Britain shaped the manufacturing world. A bold assertion, but is it true? My book How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World seeks to answer this question. The next question is what happened to British manufacturing? The result of my quest to find answers to that question is in Vehicles to Vaccines. I am now exploring Manufacturing places.
A city dominated by its cathedral; its life revolved around agriculture with regular markets controlled by the Dean & Chapter until the city received its charter in the late nineteenth century. As with so many places, it was the railways which changed everything.
Railway entrepreneurs were attracted by populations and Peterborough’s was growing as people moved there from the fens. The coming of the railways was a tortuous process as I told in my blogs about Doncaster, Stamford and Northampton. The key driver was the desire to get coal to London. York was the destination, it was the intermediate route that attracted debate. The beginning was of shorter routes, so that from Peterborough to Lincoln via Boston and that from Peterborough to Northampton. The line from London to Peterborough encountered problems with boggy land en route and that from Peterborough to Grantham and onward to Doncaster had the cost of tunnelling. Yet by 1850 Peterborough was connected. It is appropriate that an early trade was that of butchering for London’s Smithfield market.
In terms of industry, British Braids producing elastic web was encouraged by the Dean & Chapter to provide work for women. A steam flour mill was run by Cadge and Coleman. Bricks were made from Oxford clay and the works later joined with London Brick in the interwar years. Stanley’s iron works developed into Stanley & Barford eventually joining in Aveling Barford of Grantham in manufacturing rollers. J.P. Hall made pumps.
Peter Brotherhood came from London manufacturing high speed engines and compressors. They moved into tractor manufacture and joined in the Agricultural Engineers Group which in the twenties brought together similar businesses struggling in a tough market. Other members included Barford and Paxman which joined Ruston and Hornsby of Lincoln and Grantham when Agricultural Engineering was liquidated in 1932. In the Second World War a now independent public company Peter Brotherhood produced the Brotherhood-Ricardo diesel engine. They were later bought by Ingersol-Rand who sold out to Siemens. In 2008 they became part of Hayward Tyler supplying specialist equipment to the energy industry.
Another engineering firm from London was Werner, Pfleiderer and Perkins which bought Joseph Baker and Aublet, Harry &Co which was already making laundry-machines in Peterborough. The combined company became Baker Perkins. Perkins, who had developed steam ovens, emigrated to England from the USA. Baker was Canadian and invented a combined flour scoop and sifter which became a market leader in the UK. Although rivals, the two companies collaborated in supplying baking equipment to the armies in the First World War. The combined company also built a plant in Michigan in Canada and are still leaders in food manufacturing machinery.
Another Perkins, Frank, started experimental work on diesel engines in 1932 with talented engineer Charles Chapman. They conceived an idea that diesels, as well as being slow work horses, could run at as high speed as their petrol rivals. As I tell in Vehicles to Vaccines the company was bought by Massey Ferguson. It later became part of Lucas Varity and is now part of Caterpillar. Perkins diesels continues its heritage of innovation.
The city was home to GEC Domestic appliances including Hotpoint and Morphy Richards.
Further reading:
H.F. Tibbs, Peterborough A History (Cambridge: The Oleander Press, 1979)
In my perambulation around the manufacturing towns of Britain, I have normally found the presence of raw materials and water, ideally navigable. Northampton had no coal nearby and its river, the Nene, was only navigable some miles toward the sea. It was, though, on road routes from London to the north and so enjoyed the trade from passing coaches, much like Stamford. Unlike Stamford, it was the shire town and carried on all the administrative functions. It was in the middle of livestock farming country and so had a market, but also access to hides, of which more later.
Poor communications were hard to address. The Grand Junction Canal passed the town by as did the north-south railway. Anyone visiting Northampton by canal boat will know well the reason: the link from the Nene to the Grand Junction Canal demands some seventeen locks to descend one hundred and twenty feet. This link to the canal system completed in 1815 did open the town to more trade and that is where hides come in.
It was of course the shoe making industry that provided the economic growth that Northampton needed. It was a cottage industry, but quite substantial. Boots and shoes were made for the local market, but also further afield including the plantations of the West Indies. The Peninsula war created a strong demand for boots for Wellington's army. A strike by London boot makers added significantly to Northampton's business since wage rates were much lower. It wasn't only boots, it was said the Northampton lace was superior to that made in Nottingham.
The railways were a bone of contention. Land owners hated them; townsfolk knew they would be good for business. They were also not very good on steep inclines like that up from Northampton. For this reason Robert Stephenson chose to route the London Birmingham railway around the town. Nevertheless, the town did get a railway in 1845, linking it both to Peterborough and to the London Birmingham line. This enabled the cheaper import of coal and export of agricultural produce and footwear.
The footwear industry did take off, but still in small cottage units except for a very few factory employers such as William Parker and John Groom each producing 80,000 pairs of footwear a year with 800 employees. Moses Philip Manfield was not far behind. Their employees were said to be better off than their home working counterparts, given the opportunities the factories had for better ventilation of noxious fumes. Child labour was more prevalent in smaller businesses, indeed schools tried to include work based learning in their timetables.
The mid-point of the century brought to Northampton, as elsewhere, the issue of mechanisation. With footwear production it was the American invention of a sewing machine for shoes. The fear, as elsewhere, was the loss of jobs, particularly for men since the view was that women could manage sewing machines. A little later, machines for riveting soles were on offer, but not enthusiastically welcomed by masters for in the beginning they proved slower and less reliable than hand work. Finally machines to stitch soles to uppers came along and the battle was lost; the industry had become mechanised. Interestingly it seems that home working continued, but with machines in the home. It seems also that this was the case in Wellingborough and Kettering as well as Northampton and its surrounding villages.
The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a great change. Home working was nearly a thing of the past. Manfield, run by Moses's sons, employed 1,000 men and women in a single story building. Crocket & Jones and Truform (part of Sears & So) employed about the same number. Charles and Edward Lewis employed nearer 1,500, whilst Barratts were still comparatively new but distinctly ambitious. Church & Co boasted 'every conceivable style and material'. William Wren made shoe polish and Horton and Arlidge, cardboard boxes. Some seven manufacturers had come together to form Northampton Shoe Machinery Co first supplying American machines but then manufacturing them under licence. Machinery also came from the International Goodyear Shoe Machinery Company.
