Newcastle and Gateshead manfacturing history

 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) 

How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World

Vehicles to Vaccines

Ordnance

Henrietta Heald , William Armstrong, Magician of the North

Anthony Slaven, British Shipbuilding 1500-2010 (Lancaster: Crucible, 2013)

Manchester's 19th century tool makers

Manchester's booming cotton industry with its demands on mechanisation was the obvious place for an ambitious engineer to pursue his business. Much later it was where Ferranti and Fairey explored computerised machine tools. The image is of Ferranti's first computer.

One early engineer was Richard Roberts who moved back to Manchester after a spell with Henry Maudslay in London. He was a man with no financial resource and so he needed backers whom he found in the persons of Hill, Sharp and Wilkinson. The first significant Manchester venture was to explore an American patent for a power loom. Roberts was charged with finding a better design which he did and some 4,000 examples were sold. Key to the production of this volume, large by the standards of the day, was the invention of machine tools which could reproduce parts to common specification. We are talking about items such as gears which for which Roberts had produced a gear cutting tool. Although a man without much formal education, Roberts joined the Manchester Lit & Phil Society and more importantly championed the Manchester Mechanics Institute whose progeny can be traced to the world renowned University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. His most celebrated invention was a self-acting spinning mule which clearly caused him a wrestle of conscience. Skilled spinners were on strike and their Masters saw in a self-acting spinning mule a way to by-pass that human input. Roberts at first declined but eventually relented. I write in HBSTMW how the bicycle was conceived from ideas developed in the sewing machine. A perhaps similar cross-fertilisation of ideas can also be seen in Roberts as he turned his attention to railway locomotives and finally to steam ships. Throughout a key theme was the making of machines to produce the parts needed for his inventions. Many of the ideas can be traced back to what Roberts learnt through his time with Maudslay, however Roberts is rightly acclaimed as the father of production engineering.

Joseph Whitworth had also spent time with Maudslay, certainly building on his own passion for precision. He exhibited with gusto at the Great Exhibtion bringing to Hyde Park some twenty-six machine tools. He may well have been one of those shaken by what he saw of American manufacturing, what had been regarded as second rate was actually very good, so much so that he set out for the States to see for himself. He came back fired up with a mission to pursue excellence and to encourage it in others. One outcome was the universal standard for screws making them freely interchangeable. The second was about education where he found himself keenly aware that Britain lagged far behind. British engineers were trained on the job and so lacked the academic backing enjoyed by the French and Germans. He wasn’t alone. In many, if not most large, British towns men of thought had gathered together in Lit and Phil Societies to explore together a wide range of subjects including science, something eschewed by English universities. Of equal importance, like Roberts, Whitworth championed Mechanics Institutes where all were welcomed to improve their skills. I have written elsewhere about the impact of war on manufacturing and I suspect that it was the Crimean war that inspired Whitworth to turn his hand to armour. I wrote in HBSTMW of William Armstrong’s success with better big guns, where he pipped both Whitworth and Brunel at the post. Whitworth was not one to be beaten and designed a rifle employing a hexagonal bullet, a weapon far more accurate than the existing Enfield. It proved too much for the War Office to adopt, but was used nonetheless widely and to lethal effect.

James Naysmith on his return to Manchester from his time with Maudslay developed or exploited a particular talent for attracting wealthy backers. He started off in a small rented workshop making models and parts for textile machinery. With financial help from Holbrook Gaskell and Henry Garnett he built at Patricroft the Bridgewater Foundry which had on site all that was required for large scale machinery manufacture. A product list from the time exists and reveals a remarkable array of machine tools. What is the more remarkable is their size; they were capable of machining parts for very big pieces of equipment. In 1843, Naysmith was granted a patent for his steam hammer which he then exploited for the period of the patent and made himself into a multimillionaire (in current money).

William Muir worked as foreman at Whitworths after his time with Maudslays but then he set up William Muir & Co and quietly built a major business supplying excellent machine tools around the world. Muir's business was built first on the manufacture of a railway ticket machine and then a letter copier. He exhibited at the Great Exhibition winning a prize. He then probably secured additional backing and set up at the Britannia Works where he began to produce heavy machine tools. This business thrived and was taken on by his son in partnership with the Garnett brothers and continued trading until the 1930s.

One not obviously connected with Maudslay was William Fairburn who began his engineering career in partnership in 1817 but then branched out on his own account with a focus on the ironwork in mills. From there he moved to ship building both in Manchester and on the Thames. He developed a large export trade in Turkey, Russia and Sweden but his crowning glory was in the steam-powered woollen mills of Titus Salt at Saltaire near Bradford.

Beyer and Peacock built railway locomotives in Openshaw. Charles Beyer had been chief engineer at Sharp, Roberts & Co and and Richard Peacock had spent time with both GWR and the Manchester & Sheffield railway. Together with scot Henry Robertson they developed a business that in a little over a century manufactured some 8,000 locomotives for railways around the world. One of their most famed though was for the Metropolitan railway in London (the early Tube).

Further reading

• Alan Kidd, Manchester (Keele: Rayburn Publishing, 1993)

Coventry on the cusp of the twentieth century

Coventry was a city of engineering skills honed on watchmaking and it attracted first bicycle makers and then the first motor vehicle companies.

Two grandsons of the pioneer machine tool maker Henry Maudslay set up in the city: Cyril Maudslay with the Maudslay Motor Company which later joined with AEC and Reginald Maudslay with his Standard Motor company which later joined with Triumph. By then Maudslay Sons & Field was ending its life having moved from machine tools to marine engines both of which it had manufactured to great acclaim. London was a centre of engineering although much had gravitated to Manchester with the demands of an increasingly mechanised textile industry. London also had a long history of shipbuilding hence the direction of Maudslay's move away from machine tools.

Another major London manufacturer of marine engines was John Penn which company attracted a young William Hillman as an apprentice. Hillman moved back to his native Leicester where he went into partnership with William Herbert making first sewings machines and then bicycles as the Premier Company. William Herbert's younger brother was Alfred who, following an apprenticeship with Jessop in Leicester, set up in partnership before moving to Coventry as managing director of a new machine tool company, Alfred Herbert Ltd, with William Herbert as chairman.

I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how other subsequently great names gathered in Coventry: Harry Lawson, Louis Coatelin, Thomas Humber and well as William Hillman and the Maudslays. The boom in bicycles attracted American tool makers which scooped the market. Coventry was thus the obvious place for a rebirth of the British machine tool industry and Alfred Herbert was ready to lead the charge. I tell Herbert's subsequent story in Vehicles to Vaccines.

In the first part of the twentieth century, Alfred Herbert steadily built his business on the back of bicycles but when war broke out Herberts like all machine tool makers around the country faced massive demands. I wrote in my book Ordnance how Alfred Herbert was one of the industrialists - the men of push and go - who stepped forward to help Lloyd George in the war effort, in Herbert's case as Director of Machine Tools. I also wrote in Ordnance of the challenges facing manufacturing in terms of the loss of skilled men to the army. Unskilled men and women were brought into the factories and trained in specific tasks. Management then had the challenge of organising the flow of work in a way that it could be done satisfactorily with these more basic skill levels. They did not always succeed as evidenced by the number of 'duds' amongst shells supplied to the western front. Companies did go to extraordinary efforts to meet the challenge, but in the end the gap between supply and demand was met by imports from the USA. A huge quantity of armaments were imported and so these machine tools merely added to the list. It would however give the Americans a further foothold in British markets.

For Herberts and Coventry, the end of the war meant first a frenzy of activity but then the reality sunk in. The industry had grown to meet war demand and now had to shrink back to peacetime levels. Yet the world was changing and manufacturers sought different and more economical ways of doing things; the tried and tested no longer worked. For Herberts the challenge was to decide which machines to produce and how much to invest in new designs. In their book Alfred Herbert and the British Machine Tool Industry, Roger Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis suggest that Sir Alfred found it hard to set a clear direction. There was also the issue of factored machines, which I discuss in Vehicles to Vaccines, which gave Herberts the option to source the more advanced machinery from third parties and so avoid both the cost of investment and the risk of failure.

You can read a fuller account of Coventry manufacturing by following this link and something on the earlier history of machine tools in this link.

London's 19th century tool makers

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

Guns at COD Greenford in WW2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

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)

The building blocks of manufacturing: coal and metals

 Coal had ‘tentacles in every part of this changing society’. Landowners loved it, for it lay under their land; farmers benefitted from its use in burning lime for fertiliser; textile manufacturers used its heat in bleaching and dyeing; houses were built from brick and glass both made by the heat of coal; many small workshops across the land, as we shall see, used it to enhance their productivity. Metal was not only needed for large machines, but also for small machines, clocks, guns, instruments and ‘toys’  - small decorative items to delight the growing middle class. Shipbuilders began to explore the use of metal for ships. 

Read more by following the link.

Key to the effective use of coal and metals were the canals.

Who else shaped the manufacturing world - American steel

 The story of American steel making begins in the wake of the Civil War. A number of academics take a start date of 1867 which coincides with the dramatic increase in US territory with the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Steel making though was to focus on the Commonwealth of Philadelphia where there were plentiful reserves of good quality ore. The invention of a process for the mass production of steel from iron by Englishman, Henry Bessemer, provided the key first step. A fascinating article in the journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology by Henry Sisson entitled A Revolution in Steel: Mass Production in Pennsylvania, 1867-1901 offers a detailed account of both the technical developments and the companies, men and places involved.

In the years after the Civil War, railways were spreading across the vast continent and American steel makers were determined to see off foreign competitors. The Bessemer process was the starting point, but thereafter it was all about improvements in efficiency and also the quality of the finished product. This latter point came into sharper focus when manufacturing moved beyond basic rails to switches and ‘frogs’ ( common-crossing) but more importantly structural steel for bridges and the frames of buildings, eventually the skyscrapers in the 1880s. I shall pick up on some of Sisson’s detail.

He begins with some statistics. Before the Civil War, steel production was limited to specialist uses and amounted to under 12,000 tons per year. Once mass production had started in Steelton, Pennsylvania in 1870, production increased to just under 50,000 tons. By 1900, the country’s steel makers were producing just over ten and a half million tons of ingots and castings. In terms of productivity, the average tons of iron and steel per worker increased from 62 in 1880 to 132 in 1900.

John Fritz was one of the leading engineers and observed that ‘the modern practice of steel making has, in the hands of the mechanical engineer, the metallurgist and chemist, wrought wonders in producing a material which in quantity, physical qualities and cheapness would have been utterly impossible half a century ago, when steel rails, beams, angles and plates were not thought of, and steel was regarded as a luxury of the material of the working artisan’.

The driving force for this revolution was men like Andrew Carnegie who saw cost reduction as the fundamental measure of progress. He had the vision to see that capital expenditure, to ensure he was using the latest technology, was never in vain. The Bessemer process was a starting point; it needed the addition of a patent taken out by Robert Mushet. Renowned engineer Alexander Holley encouraged the holders of the two patents to join together and thereafter Holley installed the updated Bessemer plants throughout the steel making country.

As we saw in the case of Germany, Bessemer couldn’t cope with ore with a high phosphorous content; the answer was found in the open hearth furnace which were installed where needed.

So much for the process of converting iron into steel. American engineers worked at improving the efficiency of blast furnaces producing iron. This iron had to be handled and so mechanical means were introduced. Eventually iron furnaces were relocated close to the converters allowing molten iron to be used. All the time, engineers were looking for ways better to utilise the heat from the furnaces. Appropriately the produce from the converters in the form of rails were laid by the hundreds of miles to bring raw material to the sites and to take the finished products to end users.

It would be wrong to suggest that improvements were not being made in England or Germany, but the USA was spearheading mass production in steel products and this led to massive increases in manufacturing overall and hence to the shift from being an importer to being a major exporter of manufactured goods.

The position of England as described by Carr and Taplin in their History of the British Steel Industry is revealing. The Americans were much taken by the power of electricity and I will be writing about this elsewhere. They employed this power in rolling mills and a variety of other apparatus that improved the efficiency of the steel making process. We know that the British were slow in embracing the power of electricity, they were also the polar opposite of Carnegie in their reluctance to invest. The problem with steel-making was and indeed is that it is capital intensive and machine heavy, and so innovation comes at a price. Carnegie saw this as a price worth paying.

There was another factor. When the demand for steel rails slumped with the substantial completion of the rail network, alternative uses for steel were needed. Carnegie saw them with great clarity in the form of high-rise buildings constructed with a steel frame. The British were more conservative and it took half a century for that method of construction to be embraced in these islands. This was much later than continental European nations. The Eiffel Tower built in 1889 is but one example.

The exports of steel from European countries is also revealing, with England in the lead, followed by Germany and then Belgium. Belgium and indeed neighbouring Luxembourg had rich reserves of ore. But what about France? Carr and Taplin explain that France’s richest reserves in Alsace Lorraine had been taken by Germany. France had sufficient elsewhere for its own use, but not in order to play a significant role in export.

A twenty year period up to the start of the First World war witnessed a massive growth in America’s exports of manufactured goods including machinery and, in particular, electrical machinery, sewing machines and typewriters but also rails and structural steel. The reasons for the increase are intriguing. Firstly, new reserves of iron ore had been discovered near the Great Lakes, ore that was near the surface and very rich in iron. This reduced the costs of inputs which flowed through to the price of the finished product. The price steadied as Andrew Carnegie bought up some three quarters of the reserves. Mechanisation, in particular the use of electricity, in American steel production also reduced costs. A factor outside the control of the Americans was lengthy strike action in Britain in 1912 which left the door open to American goods. The American manufacturers of sewing machines (Singer) and electrical equipment (British Thomson Houston and British Westinghouse) soon followed their export success by setting up manufacturing in Britain.

Steel beams supporting the roof in Washington cathedral

Derby and the Museum of Making

 The city of Derby is a home of British engineering and of probably the first textile factory at the Silk Mill. This has been repurposed to tell Derby’s story. The image is of the mill with thanks to the museum.

The Museum of Making takes the visitor through the astonishing array of manufacturing activity carried on in this midlands city really from the eighteenth century onwards. The museum has one floor titled simply assemblage and they suggest that this looks more like a museum store than a curated display. These photographs help to give a flavour

Voltage regulator

The entrance picks up one of the earliest contributions in the Silk Mill itself, an early example of the factory manufacturing system, taken further fifty years later by Arkwright at Cromford Mill

A work in progress paying homage to the Midland Railway

The railways are the subject of many exhibits from rails, signals to telegraph equipment, but no locomotives (you need to go to York for them). There are mock ups from the Derby railway workshops, not least the Intercity 125. It is clear that the Midland Railway based in Derby was a leader.

You can just about see a wooden mock up

Lawnmowers tell of the presence in the city of Qualcast. Fashion wear speaks of the ground breaking work in artificial fibres at British Celanese later part of Courtaulds. There are a number of eletrical equipment manufacturers. Ceramics feature with industrial examples on display; Crown Derby and Denby will be found elsewhere.

There is a Rolls-Royce aero engine suspended from the roof and information boards telling the story of this, the city's most illustrious son which came to its site at Sinfin Lane because the local authority could offer electric lighting. There are on display models of Hawk and other famous engines.

Derby did its job in war time in addition to Rolls-Royce Merlins, there was a huge army Motor Transport depot

You can read more in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines

Overseas exhibitors at the Great Exhibition

 Continuing my attempt to address the question of who else shaped the manufacturing world, I draw on a series of papers given to the Society of Arts in 1852 reflecting upon the Great Exhibition. One such had as its focus machines for working in metal and wood.

