Medway towns manufacturing history

 Rochester was a cathedral city until local government changes caused the status to lapse on its joining the Medway unitary authority. Nevertheless, its cathedral is the seat of the Bishop of the Rochester Diocese dating back to the sixth century. Rochester boasts a castle whose keep is one of the best preserved in England or France. Rochester has been occupied by Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans.

Chatham in contrast was a small village on the mud flats of the Medway not far from Rochester and close to Gillingham, Strood and Rainham. It was the mud that attracted naval use. Henry VIII had built the first substantial Royal Navy including the Mary Rose, the first purpose built warship. The Medway then came into its own since the ships could safely be beached and there have their hulls cleaned, caulked and tarred.

Elizabeth I added to the navy, galleys - ships with both sail and oars. These were stationed at Chatham where they could easily be maintained. The dockyard was already bigger than Portsmouth, Deptford and Woolwich and it maintained and improved on this position through the years of war with the Dutch. The yard attracted shipwrights, carpenters, sailmakers, smiths, sawyers, riggers and mast makers.

In the early seventeenth century a new dry dock was built along with mast docks, sail loft and rope house - the latter being 1,000 feet long, the length of the longest rope. The tactic for naval ships was simple, to be massively armed to wreak destruction at short range. The massive PRINCE was an exemplar of this ship type known as the First Rate with three gun decks. These early ships would be armed by cannon cast in iron works in the nearby Weald.

With the eighteenth century came another opponent - the French - and so the centre of gravity for the navy moved westward to Portsmouth and Plymouth. More than this, the theatre of naval warfare moved from the sea between Britain and the Continent to the oceans: the Mediterranean, Caribbean and Atlantic. The ships required for this more open warfare needed to be more agile and so tended to be Third Rate with seventy-four guns or frigates with thirty-two guns. In the course of the century the Royal Navy moved to a position of increasing strength where victory was always expected. This was great credit to the men who sailed the ships and lived in the most appalling conditions, but also to the dockyards.

For Chatham, the eighteenth century meant first completion of the improvement programme, but then decline as resources were directed to Portsmouth and Plymouth. The century ended with restoration ready for the next great conflict: the Napoleonic Wars. At the end of the eighteenth century the Chatham dockyard was the largest employer in the South East with some 2,000 men.

The navy's most famous ship, the VICTORY, was built at Chatham in 1765 and had a chequered career culminating in her being fitted out as a hospital ship in 1797. Two years later she was to be converted into a prison hulk. Instead, orders were given for her to be rebuilt and she left Chatham in 1800 as a superb fighting First Rate ship. These vast ships were built from four thousand oak trees with a compliment of 850 men. The lower of three gun decks was equipped with 42-pounders, the middle deck with 24-pounders and the top deck with 12-pounders giving a broadside of 1,176 pounds. Iron guns were most likely now cast at the Carron works in Falkirk with brass cannon made by Samuel Walker in Rotherham.

The nineteenth century saw reduced employee numbers with the ending of hostilities, but also the introduction of industrial process with a steam-powered sawmill designed and built by Marc Brunel. This incorporated a canal and and overhead rail system, with seasoned uncut timber entering at one end with sawn planks emerging at the other. I wrote in my blog on Portsmouth of Brunel's other inistiative of mechanising the process of pulley production.

The new century also saw the beginning of a dramatic change with steam power taking over from wind and sail. I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the transition from wooden hulls through iron clads to iron and then steel hulled ships. Mid-century saw a major investment in Chatham as it became the only eastern yard with the closure of Woolwich (although its continuance as the army's arsenal) and of Deptford. The work was substantial with new dry and wet docks, repair and fitting out basins all demanding some 110 million bricks made on site from a 21 acre brickfield. As the century drew to a close, ships became ever bigger culminating in the Dreadnaught Class which was too big either to be built or repaired at Chatham.

Her days seemed to be numbered until the Navy decided that they needed to build the newly invented submarines alongside private contractors not least to test their costings. The yard went on to build many submarines alongside Vickers at Barrow. In the Second World War it built smaller surface vessels and refitted a great many vessels of all kinds. At its peak the yard employed 13,000 people from Chatham, Rochester, Gillingham and Strood, and further afield.

The dockyard closed in 1981.