Other businesses made cycles and motor cars. Mulliner made the bespoke car bodies for manufacturers to add to their engine and chassis. Bassett-Loake made beautiful model trains and yachts. Importantly for the future, Smith, Major and Stevens made lifts.
The First World War saw Mulliner's factory producing munitions and military vehicles. Of far more significance, the Northampton shoe companies produced 23 million pairs of footwear for British, French and Belgian forces including infantry boots, flying boots, ski boots and canvas shoes. The other shoe manufacturers in the county topped this production at 24 million and together they made up two thirds of the British footwear output between 1914-1918.
The 1930s saw Express Lifts of Leicester buy Smith, Major and Stevens but to continue to manufacture in Northampton. Other arrivals included Rest Assured with beds and Mettoy which later manufactured Corgi toys. Mettoy was encouraged to come to Northampton by Bassett-Loake whose owners played a major role in the civic community which was keen to reduce the town's dependence on shoe making.
The Second World War saw shoe factories producing an ever increasing range of footwear, including shoes designed for deception, so flying boots which could have their uppers removed to reveal ordinary well worn shoes should their wearer be shot down in enemy territory. The Birmingham British Timken company set up a shadow factory near Northampton and this reverted to peacetime work after the war.
The post war years saw the growth of earth moving equipment supplier Blackwood Hodge (owned by house builder Bernard Sunley), but the steady decline of the mass production of shoes. Manfield was bought by the British Shoe Corporation of Leicester and I write in my blog on Leicester of the gathering of former brands into this company owned by the property developer, Charles Clore.
Avon Cosmetics was encouraged to the town in the sixties a little before its designation as a 'new town' under the third wave of such towns in the post-war era. A good number of businesses came to the 'new town'. Black & Decker, set up warehousing and distribution, as did MFI; Henry Telfer employed 2,000 in food manufacturing. The Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation helped to fund the Blackwood Hodge Management Centre at Nene College.
In 1960 Electronics Weekly reported that 'the extended factory of Plessey Nucleonics at Northampton, officially opened in 1959, has doubled facilities for R&D is this rapidly growing field. During the year, Plessey Nucleonics received an order from the UKAEA for the supply of all nuclear instrumentation for the advanced gas-cooled reactor at Windscale.' This business eventually became part of Ultra Energy. Plessey also manufactured Connectors in their subsidiary Plessey Interconnect.
At the time of writing there are shoe factories still manufacturing in Northampton and neighbouring towns. In the town itself there are Church & Co, Crocket & Jones, Trickers, Edward Green and Jeffery-West. Outside Northampton there are Dr Martens in Wollaston, Grenson in Rushden and Barker in Earls Barton all just outside Wellingborough; then Loake in Kettering and Joseph Cheaney in nearby Desborough.
Express Lifts still has a presence in the town through its lift testing tower built in the seventies and shown in the image.
Further reading:
Cynthia Brown, Northampton 1835-1985: Shoe Town, New Town (Chichester: Phillimore, 1990)
Huddersfield provided a commercial centre at its famous Cloth Hall for the many thousands of home working wool weavers in the surrounding district.
The inventions of which I have written elsewhere slowly changed this settled and quite prosperous scene. In his book The Story of Huddersfield Roy Brook first points to the error in assuming that wool and cotton were distinct industries. He makes the point that ‘Manchester Goods’ (which incidentally my father traded in East Africa in the early twentieth century and of which I wrote in my book Dunkirk to D Day. The image is of my father on Mombassa railway station in 1911) were a mix of cotton and wool. Similarly the weavers and spinners of Huddersfield almost certainly worked with cotton as well as wool.
In terms of mechanisation, the first initiatives increased the speed of spinning and thus the weavers had somehow to keep up. I have read elsewhere that exports of thread to the Low Countries balanced the overproduction, but was not welcomed. Mechanisation of weaving had a more dramatic impact, for now factories filled with weaving machines could and did replaced the many thousands of hand weavers. The well known opposition of the Luddites was replicated across the wool weaving areas. Charlotte Bronte’s book Shirley offers a vivid account of what this might have been like. Mechanisation was in fact a gradual process with hand weavers providing cloth along side the much larger mills.
Huddersfield did have its weaving machine manufacturers, but, for worsted cloth, manufacturers from the west of the Pennines were used, worsted having greater similarities with cotton cloth. In Huddersfield, Haighs were well known for carding engines. Whiteleys became famous for the manufacture of spinning mules and tentering machines.
Huddersfield developed a chemical industry on the back of dye houses. Read Holliday began with dye but then moved into acids including picric acid which would become essential in the Great War as would lyddite. War also presented a challenge, for German produced materials were key in the supply chain. In time home production took the strain. The company became first part of British Dyestuffs and then of ICI. It is now run by Syngenta.
The introduction of the steam engine, about which Samuel Smiles wrote so engagingly in his Lives of Boulton and Watt, had a dramatic impact on Huddersfield as it had in other textile areas. Broadbents led the field in Huddersfield in steam powered heavy machinery. Hopkinson became well known for their ‘Indicator’ which could tell the operator how a steam engine was performing, highlighting hidden areas where problems may be arising. It was compared to stethoscope for a physician.
Machinery manufacturers engendered skills applicable in other fields of mechanical engineering, an example being plant for the production of gas.
Karrier trucks were made here and later became part of the Rootes Group.
The introduction of electricity brought about further change and it was Ernest Brook Limited which manufactured electric motors for use in factories. In November 1950, the company produced its millionth engine.
David Brown Gears began in 1860 serving the wool industry and it grew to having fourteen factories with 10,000 employees. I write of its activity with tractors in the Second World War in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. It went on to lead Aston Martin Lagonda to great success. It continues to do great engineering as David Brown Defence.
Further reading
Roy Brook, The Story of Huddersfield (London: MCGibbon & Kee, 1968)
Coal was at the heart of the economy of Tyneside which, with its long navigable estuary, was able to ship many of the millions of tons produced by the Northumberland coalfield. The presence of so many mines attracted talented engineers who rose to the challenge of tackling flooding and poor ventilation that made mining so dangerous. They also addressed the economic imperative of cost effective transport. The answer was steam as I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW) and men like George and Robert Stephenson. It is well known that the eminent scientist Humphrey Davy invented the safety lamp, but George Stephenson produced a lamp equally safe only a few weeks later and this was widely used. Stephenson with his son Robert did go on to produce the Rocket and many more railway locomotives. Again, I cover this at some length in HBSTMW.
