Yorkshire manufacturing history

 Britain's largest county with a long history of wool, coal and steelmaking. I draw together an overview of coal mining and iron and steel making to place individual regions in a national context.

Sheffield

Sheffield was to steel as Manchester was to cotton and Leeds to wool. This developed in Sheffield plate (silver plating) and stainless steel. On a larger scale, it was the place of Huntsman’s invention of crucible steel and the development of the Bessemer processes embraced by the father of Sheffield steel, John Brown, for rails and armour plating for naval ships. It was the birthplace of Vickers and the Vickers/Cammell Laird English Steel Corporation (Sheffield). Part of this now continues in public ownership as Sheffield Forgemasters. Read more about Sheffield manufacturing by following this link.

Leeds

A city that made its wealth from the wool industry; in the years following the Second World War the Burton factory employed 20,000 people. Wool attracted textile machinery manufacturers and engineering more generally, including the railways. Yorkshire Chemical Company provided the dyes for the wool industry. See much more by following this link. In nearby Temple Newsam one of the first fulling mills was erected in 1185.

Bradford

The home of worsted production and a major iron producer. In 2025 the UK City of Culture. See much more by following this link.

Wakefield

A coal mining town on the river Calder with a history of working with wool. Sirdar knitting wool is spun here. Sirdar was also famous for their knitting patterns. Hodgson and Simpson, soap manufacturer later part of Unilever, was active here. Coca Cola has major plant here. The British Premium Sausage Company formed in Bradford to produce high end sausages distinct from then prevalence of cheap sausages with low quality ingredients. At nearby Batley Angloco make fire engines.

Castleford

In 1972 Burberry moved its production of gabardine overcoats.

Yeadon

North of Leeds, Avro produced Lancasters and and Ansons in what was reputedly the largest single factory unit in Europe at the time employing 17,500 people. The Dowty Heritage site offers more fascinating detail on aircraft production and the shadow factories.

Rotherham

Yorkshire was home to Park Gate Iron and Steel Co formerly owned by Tube Investments. Liberty’s Speciality Steel is part of its progeny. J & E Walker's tin plate works was known as one of the greatest in the country until 1829. Tinplate later focused on South Wales. J&E Walker's predecessor Samuel Walker cast both iron and brass (bronze) cannon.

Halifax

Famous for its Piece Hall where merchants traded woollen products made by the many hundreds of spinners and weavers in the surrounding area. A keen competitor of Bradford in the worsted trade having the advantage of more water power. It later concentrated on 'fancy' worsted. Together with Keighley and Huddersfield, Halifax was part of a cluster of Yorkshire towns where machine tool manufacturers explored new ideas in the nineteenth century. It was where John Mackintosh set up his shop selling toffee; it merged with Rowntree in 1969. I tell more of Halifax in this blog.

Huddersfield

The home to wool products which made the town wealthy. "It is believed, in the 1940s, Huddersfield had more Rolls-Royce owners per capita than anywhere else in England, displaying the wealth of the mill owners at the time". English Cloth are one of the remaining wool manufacturers and their website tells the story. You can read more about Huddersfield manufacturing by following this link.

Barnsley

A town in the Yorkshire coalfield where mining and related metal manufacturing dominated. It was famous for its nail makers operating from small workshops, also wire stretchers. Joseph Bramah produced his famous unpickable locks in London to which he had travelled from Barnsley to seek his fortune. Metal working skills were adapted to clock making very much aimed at the monied classes. Redfearn Glass at Monk Breton near Barnsley at one time had 16% of the UK’s glass bottle production. RHM made Mr Kipling 'exceedingly good cakes' in Barnsley, subsequently owned by Premier Foods.

Whitby

Was a coal and whaling port. The ship Endeavour was built there.

Scarborough

The Canadian McCain have made frozen chips nearby since the sixties.

Hull

The city was one of the two great ports serving the industrial revolution, the other being Liverpool. Historically the docks were home to commercial shipbuilding and manufacturing activity grew up around the products traded. In the later nineteenth century fishing became a massive part of Hull. I write more about Hull manufacturing in this blog.

York

Home to Rowntree, Terry's and the National Rail Museum which grew out of the railway workshops in the city. Although without a university until 1963, it was a place of scientific invention. I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how technical development tended to be on the job rather than in formal educational settings as in France or Germany. Many towns had their scientific society where ideas were shared and stimulated. You can read more about York manufacturing by following this link.

