Manufacturing in southwest England

 Cornwall was the source of valuable metals, until more accessible reserves were found elsewhere and so a very much part of the Industrial Revolution. The image is of South Cornwall. Continuing the metals theme, I am taking the Southwest to include the English part of the Forest of Dean as well as the counties south and west of Bristol.

Cheltenham and Gloucester

The Romans installed garrisons at strategic towns across England and Gloucester was one. In medieval times and probably earlier, iron ore was found and was smelted with charcoal from the nearby Forest of Dean. At nearby Temple Guiting the Knights Templar set up one of the first fulling mills in the twelfth century. The two towns were later famous for their contribution to aircraft production. Read more by following this link.

Wotton-under-Edge

Home to Renishaw plc and McMurtry Automotive

Dursley

RA Lister made agricultural machinery and diesel engines

Bristol

Home to the early days of shipbuilding through its trading links and from these to WD & HO Wills cigarettes and Fry’s Chocolate. In the eighteenth century, Bristol was a centre of Zinc production from ore mined in the Mendips. You can read more in this link.

Bath

Harbutts plasticine was made at Bathampton. In the Second World War Bristol manufactured aircraft at a shadow factory built in a disused quarry in nearby Corsham where there was also an underground ammunition storage depot. Rotork's Brassmill Lane factory was built in 1961 and is now the HQ of a global business serving the energy industry. I also spied a Rotork motor powering locks on the River Nene. The Bathford paper mill dating back to the eighteenth century became owned by Portals the security printer and is its last remaining mill in the UK.

Trowbridge

Former home of Bowyers sausages, later joined with C&T Harris of nearby Calne as part of Northern Foods. Not to be confused with Harris sausages of London, the sausage king. Nestle and General Foods make Shredded Wheat and Cheerios.

Melksham

Home of the Avon Rubber factory. G Plan Upholstery moved here from High Wycombe.

Malmsbury

In the twelfth century one of the first fulling mills was established at nearby Heycroft.

Chippenham

Evans O'Donnell set up a railway signal works in 1897 and six years later merged with the Kilburn firm of Saby and Farmer which moved all manufacturing to Chippenham. Westinghouse Brake and Signal bought the combined business and moved from their London factory in 1932. It was bought by Hawker Siddeley in 1979 subsequently becoming part of BTR, Invensys. It is now part of Siemens Mobility rail infrastructure

Weston Super Mare

Bristol Beaufighters were produced at a shadow factory in the Second World War at nearby Old Mixon

Bridgewater

British Cellophane manufactured here from the 1930s until 2005. I was a joint venture between Courtaulds and La Cellophane SA

Taunton

Home to cider. Read more in this link.

Axminster

Carpets have been made here for over 250 years and are still woven in Devon. Machine tool manufacturer JH Shand moved from London in 1940 and carried out crucial tooling work including for the Spitfire.

Honiton

A Drake and Gorman, Skull Ltd company made switchboards. Radio-Intercom made baby alarm systems.

Newton Abbot

Centrax, with 2,000 employees, made gas turbine blades for Bristol Olympus aero-engines and mobile transformers and generating sets. The area is also a major producer of ball clay.

Paignton

STC moved here from Ilminster where it had moved during the Second World War.

Street

Where Clarks shoes were manufactured. I write more in this link.

Chard

Home to Numatic International manufacturer of the Henry vacuum cleaner

Yeovil

Home to Westland (now Leonardo) Helicopters and BAE Systems digital intelligence. You can read more in this link.

Cheddar

Home to Showerings Babycham, once again owned by the Showerings family. Cheddar cheese is made in a number of places including Redruth and Froome. The major producer Dairy Crest is now owned by the Canadian Saputo. It was previously the processing arm of the milk marketing board.

Wellington

Home to woollens manufacturer Fox Bros.

Weymouth

The first recorded incidence of the Black Death was recorded here in June 1348. The plague spread and killed perhaps half the population. With too much work for too few people and strict control of wages the poor suffered

Exeter

Was a major centre of the wool trade. It now is home to a top university and a vibrant service economy.

Tiverton

Home to John Heathcoat textiles.

Oakhampton

In the nearby Taw Valley the farmers co-op Arla are investing in a creamery to make Mozzarella.

Launceston

In nearby Lifton, Ambrosia Creamed Rice has been made since 1917. It is now owned ny Premier Foods.

Delebole

Slate is still extracted here

Plymouth

In 1859 Isambard Kingdom Brunel extended his Great Western Railway across the Tamar bridge into Devon and Cornwall. The Royal Naval Dockyard, later known as Devonport Dock Yard, was created in Plymouth in the late seventeenth century. As well as shipbuilding the city attracted technology companies. You can read more by following the link.

Appledore near Bideford

Home to Appledore shipbuilders currently owned by Harland & Wolff

St Austell

English China Clays was the major producer of china clay in Cornwall and also manufactured related building products. The Eden Project now occupies former clay mining quarries. Before china clay the St Austell area was extensively mined for metla. I write more in this link.