Shipbuilding was at the heart of the Tyne with the river in the mid nineteenth century 'positively bristling with ship yards'. Of these the most famous were T&W Smith, Wood Skinner, Wigham Richardson, William Cleland & Co, John Couts, Andrew Leslie & Co and one of the most successful, Charles Mitchell, with his yard at Walker. Mitchell added to his success by marrying Anne Swan through whom he acquired two brothers in law Charles and Henry Swan. Charles Swan merged with the Sunderland George Hunter, to form Swan Hunter; Henry later took over the Mitchell yard.
William Armstrong trained as a solicitor but was irresistibly drawn by the power of water which he had witnessed in his walks across Northumberland. He went into business first in hydraulics and then became a master of the technology of big guns which he manufactured at Elswick working closely with Mitchell on naval vessels. The two companies eventually merged in 1882. He was rightly included as one of the 'Deadly Triumvirate'. He later merged with Joseph Whitworth of Manchester and together they joined with Vickers of Sheffield. I write about all three at some length in HBSTMW. The Newcastle works built tanks, made presses for the newspaper and motor industry, and rolling mill equipment for the steel industry.
Like a number of other cities, Newcastle boasted its Lit and Phil Society, founded in 1793. One lecturer was Joseph Swan who demonstrated the electric light bulb at the same time as Edison was revealing his work on the other side of the Atlantic. Pragmatism prevailed and the two came together in the company known as Ediswan.
The shipbuilding and engineering industries were fertile ground for CA Parsons who invented the revolutionary steam turbine, equally useful in propelling ships and powering electricity generators. German born John Merz married into the Wigham Richardson family and with his brother championed the production of cheap electricity to power the growing city and its industries.
Over the river in Gateshead iron foundries prospered and the production of Alkali using the Leblanc process was championed by local entrepreneur William Losh. This was followed by soap works and a chemical plant run by Christian Allhusen which covered a massive 137 acres of the south shore. By the time of the electrical revolution the highly polluting Leblanc process was replaced by that invented by Solvay but this gravitated towards the Cheshire salt fields. Tyneside would get their own back when cheap electricity attracted Castner Kellner from Cheshire. Gateshead was also home to the workshops of the North Eastern Railway Company which at one time employed 3,300 men before it moved to Darlington. R&W Hawthorn manufactured steam locomotives. Clarke Chapman built steam engines and later nuclear generation plant, and, together with Hebburn engineers A Reyrolle & Co, CA Parsons and others, joined to become Northern Engineering Industries which was bought first by Rolls-Royce and then by the German Siemens. I write about these energy companies in Vehicles to Vaccines.
In the early twentieth century the Wigham Richardson yard specialised in cable laying ships, Armstrong Whitworth focused on the Russian market and, at their naval yard, produced warships not only for the Royal Navy but also for Norway and Japan. Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson built the renowned RMS Muretania at their Wallsend yard. I write of their contribution to the First World War effort in Ordnance.
The interwar years saw the demand for coal plummet which drew the response of reduced wages and lay offs which in turn partly provoked the National Strike of 1926. Tragically the strike handed export markets to competing coal producing countries, Germany and Poland, and so the decline of coal began. Along with coal, ship building suffered. Jarrow was home to Palmers shipyard which closed in 1936 creating mass unemployment and triggering the Jarrow march. Some help was provided through the Special Areas (Development and Improvement) Act of 1934, but the days of being the workshop of the world would never return. I write of the post-war story of British shipbuilding in Vehicles to Vaccines.
At nearby Fawdon, Rowntree manufactured Fruit Gum, Pastilles and Jelly. Imperial Tobacco built a factory at Heaton in the forties to make Wills cigarettes. There were, and are, many independent smaller manufacturing businesses, not least Jackson the Taylor which merged with Burtons.
In South Shields, Plessey built a factory to manufacture electronic telephone exchanges. In the nineties, the German Siemens set up a plant to manufacture semi-conductors but, with falling demand, it closed after two years.
Further reading
Alistair Moffat and George Rosie, Tyneside - A History of Newcastle and Gateshead from Earliest Times (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2005)
You stand in the footsteps of giants, or do you? Many people view the story of British manufacturing with reverence, others are dismissive. Probably both are right. I want to dig back and explore the last two hundred and fifty years to unearth what lessons there are that could be useful to you, tomorrow’s manufacturers
Let’s go back to the beginning the transition from trading to making.
I take as my view point the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was to be a ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations. A great people inviting all civilised nations to a festival to bring into comparison the works of human skill.’
There were 100,000 exhibits from 14,000 individuals and companies from the United Kingdom and overseas, with some 60% from the home nations. This was roughly the date that other countries enter the game: Germany and France and, after the civil war, America. They were evident at the Great Exhibition, as I tell in this link, but rather looked down upon by the host nation. There were a few Brits who looked on with a more enquiring eye and saw evidence of rapidly advancing technology. The Crystal Palace designed by Joseph Paxton covered some 900,000 square feet and welcomed six million visitors over that summer of 1851.
My great grandfather, Richard Williams, was manager of surgical instrument makers Weiss & Son at 62, The Strand just over the road from where he had been born half a century earlier. Richard had been secretary of the group of instrument makers responsible for their part of the exhibition. I found a copy of the exhibition catalogue and it read like a list of old friends – the names of companies known but some long forgotten. Ransome farm machinery, Gillow furniture, Savory and Moore medicines, Maudsely and Napier engineers, Butterley steel which incidentally had an underground wharf on the Cromford canal. Naysmith. Elliott & Sons instruments. William Hollins and Samuel Courtauld.
I had to find where they had come from and where they went. Some of the names took me back to the start.
