London's 19th century tool makers

For the Machine tools of various kinds had been used around the world for centuries; there is some evidence of a lathe being used in China in the middle of the second millennium before the Common Era. A paucity of records make it difficult to reach back to clear examples much further than 1700. The importance of machine tools is clear; they were fundamental to industrialisation, Winston Churchill is quoted as saying, in the context of production for the Second World War, that they were 'the ganglion nerve centre of the whole [of] supply’.

Guns at COD Greenford in WW2

The eighteenth century saw the first burst of industrialisation through mechanisation with Thomas Newcomen and his steam-engine. These were made of metal and so harder to work by hand than the wood used on most of the early machinery for textile spinning and weaving. There was thus an incentive to find ways of employing something more than manpower. In William Steeds' History of Machine Tools 1700-1910, the author points us to the process of gun-boring such that the barrel would be cast with a removable core but would then need to be worked to achieve a smooth inner surface. The same principle could be applied to small cylinders of a steam engine, although Steeds points out that once work was needed on Watts improved steam-engine, greater accuracy was demanded and a more accurate version of the boring machine produced.

Reading Steeds' history two points in particular shine out. Machine tools of whatever kind were subjected to continuous improvement including by the men whom I refer to below. As important was the fact that much of the improvement crossed national borders. A good deal started in Britain but then ideas were taken up and improved upon in the USA, France and Germany and indeed others among the growing number of industrialised nations. I noted this international flavour when exploring 'who else shaped the manufacturing world'.

Looking in a little more detail at Steeds' book, he identifies a number of different classes of machine tool: lathes including those for cutting screws, gun-boring/cylinder-boring machines, drilling machines, planers (to achieve a flat surface), milling machines. gear-cutting machines, slotting machines, shaping machines, milling machines and grinding machines. Henry Maudslay, of whom I write below, would have added the sliding-rest to hold the item being worked on. In looking at the names Steeds mentions, there are well known American engineers: Brown & Sharpe, Pratt & Whitney and Ingersoll; and companies I wrote about in Vehicles to Vaccines in terms of their influence in the second half of the twentieth century: Alfred Herbert, Charles Churchill and William Asquith. Writing about the Crewe Railway Works which brought in many machine tools in the 1860s and 1870s, the point is made that for British industry as a whole would embrace machine tools in the 1890s. This was before the birth of the motor industry which would be accompanied by these three British tools makers in particular.

I have made the point elsewhere in my writing on manufacturing that war provides an almost essential stimulus. So it was at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich that a young boy, Henry Maudslay, began to learn his trade. His father was a storeman, but young Henry had other ideas. He began as a powder monkey filling cartridges and progressed to the carpenters shop and then, because he showed more interest in metal working, the smithy. He would become, in the eyes of the celebrated Manchester engineer William Fairburn, 'one of the six engineers who completely dominated the profession between 1790 and 1830, the year before he died. The other five were John Rennie, Thomas Telford, James Watt, Joseph Bramah and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Henry took the skills he had garnered at Woolwich and took up employment with Joseph Bramah who had been looking for someone skilled enough to make the locks he was designing. In 1797, Henry set up his own smithy off Oxford Street, moving first to Cavendish Square and then to Lambeth in 1810. The ending of the Napoleonic wars resulted in a temporary set back in demand but then the business thrived as a partnership which included Henry's son and Joshua Field trading as Maudslay, Sons and Field. An early project was to produce machines to manufacture ship's pulley blocks to the design of Marc Brunel. Much, but not all of what, Maudslay did was about creating machines to do with consistent precision what would take a skilled man may hours.

Maudslay had his share of patents not least for his table engine which took the idea of the steam engine and made it compact but also reducing the number of parts needed. This leads to one of Maudslay's great legacies: the manufacturing process was as important as the invention itself. In this his insistence on the use of sliding rests in his workshop ensured consistency. They all enabled accuracy, the other great legacy. Within the context of his workshop he encouraged standardisation, for example, of screws, something taken even further by Whitworth in Manchester. Maudslay's work on screws enabled greater accuracy of measurement by the bench micrometer.

