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)

Weybridge and Brooklands manufacturing history

Brooklands Motor Racing Circuit was close to Weybridge and brought motor racing enthusiasts and manufacturers including the Itala Automobile Company. It was the first purpose built race track in the world and had banked curves, very much the place where enthusiasts of the internal combustion engine gathered whether on the track or in the air. Alliot Verdan Roe carried out his flight trials there as did Sopwith of Kingston which had a training school there.

In 1915, the Itala factory was taken by Vickers to manufacture aircraft. They began with the Bentley designed BE.2 but then the government decided on the Farnborough designed SE5a and production began with a Hispano-Souza engine. Some 1,000 were produce exceeding the number of aircraft produced by any of the National Aircraft Factories. Vickers were in the aircraft business.

In the interwar years, the Brooklands track became the venue for many races including the British Grand Prix and the British Racing Drivers Club 500 mile race. Drivers including Malcolm Campbell and John Cobb raced there.

Another arrival in the twenties was the Airscrew Company which manufactured propellors. Over the years the business developed to include propeller blades for variable pitch aircrews. An artificial wood was developed called Weyroc. The company diversified into all manner of fans.

During the Second World War, the Vickers Weybridge factory manufactured Wellesley and Wellington bombers. The airfield was also where the Hawker Hurricane was brought for testing from its Kingston factory.

The Vickers design team at Weybridge came up with one winner in particular in the post war world: the Viscount passenger aircraft which was flown by BEA and many other operators.

The Vickers research department was headed by Dr Barnes Wallis who had created the Dam Busters bomb. His team went on to design some of the early missiles.

Aircraft production came up with the Valiant as a stop gap before the V Bombers came into service and then the civil Vanguard and VC10 neither of which lived up to the success of the Viscount. The factory closed in 1986. I write much more about Vickers in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Further reading:

J.D. Scott, Vickers - A History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962)

 

Farnborough manufacturing history

The Factory, as the Royal Aircraft Factory was known to the early aircraft manufacturers, came to Farnborough as the Army School of Ballooning which had been formed at Woolwich during the Boer War and then moved to nearby Aldershot before coming home to Farnborough with the formation of the Army Balloon Factory.

In the early days its mission was to try to impose safety standards on the reckless adventurers who were the first to take to the air. When the Wright Brothers succeeded with powered flight the army turned its attention to the marriage of aircraft and the internal combustion engine and the Royal Aircraft Factory was born.

All this came just in time for the First World War and initially the use of aircraft for reconnaissance. The Factory came up with designs alongside the commercial manufacturers and, as I suggest in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, played leapfrog with the Germans, and aeroplanes became ever more technically advanced. I write about this in my chapter on the First World War.

The interwar years presented something of a hiatus of aircraft design until re-armament began. The Factory was once again up with the pack in aircraft design.

After the Second World War, the British aircraft industry was vast but, unlike the Americans and Germans, relied too much on old technology. The Royal Aircraft Establishment as it had been renamed was tasked with the challenge of leading the drive to ever more advanced technology. We were at war, but it was a Cold War demanding a whole different approach.

In 1962 the Establishment employed 8,500 people including 1,500 scientists.

This remarkable team of people tackled a good number of knotty problems.

• jet lift and the control of vertical takeoff aircraft, culminating in the Hawker Harrier
• supersonic interception aircraft culminating in the English Electric Lightning
• the V bombers
• the enquiry into the Comet crashes to understand why it happened and how it could be avoided in future
• Concorde and supersonic transport, employing the wind tunnels to full effect.

The site comprised a range of buildings:

• Q121 24ft wind tunnel
• R133 Transonic wind tunnel
• R52 1916 wind tunnel building
• R136 11.5 ft x 8.5ft wind tunnel
• R178 Materials and chemistry building
• R51 Forge and Foundry
• Q120/Q146 Seaplane test tank
• R173 Romney buildings
• Q134 Weapons testing building
• Q65 The fabric shop
• Q170 Telephone exchange
• Q153 Structural test building

The site was decommissioned in 1998 and had been redeveloped as Farnborough Business Park. However the legacy was preserved to an extent in the air tunnel buildings owned by the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust, a museum in the Balloon Factory named Trenchard House and a massive portable airship hangar. There is of course the annual Farnborough International Airshow held at the Farnborough International Exhibition and Conference Centre.

Further reading:

Adam Wilkinson, Save Farnborough: The Cradle of British Aviation (London: SAVE Britain's Heritage, 2001)

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)

Swindon manufacturing history

Swindon would become one of the great 19th century railway towns, but at the end of the 18th century it was a place largely passed by.

