Dartford and Thameside manufacturing history

 Dartford in the well-watered, sheltered valleys of the Darent and Cray invited occupation, certainly by the Romans and successive invaders. Over the centuries trades emerged and prospered. One of particular note was the making of paper from rags. John Spilman was granted a monopoly for the collection of rags for paper making. A number of paper mills followed including the Phoenix Mill of TH Saunders noted for the quality of its early machine made paper.

Armament production came to Dartford in the mid eighteenth century in the shape of a gun powder factory. This was succeeded by Vickers, Son and Maxim in the nineteenth century in Powder Mill Lane with an ammunition factory.

In 1889, Burroughs Wellcome took over a former mill for pharmaceutical manufacture and in 1914 built a new factory which was added to over the years reaching some 65 acres and over a million square feet of building. They had 2,800 employees in 1979.

A significant if lesser known manufacturer was John Hall a blacksmith who arrived in Dartford in 1785. By the time of his death in 1836 he had a iron works in Dartford, a gunpowder works in Faversham, a paper mill in Horton Kirby and a flour mill at Chislehurst. One of his apprentices was Bryan Donkin who with Hall built a works in Bermondsey to make tin cans for preserving food. I wrote of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. The Hall iron works supplied many local industries: gas works, zinc mills, paper mills and cement works. Of greatest importance was their work on refrigeration. It was said that in the Second World War 37% of the nations storage capacity was cooled by Hall's machines.

In 1886 Halls had installed their first cold air cooling machine on a large cargo ship carrying perishable foodstuffs. At that time Britain was the world's leading importer of food from Australia, South America and elsewhere and so refrigeration was essential. Cold air was better than previous methods but a better solution was needed. In 1889 Halls added carbon dioxide in a two stage compressor. To achieve yet colder temperatures, Ammonia was used and a plant was installed in Grimsby to make ice for the trawler fleet. In 1959, the company merged with Thermotank of Glasgow which made patented cooling and ventilation devices. The merged company bought Vent-Axia of Crawley in 1959 and was itself bought by APV in 1976. It is now part of the Japanese Daikin Group and continues to manufacture in Dartford.

The south bank of the Thames with its reserves of chalk and mud turned out to be the ideal location for cement manufacture.

Lime had been used for millennia in the making of mortar to join stone and brick. The Romans built lime kilns to burn limestone and produce quicklime. Such kilns were to be found across Britain where limestone was to hand. In the seventeenth century it was found that quicklime spread on fields would aid the growth of crops by reducing the acidity of the soil. The demand for quicklime kept growing.

There is evidence that as early as 8,000 BC it had been found that the addition of small amounts of volcanic ash gave the lime the capacity to set under water. In England, John Smeaton, known as the father of civil engineering, building the Eddystone lighthouse discovered that the property of hardening whilst submerged in water was linked to the clay content of the cement. In 1824, a Leeds stonemason, Joseph Aspdin, took this a stage further and invented a method of making from limestone and clay a cement which he called Portland Cement given the similarity in colour between it and Portland stone. He patented his invention and his son William exploited it further setting up a manufacturing plant in Rotherhithe. Other plants followed along the banks of the Thames and Medway using local deposits of chalk and clay taken from the mud of the river banks.

It seems likely that Portland cement was used by Marc Brunel in the construction of the Thames Tunnel in 1828. The story is that Brunel had been using the cheaper Roman Cement patented by James Parker of Northfleet in 1796, but the tunnel collapsed. Tons of Portland Cement were poured in and sealed the tunnel which could then be completed.

Limestone was also used as a flux for the smelting of iron to remove the impurity of silica, which when heated combines with the lime to form slag which is then removed and used for road making.

The exact proportion of lime to clay was crucial and depended on the make up of the local deposits used. The mixing would be either using water or by grinding the dry rocks. In time, cement plants appeared across Britain exploiting local mineral deposits and the availability of coal to heat the mixture until it calcined. In 1845, Isaac Johnson, then manager of the Swanscombe Works close to Dartford, fired the mixture to a higher temperature (1400-1450C) until the mixture clinkered. This was then ground to a fine powder and is essentially the Portland cement we use today.

Cement making was a dirty process and the towns folk complained. Johnson though went ahead with larger works at Greenhithe. In time there were some thousand kilns along the banks of the Thames and Medway.

In 1900 the Associated Cement Manufacturers Company was formed bringing together some twenty four companies all but two on the Thames and Medway including two of the early plants Robin's and Swanscombe. This company became Blue Circle Cement and is now owned by the French Lafarge.

Further reading:

• Geoff Porteus, The Book of Dartford (Buckingham: Barracuda Books 1979)

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)