effect. For sieges the recently introduced cannon were lethal.

I surmise that the iron for the cannon came from iron works in the Weald possibly as close as Chichester. There is evidence of cannon and gun powder being used in the thirteenth century, but the serious exploitation of Wealden iron would have to wait until the end of the fifteenth century.

Following the victory, the Hundred Years War was reignited and Henry built a navy at Southampton comprising: 'six great ships, eight barges and ten single-masted sailing vessels known as balingers'.

Henry VI succeeded to the throne as a child and was always under the influence of scheming advisers and a scheming French wife. He is the only man to be crowned king of both England and France but lost his French lands, not least because of the actions of Joan of Arc. In England the Commons rose against him and the legal system was hopelessly corrupt

Yet he founded Eton College and Kings College Cambridge. Possibly half of all parish churches were improved, libraries were built at Oxford and Cambridge and a number of cathedrals. Guild Halls were built and bridges repaired. Great houses, unfortified and built of brick, appeared around the land. Yet as always wealth was not evenly distributed.

The iron industry of the Forest of Dean thrived with many forges focused on Gloucester.

A small painted glass industry developed. Silver was mined in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset. The economy moved to money. Shipbuilding thrived, in 1497 John Cabot sailed to the new world from Bristol, just five years after Columbus sailed from Spain. It was the same year that the Portuguese Vasco da Gama sailed round Africa to India.

The world was changing.

Read more in my Who Built Britain blog

Alastair Pilkington - Pilkington and Float Glass

 In Vehicles to Vaccines I named as my construction hero Alastair Pilkington, another Cambridge graduate of Mechanical Sciences. Readers may recall Kelvin Bray in the context of energy. This second graduate was a little older, having served during the Second World War and returned to complete his degree. His name was Pilkington, but he was only very distantly related to the family owning the glass manufacturer. He was discovered by a family member exploring family trees, was interviewed and employed. He rose quickly. His massive contribution was in the invention of the float glass process.

I need to take a step back to 1795 and the birth of Richard Pilkington and 1800 when his brother William was born. Their father William came from Horwich and had moved to become apprenticed to a St Helens doctor. After a spell at St George's Hospital in London he returned to set up in practice, but also as a purveyor of wines and spirits, then not uncommon for doctors.

Dr Pilkington retired in 1826 and his two young sons set up the St Helens Crown Glass Company. They knew nothing of glass making and so hired experienced glassmakers John and Thomas Bell. Peter Greenall of the brewing family and William's brother-in-law joined them as an investor. by 1837 the business was performing well enough to dispense with wines and spirits. The Bells had left some time before and Greenall withdrew in 1847.

The company was renamed Pilkington Brothers was switched from crown glass to sheet glass and by 1860, together with Chance Brothers and one other, made 75% of all the window glass in the country.

The next generation of Pilkington to run the company was Richard's son William, born 1839, who is regarded as responsible for making Pilkington one of the most technically advanced glass companies in the world. He was followed by his sons Austin and Cecil both educated at public school (Shrewsbury) and university (Oxford). Of these Cecil was very much hands on. They saw the company through the recession of the twenties and, true to their religious convictions, set up a displaced glass makers compensation fund and a staff superannuation scheme - very much ahead of its time.

Harry Pilkington, Austin's son, became the very visible fourth generation driving force of the company which he joined in 1927. Changes in management style had been introduced and I wrote about these in relation to Ronald Weeks. Harry worked alongside another family member, Douglas Phelps, who handled day to day business leaving Harry to engage with the wider world.

Alastair Pilkington joined the company in 1947 and is renowned for his invention of float glass. He became deputy chairman in 1971 and chairman from 1973 to 1980. Anthony Pilkington, great great grandson of the founder Richard took the chair and steered the company through challenging years taking the chair of the St Helens Trust which was among the first local enterprise agencies to create jobs for those losing jobs in the company. Pilkington had employed 32,000 people in 1973, reducing to 6,500 in 1986. Anthony retired in 1995 bringing to an end the family leadership. I write of the final years of the company in Vehicles to Vaccines.

You can explore my attempt to answer the question, Who Built Britain, in this link.