Kennett and Avon canal 

The canals changed this as the ambitious link between the Thames and the Avon was debated. What became the Kennet and Avon canal was the southern link through the Vale of Pewsey. A northern route branched north near Melksham and made its way between Calne and Chippenham to pass close to Swindon on its way up to Abingdon on the Thames. Later. the north Wiltshire canal would link from Swindon to the Thames and Severn canal at Cirencester.

From next to nothing, Swindon had become an ‘epicentre’, well nearly. The impact though was real with a big drop in the price of coal from the Somerset coal fields and access to hungry urban areas for the agricultural produce of north Wiltshire farmers.

No sooner was all of this in place than Isambard Kingdom Brunel was appointed chief engineer of the yet to be built Great Western Railway. Debate followed but the route adopted would pass through Swindon after Didcot and before Chippenham and the Box tunnel through to Bath and Bristol. A little later a line would snake north west from Swindon through to Cheltenham.

A few lines of text belie the task. 1840 was in the middle of one of the 19th century’s downward economic cycles. Many railways were being built, but they were mostly short runs linking towns and neighbouring coalfields. The longer routes (The Grand Junction and the London Birmingham) were massive undertakings involving great financial risk. The GWR was no different, especially with the cost and complexity of the Box tunnel. Nevertheless it was built and opened to traffic.

The new line would need a repair workshop. John Chandler, in his Swindon - History and Guide, tells the story. Swindon was simply not suitable: it had an inadequate water supply and really no skilled labour. Surely Bristol would be better, closer to coal and with an already large population. Daniel Gooch had been appointed to create the workshops and he argued for Swindon. There were those who suggested that local landowners may have sought to influence him. Other factors also came into play. Land was available at Swindon by merging with Cheltenham railway. Swindon was also at that point along the route where a change of engine would be needed to take on the challenge of the route through the Box tunnel.

There was still no money until the idea emerged of a station at Swindon offering refreshment to passengers as the engines were changed. This resulted in grand three storey station buildings constructed along with a village of railway houses all at the builder’s expense in return for the profits from the station. Anecdotes suggest that the quality of refreshment was not great and that prices were on the steep side - perhaps nothing changes.

The building of the workshops began during the economic downturn, but by the time of the railway mania that followed, locomotives were not only being repaired but new ones were being built. The GWR had opted for a broad gauge railway in contrast to the narrow gauge adopted elsewhere. This had the advantage that locomotives could be bigger and more powerful - in 1846 a locomotive, the Great Western, could pull a full passenger train at 60 mph over a long distance. The emphasis on power and speed is born out by the contrasting comments on the Crewe works.

In terms of employee numbers, Chandler quotes 400 for 1843 growing to 1800 by 1847, but then shrinking back to 600. Towards the end of the century, tough economic conditions gave way to better times and employee numbers climbed to 11,500. Alongside a better economy, the GWR had diversified and expanded its routes. Crucially it had moved over to the new standard gauge in 1892. Possibly more important it had added a large carriage works in 1865 and was producing rolling stock built to the highest standards of luxury. Magnificent locomotives were built including the legendary Castles, Kings, Granges, Manors and Halls classes. The works expanded in area eventually covering 326 acres including 79 acres roofed over. Even in 1846 the engine shop could accommodate 36 locomotives in a building in the shape of a stable with separate stalls.

Swindon was ever more dependent on the railway with some 80% of adults males employed there. Clothing factories were attracted by the corresponding availability of female labour: Compton employed 1,000 including the manufacture of GWR uniforms.

Employment at the GWR works grew to 14,369 in 1925 but then begun its decline to 10,000 until 1960, 5000 in 1967 and just over 1,000 before it closed in 1986. I write about the massive changes in the post war railways in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Swindon attracted other industries. It became home to a Pressed Steel factory which continues to supply bodies for the Mini. The Vickers site in Swindon first produced Spitfires in the Second World War and then was used for experimental projects. The site was then taken by Honda for their UK production base. It is currently being redeveloped once more. Plessey opened a factory in Swindon during the Second World War to meet demand from the MOD. The company also managed a number of shadow factories. The Swindon factory later specialised in hydraulics and a further factory was built at Cheney Manor in 1957 to manufacture transistors. RA Lister built a factory to manufacture farm equipment and diesel engines to add capacity to its main base at Dursley.

Further reading:

• John Chandler, Swindon - History and Guide (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992)
• Michael A. Howell, Bygone Swindon (Chichester: Phillimore)
• You can read more in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines