London as a manufacturing place

Was London a manufacturing anomaly ? There were no raw materials, no coal and the weather didn't favour weaving. Yet, it was the centre of power. The rich wanted beautiful things and Londoners made them. Skills emerged and developed, which attracted more skills. Above all it was the major port.

The Thames offered a wonderful entry and exit point for London and had done since Roman times. 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 dock area was extended and trade boomed. The city and its surroundings attracted a vast variety of commercial activity.

A striking feature of this monster city in 1700 was its newness. In September 1666 some three-fifths of the City of London had been destroyed in the Great Fire. The losses were immense – 13,200 houses were burned to the ground and so were most of the great public buildings, including St Paul’s Cathedral and eighty-seven parish churches. Rebuilding the housing took well into the 1670s. The public buildings took longer – St Paul’s was not considered finished till 1711. Rebuilding was at a much-reduced density – some parish churches and livery company halls were never replaced and only around 9,000 houses filled the place of those lost. No more the narrow streets with closely packed thatched dwellings. We can thank Christopher Wren for the fine stone churches built in the classical style that can still be seen amongst the glass and steel of the 21st century city.

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.

As London grew, the banks of the Thames filled with manufacturing businesses attracted by the ease of receiving raw materials and dispatching finished goods. The docks would welcome ships arriving with cargoes from just about all over the world; ships too would leave with finished goods destined for lucrative overseas markets. The label ‘Made in London’ carried a cache the world over. It had been and still was a busy and diversified place with saw-mills, lead-smelting, paint and varnish works, iron and brass foundries and ships stores, chain and anchor works and sack, bag and canvas factories.

Much later, Joseph Rank saw the vast quantity of grain imports coming through London docks and saw the opportunity for flour mills which he built by the river. These worked alongside huge warehouses and markets. London had cornered world trade, for example Australian wool was shipped to London for onward sale. The domination in trade was mirrored and amplified in banking and finance where London took an unassailable lead until 1914.

The 18th century and earlier

Inner London

Where it all began with trade. Wool and silk occupied many Londoners as did clock-making and furniture. England’s population in 1651 is estimated at 5 million and 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. Follow this link to discover more.

East London

Docklands and the East End. Trade needed ships and London built many. When I think of shipbuilding, I see in my minds eye the North-East or the Clyde. Yet, Thames shipyards, including four Naval Dockyards, built many thousands of ships over four centuries. We can think of East Indiamen setting sail for the spices of the east, or whalers, but more-so mail steamers, wherries and tea clippers. It was said that standing on Greenwich Hill you could see hundreds of yards stretching west to Chiswick and east towards the sea. With men like Maudslay, Thames yards were ahead of the game with steam power until the proximity of raw materials passed the advantage further north. Along with ships, London made armaments at Woolwich. Follow this link to discover more and this link to the Thames shipbuilders.

South London

Tanning by the Thames created a stink. Tanning took place in Bermondsey. The River Neckinger provided the water for the tanning pits. Slaughterhouses provided a constant supply of hides and there was ample oak bark for the tanning process. There were busy cobblers and cordwainers throughout; the cordwainers in particular were very protective of their craft. It was this trade that suffered as Northampton attracted London retailers by lower prices through lower wages. Flour and beer nourished the population. Huguenots produced more fine silk. Follow this link to discover more.

19th and 20th century

East London

With yet more trade, the docks expanded. Furniture making spread with the influx of skilled Jewish makers. The area around Shoreditch and the western end of Bethnal Green became in the words of Gerry White ‘something approaching one giant factory’. Other industries gathered further along the Thames. Read more in this link.

South London

Engineers made a bee-line for Lambeth to learn from the pioneer machine-tool maker, Henry Maudslay. In his book, London: A History, Francis Sheppard observes that ‘by the end of the eighteenth century, London had more steam engines than Lancashire’. Pharmaceuticals transformed lives, much loved toys delighted generations and the Stanley knife! The Lines Brothers factory at Merton was at one time the largest toy factory in the world. Read more in this link.

Inner London

Pianos were made in Islington. Mornington Crescent was home to the 'Black Cat' Carreras cigarettes factory built in an Egyptian style and later sold to Rothmans which manufactured in Darlington. Benson & Hedges were made in Oxford Street before production moved to Ballymena. Lambert and Butler were produced in Drury Lane. There were bicycle makers in Holborn and jewellers around Fitzrovia. Holborn was also home to George Kent and his household equipment including his famous knife cleaner. Burroughs Wellcome set up offices in Snow Hill, Holborn in the late 19th century. and then many of the basic needs of life. Many of the new industries were born in Inner London before they moved out to pastures new. Read more in this link.