Further reading:

Leyland, Brian, St Helens the Great and the Good (Bowdon: Stellar Books, 2018)

Take a look at my Who Built Britain blog

My exploration into British manufacturing kept bumping into wonderful buildings and structures. I needed to discover Who Built Britain  

  Building is in my blood; my mother's family ran a Midlands building company for ninety-nine years having previously been itinerant craftsmen. I remember with huge affection childhood visits to the 'yard'.

My last employment before I retired was as Chief Executive of Lincoln Cathedral where I learnt something of stone masons and the way medieval cathedrals were built. Most recently, I have been exploring the history of British manufacturing and the places where it took place. This brought me close to the building of mills, factories and urban housing, over a period spanning three centuries or so.

I needed to try to understand how it was all built and indeed who built it. 

This research is about Britain and so the story of early English Building is relevant background and a good place to start. It will be my next post.

My next point of call is Rome. Roman architecture stands out because of the variety of materials used and structures built, but most of all because modern building from the Renaissance onward looked to Rome for both theoretical and practical ideas.

I go on from there to look at traditional building materials: wood, stone and brick. Glass comes next, linking the old to the new.

This is very much a work in progress. I hope you will join me in my quest. I plan to post further blogs in the coming weeks. 

I explore classes of building; churches and military buildings starting with castles; church building over ten centuries consumed more labour, money and materials than any other form of building.

The sixteenth century, the Tudor and Elizabethan eras, marked a change in attitude as the English become confident and developed a tendency to show off. So, I move on to the great Country Houses and Urban Houses for the Wealthy and Merchant and, later, Middle Classes. The individual blog pieces take urban building in particular further forward.

As the eighteenth century draws to a close I come to Industrial Buildings which run hand in hand with Urban Dwellings for the poor who fled to the towns from deplorable Rural Dwellings.

I then explore the contractors who first emerged in the nineteenth century. They run hand-in-hand with new building materials: Steel and Concrete and the exploration of non-traditional building methods and materials. In addition to houses, they did of course build hospitals, schools, civic buildings, places of entertainment and infrastructure for transporting the nation.

The image is of the interior of one of the oldest buildings in Britain, the Broch of Mousa on Shetland dating from 2,500 BCE.

The Weston family and Associated British Food

 Garfield Weston set his family company on course to become the anchor-man of British food manufacturing. The company is now called Associated British Food.

Canadian Willard Garfield Weston was born in 1898, his father had emigrated to Canada and created a baking business there. In 1934, Weston moved to England and founded Allied Bakeries which introduced sliced white bread to the English. He also bought the prestigious Fortnum and Mason. The business prospered and he gave generously to the war effort including £100,000 to built 16 Hurricane and Spitfire Aircraft.

He bought Ryvita in 1947 and appointed his second son Gary to run it. Gary left Ryvita for Australia in 1952 and set up Weston Biscuit Company which he grew into a successful business. He invented the Wagon Wheel.

In 1960, Allied Bakeries changed its name to Associated British Foods with the objective of diversifying. In 1963, it acquired the Fine Fair Supermarket chain and in 1967 set up Primark in Dublin. At this point Gary returned to take over from his father. He looked to refocus on food and sold Fine Fare, whilst retaining Primark.

The 1980s saw investment in bakery ingredients. In 1991, the company had built a sufficiently large war chest to buy British Sugar Corporation (BSC) from the family owned Beresfords, which in turn opened the opportunity to move into animal feed using the by-products of sugar. BSC produced sugar from home grown beat; Tate & Lyle used imported sugar cane.

Forever seeking opportunity, ABF moved into ingredients before adding Ovaltine to Twinings. Further acquisitions saw moves into world foods with Patak and Elephant Atta flour, and into health foods with Jordans and Dorset Cereals joining Ryvita.

Gary gave much of his wealth to the Garfield Weston Foundation with funds of £1 billion which supports the built heritage and much more.

In 1994 he reorganised his group creating Wittington Investments. In 1999 he stepped down on the grounds of illhealth. He died in 2002.