Rochester itself became home to Short Brothers which from 1913 manufactured flying boats or float planes was they were called at their factory at the Borstal end of the city. Their planes served with distinction during the First World War. Shorts survived the slump of the twenties by diversifying into buses, barges and motor boats. They came back into the limelight with the Shorts Singapore which in 1927 made a spectacular flight around the coast of Africa. The thirties saw the Shorts Empire operated by Imperial Airways and offering their 24 passengers a choice of cabins, births and a smoking room. From the design of the Empire came the Sunderland with innovations including a powered gun turret. Many saw service during the Second World War as did the Stirling four engine bomber of which I wrote in my book MacRoberts Reply. In 1943 the company was compulsorily purchased by the government and production dispersed to Belfast away from enemy bombing. With the return of peace, the company moved its operations to Belfast.

BAE Systems Faraday test centre and Advanced Aerospace Technologies are now based in Rochester.

In the nineteenth century Strood became home to Stewart Brothers and Spencer which extracted oil from seeds and sold the residue as cattle feed. Seeds would come by ships from as far afield as India, America and Russia.

Aveling and Porter manufactured agricultural machinery and went on to manufacture steam engines. In the thirties they became part of Agricultural Engineering and joined Barford & Perkins of Peterborough to form Aveling Barford which also took the Hornsby steam and road roller business based in Grantham.

Wingets took the Aveling site to manufacture cement mixers. Strood had attracted cement manufacturers like many sites on the Thames and Medway. Portland cement had become an essential part of building in the mid-nineteenth century. I write more about this in my piece on Dartford.

Gillingham had a history of textile manufacture with the Gillingham Silk Company in business from 1769 to 1875. There was also linen manufacture and glove making. The Copperas Works produced dyes and inks. In the late 19th century the Brennan Torpedo works was established.

Gillingham is also headquarters of Delphi Automotive Systems which had been spun out of General Motors and included AC Delco, Automotive Products of Leamington and Lucas Diesel Systems based in Gillingham. It was bought by BorgWarner which spun it into PHINIA.

Further reading:

• Philip MacDougall, The Book of Medway (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1989)
• Philip MacDougall, The Chatham Dockyard Story (Rochester: Rochester Press, 1981)
• https://www.worldcementassociation.org/about-cement/our-history

Weybridge and Brooklands manufacturing history

Brooklands Motor Racing Circuit was close to Weybridge and brought motor racing enthusiasts and manufacturers including the Itala Automobile Company. It was the first purpose built race track in the world and had banked curves, very much the place where enthusiasts of the internal combustion engine gathered whether on the track or in the air. Alliot Verdan Roe carried out his flight trials there as did Sopwith of Kingston which had a training school there.

In 1915, the Itala factory was taken by Vickers to manufacture aircraft. They began with the Bentley designed BE.2 but then the government decided on the Farnborough designed SE5a and production began with a Hispano-Souza engine. Some 1,000 were produce exceeding the number of aircraft produced by any of the National Aircraft Factories. Vickers were in the aircraft business.

In the interwar years, the Brooklands track became the venue for many races including the British Grand Prix and the British Racing Drivers Club 500 mile race. Drivers including Malcolm Campbell and John Cobb raced there.

Another arrival in the twenties was the Airscrew Company which manufactured propellors. Over the years the business developed to include propeller blades for variable pitch aircrews. An artificial wood was developed called Weyroc. The company diversified into all manner of fans.

During the Second World War, the Vickers Weybridge factory manufactured Wellesley and Wellington bombers. The airfield was also where the Hawker Hurricane was brought for testing from its Kingston factory.

The Vickers design team at Weybridge came up with one winner in particular in the post war world: the Viscount passenger aircraft which was flown by BEA and many other operators.

The Vickers research department was headed by Dr Barnes Wallis who had created the Dam Busters bomb. His team went on to design some of the early missiles.

Aircraft production came up with the Valiant as a stop gap before the V Bombers came into service and then the civil Vanguard and VC10 neither of which lived up to the success of the Viscount. The factory closed in 1986. I write much more about Vickers in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Further reading:

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

 

Farnborough manufacturing history

The Factory, as the Royal Aircraft Factory was known to the early aircraft manufacturers, came to Farnborough as the Army School of Ballooning which had been formed at Woolwich during the Boer War and then moved to nearby Aldershot before coming home to Farnborough with the formation of the Army Balloon Factory.

In the early days its mission was to try to impose safety standards on the reckless adventurers who were the first to take to the air. When the Wright Brothers succeeded with powered flight the army turned its attention to the marriage of aircraft and the internal combustion engine and the Royal Aircraft Factory was born.