The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. This was perhaps Britain in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Britain was by all accounts a place of settled economy. Land owners were rich and the rest weren’t. This conservative scene may have continued uninterrupted had it not been for the sea. The British couldn’t resist the temptation of taking to boats to see what was beyond the horizon. Having reached land, being British, the instinct then was to trade. It worked wonderfully, the wealthy landowners could use some of their wealth to buy the beautiful things that adventurers brought home. It wasn’t only beautiful things, it was exotic tastes like tea and sugar. It transformed the lives of the wealthy; the adventurers didn’t do too badly either; wealth began to leak into a small but growing part of the population: the merchant class; the nation of shopkeepers so derided by Napoleon.
The demand for shipping grew and forests were being denuded at an alarming rate. Forests which were also a store of energy for heating and cooking as well as smelting ore to find metal from which all manner of device could be made. If wood or charcoal could no longer be used, what was the alternative.
Those canny Brits living in the north east already knew the answer, for they had been collecting seacoal, as opposed to charcoal, from beaches for centuries. What’s more, they found that if you scraped the surface you could find more seacoal underneath. It was filthy and gave off noxious fumes but it provided heat when heat was needed.
None of this story is strictly linear, but some things did follow as a consequence of others.
Beautiful cloth was imported from India and this made sense because cotton grew there and they had been making it into wonderful garments for centuries. British textile merchants, who had for centuries run their supply chain of wool and flax spinners and weavers, recognised an opportunity. Why not let Lancashire spinners and weavers make the cloth from imported cotton?
It was an opportunity not to be missed until Napoleon came along.
British merchants had developed a nice little continental market for their cotton cloth. The Napoleonic wars scuppered that and prices collapsed. Somehow costs had to be reduced. There wasn’t enough scope in paying yet less to the weavers and spinners, something else was needed.
Mechanisation
The British had always been finding better ways of doing things. John Kay with his flying shuttle; James Hargreaves with the spinning jenny, Samuel Crompton’s mule and Richard Arkwright’s mechanised factory. Spinning was much easier to mechanise than weaving and so ran ahead such that yarn was exported to weavers on the continent – much to the displeasure of British weavers.
Machines were initially made of wood but to be faster demanded metal for their construction. Elsewhere in the forest, as they say, iron masters were finding better ways to make metal and better metals in the form of brass and steel.
For the development of steel we look to Sheffield and John Brown but in terms of technical developments to William Siemens and Henry Bessemer. Britain was ahead but not far behind was Krupp in Germany and Carnegie in the USA. Contrasting Britain with France and Germany we note in the UK the lack of university education for engineers. This stemmed from the traditions of the old universities which placed emphasis on the classics. There is an example from much later of the University of Birmingham being reluctant to accept sponsorship of a chair in manufacturing from Lucas.
The making of metals demanded more coal and more coal demanded deeper mines. Deeper mines brought the twin problems of flooding with water and foul air. The solution was found in the hands of men like Newcomen, Blenkinsop and Hackworth, first with the atmospheric engine to pump the water to the surface. Ever ingenious, this water was then used to power waterwheels which, in turn, could power a lift to bring the hard won coal to the surface and onwards to the canal and the final customer.
Steam
But back to the mill. All this mechanisation in textile manufacture was fine so long as you were near a fast flowing river and could harness its power to drive waterwheels to work machines. What was needed was rotational power that did not need a fast flowing river and this brings us to Birmingham.
This is and was a remarkable place. In the seventeenth and eighteen century it was a town of workshops. Accounts from the time tell of innumerable chimneys puffing out smoke as all manner of metal was worked into tools, weapons and toys – those items of delight that so thrilled the monied classes. The very special thing about Birmingham was that each workshop carried out a single process, with the item passed on to the neighbour for the next process and so on. It was classical division of labour, a production line, if you like. London also adopted division of labour perhaps to an even greater degree, The other special thing about Birmingham was a man named Watt in partnership with Boulton. Watt did of course crack the problem of rotational motion powered by steam.
Now there was no stopping this people.
Rotational motion powered by steam worked a dream in cotton mills, and the percentage of cotton clothing worn by the British and Europeans increased dramatically. It was itself a revolution but one not without its dark side as the cotton was picked by slaves and the working conditions in the mills and mines for men, women and children were appalling. Both issues have been explored extensively elsewhere. They are fundamental to the industrial revolution and, along with the impetus to manufacturing provided by war, are crucial but dark parts of this story.
It is interesting, though, to try to identify just what it was that drove the massive increase in cotton consumption. One school of thought puts it down to domestic demand; people wanted clothing they could wash. Or was it the export markets? I suspect a bit of both. But back to steam.
We had the factories, could steam also help the transport problem? Canals were great, but slow. Trevithic, Stephenson and Isembard Kingdom Brunel and the railways beckoned.
The railway entrepreneurs like Thomas Brassey and George Hudson probably built a more densely populated rail system than was absolutely essential. Yet investors kept piling and an astonishing infrastructure resulted. Britain not only built railways in Britain but in France and elsewhere. We exported rails to the USA and indeed worldwide. If we contrast the railway works at Crewe with that at Swindon we find the GWR using broad-gauge for speed with the Crewe focusing on economy.
Inextricably linked to the development of machinery were machine tools. We can go back to early nineteenth century London and find in Lambeth that factory of Maudslay Son and Field where many of the early machine tools were made. Henry Maudslay lived on the cusp between craft and mass production. He produced lathes and drills, machines for creating a perfectly flat surface and ones to bore out cylinders. He insisted on precision and was one of the first to make nuts and bolts that were interchangeable; before then a nut would fit only the bolt made for it. Maudslay attracted other engineers keen to learn at his feet. One such was Joseph Whitworth who created the international standard for screw threads now used in every workshop in the world. In time centres of machine tool expertise emerged around Manchester, Glasgow, Halifax, Birmingham and Coventry.
Machine tools of whatever kind were subjected to continuous improvement. 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.
Electricity
Trains dramatically reduced travel times, but what if there was a quicker way to send a message?
Scientists on both sides of the Atlantic had long been experimenting with electricity, but in Britain it was Cooke and Wheatstone who demonstrated that a signal could be transmitted along a wire; some suggest before Morse. Soon telegraph wires extended beside railway lines cementing the connected country.
Electrical wires needed insulation which was provided by a rubber type substance from southeast Asia called Gutta Percha, the main producer of which would become BTR, the company that eventually bought Dunlop – that though is jumping ahead.
