Financiers, some who sailed near to or sometimes over the line.

 In my exploration of British manufacturing, I have come across many men whose technical expertise advanced the cause of British industry. There were also those who brought a different kind of expertise and perhaps a different outlook on life.

George Hudson - the railway king

George Hudson was one of these. He became a firm friend of George Stephenson and it was said that whilst Stephenson dreamed grand schemes for linking the country by railway, George Hudson found ways to enable such schemes, leaving to Stephenson the task of bringing them into reality.

Railway mania of which Hudson was a part was in many ways like those other kinds of financial mania - the dot com bubble, the crash that led to the credit crunch. The railways created by Stephenson had fired the imagination, so much so that groups around the country were putting together schemes for their own pet project. Those people with money to spare were only too keen to invest. Hudson and Stephenson could see that this mania needed to be tamed in order for a coherent rail net-work to emerge that served the interests of the country. This didn't mean that Hudson eschewed profit, far from it, just that he saw a bigger picture.

We need to take a step back to 1800 and the birth of George to a poor Yorkshire farming family. George was placed as an apprentice to a York grocer from which he went on to run his own grocery business. He married and fortune shone, for George unexpectedly inherited a large sum from a distant relative making him one of the wealthiest men in York. He used his new status to move into establishment circles, the Church and the Tory party. With these new connections he formed a joint-stock bank, the York Union. This led him to further contacts including Glyn's bank in London which was financing railways.

Richard Lambert, in his book The Railway King, researched his many schemes. I recount one of the first for the sake of illustration. The starting point was the London to Birmingham railway and George Stephenson's ambition for this to extend north to either Lancashire or Yorkshire ending up at his home city of Newcastle. As plans developed, the route from Birmingham to Leeds was favoured and here in stepped Hudson who argued for his home of York instead of Leeds. This plan failed to gain favour, but he did manage to secure a scheme to link York to the North Midland Railway which ran from Derby to Leeds. (The London to Birmingham line was linked to Derby via Rugby.) In time the North Midland Railway enjoyed east-west traffic, but Hudson saw on the horizon potential competition from four sequential lines linking Liverpool to Hull via Leeds. He managed to take a lease on the stretch from Leeds to Selby and promptly closed it, forcing traffic through York even though it was a longer journey. Freight could be carried on to Selby and the River Trent. Hudson had hoped to secure the railway from Selby to Hull. His failure to do so led him to re-instate the previous route by water thus crushing the owners of the Selby-Hull line. It was brutal business which caused Hudson to gather pockets of stiff competition to his schemes.

One of Hudson's York contemporaries was Joseph Rowntree who questioned the presentation of annual accounts for the North Midland and York Railway, and he asked that they should be audited. At the time it was only banks and insurance companies which required an audit, so his request was dismissed.

Lambert suggests that Hudson’s attention to four related areas brought to fruition his ambitions. First of all he sponsored individual railway projects. Second, he had to hand the means to finance them and links to brokers who could buy and sell shares to influence pricing when takeovers were required. Third, he owned land in Yorkshire which gave him status, but some of which was also useful in enabling his schemes and blocking those of competitors. The fourth strand was political at both a local and Westminster level, the latter being shepherding his favoured schemes through Parliament.

None of this was illegal, but those who lost money at his hands were naturally unforgiving and his reputation ended in tatters.

However, he was responsible for 1,450 of the 5,000 miles of railway which opened in 1849. He employed many thousands of people and enabled the cheap transport of coal which fired the industrial revolution.

Ernest Terah Hooley

Hooley’s biggest claim to fame,  or infamy, was the purchase of the Pneumatic Tyre Company for £3 million and its immediate floatation as the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company for £5 million of which the Economist of 30 July 1898 wrote:

‘On the strength of the Dunlop deal, Mr Hooley came to be regarded as the Napoleon of Finance. At his word, Capital could be created by the million and fortunes could be made as if by a magician’s wand. There have been many successful company promoters, but Mr Hooley was to eclipse them all alike, in the variety of his schemes and in the gigantic profits provided by them not only for the great financier but that everybody connected with him.’