All this came just in time for the First World War and initially the use of aircraft for reconnaissance. The Factory came up with designs alongside the commercial manufacturers and, as I suggest in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, played leapfrog with the Germans, and aeroplanes became ever more technically advanced. I write about this in my chapter on the First World War.

The interwar years presented something of a hiatus of aircraft design until re-armament began. The Factory was once again up with the pack in aircraft design.

After the Second World War, the British aircraft industry was vast but, unlike the Americans and Germans, relied too much on old technology. The Royal Aircraft Establishment as it had been renamed was tasked with the challenge of leading the drive to ever more advanced technology. We were at war, but it was a Cold War demanding a whole different approach.

In 1962 the Establishment employed 8,500 people including 1,500 scientists.

This remarkable team of people tackled a good number of knotty problems.

• jet lift and the control of vertical takeoff aircraft, culminating in the Hawker Harrier
• supersonic interception aircraft culminating in the English Electric Lightning
• the V bombers
• the enquiry into the Comet crashes to understand why it happened and how it could be avoided in future
• Concorde and supersonic transport, employing the wind tunnels to full effect.

The site comprised a range of buildings:

• Q121 24ft wind tunnel
• R133 Transonic wind tunnel
• R52 1916 wind tunnel building
• R136 11.5 ft x 8.5ft wind tunnel
• R178 Materials and chemistry building
• R51 Forge and Foundry
• Q120/Q146 Seaplane test tank
• R173 Romney buildings
• Q134 Weapons testing building
• Q65 The fabric shop
• Q170 Telephone exchange
• Q153 Structural test building

The site was decommissioned in 1998 and had been redeveloped as Farnborough Business Park. However the legacy was preserved to an extent in the air tunnel buildings owned by the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust, a museum in the Balloon Factory named Trenchard House and a massive portable airship hangar. There is of course the annual Farnborough International Airshow held at the Farnborough International Exhibition and Conference Centre.

Further reading:

Adam Wilkinson, Save Farnborough: The Cradle of British Aviation (London: SAVE Britain's Heritage, 2001)

Southampton manufacturing history

 Southampton was one of the great English ports first identified as so used in Roman times. The port was later ravaged by the Vikings. Henry V, having won the battle of Agincourt, set about building a navy to defeat the French. His largest ship the Grace Dieu was built in Southampton. The port grew as the benefit of Agincourt flowed in terms of comparative peace and the taking of Normandy. With the shift in opponents from Spain to France, Portsmouth became the primary naval port and Southampton was called upon to supplement its ship building resources as needed. It later prospered with yards for smaller ships and yachts.

Southampton as a port thrived with deliveries of coal from the Tyne. In time it added imports and exports to and from the empire. The nearby oil refinery at Fawley is run by Esso. It has long handled imports of timber and chemicals.

The city is now forever associated with ocean going liners taking their mix of passengers to the new world. We can think of the Titanic, but many more. The Southampton story started much smaller, although P&O made the port its home from the early nineteenth century. It was the years following Waterloo and the defeat of Napoleon that the peaceful and pleasurable use of the sea took off. Steam was fundamental and it was smaller steam packets that busied themselves in the Solent crossing to the Isle of Wight and taking trippers round the island. Bigger vessels also made regular trips to the Channel Islands. The coming of the railway in 1840 opened up Southampton to the growing London population and steam packets prospered. It was then that Southampton really featured in trans Atlantic travel, although the Thames still held on to much passenger and freight business. P&O moved back to London, but Cunard White Star took its place in Southampton. In the 1930s P&O moved back to Southampton.

The Chiswick based shipbuilding company owned by John Thornycroft moved to Woolston Southampton in 1900 and continued their manufacture of specialist naval vessels in the yard built by T.L. Oswald of Sunderland in 1870. During the Second World War they built seventeen destroyers, torpedo boats, mine sweepers and landing-craft and numerous other craft. In 1968 they amalgamated with Gosport-based Vospers to form Vosper Thornycroft. Harland & Wolff had a ship repair operation in Southampton from 1907 until 1973 when it was sold to Vosper Thornycroft. The ship building activity of the company is now part of BAE Systems Maritime based in Portsmouth.

Ship building also focused on yachts. Camper and Nicholson, founded at Gosport, but with a yard in Southampton, built Gypsy Moth IV for Sir Francis Chichester for his single handed journey around the globe. Oyster at Hythe and also Wroxham in Norfolk build and manage super yachts. Moody founded in Swanwick in 1827 made world class yachts until 2007 when the company was sold to the German Hanse Yachts.

The city became home to aircraft manufacture at the time when take off and landing on the sea was seen as more convenient than building land based air-ports. The company that championed this just outside Southampton was Pemberton-Billing Ltd, later named Supermarine and later still bought by Vickers. My mother included in her diaries (transcribed in my book Dunkirk to D Day) her account of travelling in a flying boat in the Second World War.

At Woolston, Supermarine in the thirties designed Spitfires and built their fuselages, the remainder being subcontracted to other aircraft manufacturers around the country. Avro had built aircraft at Hamble in the First World War. The site was subsequently used by Hawker Siddeley Aviation for their advanced training aircraft.

In electronics, Phillips (formerly Mullard) made integrated circuits in their Southampton factory. BAE Systems manufacture radar with its Digital Intelligence unit on the Isle of Wight and Combat Management Systems at Portsmouth. They were building on the legacy of Marconi whose experiments on the Solent resulted in wireless radio as I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Southampton has been the recipient of inward investment from Pirelli with their cable works, Goodyear Tyres, Ford Motor Company, IBM, Apple and GE of America. BAT has made cigarettes in Southampton since 1912, but now the focus has shifted to non-combustible nicotine products.

As elsewhere, Southampton major employers are now in the service industries

Further reading:

A. Temple Patterson, Southampton - a biography (London: Macmillan, 1970)

Hayes manufacturing history

 Hayes was, in the early nineteen century, an agricultural town untouched by industrialisation except for the Grand Union Canal along the banks of which bricks were made to meet the demands of London's builders. The Great Western Railway passed through Hayes in the 1830's, but it would be another thirty years before the town got its own station and a further thirty years before the factories arrived.

The industrial development was to the south of the town with the Grand Union Canal to the north and the GWR running across it. Unlike the New Towns or even Letchworth, which was broadly comtemporary, Hayes industry grew with little regard to infrastructure. By 1915 the working population was 7,000, 4,000 of whom came daily by train from as far afield as Paddington and Windsor.

J.A. King and their fireproof partitions were the first manufacturers on site, followed by the British Transformer Company which moved from Paddington; Arthur Lee with slate, marble and granite working moved from Bristol. The Gos Printing Company of Chicago made newspaper printing machines.

The most significant arrival was the Gramophone and Typewriter Company which took an eleven acre site for a factory because their German factory couldn't keep pace with demand for gramophone records; the company adopted the 'His Master's Voice' HMV label. Hayes was to be a place of music, for HMV was joined by manufacturer of pianolas, the Orchestrelle Company. A pianola was a piano operated by a music roll; these were also made in Hayes by the Universal Music Company. A further link to HMV came through the printers Harrison & Sons who not only printed postage stamps but also the sleeves for records.

Food manufacturing came to Hayes in the shape of Scott's Preserves which grew strawberries in the Clyde valley. R&W Scott prospered as a family company for five generations before selling to Hero. A management buyout returned them to independence in 2022 with a plant back in Scotland.

The First World War saw factories turned over to the war effort and with three significant additions. Army Motor Lorries and Wagons employed largely Belgian refugees and made the bodies with chassis provided by motor manufacturers. Part of their premises was taken by Fairey Aviation which during the war assembled Short Model 827 planes. The other wartime addition was shell filling factory No 7. In my book Ordnance I write in detail about the shell filling factory at Chilwell just outside Nottingham. In Hayes the factory comprised 397 buildings giving a floor area of 14 acres in a site amounting to 200 acres allowing enough space between huts to avoid explosions spreading.

After the war, Fairey continued to expand and built an aerodrome near Harmondsworth; this site would become part of Heathrow Airport. In terms of music, pianolas declined in popularity as records and record players found their way into more and more homes. HMV merged with the UK arm of Columbia Gramophone Company to become Electric and Musical Industries. EMI set up their Central Research Laboratory here and produced remarkable discoveries in television but of most enduring importance the CAT Scanner which enabled doctors to examine internal tissue.

A great deal of much needed housing was built.

The Second World War saw an ICI plant in Hayes producing for the war effort as well as a Royal Ordnance Factory. Fairie manufactured many aircraft most notably the Swordfish bi-plane which proved itself especially effective in attacking enemy shipping.

