Text of talk to University of Lincoln engineering students – December 2024
I draw extensively on my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines and subsequent research published on my website www.britishmanufacturinghistory.uk
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?
Further reading
- How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World
- Vehicles to Vaccines
- Both books have extensive bibliographies
- My website is growing at present with posts on manufacturing places
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