South London manufacturing history 19th and 20th century

 In his book, London: A History, Francis Sheppard observes that ‘by the end of the eighteenth century, London had more steam engines than Lancashire’. London had also employed water power from the fast flowing river Wandle to mill flour and snuff and also to power the printing of calico.

Southwark, Lambeth and Vauxhall

Southwark and Lambeth were home to engineers Joseph Bramah, Henry Maudslay and Marc Isambard Brunel about each of whom I also wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. I explore further in a blog piece the huge influence of Henry Maudslay in particular on mechanical engineering and machine tools. Maudslay Sons and Field turned their hands to marine engines and ended the 19th century with 1,500 employees. Vauxhall began as marine engineers in Vauxhall but turned to motor cars and moved to Luton. Siebe Gorman moved to Lambeth from Denmark Street and made equipment for underwater exploration and later iron lungs for polio victims. Napier manufactured the 'perfect printing machine' (accordingly to the Great Exhibition catalogue).

Engineer, Bryan Donkin, manufactured tin cans from his premises in Bermondsey. J.C Field had candle factories in Bermondsey but also Battersea and Lambeth. Wright's coal tar soap was made in Southwark and Price's Patent Candle Company employed 2,000 people in Vauxhall and Battersea.

Peek Freans made biscuits in Bermondsey and Rowntree moved production of After Eights to the Bermondsey works of Shuttleworth in 1966.

In 1920, GEC had the Accessories Works in Southwark.

Battersea, Kennington and Wandsworth

in 1856 Morgan Brothers set up a factory in Battersea to make graphite crucibles for metals furnaces. In 1907 it progressed to make commutator brushes for electric motors and relocated to South Wales in the 1970s. In 2013 Morgan Crucible was renamed Morgan Advanced Materials with businesses across the world.

Burroughs, Wellcome & Co. set up the first office to be lit by electricity, and a factory in Wandsworth to manufacture compressed medicines. In the First World War, Burroughs Wellcome & Co supplied: ‘aspirin, chloroform (from alcohol), cholesterol, cocaine, emetine bismuthous iodide, flavine, hydroquinone, lanoline and phenacetin’.

Kennington remains home to the Beefeater Gin distillery. Airfix models were first made in Wandsworth.

Lewisham, Norwood and Deptford

Lewisham was an early home to Elliot Brothers instrument makers and George Harvey galvanisers. Catford had James Robertson preserves and Hither Green, King’s Biscuits.

Norwood was home to William Ford Robinson Stanley, a prolific inventor amongst whose devices was the Stanley Knife. He was a successful industrialist and benefactor giving the Borough the Stanley Halls and the Stanley Technical College.

The London Electric Supply Company was incorporated in 1887 with a capital of £1 million to build a power station at Deptford. Ferranti, at the age of twenty-three, was appointed chief engineer responsible for the whole project. He conceived a project of generators producing electricity which would be transmitted at 10,000 volts through cables and switchgear built to his own design. This was a massive project. Ferranti moved his works to Hollinwood, Oldham in Lancashire, and, in 1897, employed seven hundred people.

Merton, Morden and Mitcham

Of great significance was the arrival of a man of volcanic energy, William Morris. Morris had already run a decorative business at Red Lion Square and then Queen's Square but the demand for his products was such that more space was needed and the Abbey Works was founded in seven acres of 'lush meadows' interspersed with the remains of Huguenot buildings. Here Morris designed and his highly skilled employed made: painted glass windows, arras tapestry, carpets, embroidery, tiles, furniture, printed cottons, paper hangings and upholstery. Economic growth had put money in the hands of many more people who wanted to buy furnishings that were not mass produced. Morris did not eschew the factory system, he dye making was on a large scale as were bleaching and finishing. He had workshops of men and women weaving and painting, but all the designs were his or those of his best friend the artists Burns-Jones. The output was considerable. It was not surprising that Liberty & Co sourced their printed fabric from the same area.