Henry Maudslay was working at the cusp of a dramatic change from craft skills to engineering process and London was the place to be with a large and growing population and with access to the Midlands via the Grand Junction Canal. Working in London at the same time were Joseph Bramah, John Penn the ship builder, John Rennie a Scot who had trained as a millwright but was principally a civil engineer as was Telford.

Many other engineers, at that time almost all self-taught, were seeking improvement. Some may have served apprenticeship, others a period of working with more experienced men. They were referred to as journeymen and indeed they embarked on journeys around the country to learn new skills. London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was becoming a magnet for people from largely rural areas looking for work. My forebears were among them and like many arrived at Charing Cross to seek their fortune in my family's case as wax and tallow chandlers. Journeymen engineers were perhaps rather more focused and set their sights not on Charing Cross but on Maudslay's works over the river at Lambeth.

In a fascinating book, Henry Maudslay and the Pioneers of the Machine Age, editors John Cantrell and Gillian Cookson draw together chapters on those engineers who learnt their trade from Maudslay.

Richard Roberts was a Welshman who picked up skills as a turner in Staffordshire before finding work in Manchester. It was still the time of the Napoleonic wars and militia officers were seeking him. He therefore made his way to London in the hope of anonymity. This he achieved and he also found his way to Maudslay's works. He spent two years with Maudslay improving his skills as a turner and fitter but also expanding his general educuation. With the defeat of Napoleon he returned to Manchester and I continue his story in my blog piece on Manchester engineers, where he immersed himself in machinery for the textile industry.

David Napier came from a family which had worked with metal for generations. His grandfather Robert expanded their family smithy to become involved in the mechanisation of calico printing on the Clyde. Robert was succeeded by his son John who took advantage of the new Forth & Clyde canal to obtain pig iron from the Carron foundry near Falkirk for the family business now trading in Dumbarton. Robert's third son also Robert became smith and armourer to the Duke of Argyll at Inveraray where David was born in 1788 although Robert remained a partner in the family business which David joined as an apprentice in 1805. By 1814 David was working in London with Maudslay. He stayed there for two years before beginning his exploration into printing presses as employer, partner and finally on his own account. Importantly he worked with the parliamentary printer, Thomas Hansard, and produced the very successful Nay-Peer press for printing playing cards and banknotes as well as other high quality print. He also produced machines, the Imperial and Double Imperial, for newspaper printing. From this Napier went on to produce precision instruments and also skilled work for the Board of Ordnance. Their works were also in Lambeth.

Joseph Clement was born in Westmorland in 1779 and worked first as a slater before moving to metal work mainly on looms first in Glasgow and then Aberdeen when he attended courses on Natural philosophy at Marischal College. He moved to London in 1813 and worked for Alexander Galloway, a successful manufacturer less concerned with technical excellence that Braham to which he moved before joining Maudslay as chief draughtsman. In 1817 he set up on his own earning a reputation as both an excellent draughtsman and maker of fine machinery. He worked for Charles Babbage on the latter's Difference Engine but the two fell out over charges. Joseph Whitworth spent some time with Clement after leaving Maudslay and further honed his precision skills.

Joseph Whitworth was born in 1803 in Stockport son of a loom frame maker. In 1821 he became a mechanic with Crighton & Co, Manchester textile machine manufacturers. He left for London in search of self improvement and joined Maudslay working alongside the latter's most skilled me. Whitworth left Maudslay in 1828 to join Joseph Clement before returning to Manchester but with a mission for precision. He knew Tootal, William Fairburn, Charles Beyer (Peacock) and William Muir. I tell more of Whitworth in my blog on Manchester tool makers.

James Naysmith joined Maudslay for the last two years of the latter's life. There is a suggestion that Naysmith's father had had friendly dealings with Maudslay. There were though other reasons why Naysmith may have been welcomed. James was born and brought up in Edinburgh and had not excelled at school; class sizes of 200 are quoted and may well have contributed. James though was the son of an engineer who happily taught him drawing. Friends of his father, also involved in engineering taught him practical skills. These were not wasted for James soon became an accomplished model maker. These models included small steam engines which he would sell at £10 time which was put to good use in paying for his attendance at lectures on a wide variety of subjects. By 1829 when he travelled to London to join Maudslay he was already 888888. He left Maudslay's company in 1831 and returned to Manchester via a further spell in Edinburgh. I continue his story in my Manchester blog.

