My books on manufacturing

My books on manufacturing
My books on manufacturing history
Showing posts with label Machine Tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Machine Tools. Show all posts

Thursday, October 24, 2024

A town created by the railways - Crewe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

Saturday, June 22, 2024

Leicester Manufacturing History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

Manufacturing places - the art of re-invention

My exploration of British manufacturing has been sector by sector and chronological. I am now beginning to join up the dots and explore thos...