Britain wasn’t just a country, it was the heart of an empire extending across the globe. British ships sailed and steamed everywhere with iron and steel steadily taking the place of wood. The Empire could be drawn ever closer with telegraph and this is where Siemens stepped in. This was the British Siemens led by William, later Sir William, as opposed to the German company bearing the same name, run by his brother. The British Siemens Brothers made cable by the mile at their Woolwich factory, later part of AEI and then GEC. Soon the empire was linked.
Yet, telegraph was to be a splash in the ocean as far as the use of electricity was concerned. We come across a man named Ferranti working in the Siemens laboratory. From there he went on to power generation and, in his early twenties, a phenomenally ambitious scheme to provide electricity for London from a new power station at Deptford. It is important here again to mention America because Edison and Westinghouse with a much bigger market and greater resources would also grab a large share of the British market.
Telegraph was great if you could run cables, but what about ships? Just think of the commercial advantage if ships could be contacted en-route. Here another man of Italian birth steps in. Marconi created a business enabling ships to communicate with land stations using radio.
Time and again we might admit surprise at the names of those most influential in the story, for many were not ‘British’. The peoples of these islands welcomed and offered opportunity to men, for most were men, who had been born elsewhere. Perhaps it was our openness to the world more than anything that resulted in our place in the world of manufacturing.
Internal Combustion
The manufacturing ecosystem screamed for yet more power. I turn first to two Britons – James Young who found a flammable liquid seeping out of coal seams down in the mines, and Joseph Ruston top of my list manufacturing heroes.
Some of you may have come across a book titled One Hundred Years of Good Company which tells the story of Rustons, that great Lincoln engineer, with a little fictional narrative alongside the harder history. Well , this book tells the story of Joseph Ruston travelling to Russia to sell them steam pumps to drain the land ready to plant grain. Being an entrepreneur always with an eye to an opportunity, Ruston heard that a man nearby wanted to pump oil out of the ground and what better than a Rustons pump. That man’s mainstream business was trading in Shells – the rest as they say is history.
The Rustons book suggests that Ruston and Hornsby can lay claim to the first ‘diesel’ engine – indeed before diesel. These spread around the globe frequently for electricity generation as in lighthouses and the Statue of Liberty.
In any sane world British engineers would have developed the internal combustion engine to add power to carriages. Instead the island was plagued by rich idiots recklessly driving steam powered vehicles on the roads. Government stepped in to limit speeds with the Red Flag. This gave the French and Germans time to take the lead in inventing the motor car. As is often the case the British did rather well following the footsteps of others. Harry Lawson bought the Daimler patents and created the first British motor factory in an old cotton mill in Coventry.
Others quickly followed.
The route to the motor car derives quite possibly from the sewing machine but perhaps as likely the clock. The sewing machine evolved over a period with input again on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually taking shape under patents taken out by the America Isaac Singer.
A word about patents. It would be remiss not to acknowledge the role played by William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth I trusted advisor. He masterminded British patent law which provided protection to those who wished to exploit their inventions here. Many chose Britain in preference to their native land for this reason.
Some of those working with sewing machines used their new found knowledge to branch out into bicycles and here names like Humber, Hillman, Singer and Starley emerge. From bicycles came motor bikes and then motor cars. Much of this happened in Coventry, a city then known for its clock makers. The boom in bicycle attracted American tool makers which initially scooped the market. Not to be outdone Alfred Herbert the brother of one of the main cycle makers set up in machine tools. Interestingly Herbert championed the combination of factoring and manufacture; what mattered was getting the right machine. Herbert Austin the great car maker held similar views being happy to source his machine tools from anywhere in the world. This would have serious consequences for the UK industry.
For the motor car, alongside Lawson and Daimler, I might place Lanchester very much not an entrepreneur and definitely not a business administrator but a brilliant engineer who prided himself on building the entirety of his motor cars. He built the first vehicle that was not simply a horseless carriage. Harry Ricardo, who himself designed the engine for the early tank, said of the Lanchester car that he could vouch for their ‘quietness, lack of vibration and smooth ride.’
The name Harry Lawson brings in those of other entrepreneurs who sailed near to and sometimes over the line. Ernest Terah Hooley was one such described by the Economist as the Napoleon of finance.
Cars needed tyres and in steps John Dunlop with his tyre for bicycles. It wasn’t Dunlop though who drove the business from Ireland onto the world stage and motor cars. It was the du Cros family and Hooley; and much later Eric Geddes. It was Hooley who launched Dunlop as a public company, making millions as a result. He went on to build the Trafford Park industrial estate in Manchester.
Cars also needed lights and other electrical equipment and in steps Joseph Lucas, first with lights for bicycles but then for cars. But also engineers like Humber and Hillman, designers like Louis Coatalen.
Post WW1, Ruston tried their hand at motor cars. There were many others. Morris in Oxford who took the route of sourcing components rather than making everything himself. Austin who started out in Wolseley which later became part of Vickers. Rolls-Royce and WO Bentley of course.
If internal combustion engines could be used to power transport on land, why not ships and why not in the air; indeed why not on rail? Once again the British weren’t first but they prospered in the slip stream.
In relation to ships, the invention by Newcastle man CA Parsons of the steam turbine may have delayed the move by British shipbuilders to internal combustion. Steam turbine ships were very good.
Genius with steam also encouraged the British to stay with coal powered railway locomotives – after all, with the Flying Scotsman and the Mallard, it was a remarkable industry.
Clearly the same wasn’t true of aircraft and in the years before the First World War we began to see those much loved icons: de Havilland, Hadley Page, AV Roe, Sopwith and Hawker – more would follow.
War
Tragically and ironically, war played a huge part in the history of manufacturing. Aside from the loss of young lives, for Britain the drain on the exchequer especially after the second world war placed great pressure on the governments that spurred the export drive in the wake of the second war.
Looking at technological advances, the Crimea inspired William Armstrong to invent the rifled barrel for big guns, vastly improving their accuracy, and encouraging advances in metallurgy. Whitworth invented the hexagonal bullet for a rifle – supreme technology but one not embraced by the [powers that be. Interestingly in Germany Krupp also struggled to get his advances adopted. Armstrong would later join with Whitworth and then Vickers.