Doncaster

Where the Flying Scotsman and the Mallard were built. International Harvester set up their first UK full manufacturing plant before the Second World War. I write more in this blog.

Goole

The company town of the Aire and Calder canal through which many thousands of tons of coal from the South Yorkshire coalfield. It is now home to Siemens new railway factory. Croda Chemicals began production in 1925

Skipton

Was home to Dewhurst, maker of Silko thread. Metcalfe Models now make wonderful card kits for model railways.

Eastern Scotland manufacturing history

 Scotland became home to high tech in the area now known as Silicon Glen between Dundee, Inverclyde and Edinburgh. At Grangemouth it was home to oil refining and cracking for the plastics industry. Aberdeen was the heart of North Sea oil. Earlier, there was wool and iron and, in Dundee, jute.

Edinburgh

Edinburgh was a capital city of many trades: publishing, printing, paper making, bookbinding, wool, linen, cotton, glass and electronics. Read more by following this link.

Grangemouth

Grangemouth is home to the Ineos, formerly BP, refinery and cracker. The Distillers Company had its headquarters in the city but owned distilleries across the country. I tell in Vehicles to Vaccines of its involvement in chemicals, plastics and man made fibres. ICI also had a plant at Grangemouth (formerly part of British Dyestuffs).

Rosyth

The Royal Naval Dockyard at Rosyth was commissioned in 1909 and opened in 1916 in order to support the fleet in the North Sea just in time to deal with the aftermath of the battle of Jutland. Babcock International now run the Rosyth dockyard

Falkirk

Where the Carron Iron works, one of the earliest of which I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, set up. I write more in this link.

Stirling

As wool production spread across much of Scotland in the eighteenth century, mills were established in Stirling using steam power. It was an important military centre.

Perth

The Glenturret distillery produces many of the malt whiskeys that are blended into Scotland's top brand Famous Grouse now owned by William Grant & Sons.

Livingston 'Silicon Glen'

A new town designated in 1962 and thought of as the capital of silicon glen. NEC set up a major plant but closed it as a result of the downturn in electronics in 2000. Its proximity to Edinburgh means that is is now benefitting from the growth in indigenous software development companies.

Galashiels

A centre of the wool industry and the place chosen for the Heriot-Watt University's School of Textiles and Design.

Hawick

In the early nineteenth century framework knitting of hosiery produced in Hawick accounted for half of all Scottish production which in turn was one quarter of the total for Britain. I write of framework knitting in my blog piece on Leicester.

Dalkeith

Home to Ferranti measurement and inspection equipment which was later sold to Plessey.

Dundee

Home to linen manufacture which in the eighteenth century accounted for nearly half of Scotland’s exports (much to England) and also to Jute manufacture for use in sail cloth now largely gone overseas except for Jute Products Ltd at Kidderminster. The coming of steam power caused a massive increase in coal imports into Dundee from the coal fields of Fife and the Lothians shipped from the ports of Alloa and Charleston on the Forth. The largest of the linen manufacturers was Baxter Brothers Dens Works said to be the biggest in the world in 1840. Paper manufacture also took place here. Ferranti made components and laser systems here. NCR set up cash register and adding machine manufacture after the Second World War. It finally left the city after the downturn in electronics in 2000.

Dunfermline

Home to fine linen manufacture. Marconi Electronic Systems established here in the Second World War and subsequently became part of BAE Systems.

Montrose

A Glaxo primary manufacturing factory

Kirkaldy

Linoleum was manufactured by the Nairn family

Glenrothes 'Silicon Glen'

One of the new towns designated after the Second World War 1948. Elliott Automation and English Electric semiconductor plants were based here. Rodime, founded by former American and Scots employees of Burroughs, pioneered the 3.5 inch hard disc drive in 1986. In 1960 Hughes Aircraft (now Raytheon) manufactured germanium and silicon diodes. General Instruments established a wafer fab

East Kilbride 'Silicon Glen'

One of the new towns designated after the Second World War in 1947. Home to CVH Spirits formerly Burns Stewart whisky distillers. Quartztec Europe's site in East Kilbride, Scotland has been operational for over 35 years (owned by Motorola), manufacturing and supplying the Semiconductor, Solar and Fibre Optic markets.

South Queensferry

Digital Equipment operated a semiconductor manufacturing plant and sold it to Motorola. It was closed as a result of the down turn in electronics in 2000.