He was succeeded by Peter Jackson and then in 2005 by George Weston. ABF now operates in fifty six countries.

Wittington Investments bought the Boots chemists chain in 2026.

Jaguar and Land Rover - a surprising pairing?

 William Lyons and the Wilks brothers created remarkable companies which made iconic vehicles. Was it just fate that brought the companies together?

William Lyons and Maurice Wilks were born three years apart; Lyons in 1901 in Blackpool.

Son of a piano maker, William attended Arnold House School and in 1922 set up in business making sidecars in partnership with William Walmsley. They progressed into body work for cars; the Austin Swallow was one result of this. Their first full car was the Swallow Sports 'SS' which caused a sensation at the 1931 motor show; SS Cars Ltd was born. Four years later the first Jaguar emerged as the first production car to exceed 100mph. The war intervened and SS Cars played their part. The company changed it name top Jaguar Cars Ltd in 1945.

The post image is of an ashtray that was my father's. He had owned one of the first Jaguars in the 1930s; I still have the leather covered wheel hammer.

Maurice Wilks was educated at Malvern and went to the USA in 1926 to work with General Motors. After two years he returned and joined Hillman as a planning engineer. In 1930 he joined Rover as chief engineer being promoted to technical director in 1946. In the aftermath of the war, Maurice and his brother Spencer created a vehicle originally made for farmers from aluminium left over from aircraft production – the Land Rover. Interestingly they always had greater pride in their luxury cars.

The route to the first ‘marriage’ was circuitous.

In the fifties, William Lyons and Jaguar were doing well, producing cars much in demand and they had virtually doubled in size by buying Daimler, but also Coventry Climax and Guy Motors. To be honest this was a pretty rich mix. It therefore still strikes me as strange that Lyons would enter into merger discussions with George Harriman at BMC. Yet, we have to remember the times  –  when BMC’s Mini was the 'must have' car for swinging sixties. BMC also owned MG and Austin-Healey whose sports cars were much in demand.  It seems that Lyons saw BMC as having the weight to finance the development of the Jaguar models which he had at least in his mind if not on the drawing board. Jaguar merged with BMC to become British Motor Holdings in 1966.

The Wilks brothers had retired from Rover in the early sixties and Donald Stokes of Leyland viewed the company as offering a slice of motoring quality to the bus and truck company which he ran. Rover would join Triumph which had become part of Leyland with the Standard-Triumph acquisition in 1960.

The mid sixties saw BMH running into trouble. The answer in the eyes of the new Labour government was size and this would be provided by the charismatic Donald Stokes and Leyland. The merger took place in 1968.

The new group had riches beyond price in terms of wonderful motor cars. The Jaguar E-type and XJ6, the Rover P6, the Triumph 2000, not to mention the MGB and Triumph TR5, and the Land Rover. Rather more ominously it had a large number of old factories, dominant shop stewards and mass market motor cars that the public didn’t really want.

I explore what became the British Leyland story in my book, Vehicles to Vaccines.

For this blog I note just three events that ensured that Jaguar and Land Rover would survive.

The rationalisation of BL could so easily have led to the loss of the Land Rover; instead the factory at Solihull was made over to 4x4 production. The Range Rover had been introduced at the end of the sixties just as BL was running out of money. The car was perfectly timed and demand soon far exceeded supply.

A little later, a brilliant manager, Geoffrey Robinson, was appointed Managing Director of Jaguar. He had no intention of the marque losing it kudos and initiated an ambitious plan to bring the company back on track. A lack of money caused this plan to run into the buffers. The appointment of Michael Edwards to lead to the eventual breakup of British Leyland had for Jaguar a streak of brilliance for he appointed John Egan to take up the reins at the then floundering motor company. Egan and his team brought Jaguar back so much so that, following privatisation, Ford paid handsomely for what was to lead their new speciality car group.

British Leyland became the Rover Group and this was bought by BMW. They in turn sold Land Rover to Ford where it worked closely with Jaguar.

The rest as they say is history, Jaguar and Land Rover both now prosper as JLR as part of the Tata Group.

