Financiers, some who sailed near to or sometimes over the line.

 In my exploration of British manufacturing, I have come across many men whose technical expertise advanced the cause of British industry. There were also those who brought a different kind of expertise and perhaps a different outlook on life.

George Hudson - the railway king

George Hudson was one of these. He became a firm friend of George Stephenson and it was said that whilst Stephenson dreamed grand schemes for linking the country by railway, George Hudson found ways to enable such schemes, leaving to Stephenson the task of bringing them into reality.

Railway mania of which Hudson was a part was in many ways like those other kinds of financial mania - the dot com bubble, the crash that led to the credit crunch. The railways created by Stephenson had fired the imagination, so much so that groups around the country were putting together schemes for their own pet project. Those people with money to spare were only too keen to invest. Hudson and Stephenson could see that this mania needed to be tamed in order for a coherent rail net-work to emerge that served the interests of the country. This didn't mean that Hudson eschewed profit, far from it, just that he saw a bigger picture.

We need to take a step back to 1800 and the birth of George to a poor Yorkshire farming family. George was placed as an apprentice to a York grocer from which he went on to run his own grocery business. He married and fortune shone, for George unexpectedly inherited a large sum from a distant relative making him one of the wealthiest men in York. He used his new status to move into establishment circles, the Church and the Tory party. With these new connections he formed a joint-stock bank, the York Union. This led him to further contacts including Glyn's bank in London which was financing railways.

Richard Lambert, in his book The Railway King, researched his many schemes. I recount one of the first for the sake of illustration. The starting point was the London to Birmingham railway and George Stephenson's ambition for this to extend north to either Lancashire or Yorkshire ending up at his home city of Newcastle. As plans developed, the route from Birmingham to Leeds was favoured and here in stepped Hudson who argued for his home of York instead of Leeds. This plan failed to gain favour, but he did manage to secure a scheme to link York to the North Midland Railway which ran from Derby to Leeds. (The London to Birmingham line was linked to Derby via Rugby.) In time the North Midland Railway enjoyed east-west traffic, but Hudson saw on the horizon potential competition from four sequential lines linking Liverpool to Hull via Leeds. He managed to take a lease on the stretch from Leeds to Selby and promptly closed it, forcing traffic through York even though it was a longer journey. Freight could be carried on to Selby and the River Trent. Hudson had hoped to secure the railway from Selby to Hull. His failure to do so led him to re-instate the previous route by water thus crushing the owners of the Selby-Hull line. It was brutal business which caused Hudson to gather pockets of stiff competition to his schemes.

One of Hudson's York contemporaries was Joseph Rowntree who questioned the presentation of annual accounts for the North Midland and York Railway, and he asked that they should be audited. At the time it was only banks and insurance companies which required an audit, so his request was dismissed.

Lambert suggests that Hudson’s attention to four related areas brought to fruition his ambitions. First of all he sponsored individual railway projects. Second, he had to hand the means to finance them and links to brokers who could buy and sell shares to influence pricing when takeovers were required. Third, he owned land in Yorkshire which gave him status, but some of which was also useful in enabling his schemes and blocking those of competitors. The fourth strand was political at both a local and Westminster level, the latter being shepherding his favoured schemes through Parliament.

None of this was illegal, but those who lost money at his hands were naturally unforgiving and his reputation ended in tatters.

However, he was responsible for 1,450 of the 5,000 miles of railway which opened in 1849. He employed many thousands of people and enabled the cheap transport of coal which fired the industrial revolution.

Ernest Terah Hooley

Hooley’s biggest claim to fame,  or infamy, was the purchase of the Pneumatic Tyre Company for £3 million and its immediate floatation as the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company for £5 million of which the Economist of 30 July 1898 wrote:

‘On the strength of the Dunlop deal, Mr Hooley came to be regarded as the Napoleon of Finance. At his word, Capital could be created by the million and fortunes could be made as if by a magician’s wand. There have been many successful company promoters, but Mr Hooley was to eclipse them all alike, in the variety of his schemes and in the gigantic profits provided by them not only for the great financier but that everybody connected with him.’

Ernest Terah Hooley was remarkable by any standards. He was the son of a Lacemaker from the Derbyshire town of Long Eaton. He began his career in his father’s business, but moved into stockbroking and, from there, into company promotion. In his ‘golden years’ he floated and made a personal fortune out of two other household names: Bovril and Schweppes. He died in 1947 in small house in College Street, Long Eaton. The obituaries tell of a man who rubbed shoulders with royalty and the good and the great of his time. They also tell of a man bankrupted more than once, and imprisoned for fraud, again, on more than one occasion. The Derby Daily Telegraph of 12 February 1947 said this:

‘From earning 30 shillings a week in his father’s lace mill, he became one of the most powerful financiers of the century, and so wealthy that it was said he owned £10 million worth of land in Great Britain. He owned Risley Hall in Derbyshire and, of more relevance to this story, developed Trafford Park Industrial Estate in Manchester, the first such estate in the country.’

Hooley features on the government insolvency service website as an example of a Victorian Scam.

Harry Lawson

‘He was probably no less scrupulous than many of the other remarkable characters who used other people’s money to amass vast fortunes for themselves in the City of London at the turn of the nineteenth century. On the credit side, those who worked for him said that he was both fair and generous. He was certainly not a greedy man who loved money for its own sake.’ ‘Bunty’ Scott-Moncrieff on H.J.Lawson

Described as ‘the crooked entrepreneur Harry Lawson’; the records do indeed show that he was prosecuted for fraud on at least two occasions (once along with Hooley). However, Lawson was perhaps the unlikely founder of British motor manufacturing, which, in turn, sowed the seeds for motor manufacturing in many countries of the world. I tell the story in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of how he founded the British Daimler company in a former mill in Coventry.

Dudley Docker

I recall from a Goon Show (a BBC radio programme of the fifties and sixties) a mocking reference to a Lady Docker. I then found that Dudley Docker had master minded the creation of MetroVick. I put two and two together and came up with the wrong answer. Dudley was the father of Bernard, the socialite husband of the renowned lady, and a wholly different man.

Dudley grandfather, Thomas, had been a Moseley brass founder. His father, Ralph, was a solicitor who amassed public appointments in and around Birmingham, so much so that he was styled as ' the Lord High Everything of his district'. These were Victorians on a upward path.

Dudley was born in 1862 at his parent's home, Paxton House, 130 South Street Smethwick. He went to King Edward VI Grammar School, but didn't excel. He joined his father's office, but left two years. In 1881 he joined his elder brother, William, in a varnish business which at that time was a good trader with strong demand from the Birmingham japanning trade. Despite challenges, the business prospered and other brothers joined.

Cricket was the passion of the Docker Brothers. Ludford, known as the Local Leviathan, joined Derbyshire Cricket Club in 1881 and became captain in 1884. Dudley joined the newly created Warwickshire club, then a second division county unlike Derbyshire. Dudley played for them for a number of seasons.

Cricket opened doors, and the business prospered further. Docker Brothers became a limited company in 1899. Dudley amassed shareholdings and directorships in a number of growing Birmingham businesses. He married well. His wife Lucy came from a well connected family and she inherited a significant sum on her father's death. Dudley and Lucy had been living next to the varnish factory, but moved Coleshill House in the Chilterns which had been built by Roger Pratt during the Rule of the Commonwealth. They had one son, Bernard.

In 1902, Dudley and two brothers became directors of one of Britain biggest combines, the Metropolitan Amalgamated Carriage and Wagon company (later known by the initials of its subsequent name Metropolitan Carriage Wagon and Finance 'MCWF') and five years later that company amalgamated with the much smaller Docker Brothers. It was Dudley who had created MCWF by persuading five largely struggling wagon companies to join it in order to achieve Efficiency.

Efficiency was the Edwardian byword. The Boer War had humiliated the nation and so there was a public desire to do better, to become 'efficient'. The amalgamation confirmed that Dudley's vision of large integrated corporations was the right way forward. GKN and Stewarts & Lloyds were others. They were is stark contrast with the defensive amalgamations in the 1890 where companies joined in legal terms, but remained isolated in practice. In the event, the longstanding inefficiencies in the railway companies proved too much of a match for Dudley whose skills lay in finance and publicity.

The MCWF merger created a stir amongst the great and good of Birmingham and Dudley's reputation was riding high. By 1910, he thought he needed a boost and explored another potential merger, this time between BSA and Daimler. He had joined the BSA board in 1906 and had seen it struggle with its young motor vehicle business. He decided that it needed motor vehicle expertise which Daimler clearly had. Again, I write about this merger in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW) but from a different source which identified further factors that made Daimler attractive: its significant land holding in Coventry. What both BSA and Daimler lacked were cash and management expertise. The merger was not a success. Dudley had created a financial structure that was complex, involving different classes of shares with different rights and, what proved crucial, a whole web of intracompany loans. Yet, Dudley still had more deals in his sights.

He saw that the opportunities which electrical engineering presented were being pursued by the Americans (General Electric and Westinghouse) and the Germans (Siemens and AEG), but not so the British. Here Ferranti and other British companies may have taken issue. In Dudley's view there were three options: create relationships with the Americans or Germans or join a multinational combination. What ever route, the result had to be big.

In the wake of the First World War, the Board of Vickers, the armaments company, could see that their near total commitment to war materiel made them vulnerable, and diversification was the order of the day. I wrote in HBSTMW the story of how Dudley Docker persuaded Douglas Vickers that railway rolling stock and electrical engineering were the coming industries. Vickers and MCWF both invested in the company that would become Metropolitan Vickers to buy British Westinghouse. It was a complex transaction that made Dudley a good deal of money and left Vickers with a combination they couldn't manage. I wrote of its unravelling in HBSTMW.

Dudley Docker went on to advise on international trust arrangements and to chair the first meeting of the General Committee of the Federation of British Industries which would become the CBI. He was an influencer, a deal maker, a publicist, but not a manager. That would be left to people like Ronald Weeks.

Further reading:

• Lambert, Richard S.,The Railway King - 1800-1871 - A Study of George Hudson and the business morals of the time (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1934)
• Davenport-Hines, R.P.T., Dudley Docker - the Life and Times of a Trade Warrior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)

London as a manufacturing place

Was London a manufacturing anomaly ? There were no raw materials, no coal and the weather didn't favour weaving. Yet, it was the centre of power. The rich wanted beautiful things and Londoners made them. Skills emerged and developed, which attracted more skills. Above all it was the major port.

The Thames offered a wonderful entry and exit point for London and had done since Roman times. In spite of a massive growth in the volume of trade, the 'legal docks' had remained largely as they had been in the time of Elizabeth I - a stretch of quays between London Bridge and the Tower of London, although a further area of river frontage on the south bank had been added and ships were often unloaded by lightermen whilst at anchor in the centre of the river.

The dock area was extended and trade boomed. The city and its surroundings attracted a vast variety of commercial activity.

A striking feature of this monster city in 1700 was its newness. In September 1666 some three-fifths of the City of London had been destroyed in the Great Fire. The losses were immense – 13,200 houses were burned to the ground and so were most of the great public buildings, including St Paul’s Cathedral and eighty-seven parish churches. Rebuilding the housing took well into the 1670s. The public buildings took longer – St Paul’s was not considered finished till 1711. Rebuilding was at a much-reduced density – some parish churches and livery company halls were never replaced and only around 9,000 houses filled the place of those lost. No more the narrow streets with closely packed thatched dwellings. We can thank Christopher Wren for the fine stone churches built in the classical style that can still be seen amongst the glass and steel of the 21st century city.

By 1700 it had a population estimated at 575,00 which grew to 900,000 a century later. It was by far the largest urban area in Britain having attracted migrants from neighbouring rural areas in search of work. In these early days inner London overlapped to the East and to the South.

As London grew, the banks of the Thames filled with manufacturing businesses attracted by the ease of receiving raw materials and dispatching finished goods. The docks would welcome ships arriving with cargoes from just about all over the world; ships too would leave with finished goods destined for lucrative overseas markets. The label ‘Made in London’ carried a cache the world over. It had been and still was a busy and diversified place with saw-mills, lead-smelting, paint and varnish works, iron and brass foundries and ships stores, chain and anchor works and sack, bag and canvas factories.

Much later, Joseph Rank saw the vast quantity of grain imports coming through London docks and saw the opportunity for flour mills which he built by the river. These worked alongside huge warehouses and markets. London had cornered world trade, for example Australian wool was shipped to London for onward sale. The domination in trade was mirrored and amplified in banking and finance where London took an unassailable lead until 1914.

The 18th century and earlier

Inner London

Where it all began with trade. Wool and silk occupied many Londoners as did clock-making and furniture. England’s population in 1651 is estimated at 5 million and mid-century nearly one fifth of the working population was employed in the manufacture of woollen cloth. London was by far the largest centre of population and so attracted a good share of the industry. Follow this link to discover more.

East London

Docklands and the East End. Trade needed ships and London built many. When I think of shipbuilding, I see in my minds eye the North-East or the Clyde. Yet, Thames shipyards, including four Naval Dockyards, built many thousands of ships over four centuries. We can think of East Indiamen setting sail for the spices of the east, or whalers, but more-so mail steamers, wherries and tea clippers. It was said that standing on Greenwich Hill you could see hundreds of yards stretching west to Chiswick and east towards the sea. With men like Maudslay, Thames yards were ahead of the game with steam power until the proximity of raw materials passed the advantage further north. Along with ships, London made armaments at Woolwich. Follow this link to discover more and this link to the Thames shipbuilders.

South London

Tanning by the Thames created a stink. Tanning took place in Bermondsey. The River Neckinger provided the water for the tanning pits. Slaughterhouses provided a constant supply of hides and there was ample oak bark for the tanning process. There were busy cobblers and cordwainers throughout; the cordwainers in particular were very protective of their craft. It was this trade that suffered as Northampton attracted London retailers by lower prices through lower wages. Flour and beer nourished the population. Huguenots produced more fine silk. Follow this link to discover more.

19th and 20th century

East London

With yet more trade, the docks expanded. Furniture making spread with the influx of skilled Jewish makers. The area around Shoreditch and the western end of Bethnal Green became in the words of Gerry White ‘something approaching one giant factory’. Other industries gathered further along the Thames. Read more in this link.

South London

Engineers made a bee-line for Lambeth to learn from the pioneer machine-tool maker, Henry Maudslay. In his book, London: A History, Francis Sheppard observes that ‘by the end of the eighteenth century, London had more steam engines than Lancashire’. Pharmaceuticals transformed lives, much loved toys delighted generations and the Stanley knife! The Lines Brothers factory at Merton was at one time the largest toy factory in the world. Read more in this link.

Inner London

Pianos were made in Islington. Mornington Crescent was home to the 'Black Cat' Carreras cigarettes factory built in an Egyptian style and later sold to Rothmans which manufactured in Darlington. Benson & Hedges were made in Oxford Street before production moved to Ballymena. Lambert and Butler were produced in Drury Lane. There were bicycle makers in Holborn and jewellers around Fitzrovia. Holborn was also home to George Kent and his household equipment including his famous knife cleaner. Burroughs Wellcome set up offices in Snow Hill, Holborn in the late 19th century. and then many of the basic needs of life. Many of the new industries were born in Inner London before they moved out to pastures new. Read more in this link.

North London

Manufacturing moved north from Inner London and there developed a raft of different industries from electronics to aircraft, furniture to motor components. Brimsdown, Enfield was the former home of the Edison Swan Laboratory. Joseph Swan moved from Newcastle where he developed the incandescent lamp and joined with the American Thomas Edison in exploiting their invention at Ponders End in 1886. They manufactured under the Mazda brand. I write of Edison in this blog. Working with him, Ambrose Fleming invented the first thermionic valve, a diode, from which the development of wireless grew. Also in Brimsdown was Cosmos, valve manufacturers. Read more in this link.

West London

American companies flocked to Western Avenue and the Great West Road. Our iconic aircraft were built in Kingston and then radar to spot their enemies. Addlestone became home to Plessey Radar after its takeover of Decca in the mid sixties. The marine radar part of the Decca was taken over by Racal and they had a manufacturing presence in New Maldon. New Malden is also home to BAE Systems visualisation, experimentation, and design. Sunbeam Talbot made motor cars in Ladbroke Hall (post image) Read more in this link.

Postscript

In his London in the Twentieth Century, a phrase from Jerry White stuck in my mind. ‘From the middle of the sixties London’s manufacturing industry virtually bled away, along with the port that fed it.’ He offers some telling figures: between 1959 and 1974 London lost 38% of its manufacturing jobs so by 1996 only 10% of the London workforce was employed in manufacturing.' A good deal of manufacturing moved to the north, east, west and south of London and in due course out to Metroland and into the South East.

New Book - How Manufacturing Shaped Britain

 This book sets out to discover how manufacturing shaped this island. Why manufacturing spread across the country, how it grew, why it declined and what was left.

It is looking at manufacturing through the lens of geography.

Manufacturing transformed the places where it took place. Villages became towns because millennia earlier great forests had been buried and became rich seams of coal. Tiny seaside communities surviving on fishing witnessed the building of ever larger ships carrying cargoes of coal or wool and returning with exotic goods from the east. Waring barons found their swords replaced by guns cast from ore left in the earth’s crust. Disparate communities were linked first by sea then by Roman Road, turnpike, canal, railway, road and air. New communities formed on these links.

Manufacturing places emerged close to raw materials and sources of energy. Climate and topography gathered manufacturing which thrived in local conditions. In time, as centres of population emerged, manufacturing followed to meet their every need. Inventions were pursued where skills had been nurtured.

None of this was planned, least of all two world wars which energised manufacturers across the land to war effort, leaving vast factories in their wake crying out for new uses.

Books have explored why Britain moved ahead of its great trading rivals: the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. And it did, only to be overtaken by America, Germany, and France, and replaced by developing countries. This left manufacturers stranded with factories and workforces no longer needed, leaving populations without work, steelworks replaced by supermarkets, factories by warehouses.

This book is for people who wish to understand what has happened.

It is available to buy on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback.

Coming soon - How Manufacturing Shaped Britain

 This book sets out to discover how manufacturing shaped this island. Why manufacturing spread across the country, how it grew, why it declined and what was left.

It is looking at manufacturing through the lens of geography.

Manufacturing transformed the places where it took place. Villages became towns because millennia earlier great forests had been buried and became rich seams of coal. Tiny seaside communities surviving on fishing witnessed the building of ever larger ships carrying cargoes of coal or wool and returning with exotic goods from the east. Waring barons found their swords replaced by guns cast from ore left in the earth’s crust. Disparate communities were linked first by sea then by Roman Road, turnpike, canal, railway, road and air. New communities formed on these links.

Manufacturing places emerged close to raw materials and sources of energy. Climate and topography gathered manufacturing which thrived in local conditions. In time, as centres of population emerged, manufacturing followed to meet their every need. Inventions were pursued where skills had been nurtured.

None of this was planned, least of all two world wars which energised manufacturers across the land to war effort, leaving vast factories in their wake crying out for new uses.

Books have explored why Britain moved ahead of its great trading rivals: the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. And it did, only to be overtaken by America, Germany, and France, and replaced by developing countries. This left manufacturers stranded with factories and workforces no longer needed, leaving populations without work, steelworks replaced by supermarkets, factories by warehouses.

This book is for people who wish to understand what has happened.

Abraham Darby - iron master

 Iron ore was smelted by burning charcoal in the Weald and as forests were denuded, smelting spread to other forested areas. Eventually it became clear that an alternative to charcoal was needed. The Earl of Dudley's son 'Dud' claimed to have smelted iron ore with coal but there is no evidence of this. Dud was born in 1599 and Abraham Darby in 1678 both close to Dudley Castle. Abraham's father was a nail-maker and locksmith and so it is almost certain that Abraham would have been aware of Dud's experiments. He was certainly aware that an alternative to charcoal had to be found.

Abraham was apprenticed to Jonathan Freeth, a maker of malt mills in Birmingham. Of great significance the fuel used to make malt mills was coke which provided the heat of coal but without the impurities. Once free, Abraham made his way to Bristol where he set up as a malt mill maker where he soon joined forces with a fellow Quaker to form the Bristol Brass Wire Company where he further advanced his metal casting skills.

Possibly because of his Quaker upbringing, Abraham had a strong social conscience and he would see possibly most of the population of Bristol too poor to buy the pot bellied cooking vessels he cast from brass. Something cheeper was needed. There started his experiments smelting iron ore with coke. I tell more in my piece on Coalbrookdale where he established his business. His cooking vessels became very popular as did his much larger vessel for heating quantities of water, known as coppers after the material from which they were first made.

Why is that the English struggle so to embrace change? It was clear to Abraham that one reason for Dud's failure was the resistance of smiths to pig iron smelted with coal. Abraham found that pig iron smelted with coke was met by the same resistance. He was blessed with wisdom and decided not to fight the smiths, but rather to focus on casting, where his skills lay. The core business was the casting of cooking pots of all sizes for which he made a variety of moulds. In time the more adventurous smith would take his pig iron and find that it was entirely suitable. It would not be until Henry Cort at Fareham and his puddling process that production of wrought iron really took off.

Abraham Darby died at the age of thirty-nine in 1717. There followed a succession of Darbys for the next one hundred and fifty years. Abraham Darby had unlocked the industrial revolution now that large quantities of iron could be produced. In time wrought iron would be perfected and in due course be super-ceded by steel. Iron enabled the building of steam power, railways, bridges and so much more.

A Newcomen engine was erected near Dudley in 1712 and by 1716 'fire engines' as they were known were at work in Warwick, Stafford and Flint. Coalbrookdale cast their first iron pipes in 1718 and their first cylinder four years later. Iron cylinders were cheaper than those made of brass and could be much bigger. A large cylinder was cast for Killingworth High Pit where George Stephenson worked. James Watt used Coalbrook cylinders as did Trevithick who also benefitted from cast iron rails. Thomas Telford was inspired by Coalbrook casting and Dr Roebuck at Carron modelled his works on the Coalbrookdale example.

Further reading

L.T.C. Rolt, Great Engineers (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1962)

South London manufacturing history

 The south bank of the Thames and the rivers flowing into it, the Wandle and Neckinger, attracted industries needing ready transport for raw materials, water power and water itself.

Southwark, Lambeth and Bermondsey

Ceramics were made in Lambeth and also in Chelsea and Bow. Doulton & Co made rainwater goods and later fine pottery as Royal Doulton having moved to Stoke on Trent.

Glass was famously produced in Southwark and over the river at Whitefriars in the City of London. Around about one quarter of Britain's glass works were in London. I write of early British glass making in this link.

Tanning took place in Bermondsey. The river Neckinger provided the water for the tanning pits. Slaughter houses provided a constant supply of hides and there was ample oak bark for the tanning process. There were busy cobblers and cordwainers throughout; the Corwainers in particular were very protective of their craft. It was this trade that suffered as Northampton attracted London retailers by virtue of its lower pay rates.

Leading on from tanning were furriers and a trade in making fur hats which continued to thrive until machine made rabbit skin hats and felt hats from further north took over.

Londoners needed feeding and were thirsty people. The Albion Steam flour Mill was built in 1785 and had two of Watt's 50-horsepower steam engines driving eighty millstones and cranes, hoists, sifters and dressers. The largest of the London breweries was in Southwark. The great London breweries not only became very rich but were some of the pioneers of mass production. We can think of Samuel Whitbread, Richard Meux, Sir Benjamin Truman, Sampson Hanbury and John Perkins who brewed in Southwark. Four producers of vinegar added to everything else ensured a challenging smell for the uninitiated.

Merton and Morden

The presence of the river Wandle in Merton Abbey made the area attractive to Huguenots silk weavers. When they left, the attraction of the water for dyeing calicoes and linen with madder was recognised by Mr Leach who set up a dye works. William Morris and Liberties would follow.

Further reading:

• John Coulter, Norwood Past (London: Historical Publications, 1996)
• John Coulter, Lewisham (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994)
• An Illustrated History of Merton and Morden, Evelyn Jowett (ed.) (Merton and Morden Festival of Britain Local Committee)

Inner London manufacturing history

 London does of course reach back into Roman times if not earlier. By 1700 it had a population estimated at 575,00 which grew to 900,000 a century later. It was by far the largest urban area in Britain having attracted migrants from neighbouring rural areas in search of work. In these early days inner London overlapped to the East and to the South.

Trade

London was wealthy largely as a result of international trade which flowed through the Port of London. I write in this link of the role of merchant adventurers. The types of imports and exports reveal an astonishing variety. Fine cotton garments and indigo dye from India, tea from China, ivory from Africa, gold and silver from south America, sugar from the Caribbean. Exports were needed to exchange for these goods, so London’s craftsmen made metal items of beauty and utility. The major export though was wool.

The Thames, from early times, was home to shipbuilders and I wrote of the companies and the ships they built in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Ships were built both for trading and for warfare, and yards on the Thames built both.

In spite of a massive growth in the volume of trade, the 'legal docks' had remained largely as they had been in the time of Elizabeth I - a stretch of quays between London Bridge and the Tower of London, although a further area of river frontage on the south bank had been added and ships were often unloaded by lightermen whilst at anchor in the centre of the river. The congestion would not be relieved until 1790 and I write about this when looking at East London.

The huge variety of goods traded attracted manufacturing activity.

Spitalfields

In the sixteenth century and probably long before, wool had been the backbone of the English economy. It is estimated that mid century nearly one fifth of the working population was employed in the manufacture of woollen cloth. London was by far the largest centre of population and so attracted a good share of the industry. I write below of later division of labour, but cloth production had seen this from early days not least with the distinction between spinning and weaving, but also dyeing and fulling and other processes. Rural areas surrounding London played their part especially with spinning.

In the late sixteenth century Margaret of Anjou encouraged silk workers to come to Spitalfields from her native Lyon and so began the English silk trade of which I wrote in my blog on Braintree.

The introduction of the knitting frame transformed the manufacture of hosiery and this mattered in eighteenth century London which had a growing middle class which was both fashion conscious and keen to display conspicuous wealth. With hosiery, the colour had to be exactly right. Much framework knitting took place in the Midlands where wage costs were lower and I write about this in my blogs on Leicester and Nottingham, but London held on to the fashionable end.

Fashion attracted retail outlets from regional manufacturers. Josiah Wedgewood set a shop in in Grosvenor Square and another in Greek Street in Soho. Matthew Boulton chose Pall Mall to display his 'buttons, buckles, saucepans, candlesticks and snuff boxes'.

Jerry White in London in the 19^th Century highlights the degree of division of labour in London manufacturing. I have positively eulogised about Birmingham’s workshop system. White suggests that London took this a stage further with the skilled making of an item broken down into a great many simple steps in which an unskilled person could be trained. These people would often work in their own home for many hours to scrape a living from truly mindless work. I wonder whether it was this that John Ruskin was critiquing when he wrote of his concerns of industrialisation in his writings on political economy, such as Unto the Last. Textiles would seem to have been a prime but far from solitary example with silk spinning and weaving carried out in Spitalfields but also garment making with the process subdivided many times over. White suggests that there were 250,000 textile workers in inner London in 1901. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the plight of textile workers in Spitalfields in the early nineteenth century. Stephen Inwood uses the term 'sweated system' to describe the division of a skill into a number of unskilled processes thereby exploiting the large number of unskilled people flocking to London in the nineteenth century. He quotes some people as suggesting that this system achieved greater productivity then the clothing industry in - say - Leeds which took advantage of machinery.

Clerkenwell and Finsbury

Richard Tames in Clerkenwell and Finsbury Past writes of the sheer diversity of manufacturers. There were book binders and makers of book binding machines, manufacturers of addressing machines and ever pointed pencils, printers who specialised in railway tickets, a gilder who specialised in book edges.

Clerkenwell had some 7,000 people working in watch making in 1790; the process becoming increasingly subdivided. Of particular interest to me, the skills of watch making developed into mathematical, optical and surgical instruments in the Strand and Fleet Street; my great grandfather made surgical instruments at No 62 The Strand for Weiss & Co. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were 1,000 employees making cartridges at the Eley factory in Clerkenwell. Eley later joined 29 other companies in Nobel Industries Limited.

Furniture making for the aristocracy and growing middle class received a boost with the arrival of Huguenot and Dutch crafts men in the 1680s. Exotic woods were being imported from America and the West Indies: Walnut, rosewood, deal, satinwood, and mahogany and London became Europe's top manufacturer of fine furniture. Clerkenwell was home to Hepplewhite's furniture workshop; Chippendale had been in St Martin's Lane. Less well known but still highly skilled makers produced furniture in Mayfair for the well to do.

The growing population needed feeding and here mechanisation found a foothold in milling and brewing. Feeding the brain mattered too; William Caxton established the first printing press in Westminster in 1476. Printing and book binding prospered in the environs of Fleet Street.

Further reading

• Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998)
• Richard Tames, Clerkenwell and Finsbury Past (London: Historical Publications, 1999)
• The Finsbury Story (London: Pyramid Press, 1960)
• John Richardson, A History of Camden (London: Historical Publications, 2000)

Yeovil manufacturing history

 Yeovil’s traditional industry was glove making from locally sourced hides. It was a substantial industry with the final glove factory closing only in 1989.

Continuing the agricultural theme, the St Ivel brand of cheese was produced by Western Counties Creameries.