Camborne and Redruth

Cornwall was exporting the tin mined here as early as 1,300 BC. Copper and silver were also mined. In the eighteenth century Cornwall was mining the metals demanded by the industrial revolution. You can read more in this link. At nearby Upton Towans from 1888 the National Explosives Company manufactured dynamite and other explosives. They later joined 29 other companies in Nobel Industries Limited

Callington

Ginsters pasties and sausage rolls made here, now owned by Samworth Brothers of Melton Mowbray.

Truro

The cathedral city of Truro is home to Kensa Ground Source Heat Pumps. These pumps are already installed in a number of projects including the replacement of night storage heaters in three tower blocks in Thurrock, Essex.

Falmouth

The town was the busiest port in Cornwall importing wine and timber, exporting tin and pilchards. Along with this, the town's businesses supplied services to shipping including the Packet Service set up on 1689 to take post to Spain and beyond when the overland route through France was disturbed once more by war. Alongside ship repair, ships were built until 1930. Now A&P operate the largest ship repair facility in Britain, and Pendennis Shipyard offers a specialist repair facility for yachts.

Swansea manufacturing history

 Swansea at the mouth of the Tawe was recognised as a natural harbour by Norse pirates and came into its own with the discovery of bituminous coal which, from the sixteenth century, it was exporting by sea to other parts of Britain and further afield. In 1913 at its peak South Wales produced 56 million tons of coal.

Local deposits made Swansea and its surrounding area the principal place for smelting copper, which from the eighteenth century was much in demand from Birmingham's brass industry. Matthew Boulton and others formed the Rose Copper Company with a smelter on the banks of the Tawe. In time copper ore was brought by sea from Cornwall and Anglesea as well as from overseas to be smelted using the Welsh process and Welsh coal. In 1845, Swansea was producing 55% of the world's copper. Copper was joined by lead and zinc.

Tinplate was, though, what made Swansea's name. Locally produced iron would be dipped in locally mined tin. Tin was also brought in from Cornwall. In 1831, William Llewellyn had founded the Aberdulais Tinplate Company where iron ingots were rolled into flat plates and a thin protective layer of tin attached. It was one of hundreds of tin mills which grew up around the country. Tin was readily available, easy to work and very effective in coating iron and steel to prevent rust.

With the advent of steel, the iron ore local to Swansea had too high a phosphorous content (a problem also found elsewhere) and so ore was sourced from further east. William Siemens was determined to see his method of steel making, as opposed to that of Bessemer, embraced. The tin platers were reluctant and so Siemens set up his own state of the art plant at Landore. It proved successful for tin plate and gradually more plants took on the Siemens system. Swansea went from strength to strength in tin plate production.

Continuous strip mills were introduced alongside electroplating allowing a very thin coating of expensive tin. Demand grew as more and more food stuffs were packaged in tin cans.The producers of South Wales at one time provided three quarters of Britain's production with much going to the USA.

The coming of central heating created a demand for anthracite coal which was in plentiful supply around Swansea and which had proved less suitable for smelting. This provided a much needed boost to the economy.

Swansea had become a town long before Cardiff and residential development ran west along the shore with industry along the banks of Tawe running north. There were hundreds of small copper smelters most of which closed when the industry was consolidated. Balchin's introduction to his book has a vivid description of what remained: 'one of the most concentrated areas of industrial dereliction, desolation and decay in Britain.' Alongside this, the city has long been a cultural and intellectual centre.

I write about the consolidation of the steel industry in Vehicles to Vaccines and this brought about the Steel Company of Wales. This new company embraced amongst others the major tin plate producer Richard Thomas with plants at Velindre and Trostre and built a massive continuous process steel plant at nearby Port Talbot. This complex produced most of Britain's sheet steel and all its tin plate.

Copper production had suffered as other countries came on stream. The same became true of tin plating. Nonetheless Swansea attracted a wide spread of metal and other industries.

Alcoa Manufacturing and British Aluminium produced cast and sheet aluminium as well as wire. Borg-Warner from the USA produced car transmissions. Also from the USA, Jefferson Chemicals produced morpholine for making rubber and Piperazine for pig and poultry feed additives. B.P. refined oil and manufactured chemicals and 3M made tape products. Imperial Metal Industries produced Titanium and Zirconium alloy. International Nickel produced nickel and Imperial Smelting (about which I write more in the context of Bristol) produced zinc and lead. Smiths Industries made watches and Ford UK, rear axles. Mettoy built a factory at Fforestfach to manufacture Corgi toys. In the seventies Morgan Crucible relocated its electric motor brush manufacturing from Battersea.

A programme of development attracted other SMEs, but more and more the economy of Swansea became dominated by service industries. It boast a university with its own wafer fab for semiconductors.

Further reading:

• Swansea and its Region, W.G.V. Balchin ed. (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1971)
• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)

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