Chelmsford manufacturing history

 A treat for any amateur industrial archeologist, in 1987 Stanley Wood published a booklet describing Chelmsford Industrial Trail updated by Tony Crosby and Dave Buckley in 2018. This offers the reader a wonderful taste of this late industrial town and I draw upon it in this blog piece, though far from entirely.

Chelmsford was where Marconi first manufactured and I wrote extensively of him and his business in both How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. Just a little earlier Colonel Crompton came to the town following a distinguished military career and bought a local iron works. This is at the heart of the development of electricity in Britain and, again I wrote of it in both books but also the American angle in this blog. There are many other connections with the town which I highlight below. So, to Chelmsford.

It was a Roman town as indeed was neighbouring Colchester. It was an agricultural centre opened up by the Chelmer and Blackwater navigation in 1797 and by the railway in 1843 with the opening of the Brentwood to Colchester line. The London Road Iron works was taken over by Richard Coleman in 1848 and three years later he was among the prize winners at the Great Exhibition. In 1866 the business became Coleman & Morton which produced highly regarded agricultural implements until 1907.

The Anchor Works, which Colonel Crompton bought in 1878, began life as an iron works in 1833 and was later taken over by THP Dennis another agricultural implement maker. Crompton made it a key actor in the electrification of Britain.

It was the coming of electricity and Cromptons which radically changed Chelmsford, not least because in due course its streets were lit by bright electric light. Dynamos needed power to drive them and neighbouring Colchester had James Paxman all too keen to get involved. Steam engines were a competitive market and so Cromptons developed a good number of fruitful relationships. In his Reminiscences he singles out Willans as his chief steam engine collaborator and describes the single generation unit that combined on one platform a dynamo made by Cromptons with a fast steam engine made by Willans & Robinson of Thames Ditton. Cromptons could claim credit for many prestigious installations including Lord Randolph Churchill's house and the Royal Courts of Justice. Of no less importance was the ability to use incandescent lamps in coal mines.

Of possibly as great importance there is a story of Crompton himself inspiring the young Sebastian de Ferranti whose influence in the British electrical engineering industry would exceed that of Crompton and I write of it in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Whilst Crompton acknowledges his possible influence on Ferranti he spells out the fact that they were on different sides of The Battle of the Systems. I describe that in the USA between Edison and Westinghouse in the blog piece I referred to earler. In Britain it was in London that Ferranti championed high voltage AC current from his Deptford power station, whereas Crompton made money out of more local schemes using a lower voltage DC. Crompton were great adapters.

Cromptons moved to a much larger factory in 1896 whose vast assembly bays enabled the company to build the big generators, transformers and switchgear needed by the new national grid in the twenties. After a period of investment by Armstrong Siddeley, Crompton merged with Parkinson of Leeds to become Crompton Parkinson which would later join their earlier rival Brush becoming part of Hawker Siddeley.

Of interest to me but perhaps less so to Chelmsford, Colonel Crompton was a champion of motorised transport for the army, first in India but then in the First World War. Crompton tells in his Reminiscences his role in the development of the tank. I wrote about the development of the tank in Ordnance but omitted a reference to Crompton in connection with the smaller, faster Whippet. As with so many inventions, there were many hands and brains involved.

The Marriage family had been millers in and around Chelmsford for many years, and in 1898 took the plunge into the twentieth century by building Chelmer Steam Mill with modern rollers rather than millstones.

Ernst Gustav Hoffmann's invention of an automatic lathe for making ball bearings was sufficient incentive for the building, also in 1898, of the Hoffmann Works for the production of ball bearings. In 1970, Hoffmann merged with Ransomes and Marles Bearing Co, a Newark business with a connection with the Ransomes of Ipswich, and the Pollard Ball and Roller Bearing Co of Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire to form RHP plc in Newark on the River Trent in Nottinghamshire.

Guglielmo Marconi at the age of 22, again in 1898, set up in a former mill in Chelmsford the first wireless factory in the world. The mill had worked with silk but closed in 1863 when French imports flooded the market. The mill was revived briefly by Samuel Courtauld of nearby Braintree. For Marconi the beginning was all about wireless communication with ships but it grew to become serious competition to the cable operators. In 1901, he famously transmitted a signal from Poldhu in Cornwall to Signal Hill in Newfoundland. I noted elsewhere that the electricity powering the signal was generated by a Hornsby engine. Marconi developed radio transmission and after the First World War would transmit programmes from Chelmsford to the small number of radio enthusiasts. The formation of the BBC by a group of radio manufacturers including Marconi in 1922 would accelerate the growth of broadcast radio in Britain.

The next Marconi connection with Chelmsford was radar where it manufactured many sets and components before, during and after the Second World War. Related to radar was television and it was the Marconi-EMI system that was adopted by the BBC and subsequent commercial channels. A research facility was built at Great Baddow on the outskirts of the town. The company designed and built studio and broadcast equipment in its New Street factory. The adjacent factory was built for the production magnetrons for radar and after the war was occupied by the English Electric Valve company manufacturing a whole range of electronic tubes. I write at greater length about Marconi and broadcasting in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

In the postwar era, Marconi became part of English Electric and expanded in aeronautical, marine and broadcasting. English Electric became part of GEC on the breakup of which the Marconi defence business joined with British Aerospace to become BAE Systems which still have a research facility at Great Baddow.