Mechanisation did not pass the town by and at the end of the nineteenth century, James Petter set up as an iron monger and produced the acclaimed ‘Nautilus’ fire grate. From there he went on to install a one horse-power oil engine in a horseless carriage and produced well regarded stationary oil engines.

From this base his company went on to manufacture aircraft in the First World War. Short Type 166, Sopwith 1½ Strutters, de Havilland 4 and 9 two-seat bombers. de-Havilland planned to use the American Liberty engine in the DH-9 to produce the DH-9A and Westland were given the job.

Westland also built 25 Vickers Vimys making a total of 1,100 aircraft. The Yeovil site was transformed with hangers and workshop space.

During the interwar years, Westland survived but continued its drive for innovation.

One result of this quest was production of the Lysander transport aircraft ready to serve in the Second World War. It became known for its role in dropping agents into occupied France. Of more significance in terms of volume was Westland's role in building Spitfires following the bombing of the Southampton Supermarine factory.

Westland, which had built a large number of aircraft for other companies, in 1947 focused on rotor craft and built the Wyvern, the first Westland aircraft to enter service with Fleet Air Arm.

During the Second World War it had been agreed that the USA would take on the development of helicopters; Cierva, the UK pioneer of rotary aircraft was sold to flying boat manufacturer Saunders-Roe in 1951 and produced the Saro Skeeter. In 1959, Westland bought Saunders-Roe and developed the design into the Wasp for the Royal Navy. The decision to focus development work during the war in the USA gave Sikorsky a lead which it would retain for many years. Westland had produced the Sikorsky S-51 under licence and developed this into their own S51 Widgeon, followed by the Whirlwind, Wessex and Sea King.

The Times of 12 January 1960 reported that Westland had bought, in addition to Saunders-Roe, the Bristol Helicopter Division and the UK interests of Fairey Aviation. The enlarged company was now the biggest manufacturer of helicopters outside the USA, and it went on to produce further Sikorsky based craft under license from the Italian Agusta Company. The Sea King (shown in the image) was developed from the Agusta design and the other iconic name, the Lynx, from the 1968 Anglo-French Helicopter Agreement.

Notwithstanding the success of these craft, the company ran into financial difficulties in 1986 and eventually came under the control of GKN in 1994. The GKN Westland EH 101 Merlin was the child of this latter marriage and was regarded as the most advanced helicopter of its time going on to sell worldwide and in the early 2000s replacing Sikorsky as the craft used by US ‘Marine One’ Corps for the US President.

Westland later merged with Agusta a subsidiary of the Italian Finmeccania. In 2004, Finmeccania became the sole owner of AgustaWestland and in 2016 absorbed the business following which it changed its name to Leonardo in 2018.

Further reading:

• https://www.westland100.org.uk/content/history-of-westland/history-westland-1915-1998
• Leslie Brooke, Yeovil A Pictorial History (Chichester: Phillimore, 1994)

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Camborne and Redruth manufacturing history - Cornish Mining

 Mining in this central part of Cornwall had been going on long before the Christian era with miners from what would become northwest France. There is evidence of the use of Cornish tin on bronze found in the Mediterranean exported from St Michael's Mount. The image is of early mining in northwest Cornwall.

The eighteenth century saw an acceleration in mining with the coming of the industrial revolution.

'The spot we are at is the most disagreeable in the whole county. The face of the earth is broken up in ten thousand heaps of rubbish, and there is scarce a tree to be seen.'

So wrote Mrs Watt to Mrs Boulton in 1777 when her husband was supervising the installation of one of his steam engines to pump water from a mine that was becoming inoperable. Samuel Smiles wrote of this in his contemporary account of Boulton & Watt noting that the engineer faced technical challenges, but also stubborn resistance from the Cornish. I explored in my post on St Austell the issue of mines flooded with water.

Another challenge for the mines was that of transporting ore from the rock face to places where it could be smelted. Here Janet Thomas, in her book The Wheels Went Round - the Story of Camborne Town, brings in the name Trevithick. By 1803 he had designed a tram engine which was being used in Wales and was introduced to transport ore between Portreath and Poldice. Trevithick also provided machinery for lifting the ore to to the mouth of the mine.

The area between Redruth and Camborne had from early times concentrated on the mining of copper, and production increased as, in the eighteenth century, the industrial revolution got underway. The metal workers of Birmingham were demanding more and more copper and the mine owners were all too happy to oblige. As elsewhere in the revolution, the workers missed out on good fortune and suffered dreadful working conditions and poverty for their families. Mechanisation into the nineteenth century went a small way to improve their lot with better ventilation and dust suppression of which I write more below. The first part of the nineteenth century saw a boom in production and by mid century Cornwall was supplying three quarters of the copper used in the world and half of the tin. This was big business.

In Redruth, William Murdock worked at supervising the installation of Boulton & Watt steam engines. In the evenings he experimented with the use of gas emitted from coal. He discovered that it could produce a bright light and from that he devised a scheme whereby his house could be lit by this gas. This demonstration convinced his employers of the viability of the process and he was commissioned to install gas lighting in their Soho works in Birmingham.

In Camborne, it was the Holman brothers which established a business in 1839 with a foundry capable of repairing massive beam engines. There followed a dust suppressing drill delivering a water spray to the drill bit; this became known as the Cornish Rock Drill. In the late nineteenth century they were manufacturing beam engines and by the twentieth century added compressors, pumping and winding engines; electricity took over from steam power. In its heyday, they were employing 3,000 men and women in Camborne and taking on 100 apprentices each year. The Camborne School of Mines was founded in 1888.

Notwithstanding technical developments, the world was not moving in Cornwall's favour, with better mining prospects, not so much gold in California, but copper in South Australia and Lead in Illinois. This triggered emigration of miners and their families and ensured that Cornish accents were heard wherever mines were being sunk.

For Holmans, the spread of mining to other parts of the world very simply meant first exports and then the establishment of Holman plants overseas. In 1961 the company had 2,500 employees and seven years later, under the encouragement of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, merged with Broom & Wade of High Wycombe to become International Compressed Air, later CompAir with headquarters in Slough.

South Crofty mine is being redeveloped by Cornish Metals.

Further reading:

• Janet Thomas, The Wheels Went Round - the Story of Camborne Town (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran,1987)
• Samuel Smiles, Lives of Boulton & Watt (Stoud: Nonsuch Publishing, 2007 originally published 1865)
• https://cornishstory.com/2021/02/10/holman-echoes-of-an-age/

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

Stourbridge manufacturing history

 Wool was the business of Stourbridge as it was for a great deal of the kingdom from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries. Yet it was not all.

The power source for early manufacturing was strongly flowing water and the river Stour did not disappoint. All that then was needed were raw materials and here the local area provided clay, iron ore, sand and nearby Dudley had limestone. Potash, needed to make glass, was first made locally by burning bracken, later seaweed was imported from Scotland and Spain.

Bricks were made in many places across Britain, but the banks of the Stour had red clay which produced a very high quality of building brick and white clay for firebricks essential for making glass. It was very heavy work done mainly by women producing some 14 million bricks a year.

Stourbridge is famous for its high quality glass. This is probably linked to the arrival in the district of glass makers fleeing persecution in Lorraine. The Huguenots set up in Stourbridge and surrounding villages employing local workers who too gained skills. The product was window glass but also bottles for cider, and fine glass. The finest piece was said to be a chandelier for the sultan of Turkey as a cost of £10,000. A key development was the invention of a way to make glass using coal as the source of heat. The Heath Glass Works was the Stourbridge works that can be traced through the transitions. It was however not linked by the first canal bringing coal from Dudley, handing the advantage to others better located.

In 1897 the firm of Webb Corbett was founded when they took over the White House Glass Works which had been run by WH , B & J Richardson in nearby Wordsley which was on the canal. A century earlier Royal Brierley had established at nearby Brierley Hill.

The glass making inheritance has been taken up by designer makers. The most prominent of whom, Allister Malcolm Glass at Broadfield House Glass Museum the former home of Stuart Chrystal Glass also at Wordsley, has focused on sustainability. Glass requires 1200 degrees of heat and so is energy hungry. Gas took over from coal but is still carbon based. The sustainable answer is electricity powered by solar. This perhaps begs the question of whether makers could return to Stourbridge's original source of power: the river Stour.

Coal was key to the substantial iron trade of the town. The origin predates the use of coal when charcoal was used to smelt the ore. There is evidence of hand nail making from this iron. As smelting developed so too did the process of nail manufacture but it remained heavy and dangerous work. Chains, locks and scythes were other staple products of the town.

Skills in metal work translated into metal fabrication and light engineering. For example, the German Sunlight Industries set up in the town manufacturing mobility solutions for people with disabilities.

Further reading:

Nigel Perry, A History of Stourbridge (Chichester: Phillimore, 2001)

Dudley Manufacturing History

 There is evidence of iron working in Dudley in the Domesday Book. It shared the availability of raw materials with its neighbour, Stourbridge. The source of energy for Dudley though was from the surrounding forest. This it had in common with its iron smelting rivals in the Weald in Sussex. In contrast the work coming out of blacksmiths in Dudley were more utilitarian with little evidence remaining of decorative work.

Dudley took the lead over Sussex by virtue of its reserves of coal, once the secret of smelting with coal had been discovered.

The Earl of Dudley and his son, known as Dud, were strongly influential in the way the iron industry and industry generally developed in the area between the towns of Dudley and Stourbridge. Dud claimed to have used coal to smelt iron, but nothing came of it until Abraham Darby succeeded in Telford in 1765. From then on the town of Dudley's future was mapped out until reserves of raw materials ran out.

In the early days it was nails that the men and women of Dudley made. Many of them worked for Richard Foley who had discovered the Swedish method of splitting which revolutionised the industry. Along with nails, chains were made and locks and tools. The coming of the canal both enabled Dudley to export coal to other areas particularly for glass making but also to find a larger market for its produce.

Of course the reserves of raw materials did run out but the companies of Dudley adapted.

Michael Grazebrook took over some collieries and an old blast furnace at Netherton. He installed a Boulton & Watt steam engine and then electricity and the internal combustion engine. In the 1930s he established welding and foundry shops. In the Second World War he made block buster bombs. Anther business with which eventually bought Grazebrook was Hingleys which specialised in chain making and file manufacture. Hingleys installed a Naysmyth steam hammer allowing the manufacture of large anchors. Hingleys were bought by metal workers FH Lloyd which eventually became part of Triplex Lloyd.

Samuel Lewis is another company still in business making pressings, forgings, farm harrows and hand made chains. Files are still manufactured at Vaughan's Hope Works.

National businesses came to Dudley attracted by the skills base. John Thompson of Wolverhampton came to make boilers, chimneys and tanks. Ewarts made motor accessories and we can glory in brass petrol taps, bonnet fasteners, caps and nuts. Dudley became a centre for the covering of metal tanks with protective material. Metallisation Ltd is still in operation. Nearby Brierley Hill was home to the Round Oak Steel Works which became part of Tube Investments.

Further reading:

G. Chandler and I.C. Hannah, Dudley - As it was and as it is today (London: Batsford, 1949)

Reading manufacturing history

 Reading enjoyed the twin advantages of being in a fertile agricultural county and being positioned on major lines of communication. It was on the river Thames and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was linked by canals to the Midlands and the West Country; the image is of a lock in the Kennet and Avon canal. Importantly Reading was on the main road route from London to Bristol when the latter was booming with overseas trade.

Links provided the people of Reading with metal products from Birmingham, pottery from Staffordshire, groceries from London and stone from Bath.

It had been a cloth producing town, but this industry had gravitated to those areas whose natural and commercial resources best favoured it. Fortunately for Reading, London was growing quickly with a thirsty population preferring beer to polluted water. Reading provided tons of malt using water transport.

For a town far from the sea, it was perhaps surprising that a Reading firm supplied the navy with the sail cloth it needed to fight the Napoleonic wars. Musgrave Lamb in Katesgrove Lane played a key part of winning the battle of Trafalgar.

Malt provided the impetus for the industry for which Reading would become famous the world over. Joseph Huntley used money made from malting to set up his biscuit shop using local flour. Later, his son, also Joseph, set up Huntley Boorne & Stevens making tins in which to sell the biscuits in prime condition. It was Joseph's other son, Thomas, who persevered with the biscuit shop.

The coming of the railways in 1840 further improved communications. One year later Thomas Huntley took his cousin George Palmer into partnership. Palmer's focus was on the mechanisation of biscuit making. This was far from straight forward and cost the young business dearly.

Biscuit making was viewed as a lowly craft with hard, barely edible ships biscuits being made by small bakers close to ports. Fancy biscuits for home consumption were again made by bakers, whose main business was bread. The advent of the Napoleonic wars put pressure on the makers of ships biscuits. The three main naval ports of Plymouth, Deptford and Gosport had their own victualling yards which now embraced biscuit making. At the Clarence yard in Gosport, advances were made in introducing machinery, yet worker resistance was such that only very small steps were possible. After the wars further advances were made but anything like continuous production was a long way off.

Continuous production was George Palmer's goal and he worked on this with a local machine manufacturer, William Exzall. Eventually the problem was solved and machinery was installed in a former silk mill close by the Thames and Kennet and Avon canal. The challenge then was to expand the market which was then only local towns. Advertising and the use of sales agents was the route chosen until full time travelling salesmen could be employed. The invention of a process to print images and patterns directly onto tins cemented the image of the company in the minds of the buying public.

It was almost a game of leapfrog. New customers were found and capacity was utilised, but then demand leapt ahead and production had to catch up. One area of the process that was still manual was the loading of the ovens; what was needed were ovens through which a conveyor could pass carrying the biscuits. Such a mechanism had been tried by the American navy. Palmer found the perfect ovens for his purposes through two London companies: A.M. Perkins and Joseph Baker. These companies would later merge to become Baker Perkins of Peterborough. In Reading, Huntley and Palmer were the dominant employer and took advantage of this by offering meagre wages. The two world wars brought manpower pressures and wages had responded, however the company remained a low pay employer until well into the twentieth century when union action brought pressure to bear.

When Thomas Huntley died, George went in to partnership with his brothers, William who ran the factory and Samuel, based in London, who sold to that ever expanding market as well as managing exports. Biscuits were now part of the nation's diet. Railway journeys were nourished by biscuits, until dining cars appeared. Other biscuit manufacturers emerged including Carrs and Peak Frean with whom Huntley and Palmer would later enjoy a more formal relationship in Associated Biscuits. The Reading factory was further enlarged. The next generation of Palmers joined the business which was incorporated as a limited company on 29 March 1898. It was still very much a family affair with the shares split between George's descendants and those of Samuel; William died a bachelor. It then employed 5,000 people. Management continued as before with family members in charge and an understanding that, depending on the time of year, the chairman would spend three days a week hunting, shooting or playing cricket. Money for the business was spent only when there was no alternative. Machines were repaired rather than being replaced with more up to date technology. Unfortunately competitors took a rather different attitude.

The twentieth century saw the company serve its country in two world wars, suffer in the depression, face competition from other biscuit makers and retailers’ own brands; nevertheless it did prosper in the fifties. Associated Biscuits was eventually bought by Nabisco. I write of United Biscuits, Associated's great rival in Vehicles to Vaccines.

But back to Reading in the 19th century. Not all the malt produced in the town left for London; local brewers met the needs of the local population, or rather they didn't. The suggestion is that they worked in a cartel keeping the quality of beer low but cheap to make. William Simonds broke ranks and his brewery became highly successful using latest technology and chemistry to improve the product. Simonds merged with Courage and Barclay in 1960.

In common with many towns in agricultural areas, Reading manufactured farm machinery. The company emerged from Reading Iron works, was successful for many decades but closed in 1887. The mantel was taken up by George Gascoigne in the twenties in his milking machine business. The agricultural theme is taken up by Sutton's seeds. The nineteenth century saw an increase in farming but also in households with gardens; all these needed seeds. Martin Hope Sutton took advantage of this and the Penny Post to circulate catalogues and then the fast improving rail service for speedy delivery of the seeds.

In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is Reading's communications but in particular its proximity to Heathrow which has grown its economy. It is now boasts Microsoft, Cisco, Ericsson, Apple and Proctor and Gamble.

Further reading:

• Malcolm Petyt (ed.) The Growth of Reading (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993)
• T.A.B. Corley, Quaker Enterprise in Biscuits - Huntley and Palmers of Reading - 1822-1972 (London: Hutchinson, 1972)

Watford manufacturing history

 Dating from Anglo-Saxon times, Watford was probably originally a crossing place traversing the marshy Coln Valley and it was this valley that gave birth to the industry for which Watford became famous: printing. At one time at was known as the printing capital of the world.

The printing companies to be found in the town included Waterlow and the Sun Engraving Company. Odhams arrived in 1938 and dominated the town until it closed in 1983. The Coln Valley had been a centre of paper making since the eighteenth century. John Dickinson made Croxley Script nearby.

I write about the development of printing and paper making in my book Charlotte Bronte's Devotee about William Smith Williams the Reader at Smith Elder who first recognised her genius.

Watford is very much on the cusp between London and Hertfordshire. It is well connected to London being both on the LMS London to Birmingham line and also is on the London Tube map. historically its presence on the Grand Junction canal gave it access to both raw materials and markets.

Scammell trucks, which did so much heavy lifting in the Second World War with the Pioneer, tank transporters and recovery vehicles, relocated to Watford from near Liverpool Street in London.

Furniture makers Hille moved to Watford in the fifties and now manufacture in Ebbw Vale. de Havilland manufactured at what became Leavesden aerodrome.

Smith + Nephew has its headquarters in Watford.

Further reading:

Dennis F. Edwards, Watford: A Pictorial History. (Chichester: Phillimore, 1992

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.