North London

Manufacturing moved north from Inner London and there developed a raft of different industries from electronics to aircraft, furniture to motor components. Brimsdown, Enfield was the former home of the Edison Swan Laboratory. Joseph Swan moved from Newcastle where he developed the incandescent lamp and joined with the American Thomas Edison in exploiting their invention at Ponders End in 1886. They manufactured under the Mazda brand. I write of Edison in this blog. Working with him, Ambrose Fleming invented the first thermionic valve, a diode, from which the development of wireless grew. Also in Brimsdown was Cosmos, valve manufacturers. Read more in this link.

West London

American companies flocked to Western Avenue and the Great West Road. Our iconic aircraft were built in Kingston and then radar to spot their enemies. Addlestone became home to Plessey Radar after its takeover of Decca in the mid sixties. The marine radar part of the Decca was taken over by Racal and they had a manufacturing presence in New Maldon. New Malden is also home to BAE Systems visualisation, experimentation, and design. Sunbeam Talbot made motor cars in Ladbroke Hall (post image) Read more in this link.

Postscript

In his London in the Twentieth Century, a phrase from Jerry White stuck in my mind. ‘From the middle of the sixties London’s manufacturing industry virtually bled away, along with the port that fed it.’ He offers some telling figures: between 1959 and 1974 London lost 38% of its manufacturing jobs so by 1996 only 10% of the London workforce was employed in manufacturing.' A good deal of manufacturing moved to the north, east, west and south of London and in due course out to Metroland and into the South East.

Plessey father and sons

 Allen Clark, son of Byron Clark, was born in Massachusetts in 1898 and came to England in 1905. He attended Felsted School. In the First World War he served in the London Scottish and was wounded at Cambrai in 1917. He then joined the Royal Flying Corps.

in 1920, Byron Clark bought Plessey Limited which made tools in Marylebone in London. In 1922 Plessey obtained a contract to made crystal radio sets for Marconi and I write of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Marconi invested in Plessey, secured seats on the board and Plessey developed a business in making radio components.

Allen is remembered by his friend Patrick Hennesey, one time boss of Ford UK, as a man dedicated to searching the world for ideas which could enable Plessey to develop.

Plessey became a public company in 1937 and I write in HBSTMW of its contribution to the national effort in the Second World War. After the war, Allen was joined by his sons John and Michael.

John was educated at Harrow and Cambridge and served in the RNVR from 1944 to 1947. He then went to learn about electronics manufacturing first at Metro-Vick and then in the USA before joining Plessey.

John had a particular interest in materials such as gallium arsenide and silicon and took on the development of the semiconductor business and master minded Plessey's research into materials at its Caswell laboratories. A plant for manufacturing pure silicon was established in 1952 but the potential for solid state technology had yet to be embraced. It wasn't until 1957 that the company began manufacture of transistors. 1966 MOS integrated circuits were produced at Swindon, making Plessey the first European manufacturer of such microcircuits.

In 1951 a Communications Division was formed, with Michael Clark at its head, and a remit to catch up with its competitors in VHF and UHF equipment. Two senior managers, John Cunningham and Raymond Brown, left Plessey to form Racal.

Allen's big break came in 1961 when Plessey took over competing telephone manufacturers Ericsson Telephone Ltd and the Automatic Telephone and Electric Company. He was knighted that same year but tragically died before the transaction completed. He was succeeded by John as chairman and Michael as managing director.

In 1965 the company reorganised into five product groups: Automation, Components, Dynamics, Electronics, Telecommunications. The company went on to develop their electronics business in defence, semiconductors and computers. I write of all of this in Vehicles to Vaccines. In 1962, Plessey had 25,000 employers and this grew to 75,000 by 1980 in a number of different locations with head office at Ilford as I wrote in How Manufacturing Shaped Britain.

GEC and Plessey merged their telecoms businesses in GPT in 1988 and in 1989 Siemens and GEC purchased the remainder of Plessey. John Clark was knighted in 1971 and died in 2001. Michael was awarded a CBE and survived his brother by nine years.

Further reading:

Richie, Berry, Into the Sunrise - Plessey Company (London: James & James, 1989)

Link to Amazon to explore this:

Marconi and notable successors

Guglielmo Marconi, from Bolognia in Italy, at the age of 22, in 1898, set up Marconi Telegraph Company in a former mill in Chelmsford: the first wireless factory in the world. His fascination was with radio waves, and he built on earlier work, by Hertz and others, for his first patent registered in England in 1897.