Away from electronics, Britvic opened a new factory in 1955 but moved its headquarters to Hemel Hempstead in 2012 and closed the Chelmsford factory.

The Chelmsford Industrial Trail includes a description of what happened to some of the factories mentioned. Marconi International Marine became a car showroom and Britvic a retail park. The new Marconi factory became a Homebase DIY store. This is a pattern seen in most former industrial towns. We know from the statistics that manufacturing has reduced in size, these specifics bring this home. It is of course brought home much more starkly to those many thousands of men and women who saw their jobs disappear.

Further reading

• W.J. Baker, A History of the Marconi Company (London: Methuen, 1970).
• Stanley Wood, Chelmsford Industrial Trail updated by Tony Crosby and Dave Buckley (Essex Society for Archaeology and History, 1987, 2018)
• R.E. Crompton, Reminiscences (London: Constable & Co, 1928)

Colchester manufacturing history

 Colchester was said to be the first English town, established before 100 BC. It was rebuilt as a model Roman town following the invasion of AD 50 only to be destroyed along with London and Verulamium by Queen Boudicca ten years later. The Romans rebuilt it and it prospered until the Legions left and the Saxons invaded. A settled existence was then eventually enjoyed until the Danes invaded. The town became part of what would become England in the first half of the tenth century only to be disturbed this time by the Normans who left their mark on the town as evidenced by common surnames.

Like so many places, wool trade and wool manufacture formed the bedrock of industry, boosted by refugees from Holland in the sixteenth century. The town gained a reputation for quality textiles. There followed a period of decline when trading took over, the town being well placed for continental trade. Throughout this time, craftsmen in the town became well regarded for their skills at clockmaking. Clockmaking prospered in Colchester and Coventry and many other provincial towns until factory production took over in London and Birmingham. Then, as with so much, clockmaking went overseas.

The 1830s saw the coming into prominence of some of the great mechanical engineers of the East of England. In Greenwich, John Penn owned the largest marine engine business in Britain. There is evidence of regular communication between him and the much younger James Paxman who made agricultural machinery in Colchester. There was a further connection with Robert Ransome in Ipswich. I write more of Penn in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and more of Ransome in my blog on Ipswich. Here the focus is on Paxman.

In his book Steam and the Road to Glory The Paxman Story, Andrew Phillips, acknowledged that by 1865, when Paxman joined with the two Davey brothers, Davey Paxman was one of the smaller manufacturers of steam engines, so dwarfed by Ransome but also by Robey of Lincoln. Electricity changed everything. Dynamos to generate electricity for Swan's incandescent lamp demanded power and in the absence of fast running water, this was provided by all manner of steam engine. Electrical engineers, of which Crompton of Chelmsford was a leader, were spoilt for choice and would use steam engines made by any one the many manufacturers. James Paxton was definitely one and he, I suggest like Joseph Ruston, was very good at nurturing relationships. He got on well with Crompton who would use his steam engines, but not uniquely. Andrew Phillips tells the story of Paxman's big break.

Paris was host to the first electrical exhibition and was followed a year later by one at London's Crystal Palace. James Paxman won a gold medal, but so did six other manufacturers. Exhibitions were the coming thing and a purpose built space had been created in South Kensington, but this could only be fully exploited if open to evening visitors and this required light. Larger manufacturers were reluctant to exhibit again so soon, but James Paxman was at hand and Phillips tells how he met with the Prince of Wales and promised a fully functional system in just ten weeks. He delivered using his energy efficient double expansion engine. In time installations increased in size and Paxman's slower engine began to lose out. The answer was found in the high speed engine developed by J.C. Peach.

Peach had been working with the Thames Ditton firm of Willans and Robinson. On Willans’ untimely death Peach went to work with Musgraves in Bolton. James Paxman had heard of the new engine and sought an opinion from a valued colleague. The opinion was positive and Peach brought his invention to Paxman and the company went on to power a good number of electrical installations.

Paxman’s other mainstay had been winding machine engines for South Africa diamond and gold mines. Like other steam engine manufacturers they embraced the oil engine.

Davey Paxman had moved to a larger site at the Standard Works and their former site was taken by Arthur Mumford who from 1877 manufactured marine pumps. Mumford joined the Weir Group in 1933. In 1887 John Ernest Cohen founded the Colchester Lathe Co which in 1954 would be bought by George Cohen's 600 Group, of which I write more in Vehicles to Vaccines. Colchester Lathe was in competition with the less successful Britannia Engineering whose works were later used by Davey Paxman to make diesel engines in the Second World War.

Davey Paxman was one of the East Anglian companies to join Agricultural Engineering in the thirties from where it entered into a relationship with Ruston and Hornsby; both companies were bought by English Electric in 1966.

Further reading:

• Norman Jacobs, Colchester The Last Hundred Years (Lowestoft: Tyndale Press, 1989)
• Andrew Phillips, Steam and the Road to Glory The Paxman Story (Colchester: Harvey-Benham Charitable Trust, 2002)