New Book - How Manufacturing Shaped Britain

 This book sets out to discover how manufacturing shaped this island. Why manufacturing spread across the country, how it grew, why it declined and what was left.

It is looking at manufacturing through the lens of geography.

Manufacturing transformed the places where it took place. Villages became towns because millennia earlier great forests had been buried and became rich seams of coal. Tiny seaside communities surviving on fishing witnessed the building of ever larger ships carrying cargoes of coal or wool and returning with exotic goods from the east. Waring barons found their swords replaced by guns cast from ore left in the earth’s crust. Disparate communities were linked first by sea then by Roman Road, turnpike, canal, railway, road and air. New communities formed on these links.

Manufacturing places emerged close to raw materials and sources of energy. Climate and topography gathered manufacturing which thrived in local conditions. In time, as centres of population emerged, manufacturing followed to meet their every need. Inventions were pursued where skills had been nurtured.

None of this was planned, least of all two world wars which energised manufacturers across the land to war effort, leaving vast factories in their wake crying out for new uses.

Books have explored why Britain moved ahead of its great trading rivals: the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. And it did, only to be overtaken by America, Germany, and France, and replaced by developing countries. This left manufacturers stranded with factories and workforces no longer needed, leaving populations without work, steelworks replaced by supermarkets, factories by warehouses.

This book is for people who wish to understand what has happened.

It is available to buy on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback.

Coming soon - How Manufacturing Shaped Britain

 This book sets out to discover how manufacturing shaped this island. Why manufacturing spread across the country, how it grew, why it declined and what was left.

It is looking at manufacturing through the lens of geography.

Manufacturing transformed the places where it took place. Villages became towns because millennia earlier great forests had been buried and became rich seams of coal. Tiny seaside communities surviving on fishing witnessed the building of ever larger ships carrying cargoes of coal or wool and returning with exotic goods from the east. Waring barons found their swords replaced by guns cast from ore left in the earth’s crust. Disparate communities were linked first by sea then by Roman Road, turnpike, canal, railway, road and air. New communities formed on these links.

Manufacturing places emerged close to raw materials and sources of energy. Climate and topography gathered manufacturing which thrived in local conditions. In time, as centres of population emerged, manufacturing followed to meet their every need. Inventions were pursued where skills had been nurtured.

None of this was planned, least of all two world wars which energised manufacturers across the land to war effort, leaving vast factories in their wake crying out for new uses.

Books have explored why Britain moved ahead of its great trading rivals: the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. And it did, only to be overtaken by America, Germany, and France, and replaced by developing countries. This left manufacturers stranded with factories and workforces no longer needed, leaving populations without work, steelworks replaced by supermarkets, factories by warehouses.

This book is for people who wish to understand what has happened.

Barnes Wallis - aircraft designer

 Barnes was the second son of Charles and Edith, born in 1887 in Ripley in Derbyshire where his father had an unsuccessful medical practice and where his mother longed to be home in Woolwich. The family soon moved to New Cross where a third child, Anne, was born and where Charles contracted polio. He soldiered on in spite of losing the use of a leg and managed modest success.

Barnes and his brother John were fortunate at being accepted by Christ’s Hospital school. This public school accepted pupils on the basis of need and, in view of Charles’ disability, welcomed the boys. John would pursue classical studies with distinction. For Barnes, fortune had anticipated his arrival by the involvement of the eccentric Professor Armstrong who championed science in schools. In Barnes’ day this found tangible expression in Dr Browne as science master.

As I have written elsewhere, science was a second class citizen, but Browne encourage Barnes who delighted in the subject and also modern languages. The time came for Barnes to leave and his father decided that there were not funds sufficient for Barnes to follow his brother to university. Barnes took but failed London matriculation and so had to look for work.

This came at the Thames Engineering Works which built engines for the Thames Shipbuilding Company. Barnes was bored, there being insufficient work. He had however fallen in love with ships and in 1908 moved to Cowes and indentures with John Samuel White shipbuilders.

I have written elsewhere of the key position of Vickers in the defence of the nation. This company and others were busy increasing the size of the Navy. The Germans, however, had begun serious work on Zeppelins. Vickers had already dabbled unsuccessfully, attracting criticism from an employee, H.B. Pratt whom Vickers had let go and who came to work alongside Barnes. With the start of the First World War, the Admiralty had a change of heart and instructed Vickers to follow Germany’s lead; Pratt was re-engaged and with him Barnes Wallis.