It is ironic that the Wilks family didn’t see the Land Rover as their great success; it was the experimental vehicle powered by a gas turbine – Rover had after all been part of the development of the jet engine. Had this been the case, Jaguar and Rover would have been head to head. Had Land Rover stuck to the utility vehicle so loved by explorers, Ford may well not have looked at them. Yet with the Range Rover successors, Land Rover and Jaguar together look to the luxury car market where they both can prosper.

Winners and losers since 1951 - Rolls-Royce and Bentley

 Reading through my book Vehicles to Vaccines', some companies jump out as conspicuous success stories, and some less so. Beneath the surface there are many hundreds of smaller British manufacturing concerns which form the backbone of this sector.

Sales of British companies is a recurring theme and there are a number of ways of viewing this. It creates shareholder value. It offers a way for overseas companies to benefit from UK manufacturing expertise. Yet, it saddens me. Am I being too emotional? More seriously, should I be concerned?

In the case of four of our top motor companies, I believe the answer to both is yes. Let's take the example of Rolls-Royce and Bentley. I shall look at Jaguar and Land Rover in a subsequent post.

The story is well known, but can be clouded by the mists of time.

Henry Royce was a superbly talented engineer. He was born in 1863, son and grandson of flour millers. The death of his father meant that he had to leave school and he found a job as a Post Office messenger. At the age of 14 he was taken on as an apprentice at the Great Northern Railway works in Peterborough. Lack of money brought this to an end and he found work with a gun manufacturer in Leeds from where he entered the new world of electricity. He eventually formed with his brother Royce Limited electrical and mechanical engineers. I write of his meeting with Charles Rolls in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Following the untimely death of Rolls, he formed a team around him to complement his engineering skills by adding imaginative marketing. Claude Johnson and Ernest Hives are names that stand out. Johnson’s view was that the company should build on its reputation of serving the aristocracy whose cars were nearly always driven by chauffeurs. Thus, if a customer wished to test drive a car, he would be driven by a Rolls-Royce chauffeur who had been schooled in the etiquette of service. Royce demanded the highest possible standards in engineering, as Johnson did in customer service.

W.O. Bentley was probably as great an engineer. He was born in 1888, the youngest of nine children. He was fascinated by all things mechanical. On leaving Clifton College, he was apprenticed at the Great Northern Railway in Doncaster. His passion had become the internal combustion engine and in 1909 he joined the National Motor Cab Company in London. Three years later he set up with his brother as a motor agent and soon was making wonderful cars. I write of this too in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. At the start of the First World War, he worked for engine builder Gwynne who were not convinced by Bentley’s suggestion of aluminium pistons. Humber harboured no such doubts and, with him, built many engines this way. In 1920 W.O, as he was known, formed Bentley Motors. The Autocar magazine reported that he was working on a model ‘intended to appeal to those enthusiastic motorists who desire a car which, practically speaking, was a true racing car with touring accessories’. Only three years later, the car finished fourth in the Le Mans. It was the Wall Street crash that robbed Bentley of his company, and Rolls-Royce pipped at the post Napier & Sons to buy the valuable marque.

Rolls-Royce then built both cars from their factory at Sinfin Lane in Derby, alongside aeroengines.

When I say they built cars, I mean that they produced the chassis with engine ready for a specialist coach builder to add the coachwork to meet the customers’ requirements.

During the Second World War, the production of aeroengines was vast and critical to the war effort. Cars were also produced as witnessed by the Rolls-Royce used by Field Marshall Montgomery.

Following the war, Rolls-Royce moved the production of cars to the shadow factory they had managed in Crewe, leaving aero-engines at Derby.

W.O. found he could no longer work with Rolls-Royce and so joined Lagonda which later teamed up with Aston-Martin under the ownership of David Brown.

In the fifties and sixties, Rolls-Royce produced some truly iconic cars, not least the Phantom IV, available only to royalty and heads of state.

Rolls-Royce underwent a dramatic change when the development costs of the RB211 aeroengine ran out of control, leading to the placing of the aeroengine company into public ownership. Rolls-Royce Motors was separately floated in 1973, which coincided with the launch of the Corniche, the fastest Rolls-Royce ever.

