Medway towns manufacturing history

 Rochester was a cathedral city until local government changes caused the status to lapse on its joining the Medway unitary authority. Nevertheless, its cathedral is the seat of the Bishop of the Rochester Diocese dating back to the sixth century. Rochester boasts a castle whose keep is one of the best preserved in England or France. Rochester has been occupied by Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans.

Chatham in contrast was a small village on the mud flats of the Medway not far from Rochester and close to Gillingham, Strood and Rainham. It was the mud that attracted naval use. Henry VIII had built the first substantial Royal Navy including the Mary Rose, the first purpose built warship. The Medway then came into its own since the ships could safely be beached and there have their hulls cleaned, caulked and tarred.

Elizabeth I added to the navy, galleys - ships with both sail and oars. These were stationed at Chatham where they could easily be maintained. The dockyard was already bigger than Portsmouth, Deptford and Woolwich and it maintained and improved on this position through the years of war with the Dutch. The yard attracted shipwrights, carpenters, sailmakers, smiths, sawyers, riggers and mast makers.

In the early seventeenth century a new dry dock was built along with mast docks, sail loft and rope house - the latter being 1,000 feet long, the length of the longest rope. The tactic for naval ships was simple, to be massively armed to wreak destruction at short range. The massive PRINCE was an exemplar of this ship type known as the First Rate with three gun decks. These early ships would be armed by cannon cast in iron works in the nearby Weald.

With the eighteenth century came another opponent - the French - and so the centre of gravity for the navy moved westward to Portsmouth and Plymouth. More than this, the theatre of naval warfare moved from the sea between Britain and the Continent to the oceans: the Mediterranean, Caribbean and Atlantic. The ships required for this more open warfare needed to be more agile and so tended to be Third Rate with seventy-four guns or frigates with thirty-two guns. In the course of the century the Royal Navy moved to a position of increasing strength where victory was always expected. This was great credit to the men who sailed the ships and lived in the most appalling conditions, but also to the dockyards.

For Chatham, the eighteenth century meant first completion of the improvement programme, but then decline as resources were directed to Portsmouth and Plymouth. The century ended with restoration ready for the next great conflict: the Napoleonic Wars. At the end of the eighteenth century the Chatham dockyard was the largest employer in the South East with some 2,000 men.

The navy's most famous ship, the VICTORY, was built at Chatham in 1765 and had a chequered career culminating in her being fitted out as a hospital ship in 1797. Two years later she was to be converted into a prison hulk. Instead, orders were given for her to be rebuilt and she left Chatham in 1800 as a superb fighting First Rate ship. These vast ships were built from four thousand oak trees with a compliment of 850 men. The lower of three gun decks was equipped with 42-pounders, the middle deck with 24-pounders and the top deck with 12-pounders giving a broadside of 1,176 pounds. Iron guns were most likely now cast at the Carron works in Falkirk with brass cannon made by Samuel Walker in Rotherham.

The nineteenth century saw reduced employee numbers with the ending of hostilities, but also the introduction of industrial process with a steam-powered sawmill designed and built by Marc Brunel. This incorporated a canal and and overhead rail system, with seasoned uncut timber entering at one end with sawn planks emerging at the other. I wrote in my blog on Portsmouth of Brunel's other inistiative of mechanising the process of pulley production.

The new century also saw the beginning of a dramatic change with steam power taking over from wind and sail. I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the transition from wooden hulls through iron clads to iron and then steel hulled ships. Mid-century saw a major investment in Chatham as it became the only eastern yard with the closure of Woolwich (although its continuance as the army's arsenal) and of Deptford. The work was substantial with new dry and wet docks, repair and fitting out basins all demanding some 110 million bricks made on site from a 21 acre brickfield. As the century drew to a close, ships became ever bigger culminating in the Dreadnaught Class which was too big either to be built or repaired at Chatham.

Her days seemed to be numbered until the Navy decided that they needed to build the newly invented submarines alongside private contractors not least to test their costings. The yard went on to build many submarines alongside Vickers at Barrow. In the Second World War it built smaller surface vessels and refitted a great many vessels of all kinds. At its peak the yard employed 13,000 people from Chatham, Rochester, Gillingham and Strood, and further afield.

The dockyard closed in 1981.

Rochester itself became home to Short Brothers which from 1913 manufactured flying boats or float planes was they were called at their factory at the Borstal end of the city. Their planes served with distinction during the First World War. Shorts survived the slump of the twenties by diversifying into buses, barges and motor boats. They came back into the limelight with the Shorts Singapore which in 1927 made a spectacular flight around the coast of Africa. The thirties saw the Shorts Empire operated by Imperial Airways and offering their 24 passengers a choice of cabins, births and a smoking room. From the design of the Empire came the Sunderland with innovations including a powered gun turret. Many saw service during the Second World War as did the Stirling four engine bomber of which I wrote in my book MacRoberts Reply. In 1943 the company was compulsorily purchased by the government and production dispersed to Belfast away from enemy bombing. With the return of peace, the company moved its operations to Belfast.

BAE Systems Faraday test centre and Advanced Aerospace Technologies are now based in Rochester.