William Muir was another Scot and was apprenticed in Kilmarnock. He went on from there to Glasgow before heading to London where he joined Maudslay's firm only months after the the death of the founder. Muir carried out generally supervisory roles whilst refining his skills in machine making. He was with Maudslay's for five years and let to join another London engineering before moving to Manchester as foreman in Whitworth's.

As for Maudslay, they moved their focus to marine engineering and traded successfully and with technical distinction until challenging finances led to their closure at the turn of the century. A fourth generation of Maudslay (RW Maudslay) moved to Coventry to set up the Maudslay Motor Co in 1903.

Of significance to machine tools, Charles Churchill had from 1865 begun importing American machine tools. In their book Alfred Herbert Ltd and the British Machine Tool Industry, 1887-1983, authors Roger Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis first look back at the passage of the nineteenth century and see as the century progressed an increased penetration of the British market by American machine tool manufacturers. In particular when the British economy start to boom in the 1890s with bicycle manufacture the demand for machine tools outstripped British supply. There were also doubts on the quality and appropriateness on British machines as well as overcapacity in the US which spurred American salesmen in the direction of Europe and Britain in particular.

The man who took up the machine tool mantle from Maudslay was Alfred Herbert and I tell his story in this link to Coventry where he set up.

Further reading:

• William Steeds, A History of Machine Tools 1700-1910 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969)
• Henry Maudslay and the Pioneers of the Machine Age, John Cantrell and Gillian Cookson (eds.) (Stroud: Tempus, 2002)

Swindon manufacturing history

Swindon would become one of the great 19th century railway towns, but at the end of the 18th century it was a place largely passed by.

Kennett and Avon canal 

The canals changed this as the ambitious link between the Thames and the Avon was debated. What became the Kennet and Avon canal was the southern link through the Vale of Pewsey. A northern route branched north near Melksham and made its way between Calne and Chippenham to pass close to Swindon on its way up to Abingdon on the Thames. Later. the north Wiltshire canal would link from Swindon to the Thames and Severn canal at Cirencester.

From next to nothing, Swindon had become an ‘epicentre’, well nearly. The impact though was real with a big drop in the price of coal from the Somerset coal fields and access to hungry urban areas for the agricultural produce of north Wiltshire farmers.

No sooner was all of this in place than Isambard Kingdom Brunel was appointed chief engineer of the yet to be built Great Western Railway. Debate followed but the route adopted would pass through Swindon after Didcot and before Chippenham and the Box tunnel through to Bath and Bristol. A little later a line would snake north west from Swindon through to Cheltenham.

A few lines of text belie the task. 1840 was in the middle of one of the 19th century’s downward economic cycles. Many railways were being built, but they were mostly short runs linking towns and neighbouring coalfields. The longer routes (The Grand Junction and the London Birmingham) were massive undertakings involving great financial risk. The GWR was no different, especially with the cost and complexity of the Box tunnel. Nevertheless it was built and opened to traffic.

The new line would need a repair workshop. John Chandler, in his Swindon - History and Guide, tells the story. Swindon was simply not suitable: it had an inadequate water supply and really no skilled labour. Surely Bristol would be better, closer to coal and with an already large population. Daniel Gooch had been appointed to create the workshops and he argued for Swindon. There were those who suggested that local landowners may have sought to influence him. Other factors also came into play. Land was available at Swindon by merging with Cheltenham railway. Swindon was also at that point along the route where a change of engine would be needed to take on the challenge of the route through the Box tunnel.

There was still no money until the idea emerged of a station at Swindon offering refreshment to passengers as the engines were changed. This resulted in grand three storey station buildings constructed along with a village of railway houses all at the builder’s expense in return for the profits from the station. Anecdotes suggest that the quality of refreshment was not great and that prices were on the steep side - perhaps nothing changes.

The building of the workshops began during the economic downturn, but by the time of the railway mania that followed, locomotives were not only being repaired but new ones were being built. The GWR had opted for a broad gauge railway in contrast to the narrow gauge adopted elsewhere. This had the advantage that locomotives could be bigger and more powerful - in 1846 a locomotive, the Great Western, could pull a full passenger train at 60 mph over a long distance. The emphasis on power and speed is born out by the contrasting comments on the Crewe works.

In terms of employee numbers, Chandler quotes 400 for 1843 growing to 1800 by 1847, but then shrinking back to 600. Towards the end of the century, tough economic conditions gave way to better times and employee numbers climbed to 11,500. Alongside a better economy, the GWR had diversified and expanded its routes. Crucially it had moved over to the new standard gauge in 1892. Possibly more important it had added a large carriage works in 1865 and was producing rolling stock built to the highest standards of luxury. Magnificent locomotives were built including the legendary Castles, Kings, Granges, Manors and Halls classes. The works expanded in area eventually covering 326 acres including 79 acres roofed over. Even in 1846 the engine shop could accommodate 36 locomotives in a building in the shape of a stable with separate stalls.

Swindon was ever more dependent on the railway with some 80% of adults males employed there. Clothing factories were attracted by the corresponding availability of female labour: Compton employed 1,000 including the manufacture of GWR uniforms.

Employment at the GWR works grew to 14,369 in 1925 but then begun its decline to 10,000 until 1960, 5000 in 1967 and just over 1,000 before it closed in 1986. I write about the massive changes in the post war railways in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Swindon attracted other industries. It became home to a Pressed Steel factory which continues to supply bodies for the Mini. The Vickers site in Swindon first produced Spitfires in the Second World War and then was used for experimental projects. The site was then taken by Honda for their UK production base. It is currently being redeveloped once more. Plessey opened a factory in Swindon during the Second World War to meet demand from the MOD. The company also managed a number of shadow factories. The Swindon factory later specialised in hydraulics and a further factory was built at Cheney Manor in 1957 to manufacture transistors. RA Lister built a factory to manufacture farm equipment and diesel engines to add capacity to its main base at Dursley.

Further reading:

• John Chandler, Swindon - History and Guide (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992)
• Michael A. Howell, Bygone Swindon (Chichester: Phillimore)
• You can read more in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines

A town created by the railways - Crewe

 Crewe is the third town cited by Asa Briggs as created in the 19th century. It was created by the railways for the railways and Diane Drummond, in her book Crewe: Railway Town , Company and People 1840-1914, offers a precise date, 10 March 1843, when the first employees and their families were settled there.

It later became home to Rolls-Royce Motors. The image is of General Montgomery's Rolls-Royce probably manufactured in Derby (see below).

It was the Grand Junction Railway that decided Crewe was the place for its main works. It had become the place where a number of separate railway lines met what would become the west coast mainline and so it was a logical location for the factory that would maintain and manufacture locomotives and rolling stock but also rails.

Drummond offers a glimpse of the scale of railway manufacture by comparing Crewe with Swindon which was home to the works of the Great Western Railway. Crewe's initial workforce in 1843 numbered 1,150 compared to Swindon's 423. However by 1847 as a result of economic downturn, Crewe's workforce had reduced to 1,000 whereas Swindon's had increased to 1,800. Looking further ahead to 1900, Crewe employed 7,500 and Swindon 11,500.

Crewe might not have been the biggest, but it laid claim to be the most technologically advanced. Drummond suggests that, having a single customer, the works followed a path of vertical integration. At one time it made everything used in locomotive manufacture except copper piping. Famously it built its own iron and steel works being one of the first to embrace the Bessemer and then the Siemens-Martin processes. Carr and Taplin, in their History of the British Steel Industry, tell how the Chief Mechanical Engineer, John Ramsbottom was persuaded by William Siemens to instal open hearth furnaces for the conversion of old iron into new steel rails. In addition to furnaces, Ramsbotton installed a new rail-rolling mill to be added to ten years later by a second mill with an updated design by the next Chief Mechanical Engineer, Francis Webb. These two respected engineers followed in the footsteps of Francis Trevethick, son of Richard Trevethick, who set up the Crewe works.

It was said that Crewe built locomotives for economy, leaving GWR to win plaudits for power and speed. Nevertheless, Crewe earned respect for their training of young engineers among whom was Nigel Gresley. From the start, Crewe operated a division of labour with as many as nineteen different trades including: 'smiths and their strikers; moulders and their assistant dressers and casters; pattern makers and coppersmiths; boilermaking trades of platers, riveters and 'holders-up'; turners; coachbuilders and engine fitters'. Basic machine tools were employed such as lathes, 'slotting, shaping and planing machines'. Under Ramsbottom new machine tools were introduced in the 1860s and 1870s resulting in increasing standardisation using interchangeable parts. In this Crewe was perhaps twenty years ahead of the so called Machine Tool Revolution which transformed other engineering companies in the 1890s. One consequence of the increase in mechanisation was a change in the composition of the workforce with a higher proportion of general labourers and fewer skilled men.

Drummond takes her reader through the essential elements of the process of constructing a railway locomotive which I simplify in the interests of highlighting the growing role of machine tools. The starting point is the foundry where the iron is made which can then be cast, or puddled to become more malleable wrought iron. The invention of steel eventually took the place of wrought iron. In the railway workshop, parts would first be moulded, that is a mould would be created and the molten metal introduced. Moulds varied massively in complexity and so the skill required in their making. Should parts need to be joined, this was then undertaken by the smithy. Welding, as we know it, came very much later. A locomotive could comprise some 5,000 parts each of which would require a degree of finishing using perhaps a lathe. This was the job of the turner. As time progressed the number of machine tools increased and so a larger proportion of the work was carried out by semi-skilled machinists. For a locomotive, the construction of the boiler was central. Again, this was a combination of skill, machine power and stamina - it was hard work. The final part of the process was down to teams of fitter-erectors who would put all the parts together; this was one of the last stages of the process to employ machine tools. (I can't help having in my minds eye, as a contrast, the robots on the production line at today's Derby works)

This was surely a complex process and one that had to be married with work in repairing locomotives. The whole was carried out in a cyclical economy presenting management with massive challenges in balancing the books. At Crewe a device of compulsory unpaid holiday was used to match the workforce with the hours needed for the work. This unsatisfactory arrangement was eventually superseded by lay-offs, inevitably met with resistance.

All this happened in a town where employment in the railway works was life for a large proportion of the population. Towns with a wider spread of employment were far less vulnerable to the foibles of the economy.

For Crewe, the years immediately preceding the Second World War brought Rolls-Royce and a factory to manufacture aero engines. (The image is of General Montgomery's Rolls-Royce probably made in the Derby factory.) After the war the factory took over the manufacture of both Rolls-Royce and Bentley motor cars, with the Derby factory giving its focus to jet aero engines. As I tell in Vehicles to Vaccines, Rolls-Royce Motors split off from the aero-engine company and continued manufacturing in Crewe. At the turn of the twentieth century the German BMW bought Rolls-Royce and built a new factory at Goodwood in Sussex, VW took the Bentley brand and upgraded the Crewe factory. Both companies continue to trade successfully under their new ownership. Bentley is now the largest private sector employer in Crewe.

Further reading:

• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)
• Diane K. Drummond, Crewe: Railway Town, Company and People 1840-1914 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995)

Leicester Manufacturing History

 My exploration of British manufacturing has been sector by sector and chronological. It is time now to begin to join up the dots and explore those towns where manufacturing takes place or in some case took place. I begin with the city where I now live and seek of offer a flavour of manufacturing in this great city.

The image is of those famous sons of Leicester, David and Richard Attenborough, pictured at the University of Leicester.

Leicester’s traditional industry was hosiery with its origin in hand knitters who would work from their own homes in the city and around the county engaging the whole family in their enterprise. In this they were similar to the spinners and weavers of wool in and cotton in Lancashire.

Knitted hose began to take the place of stockings made from cloth in the Elizabethan age; Shakespeare makes reference to stockings in Henry IV (pt2, act 2, scene 2). The principal place of the trade was London close to those members of the population best able to afford that more expensive knitted product. Slowly, the hand knitted stocking gave way to the stocking knitted on a frame. In what were known as the Home Counties, framework knitters were to be found in Buckinghamshire and Surrey. Further north, into the Midlands, framework knitters began to appear in Leicester, Nottingham and Derby.