The Lines Brothers factory at Merton was at one time the largest toy factory in the world. By the time it came to Merton it had been trading in one form or another for one hundred years, but it was rebranded Tri-ang. A workforce of 4,000 made Fairy Cycles, Frog model aircraft, Minic clockwork toys and much more. They went on to make model railways (as the image of the signal box bears witness) and I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Watliff was the largest manufacturer of commutators and slip rings for electric motors producing up to 20,000 a day. Customers included the coal and steel industries and power stations. In the industrial area on the Kingston Road was Pilchers which made ambulances and mobile radiographic units used worldwide.

Decca pressed records in New Malden and began work on radar in Brixton. The company was floated in 1929 by stockbroker Edward Lewis. It began with records but went on to radar. The radar business was bought by Racal in 1980 and the record business was sold to Polygram.

Mullard radio components were at Mitcham and Balham having set up in Hammersmith in 1920, founded by Captain Stanley Mullard who had previously made valves for the Admiralty. The move to Mitcham came in 1929 after the Dutch Phillips had taken control of the company. Phillips made radios in a neighbouring plant. Philips only just managed to ship over components and machinery for their vital EF50 valve just before the Germans invaded in May 1940 In 1960 Mullard held 75% of the transistor market in Britain.

Marconi made radio transmitters and receivers in Hackbridge.

Carshalton had an industrial alcohol plant of the Distillers Company.

Croydon

Home to Powers Samas accounting machines which was bought by Vickers in an attempt to diversify after the Second World War. Powers Samas later joined with the British Tabulating Machine Company of Letchworth to form the International Computers and Tabulators Company.

Southeast London

Beckenham had the Wellcome research laboratories. Caterham was home to motor sport engineers by the same name.

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)
• Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998)

Chelmsford manufacturing history

 A treat for any amateur industrial archeologist, in 1987 Stanley Wood published a booklet describing Chelmsford Industrial Trail updated by Tony Crosby and Dave Buckley in 2018. This offers the reader a wonderful taste of this late industrial town and I draw upon it in this blog piece, though far from entirely.

Chelmsford was where Marconi first manufactured and I wrote extensively of him and his business in both How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. Just a little earlier Colonel Crompton came to the town following a distinguished military career and bought a local iron works. This is at the heart of the development of electricity in Britain and, again I wrote of it in both books but also the American angle in this blog. There are many other connections with the town which I highlight below. So, to Chelmsford.

It was a Roman town as indeed was neighbouring Colchester. It was an agricultural centre opened up by the Chelmer and Blackwater navigation in 1797 and by the railway in 1843 with the opening of the Brentwood to Colchester line. The London Road Iron works was taken over by Richard Coleman in 1848 and three years later he was among the prize winners at the Great Exhibition. In 1866 the business became Coleman & Morton which produced highly regarded agricultural implements until 1907.

The Anchor Works, which Colonel Crompton bought in 1878, began life as an iron works in 1833 and was later taken over by THP Dennis another agricultural implement maker. Crompton made it a key actor in the electrification of Britain.

It was the coming of electricity and Cromptons which radically changed Chelmsford, not least because in due course its streets were lit by bright electric light. Dynamos needed power to drive them and neighbouring Colchester had James Paxman all too keen to get involved. Steam engines were a competitive market and so Cromptons developed a good number of fruitful relationships. In his Reminiscences he singles out Willans as his chief steam engine collaborator and describes the single generation unit that combined on one platform a dynamo made by Cromptons with a fast steam engine made by Willans & Robinson of Thames Ditton. Cromptons could claim credit for many prestigious installations including Lord Randolph Churchill's house and the Royal Courts of Justice. Of no less importance was the ability to use incandescent lamps in coal mines.

Of possibly as great importance there is a story of Crompton himself inspiring the young Sebastian de Ferranti whose influence in the British electrical engineering industry would exceed that of Crompton and I write of it in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Whilst Crompton acknowledges his possible influence on Ferranti he spells out the fact that they were on different sides of The Battle of the Systems. I describe that in the USA between Edison and Westinghouse in the blog piece I referred to earler. In Britain it was in London that Ferranti championed high voltage AC current from his Deptford power station, whereas Crompton made money out of more local schemes using a lower voltage DC. Crompton were great adapters.