In the nineteenth century Strood became home to Stewart Brothers and Spencer which extracted oil from seeds and sold the residue as cattle feed. Seeds would come by ships from as far afield as India, America and Russia.

Aveling and Porter manufactured agricultural machinery and went on to manufacture steam engines. In the thirties they became part of Agricultural Engineering and joined Barford & Perkins of Peterborough to form Aveling Barford which also took the Hornsby steam and road roller business based in Grantham.

Wingets took the Aveling site to manufacture cement mixers. Strood had attracted cement manufacturers like many sites on the Thames and Medway. Portland cement had become an essential part of building in the mid-nineteenth century. I write more about this in my piece on Dartford.

Gillingham had a history of textile manufacture with the Gillingham Silk Company in business from 1769 to 1875. There was also linen manufacture and glove making. The Copperas Works produced dyes and inks. In the late 19th century the Brennan Torpedo works was established.

Gillingham is also headquarters of Delphi Automotive Systems which had been spun out of General Motors and included AC Delco, Automotive Products of Leamington and Lucas Diesel Systems based in Gillingham. It was bought by BorgWarner which spun it into PHINIA.

Further reading:

• Philip MacDougall, The Book of Medway (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1989)
• Philip MacDougall, The Chatham Dockyard Story (Rochester: Rochester Press, 1981)
• https://www.worldcementassociation.org/about-cement/our-history

Southampton manufacturing history

 Southampton was one of the great English ports first identified as so used in Roman times. The port was later ravaged by the Vikings. Henry V, having won the battle of Agincourt, set about building a navy to defeat the French. His largest ship the Grace Dieu was built in Southampton. The port grew as the benefit of Agincourt flowed in terms of comparative peace and the taking of Normandy. With the shift in opponents from Spain to France, Portsmouth became the primary naval port and Southampton was called upon to supplement its ship building resources as needed. It later prospered with yards for smaller ships and yachts.

Southampton as a port thrived with deliveries of coal from the Tyne. In time it added imports and exports to and from the empire. The nearby oil refinery at Fawley is run by Esso. It has long handled imports of timber and chemicals.

The city is now forever associated with ocean going liners taking their mix of passengers to the new world. We can think of the Titanic, but many more. The Southampton story started much smaller, although P&O made the port its home from the early nineteenth century. It was the years following Waterloo and the defeat of Napoleon that the peaceful and pleasurable use of the sea took off. Steam was fundamental and it was smaller steam packets that busied themselves in the Solent crossing to the Isle of Wight and taking trippers round the island. Bigger vessels also made regular trips to the Channel Islands. The coming of the railway in 1840 opened up Southampton to the growing London population and steam packets prospered. It was then that Southampton really featured in trans Atlantic travel, although the Thames still held on to much passenger and freight business. P&O moved back to London, but Cunard White Star took its place in Southampton. In the 1930s P&O moved back to Southampton.

The Chiswick based shipbuilding company owned by John Thornycroft moved to Woolston Southampton in 1900 and continued their manufacture of specialist naval vessels in the yard built by T.L. Oswald of Sunderland in 1870. During the Second World War they built seventeen destroyers, torpedo boats, mine sweepers and landing-craft and numerous other craft. In 1968 they amalgamated with Gosport-based Vospers to form Vosper Thornycroft. Harland & Wolff had a ship repair operation in Southampton from 1907 until 1973 when it was sold to Vosper Thornycroft. The ship building activity of the company is now part of BAE Systems Maritime based in Portsmouth.

Ship building also focused on yachts. Camper and Nicholson, founded at Gosport, but with a yard in Southampton, built Gypsy Moth IV for Sir Francis Chichester for his single handed journey around the globe. Oyster at Hythe and also Wroxham in Norfolk build and manage super yachts. Moody founded in Swanwick in 1827 made world class yachts until 2007 when the company was sold to the German Hanse Yachts.

The city became home to aircraft manufacture at the time when take off and landing on the sea was seen as more convenient than building land based air-ports. The company that championed this just outside Southampton was Pemberton-Billing Ltd, later named Supermarine and later still bought by Vickers. My mother included in her diaries (transcribed in my book Dunkirk to D Day) her account of travelling in a flying boat in the Second World War.

At Woolston, Supermarine in the thirties designed Spitfires and built their fuselages, the remainder being subcontracted to other aircraft manufacturers around the country. Avro had built aircraft at Hamble in the First World War. The site was subsequently used by Hawker Siddeley Aviation for their advanced training aircraft.

In electronics, Phillips (formerly Mullard) made integrated circuits in their Southampton factory. BAE Systems manufacture radar with its Digital Intelligence unit on the Isle of Wight and Combat Management Systems at Portsmouth. They were building on the legacy of Marconi whose experiments on the Solent resulted in wireless radio as I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Southampton has been the recipient of inward investment from Pirelli with their cable works, Goodyear Tyres, Ford Motor Company, IBM, Apple and GE of America. BAT has made cigarettes in Southampton since 1912, but now the focus has shifted to non-combustible nicotine products.