The author looks first at what I suspect was a bug bear, the gulf between scientific and practical men and the huge distrust each group had for the other. He then moves to machinery and looks first at early examples before focusing on clock making where he suggests some of the first machines were to be found.

In terms of shaping the manufacturing world, he sees a process of one idea leading on to the next, but, importantly, without national borders. So the British may come up with a new machine, for example for gear cutting, but then the French perhaps would improve on it. He explores wood working machines and again sees the interplay between artisans of different countries.

In relation to America he refers to all manner of contrivance used in workshops including first a foot-mortising machine for wood patented in 1827 by John McClintic of Pennsylvania. He then traces the machine to Liverpool and a patent for improvements granted in 1851. The point he makes is that invention is difficult, but is made much easier the more brains that are brought to bear on the problem. Collaboration is key and in this the Exhibition could offer a meeting place where inventors from different countries could see the fruits of each other’s labour.

Another paper had its focus on philosophical instruments, which was part of the section for which my great grandfather was responsible. The image, with kind permission of Weiss & Son for the post is a knife in the shape of a cross with 1851 blades made by Weiss for the exhibition.

The author lists some of the inventions that had by 1851 become almost commonplace: steam engines, the telegraph, photography and electromagnetism.  He then notes that in relation to agriculture each of chemistry, mechanics and astronomy have made their contribution. Once again he picks up the value of the interchange of ideas between countries.

The benefit of sharing ideas is brought into sharp relief in an encounter with a would be exhibitor who had spent years developing a particular machine only to be told that a number of similar machines had already accepted. He then offers a summary of the categories of instrument before looking in detail at astronomical instruments. He makes the point that would be exhibitors from overseas may have been put off by the risk of damage to their instrument in the course of travel to the exhibition. He then highlights two exceptions from Germany who instruments he praises highly.

Electromagnetism is his next focus beginning with Volta’s discovery in 1800 of voltaic electricity and then Oersted’s work in 1820 on the interaction of electricity and magnetism, from which the electric motor was conceived. We could add to this list of inventors, the English scientist Michael Faraday. The paper’s author instead takes his audience to the United States and a galvanic meter which enabled the measuring of longitude and then an electromagnetic clock.

Levelling and surveying instruments were exhibited by England, France and Belgium. Optical instruments ranged from microscopes to lighthouses. Thermometers were exhibited by the English Negretti and Zambra and the French Fastre. Photography originated in France and at the Exhibition was represented by Germany, Austria and England. Balances attracted a broader following with exhibits from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium , Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and the USA. Calculating machines bring in the name Babbage, but not as an exhibitor. The best instrument was Russian made by Staffel. The exhibition was ‘rich with electric telegraphs’, with the British Electric Telegraph Company’s instruments taking pride of place. Prussia exhibited through Siemens and Halske. Cooke and Wheatstone are praised for keeping the UK ahead in telegraph technology. He concludes his talk by lamenting the lack of reward for British scientists, despite which they labour on.

The presentation on large steam engines begins with a lament on the limitations of the exhibition space which restricted the size of machine which could be exhibited. The well known British names are mentioned first but then a Belgian, French and Dutch, the latter particularly for land drainage. Fire engines were exhibited by France and Canada as well as the UK. Railway locomotives were dominated by the famous British makers. There were then manufacturing machines with Oldham’s Hibbert & Platt textile machinery. France, Belgium and the USA exhibited machines for working with cotton. There is a note that a future exhibition was planned for India. Wool machinery came from Yorkshire but also from France which produced the medal winning Mercier and Company. The most frequently mentioned name was Jacquard and this apparatus was shown as attached to a number of weaving machines. The other French invention of the circular knitting machine for the making of stockings was highlighted as only then recently taking the place of frame-knitting and so saving many hours of work. The section ends with printing machines and a further mention of Applegarth’s advanced machine previously highlighted in Ward’s account of the exhibition.