He was born in Italy of an Italian father and Irish mother who had eloped ten years earlier. He was brought up largely by his doting mother who loved everything British; his father was distant and disapproving. He developed a fascination with science and electricity, frowned on by his father. He was no great scholar, but an obsessive experimentalist.

Maxwell had produced a theory supporting the existence of electromagnetic waves and eight years later Hertz had carried out experiments which demonstrated the theory. All this captured the imagination of the teenage Marconi who took over his mother’s loft to replicate Hertz’s experiments and improve upon them. A number of established scientists were exploring the theory of electromagnetic waves, Marconi’s only interest was in seeing whether the waves could transmit information. He found that whilst the transmitted wave might be weak, it could control a much stronger signal and so, for example, make a sound. Further experiments increased the range of transmission.

At the age of 21, Marconi was ready for backers to take forward his invention. His father approached the Italian Post Office, which declined. His mother took him to England where William Preece, the Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, had been experimenting with electromagnetic induction. Marconi lodged a patent application and was then introduced to Preece to whom he demonstrated his invention. A public demonstration followed in July 1896 with Morse messages sent a mile across London. Further public demonstrations followed in England and Italy. Marconi sold his patent rights to the company that bears his name receiving in exchange a controlling shareholding.

The choice of where to manufacture wireless equipment is interesting. He had experimented in London but suffered interference from the tram network. Chelmsford was far away from trams and had electrical engineers thanks to Crompton, and also factory space.

I write of the remarkable company he created in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

The company’s long term success owed a great deal to Marconi’s commitment to excellence. The company would recruit the best talent. Here are just two outstanding examples.

Dr Eric Eastwood

Dr Eric Eastwood who was recruited by Marconi after the war to lead its work on radar. He undoubtedly enhanced the technical expertise within the company which in turn led to it being the most significant part of GEC prior to that company’s breakup. Marconi Defence Systems was the perfect fit for British Aerospace with which it merged to become BAE Systems, now a respected and successful British company.

Eric Eastwood was born in Rochdale on 12 March 1910. His father was a mill worker eventually becoming an administrator. His mother kept a shop especially during periods when his father was laid off. Eric had a brother and two sisters who with Eric moved from school to school as their father sought work. It became clear that Eric was the most intellectually gifted and so the family decided to focus their resources in his schooling at Oldham. He was by all accounts a hard working and well organised student. This paid off with first scholarships to read Physics at Manchester and then to write a PhD at Cambridge.

His first career was in teaching physics which he did at Runcorn at a school founded by Brunner and Mond. He moved from there to Liverpool and in 1941 volunteered for the RAF. It didn't take long for his particular skills to be noticed and he was transferred to 60 Group which has responsibility for running the CH (chain home) network of radar stations. His first job was the calibration of one of the stations to take account of its physical position in order to report with a degree of accuracy on the position of enemy aircraft. Eric was promoted, eventually had full command of the whole of the home radar establishments.

After the war he joined English Electric in their Research Department at Stafford then, following EE's purchase of Marconi, Eric moved to Marconi Research Laboratories at Great Baddow near Chelmsford first as Deputy Director and then as Director in 1954. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines of the vital work carried out by Eric and his colleagues both to benefit the defence of these islands but also to advance the commercial success of the Marconi company.

He eventually retired from GEC in 1981 having also served on a number of governmental and professional committees. His contribution to radar was second to none. He received many awards including that of Knight Batchelor.

F.N. Sutherland

Frederick Neil Sutherland graduated from Cambridge and went to serve as a pilot in the RNAS joining English Electric in Preston in 1922. He started on the shop floor before becoming an apprentice. He was appointed Chief Engineer in South America and General Manager in Brazil before an appointment as Managing Director of English Electric South Africa. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines how he was chosen by George Nelson to run their new acquisition, Marconi. He turned out to be the perfect man for the job. Interestingly, he followed the tradition set by Marconi’s former boss, Admiral Grant, of involving his wife in the welfare of his employees, something I had only ever seen at the Central Ordnance Depot at Greenford in the early years of the Second World War.

During his tenure the turnover of Marconi grew from £2.5 million to £50 million becoming one of our largest exporters. With him at the helm the company won the Queens Award for Exports three years running.

Further reading:

• Jolly, W.P., Marconi (London: Constable, 1972)
• Jones, Francis Edgar ; Eric Eastwood, 12 March 1910 - 6 October 1981. Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 1 November 1983; (29): 177–195. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.1983.0007

Link to Amazon to explore this: