Aberdeen manufacturing history

 Granite City, and any visitor will know immediately why Aberdeen is so called. Yet at the start of the nineteenth century this was not the case. Aberdeen like so many towns was built largely of wood. It had enjoyed a degree of prosperity since the twelfth century thanks to its agricultural hinterland. It was ready to move forward.

Communications were not good. In the city the roads were narrow, steep and poor, outside the city they were if anything worse. The saviour came in the shape of the turnpikes which transformed access to the city and inspired the city fathers to take action within the city boundaries. This they did with a revolutionary thrust. Union Street with its 135 ft bridge carved a route right through the decaying wooden dwellings; King Street too. The old and new towns were connected. Thomas Telford was at hand to advise.

These better routes for raw materials and finished goods made the way clear for growth in both woollens and linen; jute was tried but Dundee had bagged that one. The mid nineteenth century saw the cotton areas of Lancashire, the wool of Yorkshire and the linen of Belfast move ahead of the pack largely because of the economies of scale which they could enjoy. Aberdeen slipped back to concentrate on low volume and high quality.

Aberdeen had three paper mills and I wrote of Stoneywood paper mill in my book MacRobert's Reply. It was in the late nineteenth century one of the highest regarded paper mills in the world. It belonged to the Pirie family whose company became part of Wiggins Teape.

Communication improved further with massive work on the harbour which encouraged the building of fine clippers ideal for the long journey to the far east around the cape. The railways followed with a direct route to London in 1849. The city's buildings were replaced with fine granite brought in from the hinterland and cut and polished using an Aberdonian's own invention. The fine streets became lined with fine granite buildings. Even housing for the poor was granite and so much better than the brick back to backs in so many of England's industrial towns. Granite was exported as far as the USA.

Aberdeen's improved harbour proved ideal for trawlers catching herring and, later, white fish. The railways could have a catch in Billingsgate market by the following day. Cattle raised in that hinterland could be sent by rail down to Smithfield. The city began to feed the hungry nation.

The close of the nineteenth century saw further granite building not least the Marichal College

Marichal College

Aberdeen played its part in both world wars and in the second suffered from enemy bombing especially the Aberdeen Blitz of 1943.

In the 1970s Aberdeen became the onshore focus of much north sea oil production. I recall spending time on the audit of American oil drilling companies. One of my friends was designing oil rigs, Kelvin Bray, of whom I write in Vehicles to Vaccines, ran the company manufacturing the gas turbines necessary for the rigs. I explored the story further in Vehicles to Vaccines and found to my disappointment that British manufacturing had not fully exploited the opportunity oil offered. Aberdeen though was a busy and prosperous place.

Visiting recently, the granite city is looking tired with the problems facing so many high streets. However it is now home to British Energy and the move to net zero. It is a city well capable of reinvention and so the opportunity of the green revolution is likely to be grasped with accustomed energy.

Further reading:

Aberdeen in the Nineteenth Century - the Making of a Modern City John S. Smith and David Stevenson (eds.) (Aberdeen University Press, 1988)

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

Dartford and Thameside manufacturing history

 Dartford in the well-watered, sheltered valleys of the Darent and Cray invited occupation, certainly by the Romans and successive invaders. Over the centuries trades emerged and prospered. One of particular note was the making of paper from rags. John Spilman was granted a monopoly for the collection of rags for paper making. A number of paper mills followed including the Phoenix Mill of TH Saunders noted for the quality of its early machine made paper.

Armament production came to Dartford in the mid eighteenth century in the shape of a gun powder factory. This was succeeded by Vickers, Son and Maxim in the nineteenth century in Powder Mill Lane with an ammunition factory.

In 1889, Burroughs Wellcome took over a former mill for pharmaceutical manufacture and in 1914 built a new factory which was added to over the years reaching some 65 acres and over a million square feet of building. They had 2,800 employees in 1979.

A significant if lesser known manufacturer was John Hall a blacksmith who arrived in Dartford in 1785. By the time of his death in 1836 he had a iron works in Dartford, a gunpowder works in Faversham, a paper mill in Horton Kirby and a flour mill at Chislehurst. One of his apprentices was Bryan Donkin who with Hall built a works in Bermondsey to make tin cans for preserving food. I wrote of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. The Hall iron works supplied many local industries: gas works, zinc mills, paper mills and cement works. Of greatest importance was their work on refrigeration. It was said that in the Second World War 37% of the nations storage capacity was cooled by Hall's machines.

In 1886 Halls had installed their first cold air cooling machine on a large cargo ship carrying perishable foodstuffs. At that time Britain was the world's leading importer of food from Australia, South America and elsewhere and so refrigeration was essential. Cold air was better than previous methods but a better solution was needed. In 1889 Halls added carbon dioxide in a two stage compressor. To achieve yet colder temperatures, Ammonia was used and a plant was installed in Grimsby to make ice for the trawler fleet. In 1959, the company merged with Thermotank of Glasgow which made patented cooling and ventilation devices. The merged company bought Vent-Axia of Crawley in 1959 and was itself bought by APV in 1976. It is now part of the Japanese Daikin Group and continues to manufacture in Dartford.