My talk to the Leicester Historical Association on How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing world

I want this evening to talk about my quest to discover How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

My quest began in April 2014. I brought down from the loft two big box containing scrapbooks which my mum had compiled of my dad’s war. I had always known that they existed but small boys have little interest in scrap books. This time though I turned the pages and found myself speechless. My dad had headed up supply of army vehicles and weapons in WW2 and my mum had been his PA. The albums told an incredible story – the number of vehicles used by the army grew from 40,000 to 1.5 million. I researched and discovered that just about every British motor company had made not only vehicles but anything from tin hats to ammunition. It was a War on Wheels and that was the name of my first book published in 2016. 

This evening, instead of a power point, I thought I would use some of the books I drew on to illustrate the talk. This one is brazen publicity as is the next. I promise not all! After the talk I will post both the text and the bibliography on my blog https://britishmanufacturinghistory.uk/

But back to the quest. I had caught the bug: what had happened in the first world war? Just about every British engineering company put its shoulder to the war effort. That book was called Ordnance

Where had the companies come from and where did they go to?

To try to answer the first question I worked back and got to 1851 and the Great Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park. This as I’m sure you know was an adventurous idea by Prince Albert and Sir Henry Cole aided by others.  The organising committee included such grandees as William Cubitt the builder, Joseph Paxton who designed the massive crystal palace for the exhibition, Robert Stephenson the railway engineer and Charles Wentworth Dilke – editor of the Times. 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. The Crystal Palace 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 full exhibition catalogue online 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 of the steam hammer fame. Elliott & Sons instruments. William Hollins who would later produce Viyella  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 century. Land owners were rich and the rest weren’t. I suggest that 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. Some forty years of research have been brought together in Anthony Slaven’s British Shipbuilding 1500-2010; 

Ship building, like wool, is fundamental to our island story. Slaven suggests that, all around our shores, there were many carpenters who turned their hand to the building of small boats. Their use was restricted to coastal waters, and, perhaps, as far as the Low Countries, France and possibly Portugal and the Mediterranean. Trade with the Far East was conducted overland, as evidenced by the Silk Road. The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw the ‘great voyages of discovery’, and much longer voyages to the spice islands, Africa and China. This is subject explored extensively elsewhere and so I didn’t dwell on it in my book. 

With all this shipbuilding 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 – who were becoming desperate

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 Arkwrights mechanised factory. 

These machines demanded metal for their construction. 

Elsewhere in the forest, as they say, iron masters were finding better ways to produce metal and better metals in the form of brass and steel. All this demanded more coal and more coal demanded deeper mines. Deeper mines brought twin problems of flooding with water and foul air. Metal provided the solution 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. 

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. 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 grown by slaves and the working conditions in the mills and mines for men, women and children were appalling. This has been explored extensively elsewhere and although fundamental to the industrial revolution and indeed our history, I won’t talk more about it this evening. 

It is interesting 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? Roads were dangerous and often potholed, Canals were great, but slow. In step  Trevithic, Stephenson and Isembard Kingdom Brunel and the railways beckoned.

The railway entrepreneurs like Thomas Brassey and George Hudson 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

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 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 for ship construction. 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.

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 then 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.

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. 

Joseph Ruston was one of the founders of the Lincoln firm, Ruston and Hornsby. He was the complete businessman: innovative, a great salesman and financially astute. There is a delightful book One Hundred Years of Good company which tells the story of Rustons with a little fictional narrative alongside the harder history.

Well , this book tells a story of 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 – it did of course become the massive Shell Oil Company.

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 indeed 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. This piece of apparatus evolved over a period with input again on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually taking shape under patents taken out by the America 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.

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.

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. He built the first vehicle that was not simply a horseless carriage. Harry Ricardo, who himself designed the engine for the tank, said of the Lanchester 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.