Ernest Terah Hooley was remarkable by any standards. He was the son of a Lacemaker from the Derbyshire town of Long Eaton. He began his career in his father’s business, but moved into stockbroking and, from there, into company promotion. In his ‘golden years’ he floated and made a personal fortune out of two other household names: Bovril and Schweppes. He died in 1947 in small house in College Street, Long Eaton. The obituaries tell of a man who rubbed shoulders with royalty and the good and the great of his time. They also tell of a man bankrupted more than once, and imprisoned for fraud, again, on more than one occasion. The Derby Daily Telegraph of 12 February 1947 said this:

‘From earning 30 shillings a week in his father’s lace mill, he became one of the most powerful financiers of the century, and so wealthy that it was said he owned £10 million worth of land in Great Britain. He owned Risley Hall in Derbyshire and, of more relevance to this story, developed Trafford Park Industrial Estate in Manchester, the first such estate in the country.’

Hooley features on the government insolvency service website as an example of a Victorian Scam.

Harry Lawson

‘He was probably no less scrupulous than many of the other remarkable characters who used other people’s money to amass vast fortunes for themselves in the City of London at the turn of the nineteenth century. On the credit side, those who worked for him said that he was both fair and generous. He was certainly not a greedy man who loved money for its own sake.’ ‘Bunty’ Scott-Moncrieff on H.J.Lawson

Described as ‘the crooked entrepreneur Harry Lawson’; the records do indeed show that he was prosecuted for fraud on at least two occasions (once along with Hooley). However, Lawson was perhaps the unlikely founder of British motor manufacturing, which, in turn, sowed the seeds for motor manufacturing in many countries of the world. I tell the story in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of how he founded the British Daimler company in a former mill in Coventry.

Dudley Docker

I recall from a Goon Show (a BBC radio programme of the fifties and sixties) a mocking reference to a Lady Docker. I then found that Dudley Docker had master minded the creation of MetroVick. I put two and two together and came up with the wrong answer. Dudley was the father of Bernard, the socialite husband of the renowned lady, and a wholly different man.

Dudley grandfather, Thomas, had been a Moseley brass founder. His father, Ralph, was a solicitor who amassed public appointments in and around Birmingham, so much so that he was styled as ' the Lord High Everything of his district'. These were Victorians on a upward path.

Dudley was born in 1862 at his parent's home, Paxton House, 130 South Street Smethwick. He went to King Edward VI Grammar School, but didn't excel. He joined his father's office, but left two years. In 1881 he joined his elder brother, William, in a varnish business which at that time was a good trader with strong demand from the Birmingham japanning trade. Despite challenges, the business prospered and other brothers joined.

Cricket was the passion of the Docker Brothers. Ludford, known as the Local Leviathan, joined Derbyshire Cricket Club in 1881 and became captain in 1884. Dudley joined the newly created Warwickshire club, then a second division county unlike Derbyshire. Dudley played for them for a number of seasons.

Cricket opened doors, and the business prospered further. Docker Brothers became a limited company in 1899. Dudley amassed shareholdings and directorships in a number of growing Birmingham businesses. He married well. His wife Lucy came from a well connected family and she inherited a significant sum on her father's death. Dudley and Lucy had been living next to the varnish factory, but moved Coleshill House in the Chilterns which had been built by Roger Pratt during the Rule of the Commonwealth. They had one son, Bernard.

In 1902, Dudley and two brothers became directors of one of Britain biggest combines, the Metropolitan Amalgamated Carriage and Wagon company (later known by the initials of its subsequent name Metropolitan Carriage Wagon and Finance 'MCWF') and five years later that company amalgamated with the much smaller Docker Brothers. It was Dudley who had created MCWF by persuading five largely struggling wagon companies to join it in order to achieve Efficiency.

Efficiency was the Edwardian byword. The Boer War had humiliated the nation and so there was a public desire to do better, to become 'efficient'. The amalgamation confirmed that Dudley's vision of large integrated corporations was the right way forward. GKN and Stewarts & Lloyds were others. They were is stark contrast with the defensive amalgamations in the 1890 where companies joined in legal terms, but remained isolated in practice. In the event, the longstanding inefficiencies in the railway companies proved too much of a match for Dudley whose skills lay in finance and publicity.

The MCWF merger created a stir amongst the great and good of Birmingham and Dudley's reputation was riding high. By 1910, he thought he needed a boost and explored another potential merger, this time between BSA and Daimler. He had joined the BSA board in 1906 and had seen it struggle with its young motor vehicle business. He decided that it needed motor vehicle expertise which Daimler clearly had. Again, I write about this merger in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW) but from a different source which identified further factors that made Daimler attractive: its significant land holding in Coventry. What both BSA and Daimler lacked were cash and management expertise. The merger was not a success. Dudley had created a financial structure that was complex, involving different classes of shares with different rights and, what proved crucial, a whole web of intracompany loans. Yet, Dudley still had more deals in his sights.