The south bank of the Thames with its reserves of chalk and mud turned out to be the ideal location for cement manufacture.

Lime had been used for millennia in the making of mortar to join stone and brick. The Romans built lime kilns to burn limestone and produce quicklime. Such kilns were to be found across Britain where limestone was to hand. In the seventeenth century it was found that quicklime spread on fields would aid the growth of crops by reducing the acidity of the soil. The demand for quicklime kept growing.

There is evidence that as early as 8,000 BC it had been found that the addition of small amounts of volcanic ash gave the lime the capacity to set under water. In England, John Smeaton, known as the father of civil engineering, building the Eddystone lighthouse discovered that the property of hardening whilst submerged in water was linked to the clay content of the cement. In 1824, a Leeds stonemason, Joseph Aspdin, took this a stage further and invented a method of making from limestone and clay a cement which he called Portland Cement given the similarity in colour between it and Portland stone. He patented his invention and his son William exploited it further setting up a manufacturing plant in Rotherhithe. Other plants followed along the banks of the Thames and Medway using local deposits of chalk and clay taken from the mud of the river banks.

It seems likely that Portland cement was used by Marc Brunel in the construction of the Thames Tunnel in 1828. The story is that Brunel had been using the cheaper Roman Cement patented by James Parker of Northfleet in 1796, but the tunnel collapsed. Tons of Portland Cement were poured in and sealed the tunnel which could then be completed.

Limestone was also used as a flux for the smelting of iron to remove the impurity of silica, which when heated combines with the lime to form slag which is then removed and used for road making.

The exact proportion of lime to clay was crucial and depended on the make up of the local deposits used. The mixing would be either using water or by grinding the dry rocks. In time, cement plants appeared across Britain exploiting local mineral deposits and the availability of coal to heat the mixture until it calcined. In 1845, Isaac Johnson, then manager of the Swanscombe Works close to Dartford, fired the mixture to a higher temperature (1400-1450C) until the mixture clinkered. This was then ground to a fine powder and is essentially the Portland cement we use today.

Cement making was a dirty process and the towns folk complained. Johnson though went ahead with larger works at Greenhithe. In time there were some thousand kilns along the banks of the Thames and Medway.

In 1900 the Associated Cement Manufacturers Company was formed bringing together some twenty four companies all but two on the Thames and Medway including two of the early plants Robin's and Swanscombe. This company became Blue Circle Cement and is now owned by the French Lafarge.

Further reading:

• Geoff Porteus, The Book of Dartford (Buckingham: Barracuda Books 1979)

Basingstoke manufacturing history

 Basingstoke was a small Hampshire market town with a history of wool and then malting. The industrial revolution arrived in the form of Wallis's foundry which produced farm equipment and in time powered threshing machines. The town had already been linked to the Thames via the Basingstoke canal and Wey navigation. Railways arrived between 1840 and 1854 and could have brought railway workshops but for the town's resistance. These went instead to Eastleigh.

In 1856 Thomas Burberry noticed that the coats that shepherds wore tended not to soak up rain and he concluded that this must be because of the natural oil in fleeces. He took the idea and began manufacturing coats that also did not absorb rain. This was a product of the process he invented to produce woollen material called gabardine. Coats made of this were, and indeed are, sold under his name. Some half a million were worn as trench coats by British troops in the First World War. The Basingstoke factories closed in 1959 but production continues in Castleford In Yorkshire.

John Isaac Thornycroft of Chiswick built ships and in the later nineteenth century built a vertical steam engine to power a wheeled wagon. In the early twentieth century he moved this activity to Basingstoke and developed petrol engines capable of powering trucks. In 1905 the company produced a bus with capacity for 36 passengers. In the First World War the company supplied 5,000 'J' type trucks for various uses including having an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back. Further buses and trucks were developed and in the Second World War Thornycroft again provided many heavy vehicles. The company joined Leyland in 1962 with specialist vehicles going to Scammells in Watford. The Basingstoke factory was sold to the American axle manufacturer, the Eaton Corporation, and now manufactures power solutions.

In 1960 Basingstoke was designated as a London over-spill town and this required new housing but also employment. The companies which chose to set up in Basingstoke included the British fork lift truck maker, Lansing Bagnall, Honeywell, Thermo-Fisher, De La Rue, Albright International and the AA.

Paper maker Wiggins Teape had their headquarters in the town. The predecessor partnerships were founded in Aldgate in the eighteenth century. Gateway House was opened in 1977 by which time the Group had mills across the UK and around the world. It later merged with the French Arjo but was forced into administration in 2021 partly as a result of rising gas prices.

At nearby Laverstoke Henry Portal set up his second paper mill in the early eighteenth century. It began printing bank notes for the Bank of England. The company bought the Bathford mill in Bath in 1970.

Further reading:

Anne Hawker, The Story of Basingstoke (Newbury: Local Heritage Books, 1984)