There were many others. Morris in Oxford. Austin who started out in Wolseley making sheep shearing equipment. Wolseley later became part of Vickers of which more later. There were also 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.

Tragically and ironically, war played a huge part in the history of British manufacturing. Aside from the loss of young lives, the drain on the exchequer especially after the second world war placed great pressure on the governments that spurred the export drive in its wake. 

Looking at war driven technological advances, the Crimean war inspired William Armstrong to invent the rifled barrel for big guns, vastly improving their accuracy, and encouraging advances in metallurgy. Armstrong would 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 initial 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 for all war office vehicles. 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 and Abel. 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. 

Lincoln’s William Tritton invented the tank, made by manufacturers across the land. In truth under the inspiration of Lloyd George the whole national industry went to war. 

I spotted a toy tank in a national trust house we visited a couple of years ago. It has a strong message about toys which were barely visible 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 had them manufactured in Germany. Between the wars, the absence of German suppliers boosted British toy makers into world leadership

Telegraph and telephone were used by the country mile but also radio especially for contact between the ground and aircraft overhead. 

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. The chemicals giant 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 to rayon – 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. 

I don’t know whether magnificent head offices were a hint of something to come.

Elsewhere Lever Brothers were making more than soap, Burroughs Welcome were developing medicines although Glaxo still focused on baby milk – how it would change!

English Electric and Associated Electrical Industries were both products of the interwar years. It is interesting though that these giant electric companies owe their childhood years to America.

Motor cars went from strength to strength

 Radio thrived, 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.

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. 

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 was invented. British Nylon Spinners, owned jointly by ICI and Courtaulds, exploited the American invention. Glaxo and Wellcome produced penicillin initially using a natural fermentation. 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, 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 ever 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. What might be termed the gluttony of hydrocarbons got under way.

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. 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 not existent. Old work practices were re-embraced. 

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 powering  aircraft 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 a watchful eye from Frank 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

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. The post war era saw wonderful motor cars but also Rolls-Royce jet engines and work on nuclear power for submarines.

This part of my story ends with the Festival of Britain, an occasion of great hope for the future. For my book it forms a bookend to mirror that of the Great Exhibition. 

The Festival itself was to be unlike the Great Exhibition; in the words of the Festival director:

We were going to tell a story not industry by industry, still less firm by firm, but the consecutive story of the British people in the land they live in. Each type of manufacture and each individual exhibit would occur in the setting appropriate to that part of the story in which it naturally fell e.g. steel knives and sinks in the home part of the story, steel machines in the industry part of the story, steel chassis in transport, and so on.

Exhibits were chosen as products of good design, functional efficiency and manufacture. We had moved on to a world of design and people like Robin Day with his iconic plastic chairs.

I found surprising the emphasis given to the manufacture of textiles. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, given the importance of textiles to the whole industrialisation process. In 1914 it was said that Britain produced enough cloth to clothe half the world’s population.  In 1951, the future of textiles was considered strong – they were to lead the export drive. How things have changed. 

There was an emphasis on new materials: aluminium, fibreglass and all manner of rubber highlighted by Dunlop. There was a focus on what we now call green energy: nuclear and hydroelectric.

A Design Review was compiled of some 24,000 products chosen for good design, functional efficiency and manufacture. It was to be a showcase for the nation. It also provides the spring board for my current book, Vehicles to Vaccines, which explores what happened next. Contrary to popular opinion it is not all doom and gloom, British manufacturing, although employing many fewer people, may well be approaching another golden era.

Talk to Leicester branch of the Historical Association

 Delighted to have been invited to do a virtual talk about How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. 

I have dispensed with PowerPoint and will talk with reference to my secondary sources - the book was written in lockdown, although I did have some earlier research of primary sources. 

I plan to post the text of my talk and a list of the books after the talk 

Vehicles to Vaccines - a working draft

 This week I have been editing the draft of my next book Vehicles to Vaccines exploring the #ukmfg story from 1951. I have also received a draft contract from a publisher. So onward I go!