Wallis’s biographer J.E. Morpurgo sets out in embarrassing detail that politics and maladministration that surrounded the British zeppelin programme. Pratt and Wallis worked secretly on design, whilst Vickers at Barrow found endless reasons to slow their progress. The army would have nothing to do zeppelins and so it was left to the Navy, only part of which had any enthusiasm. On top of this both Pratt and Wallis deeply resented the blocking of repeated attempts by them to join up. As the war progressed so too did aeroplanes in which Pratt and Wallis had little involvement. It was four years of frustration.

The coming of peace saw no new enthusiasm for airships, but Vickers decided to hedge their bets and keep on a retainer Wallis who was then the country’s foremost designer. Wallis took the opportunity to take the degree which he had so wanted to take after leaving school. Alongside this academic achievement, he discovered that he had a gift in communication. His voice was delightful and he could engage an audience on many subjects. Over the coming years his technical papers too proved clear and compelling.

Over the next ten years the airship programme staggered forward as, with changes in government, the involvement of Vickers was brought into question. The Vickers programme of what became airship R100 at Holden in Yorkshire was joined by a government sponsored R101 at Cardington near Bedford. Instead of collaboration, there was fierce rivalry not from Wallis or his right hand man Neville Shute Norway but from their superiors. Wallis did manage to focus on the project and taught himself and the wider aeronautical engineering community a huge amount about flight. In this, the work of Lanchester comes to mind.

A key area which would hold Wallis in good stead in the forthcoming war years to come was geodetic construction, a latticework (show in the image) tightly covered with cloth. It was said that the ability of the Wellington bombers to return safely to base in spite of severe damage was the result of the inherent stability offered by the design. There were other technical advances: the use of alloys and the design of fuel tanks, to name but two.

Following the successful flight of the R100 to Canada, the R101 suffered a catastrophic crash in France only seven hours into its maiden flight to India. So much store had been placed in the project by an eager public, that the crash was met by widespread mourning, not least from Wallis. The airship programme came to a halt.

The ten years of the programme has taught Wallis and his colleagues a massive amount. For Wallis it had also seen his marriage to his much younger cousin Molly and the beginning of their family life together.

For Vickers, the end of the programme removed a barrier to Wallis joining Vickers Aviation, which after all had an enviable record with the Vimy. Wallis came with a glowing reputation and immediately impressed Pierson, the Chief Designer at Weybridge. A similar relationship with Mitchell who joined Vickers with Supermarine presented a greater challenge. A third relationship with chief test pilot Mutt Summers bore fruit from the start.

Key to the Vickers later success was Sir Robert McLean who believed in giving talent the resource and opportunity it needed despite the insistence of government that war was unthinkable. Vickers had been vilified after the First World War and government was for ever cautious of its relationship with the foremost arms manufacturer.

Wallis went about the design task alongside Pierson with total dedication. He allowed himself time for exercise but hid behind the masque of theVictorian father in his remoteness from his children leaving Molly to carry the family.

Wallis’s first design was for a biplane to meet Air Ministry specifications. Its crash made way for the monoplane with geodetic construction that Wallis favoured. McClean argued for it successful with the RAF hierarchy and the Wellesley was conceived. Such was the speed with which technology advanced that its successor the Wellington was conceived as soon as the Wellesley was born. Then politics reared their ugly head once more with the Air Ministry set on Handley Page’s Hampden. McClean argued long and hard and the Wellesley performed far ahead of specification. The Vickers board was desperate to nurture a good relationship with the Ministry and so McClean was forced to resign. Wallis’s champion had gone and the Ministry had set itself against geodetic construction.

With the coming of war, the Wellington was needed and Wallis was kept busy with modifications. He achieved both high altitude (40,000ft) and long distance. He had though a longer term project to crush Germany’s might: very large penetrating bombs. The old guard were reluctant to move away from the model of bombers as artillery in the air and fighters as airborne cavalry. Wallis saw a wholly new role in heavy targeted bombing. He designed a very large bomber capable of carrying such a bomb. He researched explosives and bomb casings. He mapped Germany’s industries and particular ways of attacking each. The Air Ministry wouldn’t listen and he had no McClean to bang his drum. The Ministry chose the Lancaster with its conventional construction designed by Roy Chadwick at Avro. There was a further issue which gave the Ministry concern, bomb aiming was simply insufficiently accurate for precision bombing.

The arrival of Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Aircraft Production offered a chink of light for the heavy bomb. Wallis’s paper entitled Method of Attack slowly garnered support and found expression in a newly formed Air Attacks on Dams Committee.

The story of the Dam Busters raid is well known. Less well known to me certainly was the attitudes of Bomber Harris, Charles Craven (Managing Director of Vickers) and Lord Cherwell (Lindemann, the scientist on whom Churchill relied). Taking Cherwell first, he simply couldn’t see the importance of the dams. Then Harris didn’t believe that pin point accuracy possible and so favoured blanket bombing. Craven like his predecessors was determined not to upset the Air Ministry. There was one further point I hadn’t picked up, Wallis had conceived a spherical bomb which would bounce like a Tudor canon ball on its way to hit a man-of-war. Small test models proved highly successful and were warmly welcomed by the Navy who adopted them to be dropped from de Havilland Mosquitoes. For a full size bomb the powers that be said a sphere would take too much scarce steel and hence the cylindrical version that actually destroyed the dams.

Wallis and his team went on to produce the Tallboy, a bomb designed to set off an earthquake reaction close to a highly defended rocket emplacement. In the event before the Tallboy could be used, the rockets were redeployed to mobile sites. Nevertheless the Tallboy was used, including in the successful attack of the Tirpitz. The other big bomb, the Grand Slam, was used to devastating effect in the final push into Germany.

After the war, Wallis remained with Vickers at Weybridge with a free ranging remit. He used this first to continue his exploration of aerodynamics with the Wild Goose glider which was launched from a trolley and then radio controlled using only wing moderation. The other was the Swallow, a rocket using a swing wing arrangement. In the American F111, it is possible to see the influence of the Wild Goose which Wallis had taken to the USA. The Swallow came into being as a possible swing-wing successor to the Valiant and influenced the design of the V Bombers.

It was not until 1968 that Wallis contribution to aviation was acknowledged with a knighthood. Wallis died in 1979 but had never really gave up inventing.

Further reading:

Morpurgo, J.E. Barnes Wallis (London: Longman, 1972)

Link to Amazon to explore this:

William Morris - Lord Nuffield

William Richard Morris was born on 10 October 1877 in Worcester where his father, Frederick, was working as a draper. Both Frederick and William's mother, Emily Ann, were of Oxfordshire yeoman stock and both had received a sound education. The indoor life of a draper didn't suit Frederick and so the family returned to Oxford and farming in Cowley. They had seven children of whom William was the eldest. Five died in childhood but William's sister lived a full life in Oxford.

William attended the village school but left at age fifteen when his father had to give up his job through ill health. Frederick returned to bookkeeping which he had learnt at the drapers and he was by all accounts meticulous. The evidence was there to see in the early records of his son's business.

William showed an early aptitude for things mechanical, particularly bicycles. He owned a penny farthing and an early solid-tired safety bicycle. His first job was in the bicycle trade where he learnt his basic skills. These he developed when he set up on his own. As an engineer he was entirely self taught.

William Morris was a remarkable man by any measure. Among my father's books was a biography of Morris by P.W.S. Andrews and Elizabeth Brunner and I drew on this for my book How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World in which I seek to tell the Morris story in the context of British manufacturing more generally. Here I record just four anecdotes which seem to me helpful in summing up the man who did of course found the Morris Motor Company and endow the Nuffield Foundation.

The first was the occasion of the 1906 General Election, and candidates were perceiving a benefit in having a motor car to carry them round on their electioneering. It seems the Morris’s reputation was spreading far and wide, for he was asked by a candidate in Stirling to find a suitable car. There were none available in Britain, and so Morris set off for Paris where he found a Lacoste & Batman car. This was a highly regarded make, and Morris must have felt thoroughly satisfied. That is, until twenty-five miles from Paris, when the car broke down with a seized gear-box and back-axle. He discovered that despite promises, oil and grease had not been filled before he set off. Morris returned to Paris, and bought the necessary parts, which he then fitted and set off again. Five miles short of Amiens, a broken exhaust valve stopped the car once more. Happily, spare valves had been provided, but they were one eighth of an inch too long. He did what many early motorists did in such circumstances, and spent one and a half hours grinding the valve down on the cobble stones to the required size. He then made it back to Oxford where his staff took over to drive up to Stirling. Late that night, he received a message that the car had broken down again, just short of York, with a broken bevel gear in the back axle. Morris set off for York, and, with the help of a local blacksmith, made and brazed two new teeth to the bevel. This sequence of break down and repair followed him all the way to Stirling, where he arrived two weeks late and much the poorer. He offered to rescind the contract, but the purchaser went ahead and no more was heard. Morris had though learned a great deal, all of which he incorporated into the design of the Morris Oxford. The other thing he learnt was not to make all the car himself, but to seek reliable suppliers of the key parts.

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In the mid thirties, a delegation from the War Office visited Moscow to witness the annual armaments parade and they saw a very basic but very fast tank. On making enquiries they discovered that it was built round a new suspension system developed by a man called Christie in the United States. The system enabled the tank to go fast, but also relatively smoothly, making it much safer for the driver, who previously would often be knocked out should the tank encounter a sharp undulation in the land it was crossing. Lord Nuffield purchased a Christie tank with his company’s own money and then proceeded to develop a new Nuffield tank employing the Christie suspension. The result was the Cruiser. In May 1940 the first few Cruiser tanks arrived in France.

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Another major Nuffield initiative was that of the Civil Repair Organisation. This had begun as an RAF initiative, but, with increasing demands on their manpower, they were content to hand it over to Lord Nuffield as Director General of Maintenance - RAF, with headquarters and one of the six repair depots at Cowley. Throughout the Battle of Britain, RAF planes were being shot down, making forced landings or landing at base with battle damage. It soon became obvious that to carry out repairs to get the planes airborne must make sense. Andrews gives some numbers. The total number of people employed in aircraft production was 664,200; a further 63,600 carried out repairs on some 80,000 aircraft put back into service over the period. Ernest Fairfax, in his closer look at the wartime contribution of the Nuffield companies, Calling All Arms, adds some more detail. There were in effect three strands to the operation: those mobile units who would go round the country retrieving damaged aircraft; the repair factories themselves; but then the foundries where scrap metal would be recycled into new aircraft. He suggests that the metal recovered was enough to build five thousand new planes.

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Lord Nuffield, who had been to see Chilwell, had told the War Minister, Mr Hore Belisha, about all that was happening in the mechanisation of the army. So, when in the summer of 1939 the question of an appointment as Deputy Director of Ordnance Services (Motor Transport) came up, the War Minister asked, ‘why not Williams at Chilwell?’

Williams was my father and Chilwell the Army Centre for Mechanisation which he created. He went on to serve as Controller of Ordnance Services of which I write in War on Wheels.

Further reading:

Andrews, P.W.S. and Brunner, Elizabeth The Life of Lord Nuffield – A Study in Enterprise and Benevolence, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955).

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Long Eaton manufacturing history

This midlands town was home to my mother's family who had been builders in the town since 1883. The company was called F.Perks & Son and played a large role in the main industry of the town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century - lace making. I wrote of the industry in my blog on Nottingham which was the major area of manufacture. Long Eaton though had three large lace mills:

Bridge Mill built by my great grandfather's building firm, F. Perks & Son, in 1902 for the Long Eaton Bridge Mills Company of which members of the Attenborough family were directors.

Springfield Mills in Sandiacre built by the notorious financier Terah Hooley in 1888 designed by John Sheldon. I write of Hooley elsewhere in the context of Dunlop, Coventry and Trafford Park, Manchester. I noted in the Derbyshire archive that F. Perks & Son, had carried out a major improvement project on his house in the town.

Harrington Mill built in 1885-7 designed by John Sheldon

These were tenement mills occupied by a number of businesses and at the turn of the century some 4,000 people worked in them. The lace industry declined after the First World War.

Another Long Eaton industry was furniture and Wades stand out as the survivor

F. Perks & Son carried out much of the building work for the Army Centre of Mechanisation at the former shell filling factory at Chilwell.

Carters Gold Medal Soft Drinks were are nearby Sawley.

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