Linlithgow

Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) set up a major plant but the downturn in 2000 caused its closure.

Hillend, Fife

Home to BAE Systems electronic engineering. Fife is also home now to the distilleries making Tanqueray and Gordon's Gin, owned by Diageo.

Aberdeen

Home to shipbuilding dating back to clippers for the tea and silk trades. The UK base for North Sea oil and gas and now home to British Energy. Read more in this link. In nearby Rothienorman, Mackie make ice cream and chocolate.

Inverness

Nearby Speyside is the largest centre of Scotch whiskey production. In Dufftown is the Glenfiddich distillery and headquarters of William Grant and Sons.

Inner London manufacturing history

 London does of course reach back into Roman times if not earlier. By 1700 it had a population estimated at 575,00 which grew to 900,000 a century later. It was by far the largest urban area in Britain having attracted migrants from neighbouring rural areas in search of work. In these early days inner London overlapped to the East and to the South.

Trade

London was wealthy largely as a result of international trade which flowed through the Port of London. I write in this link of the role of merchant adventurers. The types of imports and exports reveal an astonishing variety. Fine cotton garments and indigo dye from India, tea from China, ivory from Africa, gold and silver from south America, sugar from the Caribbean. Exports were needed to exchange for these goods, so London’s craftsmen made metal items of beauty and utility. The major export though was wool.

The Thames, from early times, was home to shipbuilders and I wrote of the companies and the ships they built in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Ships were built both for trading and for warfare, and yards on the Thames built both.

In spite of a massive growth in the volume of trade, the 'legal docks' had remained largely as they had been in the time of Elizabeth I - a stretch of quays between London Bridge and the Tower of London, although a further area of river frontage on the south bank had been added and ships were often unloaded by lightermen whilst at anchor in the centre of the river. The congestion would not be relieved until 1790 and I write about this when looking at East London.

The huge variety of goods traded attracted manufacturing activity.

Spitalfields

In the sixteenth century and probably long before, wool had been the backbone of the English economy. It is estimated that mid century nearly one fifth of the working population was employed in the manufacture of woollen cloth. London was by far the largest centre of population and so attracted a good share of the industry. I write below of later division of labour, but cloth production had seen this from early days not least with the distinction between spinning and weaving, but also dyeing and fulling and other processes. Rural areas surrounding London played their part especially with spinning.

In the late sixteenth century Margaret of Anjou encouraged silk workers to come to Spitalfields from her native Lyon and so began the English silk trade of which I wrote in my blog on Braintree.

The introduction of the knitting frame transformed the manufacture of hosiery and this mattered in eighteenth century London which had a growing middle class which was both fashion conscious and keen to display conspicuous wealth. With hosiery, the colour had to be exactly right. Much framework knitting took place in the Midlands where wage costs were lower and I write about this in my blogs on Leicester and Nottingham, but London held on to the fashionable end.

Fashion attracted retail outlets from regional manufacturers. Josiah Wedgewood set a shop in in Grosvenor Square and another in Greek Street in Soho. Matthew Boulton chose Pall Mall to display his 'buttons, buckles, saucepans, candlesticks and snuff boxes'.

Jerry White in London in the 19^th Century highlights the degree of division of labour in London manufacturing. I have positively eulogised about Birmingham’s workshop system. White suggests that London took this a stage further with the skilled making of an item broken down into a great many simple steps in which an unskilled person could be trained. These people would often work in their own home for many hours to scrape a living from truly mindless work. I wonder whether it was this that John Ruskin was critiquing when he wrote of his concerns of industrialisation in his writings on political economy, such as Unto the Last. Textiles would seem to have been a prime but far from solitary example with silk spinning and weaving carried out in Spitalfields but also garment making with the process subdivided many times over. White suggests that there were 250,000 textile workers in inner London in 1901. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the plight of textile workers in Spitalfields in the early nineteenth century. Stephen Inwood uses the term 'sweated system' to describe the division of a skill into a number of unskilled processes thereby exploiting the large number of unskilled people flocking to London in the nineteenth century. He quotes some people as suggesting that this system achieved greater productivity then the clothing industry in - say - Leeds which took advantage of machinery.

Clerkenwell and Finsbury

Richard Tames in Clerkenwell and Finsbury Past writes of the sheer diversity of manufacturers. There were book binders and makers of book binding machines, manufacturers of addressing machines and ever pointed pencils, printers who specialised in railway tickets, a gilder who specialised in book edges.

Clerkenwell had some 7,000 people working in watch making in 1790; the process becoming increasingly subdivided. Of particular interest to me, the skills of watch making developed into mathematical, optical and surgical instruments in the Strand and Fleet Street; my great grandfather made surgical instruments at No 62 The Strand for Weiss & Co. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were 1,000 employees making cartridges at the Eley factory in Clerkenwell. Eley later joined 29 other companies in Nobel Industries Limited.

Furniture making for the aristocracy and growing middle class received a boost with the arrival of Huguenot and Dutch crafts men in the 1680s. Exotic woods were being imported from America and the West Indies: Walnut, rosewood, deal, satinwood, and mahogany and London became Europe's top manufacturer of fine furniture. Clerkenwell was home to Hepplewhite's furniture workshop; Chippendale had been in St Martin's Lane. Less well known but still highly skilled makers produced furniture in Mayfair for the well to do.

The growing population needed feeding and here mechanisation found a foothold in milling and brewing. Feeding the brain mattered too; William Caxton established the first printing press in Westminster in 1476. Printing and book binding prospered in the environs of Fleet Street.

Further reading

• Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998)
• Richard Tames, Clerkenwell and Finsbury Past (London: Historical Publications, 1999)
• The Finsbury Story (London: Pyramid Press, 1960)
• John Richardson, A History of Camden (London: Historical Publications, 2000)

Edinburgh manufacturing history

 The capital city of Scotland, with access to the sea at the port of Leith, had for centuries a closer relationship with the continent of Europe than with its land neighbour, England. This was particularly evident in Edinburgh’s principal manufacturing activity - the making of books. The first printing press came from France in 1507 when the Scottish king instructed his friend Walter Chepman and Andro Myllar, who had learnt the technique of printing in Rouen, to print the laws of Scotland. Previously Scots writers had been published and printed in Europe. Printing brought paper making and book binding as well as publishing.

The industrialisation of printing created a number of Edinburgh businesses. Oliver & Boyd were the first to combine publishing, printing and book binding in one building. T & A Constable also combined publishing and printing as did James Ballantyne which had a close relationship with Sir Walter Scott. Thomas Nelson at their Parkside Works both made paper and printed. They are now part of Harper-Collins based at Walton on Thames. R & R Clark at Brandon Street printed Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. They are now part of William Thyne whose principal business is packaging.

The Port of Leith was busy and had shipbuilders including Henry Robb, but, in contrast to the Clyde, focussed more on smaller vessels for trawling and whaling. Robbs became part of British Shipbuilders and closed in 1984. Robb became a shareholder in Ringsend Dockyard of Dublin which made similar vessels.

In the mid nineteenth century Lachlan Rose, a ships chandler from Leith, discovered a way to preserve lime juice. He bought a former sugar plantation in Dominica to grow limes and Rose’s Lime Juice reached the world, not least India. Factories were built in St Albans and on Merseyside and further estates were acquired in the Gold Coast. The company was bought by Schweppes in 1955.

Paper making from linen waste picks up Scotland’s largest export much of which was produced in Edinburgh but a good deal more further north in Dundee. Penicuik near Edinburgh was known as the paper making town with its first mill founded in the eighteenth century. An Edinburgh engineer, Bertrams of Sciennes, manufactured paper making machinery. Other engineering companies supported shipbuilding focused on Leith and more general engineering.

Cotton, which had started in the country with Scotland's first mill also at Penicuik, was important for Edinburgh but it spread throughout Scotland so to Dumfriesshire, Stirlingshire, Aberdeenshire and Perthshire using water power. The steam engine changed all this, with a migration to the coal rich areas around Glasgow and Paisley.

The wool industry in Scotland was truly a cottage industry with knitters, spinners and weavers in many counties. Edinburgh played a large part in fine cloth and also carpets. New Mills at nearby Haddington was formed in the late seventeenth century to boost Scotland's cloth production. At one time it employed 700 people carry on all the constituent tasks in woollen cloth manufacture, but all were done by hand except for fulling where a mill was driven by the local river. Gradually the mechanised industry spread to the the towns and villages to the south, so Galashiels and Hawick whose framework knitting production accounted for one eighth of British knitted hosiery. Edinburgh does lay claim to the first Paisley shawls.

