In 1843 Isambard Kingdom Brunel built a revolutionary ship in Bristol’s western dock. It was iron hulled and had both steam engine and sails. The principal innovation was the screw propeller replacing the paddles used up to that point. The image is of a replica of the original propeller on the conserved SS Great Britain at its home in the dry dock in Bristol.
The ship made the trip to Australia some thirty times and ended its service coaling the British fleet in the First World War. It offered luxury
Alongside hardship
Bristol’s history is maritime and inevitably bound up with slavery as were so many British ports. The maritime link led to the city’s principal businesses WD and HO Wills with cigarettes and JS Fry with chocolate. The city also refined sugar. The presence of these businesses and extensive foreign trade encouraged the development of banking in the city which, until comparatively recently, prided itself on its ability to finance its own business.
Shipbuilding was important, but, like textiles and iron, Bristol didn’t have the advantages of competing northern cities. Nonetheless the city had a major cotton mill for over a century. Before this, like many parts of the country, it was a centre of the woollen cloth trade. It gained a reputation for skilled iron work. The size of the dock limited the size of ships that could be built. The same was less true of non-ferrous metals.
The Mendips had reserves of both lead and zinc. Lead was mined and smelted during the nineteenth century. The arsenic content hardened the metal making it suitable for use as shot. It was a Bristol engineer who invented the process of making shot by dropping it from a tower through a sieve into cold water thus producing perfectly spherical shot.
Zinc had many uses. Added to copper, mined in Cornwall, it made brass largely for Birmingham manufacturers. The smelting of the ore released sulphuric acid used in the production of tin in Swansea just over the Bristol channel. Zinc was also used in galvanising first iron and then steel. John Lysaght set up in Bristol to exploit this process; he added mills in Newport and Wolverhampton and eventually became part of GKN. A fourth use of zinc as an oxide is used in medical products.
Bristol's relationship with zinc came in two major phases. William Champion began exploitation in 1743 and the industry thrived and then declined as Birmingham took more of the processing. The First World War offered a resurgence. Then zinc ore was coming from Australia and was being smelted in Germany before subsequent import into Britain. Clearly the war put a stop to this and Winston Churchill commissioned a major zinc production plant on Avonside, the National Smelting Corporation, which was completed in 1923. In 1928 it became part of the Imperial Smelting Corporation and then faced a long period of decline as the demand fell back to peacetime levels. Imperial Smelting, also in Swansea, became part of RTZ.
WD and HO Wills distinguished themselves from the many other cigarette makers by their technical innovation and marketing. In 1902 they became the largest part of the new Imperial Tobacco. Both Wills and Fry had attracted packaging businesses. ES & A Robinson emerged as a leader and later merged with Dickinson of Hemel Hempstead. Printed packaging materials were needed in ever increasing quantities. The most significant manufacturer became part of Imperial which later dramatically increased production only for it to fall back as cigarette smoking declined in popularity.
The GWR connected Bristol to London in 1841, with the workshops at Swindon. Nevertheless there was room for more, and engineering came to Bristol in the form of locomotive and railway wagon builders. These were followed by trams, out of which the Bristol Aeroplane Company emerged. In the Second World War it employed over 50,000 people and built such iconic aircraft as the Blenheim. Bristol Aero Engines was later bought by Rolls-Royce; their Olympus powered Concorde. The British Aircraft Corporation, into which Bristol Aircraft merged, built their Concorde at nearby Filton. I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines. BAE Systems still manufacture aircraft at Filton where Airbus UK also carry out design work. At nearby Abbey Wood, BAE Systems manufacture combat vehicles. The Bristol Motor Company was a child of the city. The Douglas Motor Cycle company manufactured many thousands of motor bikes in the First World War. This was bought by Westinghouse Brake and Signal and made brakes and signals but also Vespa scooters.
More recently Bristol attracted service businesses and also inward investment; Hewlett Packard built a factory to the north of the city in the 1980s. The semiconductor manufacturer Inmos (later owned by Thorn EMI) had a design centre in Bristol. Bristol now thrives as a predominantly service economy.
Further reading
- Industrial Change in Bristol since 1800 (http://historycd.uwe.ac.uk/)
- E.J. COCKS and B. WALTERS. A History of the Zinc Smelting Industry in Britain (London: George Harrap. 1968)
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