Advances in medicine are well known. War also inspired Donkin to develop the tin can for preserving food especially for the Navy. Napoleon could claim the credit since he had sponsored a competition to produce a means of storage of meat for his sailors. The competition was won by a glass container; Donkin’s metal one worked rather better in practice.
The Boer war developed the use of telegraph transforming the way infantry and cavalry worked together.
The First World War had a massive influence.
At the start, the War Office had specified Bosch magnetos. In stepped Peter Bennett of Thomson Bennett which were the only UK manufacturer of such parts. Lucas spotted an opportunity and bought the company, massively increasing its production. Almost as important, Bennett would go on to run Lucas in the interwar years with great success.
Inevitably expertise with explosives grew with people like Nobel, Abel and other chemists. A whole string of munitions factories were created. Heavy engineering flexed its muscles with companies like Vickers, John Brown, Cammell Laird and Beardmore. The young motor industry stepped up with large numbers of lorries, motor bikes and cars. Textile manufacturers churned out tons of uniforms. Tritton invented the Lincoln tank, made by manufacturers across the land. In truth under the inspiration of Lloyd George the whole national industry went to war. In Lincoln we can look not only a Tritton, but Claytons, Marshalls, Robey and Rustons. Inevitably machine tool makers were busy but sadly for Britain they failed to achieve sufficient capacity to meet the phenomenal demand and the shortfall was met by America.
Telegraph and telephone were used by the country mile but also radio especially for contact between the ground and aircraft overhead.
Toys
I found a toy tank in a National trust house we visited. But it has a strong message about toys which were barely visible in Britain in any quantity before the twentieth century. There may have been a horse tricycle from G&J Lines, but more likely a wooden toy bought from a street trader. After 1900, they may have had a Mechanics Made Easy set and accompanying instruction manual. Frank Hornby, a Liverpool office worker, had been making perforated metal strips for his sons. These could be connected by means of small bolts and nuts to make anything from model trains to bridges and cranes. The adoption of the name Meccano came in 1907. Harbutt’s Plasticine was first manufactured in 1900. For wealthier families, the main source of toys was Germany with manufacturers such as Steiffe for Teddy Bears and Marklin for tinplate. The British firm Bassett-Lowke designed and supplied clockwork trains, but often manufactured for them in Germany. The absence of German suppliers after the first war boosted British toy makers into world leadership between the wars.
The interwar years witnessed change on a grand scale.
At first there was a short post war boom but then old industries suffered as former customer nations found they could make it themselves – so textiles and shipping. Then the massive infrastructure of war production had to be redeployed. Shipyard owners rationed themselves to share out the reduced volume of work. Thousands of skills workers were laid off. The consumption of whisky fell and producers such as the Distillers Company sought new uses for their plant – industrial alcohol made from molasses was one answer.
New industries prospered. ICI was created in 1926 and would fund research which would, within a decade lead to the invention of polythene and Perspex, using that industrial alcohol. Courtaulds took a licence for the production of rayon from vegetable material and soon transformed the dress of the British from cotton and wool – once again historic skills of spinning and weaving came in. The Celanese company of Derby took this further by using chemicals derived from cracking oil.
Elsewhere Lever Brothers were making more than soap, Burroughs Wellcome were developing medicines although Glaxo still focused on baby milk. English Electric and Associated Electrical Industries were both products of the interwar years.
Motor cars went from strength to strength as did radio, once businesses realised they could make money out of it. The BBC was formed by radio manufacturers in the 1923. To begin with the number of amateur licences far exceeded those who simply wanted to listen. A great many of the early radios were home made, but then we have names like Ekco and Pye. Gramophone recording kept pace with radio but television would follow later. There were British fingers in each of the pies.
In the mid-thirties, rearmament saved shipping, but also aircraft. Companies such as Avro, Supermarine, de Havilland, Vickers and Shorts were busy again.
Second World War
There is a case for saying that the Second World War lasted for ten years for British manufacturers. It produced an astonishing set of advances.
The mantle of machine tools had passed to Alfred Herbert of Coventry. The importance of machine tools in the war was underlined by Churchill describing them as ‘the ganglion nerve centre of the whole [of] supply’.
Motor manufacturers stepped up to the mark even more, producing everything from tanks, tin hats and ammunition to vehicles of all kinds – they made aircraft in the shadow factories built in the thirties in anticipation of war. Out of aircraft production came the jet, brain child of Frank Whittle which took to the air in the Meteor.
Radio manufacturers produced thousands of sets for all three services; they developed and manufactured radar and many other devices not least the Collosus computer that cracked the enigma code.
The potential of nuclear power was explored by ICI and others. Interestingly Frank Kierton, who went on to run Courtaulds, was part of the ICI team. Nylon, based on chemicals derived from oil, and penicillin, initially using a natural fermentation, were discovered. British Nylon Spinners, owned jointly by ICI and Courtaulds, exploited the American invention. Glaxo and Wellcome produced penicillin. It would not be long before penicillin was joined by pharmaceuticals also derived from oil. Aluminium, which had been produced in the UK since the late 19th c, had been used by the ton in aircraft manufacture and would go on to be used in London’s tube trains.
Post war export drive
Post war, there was no respite. Exports were needed in unimagined quantities to balance the nation’s books. It was tough on an exhausted population for rationing became over fiercer. For exports, plastics mushroomed as more oil was refined to meet demand. Polythene began to be seen in the home. Giant chemical works appeared.
The motor industry yet again came into its own. The problem was how to meet the pent up demand. The American market was hungry for Jaguars, Austin Healey and MG and the Sunbeam Talbot. This strong demand laid the foundations of troubles to come as demands for higher wages were accepted just to keep production moving. Coventry was a busy place. The steel works struggled to keep pace. Shipyards were rationing orders to cope with demand. Again storing up problems for the future. The absence of competition meant that technical advance was slow or non-existent. Old work practices were re-embraced. There were exceptions. A man named Bamford made his first excavator from a converted tractor. The Vickers Viscount and de Havilland Comet took to the air
The jet engine powered aircraft but also found spectacular use as gas turbines powering the new oil industry. I was privileged to meet Kelvin Bray, managing director of Ruston Gas Turbines for twenty five years and he told me how the team in Lincoln, working under Bob Fielden with a watchful eye from Whittle, developed the gas turbine with encouragement from Arnold Weinstock of Ruston’s then owner, GEC. Rustons gas turbines were used by 80% of the world’s oil industry
In Lincoln, there was also a timber fabrication company whose building was taken over by AEI and then GEC and became home to British semiconductor manufacture. Now, as Dynex, it is a leading manufacturer of complex power semiconductors. A former finance director suggested to me that had Weinstock been braver it could now be a mass producer of semiconductors.