In Henson’s History of the Framework Knitters, it is suggested that by the mid-eighteenth century, a move had taken place towards the midland towns with the number of frames in Leicester exceeding those in London. It is suggested that wage costs were the significant driver and further moves would have taken place but for the demands of fashion. For the elegant in London it was essential that stockings should be a perfect colour match, something achievable only with the cloth and hosiery trades side by side. Frames were used to knit hosiery from wool, cotton and silk, with the latter producing the finest garments. By the mid nineteenth century, Nottingham had outgrown Leicester and Derby was fast catching up.

Leicester suffered from stiff competition from America where a degree of mechanisation had been introduced. We can see mechanisation seeping into the Leicester industry a little later than its northern counterparts essentially because of the greater complexity of knitting a stocking. When it came, it was from over the Atlantic where Americans had found solutions. In terms of local industry, Siobham Begley, in her book The Story of Leicester, writes how the Loughborough firm of Paget introduced power-run frames, Leicester’s Matthew Townsend invented the latch needle and Loughborough man, William Cotton, built on these developments with his Cotton Patent machine. Slowly machines were introduced and frame workers began to work in groups in a workshop setting. Pay for frame workers was bad until Corah built their factory at St Margaret’s, where, it was said, rates were 25% higher. Further impetus to the factory system came with the Education Acts where child labour was restricted and so home working became less economically viable.

Following on from hosiery came shoe making, especially for children’s shoes. This trade had prospered in nearby Northampton where it concentrated on men’s boots. Employment in Leicester’s shoe industry gradually grew and eventually overtook that in Northampton. As with hosiery, mechanisation crept in. Begley singles out Thomas Crick in Leicester making a breakthrough by riveting soles to shoes instead of stitching them. He went on to produce a machine which was later steam powered. Factory based production followed, boosted by the move of Leeds based Stead and Simpson to Leicester using an American invention, the Blake sewer, which could produce three hundred pairs of shoes a day. Leicester held on to the tradition of outworking, long embraced in hosiery, until the push of mechanisation from American essentially forced the move to factory working by the end of the nineteenth century.

In the mid nineteenth century ancillary businesses began to appear producing gussets and elastic web. More significantly, engineering businesses emerged with a focus on machinery for hosiery and shoe manufacture. Richard Rodger, in Leicester A Modern History, writes of some 7,000 male engineering workers in 1900. He lists some of the companies. Pegg’s dyeworks equipment, Phoenix Foundry for heavy casting for railways, Gimson’s Vulcan foundry on Welford Road, Gent’s clocks, Taylor & Hobson lenses and optical equipment, Pearson & Bennion boot and shoes machinery which became part of the British United Boot and Shoe Company, Wolsey Hopkins, Bentley Engineering and Mellor Bromley machines. It is fair to assume that these engineering skills encouraged Imperial Typewriters to set up in Leicester. Machine tool manufacturers Jones & Shipman set up in Leicester as did Wadkin which specialised in wood working tools. Later additions to the Leicester manufacturing scene include Thorn Lighting.

The city is also famous for Walkers Crisps and Foxes Glacier Mints.

I tell in Vehicles to Vaccines how the British commitment to excellence in textiles is evidenced by the presence of colleges devoted to teaching skills to those employed in the industry. One such was the School of Textiles in Leicester which celebrated its centenary in 1983-84 with the publication of a short history. The focus was on knitting, and the founding of the college was initiated by yarn merchants witnessing the quality of continental competitors which benefitted from formal technical education. In the second half of the twentieth century the focus moved to artificial fibres, machinery capable of producing whole garments, and textile and knitwear design. Textile manufacturing continues in Leicester albeit in reduced volumes given to move to sourcing from low wage economies.

Further reading:

Gravenor Henson, Civil, Political and Mechanical History of the Framework Knitters in Europe and America (Nottingham: Richard Sutton, 1831, reprinted 1970)
Siobhan Begley, The Story of Leicester (Brimscombe: The History Press, 2013), p.122.
Richard Rodger and Rebecca Madgin Ed’s. Leicester a Modern History (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2016)