Rolls-Royce Motors was  bought by Vickers plc in 1980. They had been faced with the capital cost of tooling for new models; Vickers, on the other hand, expected a windfall from the nationalisation of their aircraft and shipbuilding businesses. Vickers worked hard to make the combination work, producing motor cars that the wealthy of the world wanted to buy, under both the Rolls-Royce and Bentley marques. In time, Vickers had to seek partners for Rolls-Royce to develop the next new model. The seeking evolved into a potential sale with BMW as front runners. BMW were already supplying engines for both Rolls-Royce and Bentley models; they also enjoyed success with joint ventures with the aeroengine company, Rolls-Royce plc, which had been privatised in 1987.

In the event, VW outbid BMW. As was widely reported at the time, VW found that they had bought the company without the right to use the brand which still belonged to Rolls-Royce plc. Undaunted, they set about building Bentleys at Crewe. BMW acquired the licence to use  the Rolls-Royce brand and set up a new factory on the Goodwood Estate in Sussex. 

The net result of all this is a duo of fully financed and commercially supported companies building distinct Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars in England. So, possibly not a cause for sadness.

Is it a cause for concern? Had this been an isolated incident the answer may well be no. As it is, these were just two of a long line of sales which neither the government nor the city did a thing to stop.

There is of course a postscript. The flood of Chinese cars into the EU is putting pressure on the German car makers. The outcome at present is uncertain.

Read more in Vehicles to Vaccines

Sir Arnold Hall - Hawker Siddeley

 My favourites were the Vickers Viscount, in which I was fortunate enough to fly on a number of occasions, and the de Havilland Comet. My aircraft manufacturing hero though is Sir Arnold Hall, chairman and managing director of Hawker Siddeley from 1967 to 1977. There are many possible reasons, but top of the list must be Hawker’s decision to remain with the Airbus project when the government decided to end its involvement.

The name, Hawker Siddeley, still sends shivers down my spine and I shared Hall’s sadness when it was absorbed into British Aerospace. The name Hawker conjures up Sopwith and later the Hurricane. It was, though, the Comet that made Hall’s name. Let me explain.

Arnold Hall was born in Liverpool to a talented piano teacher; his father was an upholsterer. Other members of the family had been seafarers. His boyhood passion was making steam engines. He won a scholarship to Alsop High School at Walton from which he went on to a brilliant career at Claire College, Cambridge where he won many prizes. During his doctorate, he worked with Frank Whittle on the mathematics of the jet engine compressor.

The Second World War found him at the Royal Aircraft Establishment where he led the teams that produced both the advanced bomb-sight and the gyro gun-sight. He was appointed director of the Farnborough establishment in 1951.

In 1952, the Comet took to the skies to much acclaim,.but after only two years three aircraft failed in operation. Investigations were undertaken, but no cause found. The government called upon Farnborough to undertake a full independent investigation which Hall led. He concluded that mathematical investigation was not leading to answers. In his obituary in the Guardian, the writer says this:

Hall promptly built Farnborough's famous "whole pressurised aircraft" test rig, in which the stresses of flight cycles could be simulated rapidly many thousands of times on a complete aircraft. The outcome, clinched by early and massive failure of the test aircraft's pressurised cabin, explained the catastrophes, provided new knowledge of aluminium alloys under repeated stress, gave new meaning to the concept of "fatigue life", and revealed the unexpected inadequacy of conventional and hitherto highly trusted methods of stress testing and analysis.

With this discovery, the Comet 4 was produced but by then it had been overtaken by other aircraft. Hall was knighted at the age of 39.

Hall joined Hawker Siddeley first as Technical Director. He led Bristol Aero-engines and then joined the main company where amongst much else he chaired the Anglo-French Concorde design team. In Vehicles to Vaccines I write of the nationalisation of the aircraft industry and the subsequent diversification of Hawkers which Hall led.

He retired in 1986, but continued his involvement with the scientific life of the nation,

Further reading:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/jan/11/guardianobituaries2

Follow this link to discover more

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.

Find out most of this by following the link

New Book - 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.

It is available to buy on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback.

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)

Link to Amazon to explore this: