East London manufacturing history

 Writing of London in the Nineteenth Century, Jerry White remarks on the large proportion of the population – some 30% - who made things, countering a common belief that London was a place of commerce with local manufacturing restricted to small and niche workshops. This was largely the result of what had gone before. London as a port was fundamental.

Docklands

The Naval dockyard at Woolwich became the principal focus in the reign of Henry VIII and the building of Henri Grace a Dieu. Looking at the records of the Board of Ordnance, which supplied cannon, powder and cannon balls, there grew up substantial stores at Chatham, Tilbury and Sheerness and to a lesser extent Woolwich itself. I write below of the major role that Woolwich would take in the supply of the army. Significant naval stores were also held at Portsmouth and Plymouth. With the later expansion of empire, stores were located overseas at for example Gibraltar.

Alongside naval shipbuilding, commercial shipbuilding yards stretched east from Bermondsey. They provided the essential transport for adventurers and traders. East Indiamen made the long and challenging journey to the far east to bring back exotic cargoes. Nearer to home coal was brought by coastal ships from Newcastle. The yards were busy places and I wrote of them in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

At the end of the eighteenth century the pressure on the small area of 'legal' docks for commercial shipping was clearly grossly inadequate and expansion became urgent. I wrote of this in my page on Inner London for that was where the docks were.

As London grew, the banks of the Thames filled with manufacturing businesses attracted by the ease of receiving raw materials and dispatching finished goods. The docks would welcome ships arriving with cargoes from just about all over the world; ships too would leave with finished goods destined for lucrative overseas markets. The label ‘Made in London’ carried a cache the world over.

It had been and still was a busy and diversified place with saw-mills, lead-smelting, paint and varnish works, iron and brass foundries, chemicals works and ships stores, boiler makers works, chain and anchor works and sack, bag and canvas factories.

Woolwich

The Weald provided charcoal and iron ore for the production of all things metal, so guns in the environs of the Tower of London and at the Woolwich Arsenal, and cutlery before Sheffield bagged the lead in that trade. As to the manufacture of weapons, the casting of brass cannon had been carried out at Moorfields and before that on the Weald itself. In the first half of the eighteenth century there were built on the Woolwich site a foundry for casting guns, a Laboratory for making gunpowder and a workshop for gun carriages as well as extensive storage. Further development would follow in the end of the Napoleonic wars.

Shoreditch and Bethnal Green

Furniture making was to be found in Mayfair for the well-to-do and in the East End, using semi-skilled labour, for the rest of the market. Furniture skills were gathered together by companies like Gillow and Seddon. Once again, processes would be subdivided into different skill sets; in time mechanisation would make redundant much of the handicraft. The area around Shoreditch and the western end of Bethnal Green became in White’s words ‘something approaching one giant factory’.

A book titled Furnishing the World - The East London Furniture Trade 1830-1980 looks at this in more detail. The starting point was the growing population and house building, all of which drove demand for furniture. This was matched by an east end population which included Jewish immigrants skilled in carpentry and the availability of wood coming in through the growing docklands but also later along the Regents Canal which opened in 1820. The overwhelming majority of the furniture makers were small workshops selling mainly to wholesalers.

Further reading:

• Richard Tames, Barking Past (London: Historical Publications, 2002)
• Sue Curtis, Dagenham and Rainham Past (Chichester: Phillimore, 2000)
• Pat Kirkham, Rodney Mace and Julia Porter, Furnishing the World - The East London Furniture Trade 1830-1980 (London: Journeyman Press, 1987)

High Wycombe manufacturing history

 Cloth was the industry of this Buckinghamshire village, like so many places in Britain. Being close to the river Wye, paper mills appeared; in common with other villages in the south of the midlands straw plaiting was an occupation for women, as was lace making. It was though furniture making that would enable High Wycombe to stamp its mark, although being the Operations Control Centre of Bomber Command in the Second World War was certainly higher profile for a number of decades.

First a word about paper making. The earliest records show paper making from rags pounded to pulp in the chalky water from the river Wye in the late sixteenth century. One of these early mills, Glory Mills at Woodburn Green, was bought by Wiggins Teape in 1894. Much later Wiggins Teape would have a research centre at nearby Beaconsfield. The mill finally closed in 1999. I write more about paper making in my blog on Hemel Hempstead, also on the Wye.

I am grateful to L.J. Mayes for his book The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe for a fascinating description of the industry. Before referring to this, the Wycombe Chair Museum offers a list of furniture makers. It runs to some sixty-three pages and so offers a sense of just how widespread this activity was. Having said that, I suspect it was no more widespread than the plaiting of straw and making of hats in the dwellings of Luton or the spinners and weavers of the northwest.

Mayes offers a description of the chair making process of which I offer a precis, for my back hurts just to write it. We have to imagine an elm tree some forty feet tall. It has to be felled, stripped of its branches and bark. It then has to be sawn into planks two inches thick. This process is of course not unique to chair making; I refer to it also in relation to the naval shipyard in Portsmouth. Sawing was most often done in the wood where the tree was felled. A saw pit is dug some seven feet deep and in its stands the sawyer who will do most of the back breaking work. The prepared tree is moved over the saw pit and a second man first marks a straight line with string and chalk. He then stands on the tree holding the top end of the seven foot saw which he guides along the line whilst his mate sweats and is covered in saw dust. I was astonished to read in the context of shipbuilding that the sawyers of Portsmouth resisted the move to powered saw mills.

The plank is cut into sections to provide the seat for the chair. In order to make it into the seat of a comfortable Windsor chair, the seat has to be shaped. Next come the legs and and laths which are cut from green beech by 'bodgers' who also work within the wood from a simple shelter which they build themselves. The young tree trunks are roughly shaped and divided before being finely shaped by a simple pole lathe - a tool that has been used for centuries. All the parts including ash to be bent for the bannister are then assembled in the workshop using simple drills and chisels, everything done by experienced eye. The finished chair is stained by immersing it in liquid and then polished ready for sale. Mayes suggests that this manual process was still in use in the 1950s by a few chair-makers.

Industrialisation did impact Wycombe chair-making, but indirectly. The growing number of skilled men working in manufacturing around the country were being better housed and the houses needed well made furniture. Equally mechanisation reduced the workforce in paper making and farming releasing labour who found work in chair making. Increasingly the processes were broken down in a division of labour. Steam power came in the saw mills and massively increased output compared to saw pits. Bodgers continued to bring bundles of their work to the workshops. Relatively unskilled factory work came in with chair-seat caners, many of whom were women. The assembly of the chair, though, remained a skilled occupation for many years. In terms of selling, furniture vans would leave Wycombe on a tour of towns to sell their wares. In time retailers stepped in and catalogues were produced by the larger companies.

1851 saw Wycombe master chair-maker Edmund Hutchinson awarded the title of Champion Chair of the Exhibition. Already company names were emerging ahead of the pack: Gomme, Skull, Glenister, Dancer & Hearn.

Mechanisation increased with steam powered circular saws and borers. In 1874 the output of the town was estimated at one and half million chairs worth a quarter of a million pounds. The population had trebled over a quarter of a century, but without the utilities in place to cater for it; the river Wye was filled with waste. In time matters improved.

Wycombe had gained a reputation for cheap furniture. This stung and a number of companies embraced new styles. E.G. Punnett was engaged to design pieces influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement.

The coming of war in 1914 saw an immediate fall in demand for this higher end furniture and skilled workers were redeployed on short term public projects including wood panelling the Guildhall. Demand for lower end furniture was strong with orders for the many new barracks. War meant an end to competition from German and Austrian furniture makers and so in due course skilled men found themselves back in demand. Men volunteered or were called up and so manpower shortages became an issue. As elsewhere, the end of the war saw an upturn in demand but this was short-lived and unemployment loomed.

With the challenges of the interwar years many companies were reluctant to invest in mechanisation to reduce costs, an exception being E. Gomme & Sons which went from strength to strength. Mechanisation helped but more was needed.

Aircraft were built requiring woodworking skills. Dancer & Hearn in particular formed a relationship with de Havilland (the two owners were friends) and during slack periods parts were supplied for the Mosquito. Others followed with Gomme supplying fuselages and Baker's veneers.

Ercol was set up in Wycombe in 1920 by Lucian R. Ercolani and new designs began to appear.

The Second World War saw High Wycombe identified as a place where London based manufacturers could re-locate to escape bombing. Amongst these were Cossor which manufactured radar screens and cathode ray tubes. A number of medium sized furniture manufacturers took advantage of the opportunity to leave an industry that was becoming ever more challenging. Those that remained had the challenge of utility furniture of which I wrote in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The fifties saw a change in the way furniture was marketed. Hitherto it had been the wholesalers and large retailers which had controlled what was produced. Parker-Knoll had begun their own consumer advertising and this was followed by Ercol and Gomme. Ercol chose the windsor style chair as their theme. Gomme preferred a series of furniture units which could be added to as required - G-Plan. I write of the further development of the British furniture industry in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The fifties saw consolidation among the furniture companies and the eighties and nineties closures and relocation. Glenisters closed; Gomme moved to Melksham, Parker-Knoll to Chipping Norton and Ercol to Princess Risborough.

At the beginning of this blog I referred to the Bomber Command Operations Centre. This has been written about extensively elsewhere. However the presence of the RAF and a major US Airforce base impacted on the town. Towards the end of the First World War the towns furniture makers who were busy supplying wooden components, set up The Aircraft Manufacturing Company. It came too late to contribute much, but its premises were re-purposed by woodworking tool maker, Broom and Wade, as the factory in which they manufactured pneumatic equipment amongst much else. They became the town's biggest employer and merged with Holman of Cambourne to become International Compressed Air (later Compair) in Slough. Other more recent aircraft related businesses are Springtech which manufactures precision springs, and Sabeti Wain which designs and manufactures aircraft interiors.

Further reading:

• James Rattue, High Wycombe Past (Chichester: Phillimore, 2002)
• L.J. Mayes, The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960)