After the war, the Smith Crisps factory, which had been built in the twenties, was moved to Corby with associated job losses. Fairey merged with Westland eventually moving to Taunton. EMI merged with Thorn but then de-merged and focused on music publishing rather than the associated hardware. I write more about Thorn and EMI in Vehicles to Vaccines. As was the case elsewhere, distribution and service industries gradually took the place of manufacturers.

Further reading:

Catherine Kelter, Hayes Past (London: Historical Publications, 1996)

Hull manufacturing history

 ‘It presents the eye an interesting spectacle of numerous vessels floating to and from the port of Hull: while that opulent and commercial town in its low situation close to the banks and surrounded by the masts of the shipping in the docks seems to rise like Venice from amidst the sea, the whole comprising a scene which for beauty and grandeur can scarcely be exceeded.’

This quotation from Bradshaw’s Guide had, behind it, a profound change in the lot of the British home. The railway had opened the inland but had also made accessible the shore to inland dwellers, and, in particular, had brought to the tables of ordinary people food never previously dreamed of. Hull, which had been a home of whaling, became the home of the British fishing fleet landing vast quantities of cod and haddock which would be whisked away by railway train to all parts of the country. That though is for later in the story.

Hull was first and foremost a port. In his book History of Kingston upon Hull, Hugh Calvert writes that Hull along with Liverpool were the major ports serving the Industrial Revolution and so were busy with both imports and exports. Hull at the mouth of the Humber was by the eighteenth century linked by rivers to Sheffield, Leeds, Huddersfield, Wakefield and Halifax. Soon canals would also link to Birmingham, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and Leicestershire and East Lancashire. Exports comprised iron, lead and metal goods but also pottery, hosiery and beer. Imports were of Swedish and Russian iron, timber, corn, linseed, flax, turpentine and tar. The Continent of Europe was the major destination but Hull also competed with Liverpool for the trade with America. With trade grew banking and the Smith's Bank also in Nottingham and Lincoln was just one of the progeny.

Shipbuilding had flourished in Hull since the fourteenth century or even earlier. Ships built included whalers, ships for the carriage of wine and naval vessels. The most important shipbuilder by the eighteenth century was the Blaydes family. Notoriously, a Hull shipyard built the Bounty later known for the mutiny against Captain Bligh. Steam and iron came successfully to Hull at the hands of the Earle family. In terms of shipping companies, it was the Wilson family that took pride of place.

The Earle family was also responsible for bringing the making of Roman Cement to Hull just three years before the invention of modern Portland Cement in 1824. The company would become part of the Blue Circle Group.

Manufacturing was the order of the day and Hull was not to be left out. It tried mills for both flax and cotton, but neither took off. Seeds for the oil they contained were more promising and factories for rolling and crushing seeds began to be built alongside businesses manufacturing the machinery required. In terms oil for margarine and soap, much later Unilever bought into the local industry. Oil was also used for paint, especially when combined with lead, and a paint industry emerged with Blundells, but also Reckitts which would become Reckitt and Colman manufacturing laundry starch, black lead and household polish.

The latter part of the nineteenth century saw a dramatic increase in the number of ships fishing from Hull. A rich area of fish had been discovered, growing urban areas were seeking sources of food and the technique of trawling for fish had been adopted. Ships powered by steam and then diesel added to the activity as did the invention of a means of making ice. Fish had to be kept cold from the point of being caught up to the point of sale at the fish market, and ice had been imported from Norway to achieve this. The Hull Ice Manufacturing Company began making its own ice in 1891. The Fylde Ice Company may take issue and suggest that its founder Joseph Marr, a Hull trawler man, had begun importing ice in 1860 and his son James set up the Ice Company in Fylde in 1908. That company expanded in to cold storage and still makes ice. One spin off from deep water fishing was the processing of cod liver oil, much 'loved' by those of us of a certain age.

The twentieth century saw Distillers set up plant to produce industrial alcohol and other chemical products of which I write in Vehicles to Vaccines. Smith + Nephew started out in Hull and still manufacture in the town. Hull is also still home to Ideal Heating formed in 1906. In nearby Brough, BAE Systems run the engineering centre for the Hawk trainer. This builds on the legacy of Hawker Siddeley and before then Robert Blackburn who set up the Brough factory at the start of the First World War.

Further reading:

Hugh Calvert History of Kingston upon Hull (Chichester: Phillimore, 1978)