As elsewhere, Southampton major employers are now in the service industries

Further reading:

A. Temple Patterson, Southampton - a biography (London: Macmillan, 1970)

Portsmouth manufacturing history

 Portsmouth was one of the earliest homes of naval shipbuilding; there is some evidence that Richard the Lionheart's ships taking him on the crusades were built there. Henry VII commissioned the first dry dock in 1495. The Mary Rose was built there as Henry VIII amassed galleons to keep up with the Spanish and Portuguese.

It wasn't only naval shipping, Portsmouth's ships travelled the globe with particular emphasis on trading in spices so much so that a part of the dock area became known as spice island.

Towns which were home to naval dockyards boomed in times of war, but when peace came so did unemployment and poverty. Yet war was never far away, especially with the French who posed a constant threat. In the years following the restoration of the monarchy, in 1665 Sir Bernard de Gomme, Engineer in Chief of all the King's castles reviewed coastal defences and began a fifty year programme in Portsmouth for the defence of the crucially important dockyard. In spite of all this civil engineering, shipbuilding continued notably with the 100 gun Britannia.

Naval harbours were also changing as a result of penal policy. The number of offences punishable by transportation increased with convict numbers beyond the capacity of penal colonies and so prison hulks became a feature in many harbours over filled with inmates in appalling conditions. The first fleet for Australia left in 1787 and began to relieve the pressure just in time to the renewed pressure of war from the French Republic.

Portsmouth, at the time of the Napoleonic wars, was home to naval shipbuilding on a massive scale. There were woodworking shops powered by steam, including engines from Boulton and Watt. Marc Isambard Brunel invented machines for making the thousands of pulley blocks that the navy needed. He collaborated with Henry Maudslay who made the machine tools required. It was a huge enterprise that dominated the town. It was the first example of mass production in Britain.

We need to take a step back to understand what was happening. Naval shipbuilding was an ancient trade in which old habits died hard. Sawyers were protective of their back breaking work in the saw pit even though in other countries water powered sawmills were gaining popularity. Small businesses supplying largely hand made pulley blocks were equally protective of their lucrative contracts. The navy's demands were huge and change was needed. The right man at the right time was Samuel Bentham, the brother of the political economist and prison reformer Jeremy Bentham. Samuel was put in charge of the dock yard and set about radical changes.

1840 saw the French employ steam power for their battleships and Portsmouth needed to follow suite. A separate area was set aside and the necessary skills recruited. I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the transition to iron and steel hulls propelled by steam power.

With the navy and military the overwhelmingly dominant employer, its importance is underlined by the growth in population from 30,000 in 1801 to 260,000 in 1931.

Portsmouth docks served the Royal Navy in two world wars. In 1905 the yard launched the Dreadnaught which rendered obsolete the capital ships of the world's navies. It went on to launch one of the largest ships ever built in Portsmouth at 27,500 tons the Queen Elizabeth and the 25,000 ton Iron Duke in 1914. In recent years the building and maintenance of naval ships has fallen more and more to the private sector in companies such as Babcock International and BAE Systems Marine.

Employment in naval activity declined from some 22,000 in 1945 to 6,500 in 1985. Nevertheless, Portsmouth has attracted other major employers. Top of the list must come IBM with their UK Headquarters but followed by the Inland Revenue computer centre, the Board of Trade and Zurich Insurance.

Further reading:

James Cramer, The Book of Portsmouth (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1985)

Sunderland manufacturing history

As a port on the Wear, Sunderland grew from handling exports of coal from the Northumberland coal field. Coal went to London and the southwest as well as over the North Sea.

Along with coal, two related industries can be traced back to before the industrial revolution: glass making and pottery. These industries were present elsewhere in the northeast and indeed elsewhere in the UK. Glass was for bottles, for windows and tableware and, as the urban areas grew and prosperity spread from the fruits of industry, so the demand for all three types of glass grew. Sunderland's Wear Glassworks became a producer of national importance. Pottery tended to be earthenware for general use and was some glass tableware. However, Wear Flint Glass could boast the Marquess of Londonderry among its customers.

Like many coastal towns, Sunderland had a long history in shipbuilding and, alongside this, rope making was significant in the town. Ropes were also needed for railways where trucks were pulled along by static steam engines. Webster's rope works at Depford boasted the first machine-made rope in the country.

For shipbuilding, we can look to Austin and Pickersgill, Doxfords, J.L. Thompson and Sir James Laing & Son. In early days it was wood and sail, in particular keels to bring coal from the mines to the waiting colliers. The use of iron and steel and the advent of the steam engine enabled Sunderland's shipbuilding to boom in the mid nineteenth century making it one of the prime shipbuilding ports on the world. Decline followed boom and, with the exception of busy wars and short periods of catch up after the wars, the days of large scale shipbuilding on the Wear were numbered. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines of the last gasp with the combination into North East Shipbuilders Limited.

Sunderland was very far from lost, for Nissan chose to build its British motor car factory near to the town and this continues to prosper.

Further reading:

• Glen Lyndon Dodds, A History of Sunderland (Sunderland: Albion Press, 1995)
• Anthony Slaven, British Shipbuilding 1500-2010 (Lancaster: Crucible, 2013)
• How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World
• Vehicles to Vaccines