The post war era saw Brush at the Falcon Works in Loughborough manufacture generators, transformers and railway locomotives. Brush later became part of Hawker Siddeley.
Rolls-Royce at Derby had powered so many aircraft with the iconic Merlin engine amongst others. Their motor cars transported royalty and as seen here Field Marshall Montogmery. The post war era saw wonderful motor cars but also Rolls-Royce jet engines and work on nuclear power for submarines.
The Festival of Britain
The Festival of Britain of 1951 may be seen as the starting point of what was a new era. It was all about design, new sources of power (nuclear and hydroelectric) but it also celebrated British railways, shipbuilding and aircraft.
The Festival was to be quite different from the Exhibition which unashamedly set out the stall of British manufacturing, The Festival sought to tell the story of the people of these islands through exhibitions throughout the land. There was a strong cultural offering and a show case on craft skills. Above all manufacturing was about great design
In Northern Ireland there was a focus on agriculture and linen production. The past seemed to be woven into the present. There was very little if anything on food manufacture, really because there was relatively little processing – Birds Eye frozen fish and peas, Batchelors soups and tinned vegetable, Fray Bentos corned beef and, of course, spam.
There was an exhibition ship and also exhibitions in large conurbations away from London
The review of products being made by British companies was important. Products were selected by what would become the design council for their good design in four categories: household, recreation, work and transport
So let’s visit the Festival Park on London’s Southbank with the benefit of hindsight.
In the background is the dome of discovery of which more later. Of relevance here are the materials used in its construction and that of the Skylon – the icon of the festival. Fibre glass and Aluminium. Although not new, these were the coming materials. Fibre glass soon to be part of the glass maker Pilkington in St Helens and aluminium produced in Scotland using hydroelectricity but also quite possibly from recycled WW2 aircraft. The absence of steel is significant. Every ounce that was being produced was needed to build ships and motor vehicles to sell in overseas markets
Another material in evidence was rubber, more specifically Dunlop rubber. Dunlop, with their majestic headquarters at Fort Dunlop in Birmingham were very much the doyen of post war British industry with their tyres on most cars and lorries.. Dunlop also provided floor covering, seating and much more at the Festival as we will see. It was the time of the great British companies. So I could add Lucas, British Motor Corporation , Unilever, Vickers, English Electric, Associated Electrical Industries, Courtaulds, ICI, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar. Interestingly a company not featured at the Festival which today is very much in evidence is JCB only created by Joseph Bamford in 1947
The Dome of Discovery, together with exhibitions at the science museum at South Kensington was all about the thrill of science. In 1951 we were talking of the discovery of genes, atomic energy and interestingly tortoises, mechanical objects with simple brains! These were the creation of Grey Walter and were attracted by light and repulsed by contact. Alan Turing was amused by them. We can perhaps trace from them to modern Robotics and much computing for which we do of course also look to Turing. One of the first was by the Manchester based Ferranti.
What else was being made?
We can look inside the power and production pavilion. A plethora of machinery, but I am sure I see a loom. This is important because it brings to the fore textiles where it was said that at one time Lancashire had clothed half the world. Looking through the festival literature it is clear that the expectation was that textiles would continue to be Britain’s industrial power house. What though was the reality?
Fifties
The 1956 Clean Air Act provided the impetus needed to move the railways away from their dependence on coal. The fifties were a busy decade with motor factories churning out motor cars for export, shipyards building fine yet outmoded craft, aircraft factories exploring the potential of jet propulsion not least with the V Bombers. Christopher Cockerell devised the Hovercraft in 1953.
Radio manufacturers turned their hands to transistors and television. Plastics found their way into the home as did detergents. ICI boasted some of the largest chemical plants in the world.
Yet, Germany and Japan began to see the fruits of their rebuilt industries whilst in Britain companies made use of old buildings and plant; management had become complacent with the absence of competition from the major industrial nations. America was enjoying a post war boom, but was at war in Korea and was face to face with the USSR in what became known as the Cold War.
The Suez Crisis put markers down for Britain's loss of influence on the world stage but also for the vulnerability of oil supplies and the knock on reduction in the size of cars. The Morris Mini was Britain's answer in the final year of the decade.
Sixties
Swinging London witnessed the Beatles and the miniskirt.
It was a time for change, for the white heat of technology. Government looked to harness the talent within our industries by building bigger companies able to compete on the world stage. GEC joined with English Electric and Associated Electrical Industries to become a company employing a quarter of a million people. It then dramatically slimmed with closures and redundancies.
Other initiatives produced the British computer giant ICL later bought by Fujitsu, yet more money was spent propping up shipyards. Machine tools were becoming computerised and were seen as key.
Former ICI chief chemist, Dr Richard Beeching, both modernised and cut the railway network. The QE2, built by John Brown, on the Clyde was launched.
Pilkington float glass transformed glass manufacture and this was visible in the concrete high-rise blocks which were replacing war damaged and ageing housing.
The ATM cash machine, a British invention, began to appear in our high streets.
The motor industry produced the Jaguar E-type, Triumph Spitfire, MGB and Lotus Elan. Paddy Hopkirk won the Monte Carlo rally in a Mini Copper S. James Bond burst onto cinema screens first in a Sunbeam Alpine and then the Aston Martin DB5. Yet, the Rootes Group sold out to the American Chrysler. BMC began to look unhealthy.
It worth pausing here. BMC was the combination of two competitors, in a way just as GEC combined with fierce rivals AEI and EE. Austin and Morris produced much loved cars. The Morris Minor designed by Isisgonis who also designed the Morris Mini and Austin Seven essentially the same car but in competition. When you add the Wolseley Hornet and Riley Elf you begin to see a mess. The combined company had a great many old factories and aging plant. Machine tool makers were failing to deliver the multi function machines needed. Sales didn’t talk to production and no one did any marketing.
There was another side to the coin. Lucas embraced fuel injection, being happy to bring better manufacturing skills to products licenced from competitors. Precious metal specialist Johnson Mathey produced the catalytic converter.
New aircraft, the Vanguard and VC10 failed to live up to the promise of the Vickers Viscount. The Labour government cancelled the TSR2 project option to buy from the USA
We began to buy transistor radios from Hong Kong who benefitted from Commonwealth preference. . Courtaulds became the biggest textile manufacturer in the world but faced a massive struggle from low wage producers.
Lines Brothers had the biggest toy factory but didn't embrace the marketing might of the American.
A currency crisis led to a devaluation of the pound. The steel industry was nationalised once more. Industrial unrest was felt throughout the economy.
Seventies
Oil crises caused the wheels to fall off the British economy, as rampant inflation tore through. Nationalisation of ailing industries marked the mid-decade: shipbuilding and, by the formation of British Aerospace, aircraft manufacture. The entry into service of Concorde put a beautiful face on the struggling industry. Britain so nearly lost Rolls-Royce in 1971 as the development costs of the RB211 engine ran out of control. The aero-engine business became state owned with the separation of Rolls-Royce Motors.
Belatedly, the UK joined the EEC. A visit by the International Monetary Fund in 1976 shocked the nation.
Yet, Glaxo, Wellcome, Beecham and Boots each launched drugs that would transform their businesses.
The railways began a further transformation with the Intercity 125.
The coming on stream of North Sea Oil drove up the exchange rate although making life doubly tough for manufactured exports. Nevertheless, North Sea Gas found its way into most British homes for cooking and heating. Boiler manufacturers did well. By 1977 the North Sea was producing half a million barrels of oil a day, a third of the country’s needs and by 1980, Britain was self-sufficient in gas and oil.
Alfred Herbert, the heart of the nation's machine tools industry, was rescued in 1975 but finally collapsed in 1980; TI bought a good part of its assets. Now most machine tools come from Taiwan. A young company, Renishaw, took up the cudgels of British machine tool making with its revolutionary twin axis measuring device. It has since expanded into 3D printing
Eighties
Acorn built the BBC Computer. But the cold wind of the free market swept through the eighties with a new Prime minister Margaret Thatcher.. The eighties saw a ravaged economy opened to the forces of the market, and, with privatisation, much manufacturing was lost.
British Rail Engineering was sold to the Canadian Bombardier. The shipyards were privatised but in the process shrunk with yet more job losses.
In the few brighter spots, Jaguar was floated. We welcomed Japanese motor manufacturers to build factories in the UK and also investment by Japanese television manufacturers; home grown television manufacture began to wilt.
The rump of the last British volume motor manufacturer, Austin Rover, was bought by the newly privatised British Aerospace; six years later they sold on to BMW who kept Mini - the remainder wilted on the vine.
The privatisation of British Telecom created a crisis for British telecoms manufacturers; GEC eventually bought Plessey but only with the involvement of the German Siemens.
Nineties
Looking to the nineties, Rolls-Royce plc launched its best ever engine, the Trent, the origin of which can be traced back to the RB211. BAE Systems was formed by the merger of British Aerospace and Marconi Electronic Systems from the break-up of GEC Marconi.
The decade of the dotcom bubble had both winners (ARM) and losers (GEC Marconi) in the UK. Technology companies had become the must have investment. With ARM this made sense for they designed the operating software of mobile devices world-wide. For GEC, it meant that they overpaid for acquisitions, something that led to the break-up of this once great company.
Babcock International marked out its future by taking over naval dockyards at Rosyth and Devonport. Between Babcock and BAE Systems, we are major defence manufacturers
Government turned its attention to financial services as the nation’s saviour and began to ignore manufacturing. Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Jaguar and Land Rover were sold to foreign owners. Lucas fell into the hands of the US Varity in 1996 and Racal was bought by the French Thomson-CSF in 2000.
Yet, pharmaceutical companies (Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham) combined to achieve economies of scale and a place on the world scene.
Noughties
Raspberry Pi launched its computer kits to encourage understanding of what had become commonplace devices. In the background though British companies were working more with universities in developing technologies for the future with new materials such as graphene.
The twenty-first century witnessed the growth of financial services made visible in London's Canary Wharf. This was followed by the financial crash of 2008 which starved businesses of finance.
There was a spate of disposals of building products companies: Redland sold to the French Lafarge and British Gypsum to the French St Gobain; Pilkington bought by Nippon Glass; and RMC sold to the Mexican CEMEX, Blue Circle to the Irish CHR-owned Tarmac and Hanson Cement to the German Heidelberg Group.
Jim Radcliffe continued the growth of Ineos by buying chemical plants largely from oil majors who wanted to focus on oil exploration and production.
Oneties and early twenties
The financial crash impacted the economy both immediately in the lack of available credit for industry but longer term in the fruits of austerity seen in the deterioration of the national infrastructure.
Brexit followed, forcing a massive change in business models with the loss of a huge 'home' market.
Covid shut everything down and left the UK with a depleted workforce from long term illness.
The war in Ukraine set energy prices rocketing and inflation returned.
Global warming and the imperative to move to net zero set major challenges throughout society. Traditional methods of steel production came under attack with the proposed alternative of electric furnaces. In the motor industry, manufacturers were encouraged to move to electric vehicles despite issues concerning battery manufacture, the lack of charging points and the inadequacy of the national grid. Lively debate continues of the merits of hydrogen as an alternative. Yet, JCB, which had manufactured machinery for building and civil engineering as well as farming, produced the first hydrogen powered digger.
Astra-Zeneca, which can trace its origin back to ICI, produced, with Oxford University, an effective Covid vaccine. GSK became one of the world's major pharmaceutical companies.
Companies come and go; some say that an optimum life is about twenty-five years, so around a third of the period under review. Great companies buck the trend, and there are a quite a few. I highlight Jaguar and JCB but could add Rover, Glaxo and, in its current name and form, ICI as AstraZeneca.
What will your great company be and what will it make?
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 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)
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