The production of tartan became a serious industry following the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822 when Sir Walter Scott made much of Highland tradition. A number of Edinburgh mills joined in production but now the main producers of tartan cloth are Lochcarron Mills and Harris Tweed Hebrides. Marton Mills of Wharfdale in Yorkshire also include tartan in their range. For the other famous Scots cloth, tweed, it is necessary to visit the isles of Harris and Lewis.

Edinburgh was also near to coal reserves and so coal mines were sunk near to the city. Coal was used to produce glass which became another Edinburgh industry. It began with green bottle glass, but then advanced into crown glass for windows and fine glass for cutting - the famous Edinburgh Crystal. The company, Edinburgh and Leith Flint Glass was bought by Webb Corbett of Stourbridge in 1921. The company turned its production to the war effort in both world wars, and in the Second produced cathode ray tubes for radar.

Coal was also used to smelt iron ore, for example at the Cramond Iron works run by the Cadell family which had been joint founders the Carron works in Falkirk. Thomas Edington became manager of the Cramond works in 1765 and married Christian Cadell seven years later. Edington and the Cadells then looked to Glasgow for supplies of pig iron to replaced the existing imported supplies.

The mid nineteenth century saw the foundation of the Scottish Vulcanite Company. Vulcanite was a hard form of rubber invented by Charles Goodyear in 1839 but patented in England in 1844 by Thomas Hancock of Charles Mackintosh of Manchester. Goodyear obtained his Scottish patent in 1843 and a licence was taken by the American Norris & Co to begin manufacture in Edinburgh. This started with four Norris employees from New York coming to Edinburgh to teach the necessary skills to the local workforce. They went on to boot and shoe production and then tyres for steam traction engines. The company became the North British Rubber Company and went on to produce car tyres (renamed Uniroyal) and boots (renamed Hunter Boots). The original Fountainbridge plant closed in the sixties with the opening of a Uniroyal plant at Newbridge. Boot and shoe manufacture moved to Dumfries and production was transferred abroad in 2008.

During the Second World War, Ferranti viewed their manufacturing base in Manchester as vulnerable to air attack and so moved some activities to Scotland. Ferranti made military electronic systems at Crewe Toll, inertial systems and cockpit displays at Silverknowes and Electro-optic systems at Robertson Avenue. The company was employing 5,000 people in Edinburgh by 1963 as the city's largest employer. Electronics probably transformed Edinburgh; other electronics companies followed Ferranti's lead. Much later, Amazon set up their only software development centre outside the USA and Rock Star computer games are created here. I write about Ferranti's latter days in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Glaxo had a presence in the city through their purchase of Edinburgh Pharmaceutical Industries.

Further reading:

• Christopher A. Whatley, The Industrial Revolution in Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
• Albert Mackie, An Industrial History of Edinburgh (Glasgow: McKenzie, Vincent & Co, 1963)

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

Stourbridge manufacturing history

 Wool was the business of Stourbridge as it was for a great deal of the kingdom from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries. Yet it was not all.

The power source for early manufacturing was strongly flowing water and the river Stour did not disappoint. All that then was needed were raw materials and here the local area provided clay, iron ore, sand and nearby Dudley had limestone. Potash, needed to make glass, was first made locally by burning bracken, later seaweed was imported from Scotland and Spain.

Bricks were made in many places across Britain, but the banks of the Stour had red clay which produced a very high quality of building brick and white clay for firebricks essential for making glass. It was very heavy work done mainly by women producing some 14 million bricks a year.

Stourbridge is famous for its high quality glass. This is probably linked to the arrival in the district of glass makers fleeing persecution in Lorraine. The Huguenots set up in Stourbridge and surrounding villages employing local workers who too gained skills. The product was window glass but also bottles for cider, and fine glass. The finest piece was said to be a chandelier for the sultan of Turkey as a cost of £10,000. A key development was the invention of a way to make glass using coal as the source of heat. The Heath Glass Works was the Stourbridge works that can be traced through the transitions. It was however not linked by the first canal bringing coal from Dudley, handing the advantage to others better located.

In 1897 the firm of Webb Corbett was founded when they took over the White House Glass Works which had been run by WH , B & J Richardson in nearby Wordsley which was on the canal. A century earlier Royal Brierley had established at nearby Brierley Hill.

The glass making inheritance has been taken up by designer makers. The most prominent of whom, Allister Malcolm Glass at Broadfield House Glass Museum the former home of Stuart Chrystal Glass also at Wordsley, has focused on sustainability. Glass requires 1200 degrees of heat and so is energy hungry. Gas took over from coal but is still carbon based. The sustainable answer is electricity powered by solar. This perhaps begs the question of whether makers could return to Stourbridge's original source of power: the river Stour.

Coal was key to the substantial iron trade of the town. The origin predates the use of coal when charcoal was used to smelt the ore. There is evidence of hand nail making from this iron. As smelting developed so too did the process of nail manufacture but it remained heavy and dangerous work. Chains, locks and scythes were other staple products of the town.

Skills in metal work translated into metal fabrication and light engineering. For example, the German Sunlight Industries set up in the town manufacturing mobility solutions for people with disabilities.

Further reading:

Nigel Perry, A History of Stourbridge (Chichester: Phillimore, 2001)

Kidderminster manufacturing history

Kidderminster is of course known for carpets, along with Wilton and Axminister and a number of Yorkshire wool towns including Halifax. With the suffix 'minster', it was quite possibly established as a minster church as early as the arrival of St Augustine in 597 AD. Oddly, or perhaps not, Axminster is a similar name.

The town was well placed being near to Wales and the hard wearing wool of hill sheep and the growing population of the Black Country. Wool weavers turned their attention to floor covering. Wilton was a clear rival and Kidderminster man, John Broom determined not to let them get ahead, visited Belgium to learn the latest techniques. These he brought back together with a Belgian weaver and the town went from strength to strength. By 1800 there were 1,000 looms in the town with most weavers working from their own dwelling. The arrival of the canals in the 1770s gave the town vital access both to more distant markets and to fuel.

The progression of carpet making was a mix of the technical and economic. The raw material was wool but a carpet that made best use of the least material has an economic attraction. Then came the speed of weaving and effective mechanisation even in the small dwellings where most carpets were still made. Lastly came design and colour. Here we have the science of dyeing and the Jacquard technique which enabled the weaving of complex patterns by machine.

In time weavers were collected together in manufactories with machines powered by steam engines. Kidderminster was making half of the carpets made in England. The town’s businesses led the field. Brintons, which remains a major employer in the town, began in the late eighteenth century and were best known for the invention of the Brinton Jacquard gripper Axminster loom. There were then the companies that would join with Halifax carpet makers to form Carpets International which fell into receivership in 2003. A third company, Brockways, only set up in the 1930s, is still trading. Kidderminster has now lost most of its carpet industry to foreign competition.

In time cheaper materials were sought to make the less visible parts of the carpet. Jute was used to back certain carpets. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines how manmade fibres were brought into carpet making.

Now it is jute that is made into a variety of products by Jute Products Ltd some of which are still used in carpet making. Jute, as a natural sustainable material is seen to have great potential in a post plastics world.

In the Second World War, the Rover company managed a shadow factory in Drakelow Tunnels manufacturing aircraft parts. The tunnels later became a cold war bunker. In my auditing days, I recall visiting a hot water bottle manufacturing business in the town.

Further reading:

Ken Tomkinson and George Hall, Kidderminster since 1800 (Kidderminster: Kenneth Tomlinson, 1975)

 

Colchester manufacturing history

 Colchester was said to be the first English town, established before 100 BC. It was rebuilt as a model Roman town following the invasion of AD 50 only to be destroyed along with London and Verulamium by Queen Boudicca ten years later. The Romans rebuilt it and it prospered until the Legions left and the Saxons invaded. A settled existence was then eventually enjoyed until the Danes invaded. The town became part of what would become England in the first half of the tenth century only to be disturbed this time by the Normans who left their mark on the town as evidenced by common surnames.

Like so many places, wool trade and wool manufacture formed the bedrock of industry, boosted by refugees from Holland in the sixteenth century. The town gained a reputation for quality textiles. There followed a period of decline when trading took over, the town being well placed for continental trade. Throughout this time, craftsmen in the town became well regarded for their skills at clockmaking. Clockmaking prospered in Colchester and Coventry and many other provincial towns until factory production took over in London and Birmingham. Then, as with so much, clockmaking went overseas.

The 1830s saw the coming into prominence of some of the great mechanical engineers of the East of England. In Greenwich, John Penn owned the largest marine engine business in Britain. There is evidence of regular communication between him and the much younger James Paxman who made agricultural machinery in Colchester. There was a further connection with Robert Ransome in Ipswich. I write more of Penn in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and more of Ransome in my blog on Ipswich. Here the focus is on Paxman.

In his book Steam and the Road to Glory The Paxman Story, Andrew Phillips, acknowledged that by 1865, when Paxman joined with the two Davey brothers, Davey Paxman was one of the smaller manufacturers of steam engines, so dwarfed by Ransome but also by Robey of Lincoln. Electricity changed everything. Dynamos to generate electricity for Swan's incandescent lamp demanded power and in the absence of fast running water, this was provided by all manner of steam engine. Electrical engineers, of which Crompton of Chelmsford was a leader, were spoilt for choice and would use steam engines made by any one the many manufacturers. James Paxton was definitely one and he, I suggest like Joseph Ruston, was very good at nurturing relationships. He got on well with Crompton who would use his steam engines, but not uniquely. Andrew Phillips tells the story of Paxman's big break.

Paris was host to the first electrical exhibition and was followed a year later by one at London's Crystal Palace. James Paxman won a gold medal, but so did six other manufacturers. Exhibitions were the coming thing and a purpose built space had been created in South Kensington, but this could only be fully exploited if open to evening visitors and this required light. Larger manufacturers were reluctant to exhibit again so soon, but James Paxman was at hand and Phillips tells how he met with the Prince of Wales and promised a fully functional system in just ten weeks. He delivered using his energy efficient double expansion engine. In time installations increased in size and Paxman's slower engine began to lose out. The answer was found in the high speed engine developed by J.C. Peach.

Peach had been working with the Thames Ditton firm of Willans and Robinson. On Willans’ untimely death Peach went to work with Musgraves in Bolton. James Paxman had heard of the new engine and sought an opinion from a valued colleague. The opinion was positive and Peach brought his invention to Paxman and the company went on to power a good number of electrical installations.

Paxman’s other mainstay had been winding machine engines for South Africa diamond and gold mines. Like other steam engine manufacturers they embraced the oil engine.

Davey Paxman had moved to a larger site at the Standard Works and their former site was taken by Arthur Mumford who from 1877 manufactured marine pumps. Mumford joined the Weir Group in 1933. In 1887 John Ernest Cohen founded the Colchester Lathe Co which in 1954 would be bought by George Cohen's 600 Group, of which I write more in Vehicles to Vaccines. Colchester Lathe was in competition with the less successful Britannia Engineering whose works were later used by Davey Paxman to make diesel engines in the Second World War.

Davey Paxman was one of the East Anglian companies to join Agricultural Engineering in the thirties from where it entered into a relationship with Ruston and Hornsby; both companies were bought by English Electric in 1966.

Further reading:

• Norman Jacobs, Colchester The Last Hundred Years (Lowestoft: Tyndale Press, 1989)
• Andrew Phillips, Steam and the Road to Glory The Paxman Story (Colchester: Harvey-Benham Charitable Trust, 2002)

Norwich manufacturing history

The second largest city in Britain at the start of the eighteen century made wealthy by wool, Norwich, with a population of 30,000, was a city of spinners, wool-combers and weavers.

The principal product was worsted cloth. To this were added worsted made of wool and silk to make it softer and so offer competition to Indian cashmere, and later wool and cotton worsted. Norwich won business from Exeter through its lower wages, but then Yorkshire won over Norwich for the same reason. By the end of the century Norwich was dependent upon export sales via the East India company and, when these ceased in the early nineteenth century, Norwich's wool workers were destitute. They had long resisted mechanisation but eventually relented. The trade did revive but never to its former level. In 1961, there were 10,000 employed in the clothing trade around about the same number as in shoe making.

In 1800, there had been cordwainers making shoes and boots in the city for decades, but wool had always been the dominant trade. With wool's decline and increased demand for shoes from London, the colonies and the growing industrial towns, Norwich began its journey to become a centre of shoemaking, particularly for women. The earliest recorded shoe manufacturer was James Southall & Co in 1792. In terms of other activity, Gurney's Bank (later part of Barclays) was founded 1775 and Hills and Underwood vinegar maker in 1762.

In 1846 Norwich became the last major city to be connected to the growing railway net work. This facilitated further growth in shoe making, with Norwich becoming, so Frank Meeres suggests in his A History of Norwich, the fourth largest shoe city in Britain. Norvic shoes was a celebrated brand for women's footwear and one of the first to embrace advertising. This company, formed by the older Howlett and White, made many thousand of boots and shoes for the armed forces in both world wars. One Norvic speciality was sports shoes including running spikes.

The commercial strength of Norwich was in the diversity of its industry. Boulton and Paul manufactured all manner of product from wood including aircraft, at one time employing 1,300. Jewson Timber Merchants were founded in Norwich. Barnard, Bishop and Barnard invented a machine for making wire netting which sold all over the world. The company later became part of Tinsley Wire of Sheffield. Laurence, Scott and Electromotors embraced electricity and made dynamos and electric motors with a workforce at one time of 3,500. The company still manufactures in the city but was bought by the Austrian ATB in 2007 and now is financed by the Chinese Wolong. Coleman's mustard business was founded in 1804 and by 1900 had 2,000 employees. Coleman merged with the Recketts of Hull in 1938. As I told in my blog on Halifax, Mackintosh bought the Norwich chocolate maker, AJ Caley. Elsewhere the Norwich Union insurance company was founded in 1806. HMSO moved to Norwich in 1968 but closed in 1996. The publisher Jarrold moved to Norwich in 1823 and still publishes from the city.

Further reading

Frank Meers, A History of Norwich (Stroud: Phillimore, 1998)

Huddersfield manufacturing history

 Huddersfield provided a commercial centre at its famous Cloth Hall for the many thousands of home working wool weavers in the surrounding district. 

The inventions of which I have written elsewhere slowly changed this settled and quite prosperous scene. In his book The Story of Huddersfield Roy Brook first points to  the error in assuming that wool and cotton were distinct industries. He makes the point that ‘Manchester Goods’ (which incidentally my father traded in East Africa in the early twentieth century and of which I wrote in my book Dunkirk to D Day. The image is of my father on Mombassa railway station in 1911) were a mix of cotton and wool. Similarly the weavers and spinners of Huddersfield almost certainly worked with cotton as well as wool. 

In terms of mechanisation, the first initiatives increased the speed of spinning and thus the weavers had somehow to keep up. I have read elsewhere that exports of thread to the Low Countries balanced the overproduction, but was not welcomed. Mechanisation of weaving had a more dramatic impact, for now factories filled with weaving machines could and did replaced the many thousands of hand weavers. The well known opposition of the Luddites was replicated across the wool weaving areas. Charlotte Bronte’s book Shirley offers a vivid account of what this might have been like. Mechanisation was in fact a gradual process with hand weavers providing cloth along side the much larger mills. 

Huddersfield did have its weaving machine manufacturers, but, for worsted cloth, manufacturers from the west of the Pennines were used, worsted having greater similarities with cotton cloth. In Huddersfield, Haighs were well known for carding engines. Whiteleys became famous for the manufacture of spinning mules and tentering machines. 

Huddersfield developed a chemical industry on the back of dye houses. Read Holliday began with dye but then moved into acids including picric acid which would become essential in the Great War as would lyddite. War also presented a challenge, for German produced materials were key in the supply chain. In time home production took the strain. The company became first part of British Dyestuffs and then of ICI. It is now run by Syngenta.

The introduction of the steam engine, about which Samuel Smiles wrote so engagingly in his Lives of Boulton and Watt, had a dramatic impact on Huddersfield as it had in other textile areas. Broadbents led the field in Huddersfield in steam powered heavy machinery. Hopkinson became well known for their ‘Indicator’ which could tell the operator how a steam engine was performing, highlighting hidden areas where problems may be arising. It was compared to stethoscope for a physician. 

Machinery manufacturers engendered skills applicable in other fields of mechanical engineering, an example being plant for the production of gas.

Karrier trucks were made here and later became part of the Rootes Group.

The introduction of electricity brought about further change and it was Ernest Brook Limited which manufactured electric motors for use in factories. In November 1950, the company produced its millionth engine.

David Brown Gears began in 1860 serving the wool industry and it grew to having fourteen factories with 10,000 employees. I write of its activity with tractors in the Second World War in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. It went on to lead Aston Martin Lagonda to great success. It continues to do great engineering as David Brown Defence.

Further reading 

Roy Brook, The Story of Huddersfield (London: MCGibbon & Kee, 1968)