Cromptons moved to a much larger factory in 1896 whose vast assembly bays enabled the company to build the big generators, transformers and switchgear needed by the new national grid in the twenties. After a period of investment by Armstrong Siddeley, Crompton merged with Parkinson of Leeds to become Crompton Parkinson which would later join their earlier rival Brush becoming part of Hawker Siddeley.

Of interest to me but perhaps less so to Chelmsford, Colonel Crompton was a champion of motorised transport for the army, first in India but then in the First World War. Crompton tells in his Reminiscences his role in the development of the tank. I wrote about the development of the tank in Ordnance but omitted a reference to Crompton in connection with the smaller, faster Whippet. As with so many inventions, there were many hands and brains involved.

The Marriage family had been millers in and around Chelmsford for many years, and in 1898 took the plunge into the twentieth century by building Chelmer Steam Mill with modern rollers rather than millstones.

Ernst Gustav Hoffmann's invention of an automatic lathe for making ball bearings was sufficient incentive for the building, also in 1898, of the Hoffmann Works for the production of ball bearings. In 1970, Hoffmann merged with Ransomes and Marles Bearing Co, a Newark business with a connection with the Ransomes of Ipswich, and the Pollard Ball and Roller Bearing Co of Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire to form RHP plc in Newark on the River Trent in Nottinghamshire.

Guglielmo Marconi at the age of 22, again in 1898, set up in a former mill in Chelmsford the first wireless factory in the world. The mill had worked with silk but closed in 1863 when French imports flooded the market. The mill was revived briefly by Samuel Courtauld of nearby Braintree. For Marconi the beginning was all about wireless communication with ships but it grew to become serious competition to the cable operators. In 1901, he famously transmitted a signal from Poldhu in Cornwall to Signal Hill in Newfoundland. I noted elsewhere that the electricity powering the signal was generated by a Hornsby engine. Marconi developed radio transmission and after the First World War would transmit programmes from Chelmsford to the small number of radio enthusiasts. The formation of the BBC by a group of radio manufacturers including Marconi in 1922 would accelerate the growth of broadcast radio in Britain.

The next Marconi connection with Chelmsford was radar where it manufactured many sets and components before, during and after the Second World War. Related to radar was television and it was the Marconi-EMI system that was adopted by the BBC and subsequent commercial channels. A research facility was built at Great Baddow on the outskirts of the town. The company designed and built studio and broadcast equipment in its New Street factory. The adjacent factory was built for the production magnetrons for radar and after the war was occupied by the English Electric Valve company manufacturing a whole range of electronic tubes. I write at greater length about Marconi and broadcasting in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

In the postwar era, Marconi became part of English Electric and expanded in aeronautical, marine and broadcasting. English Electric became part of GEC on the breakup of which the Marconi defence business joined with British Aerospace to become BAE Systems which still have a research facility at Great Baddow.

Away from electronics, Britvic opened a new factory in 1955 but moved its headquarters to Hemel Hempstead in 2012 and closed the Chelmsford factory.

The Chelmsford Industrial Trail includes a description of what happened to some of the factories mentioned. Marconi International Marine became a car showroom and Britvic a retail park. The new Marconi factory became a Homebase DIY store. This is a pattern seen in most former industrial towns. We know from the statistics that manufacturing has reduced in size, these specifics bring this home. It is of course brought home much more starkly to those many thousands of men and women who saw their jobs disappear.

Further reading

• W.J. Baker, A History of the Marconi Company (London: Methuen, 1970).
• Stanley Wood, Chelmsford Industrial Trail updated by Tony Crosby and Dave Buckley (Essex Society for Archaeology and History, 1987, 2018)
• R.E. Crompton, Reminiscences (London: Constable & Co, 1928)