He saw that the opportunities which electrical engineering presented were being pursued by the Americans (General Electric and Westinghouse) and the Germans (Siemens and AEG), but not so the British. Here Ferranti and other British companies may have taken issue. In Dudley's view there were three options: create relationships with the Americans or Germans or join a multinational combination. What ever route, the result had to be big.

In the wake of the First World War, the Board of Vickers, the armaments company, could see that their near total commitment to war materiel made them vulnerable, and diversification was the order of the day. I wrote in HBSTMW the story of how Dudley Docker persuaded Douglas Vickers that railway rolling stock and electrical engineering were the coming industries. Vickers and MCWF both invested in the company that would become Metropolitan Vickers to buy British Westinghouse. It was a complex transaction that made Dudley a good deal of money and left Vickers with a combination they couldn't manage. I wrote of its unravelling in HBSTMW.

Dudley Docker went on to advise on international trust arrangements and to chair the first meeting of the General Committee of the Federation of British Industries which would become the CBI. He was an influencer, a deal maker, a publicist, but not a manager. That would be left to people like Ronald Weeks.

Further reading:

• Lambert, Richard S.,The Railway King - 1800-1871 - A Study of George Hudson and the business morals of the time (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1934)
• Davenport-Hines, R.P.T., Dudley Docker - the Life and Times of a Trade Warrior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)

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.

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.

The Quaker manufacturers

 English towns had grown up with trades run by guilds jealous of their position and associated with the Church of England and political establishment.

Quakers and other non-conformist churches thrived in smaller growing towns and we see notable businesses emerging from that background. There was the congregationalists Titus Salt in Bradford and William Lever in Liverpool, the Quakers including John and his sons George and Richard Cadbury in Birmingham, Joseph and his son Seebohm Rowntree in York, Joseph Fry in Bristol and Cyrus Clarke in Street. I write of Abraham Darby in Telford elsewhere.

It is worth stepping back to ask the question, why? Anne Vernon suggests that the closeness of the members of the Society of Friends created a grouping as close as the old aristocracy. That many members chose to go into business she explains was probably due to many other professions being barred. Thus men who may have been successful Generals, Admirals or Surgeons turned their talents to stocking shelves and satisfying customers. She also observes that many developed interests outside their business, so British Birds or Trollope novels!

Titus Salt

Titus Salt was born in the Old Manor House in Morley in Yorkshire in 1803 son of Daniel Salt who was in business as a white cloth merchant and drysalter. Balgarnie explains that the house no longer had a manor attached. Titus was the oldest of eight children, four boys and four girls and survived them all. He attended the Dame school in Morley. In 1813, Daniel moved his family to a farm three miles from Wakefield and initially prospered with the demand from the Napoleonic wars. Titus attended school in Wakefield where he was described as steady and attentive, but not a bright pupil. Nevertheless, Titus dreamed of a career in medicine until he discovered that he fainted at the sight of blood! What else? It turned out to be work with Mr Jackson of Wakefield in the woolstapling business.

Once peace returned, so did hard times in the fields and the family moved to Bradford and the business of wool at the time when the town was taking over the production of worsted from Norwich as mechanisation began to take hold. Titus found employment first with Messrs. Rouse. Titus inherited his strength and determination from his father and his piety and concern for mankind from his mother; he spent Sundays teaching and preaching.

Bradford was thriving and with it his father’s business, so much so that he took in Titus as a partner. Titus’ reputation for fair dealing and expertise with wool attracted many customers. He travelled around the country both to buy and sell. Lincolnshire wool proved suitable for fine worsted and on a visit to Grimsby he met Caroline Whitlam whom he married. He built mills for spinning and then added weaving. His discovery of the use of alpaca wool added to the fineness of his cloth and revolutionised the Bradford wool industry.

Titus worked hard in the business. For the less fortunate of Bradford, unemployment hit and added to the misery of overcrowding and poor sanitation. Titus resolved that he must move his businesses to an uncrowded site where everything could be housed in the same place with employees having decent living conditions. This resolution became reality at Saltaire with the help of William Fairbairn.

Titus was created Baronet in 1869. He died in 1876. During his life he gave considerable sums to charity and served the Bradford community in local government.

William Lever

William was born in 1851 in Bolton into a lower middle class family in a town suffering from dreadful overcrowding. William's father was a grocer who moved into wholesale among whose range of goods included soap manufactured by a number of local firms.

Soap was very much a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. As towns became crowded and polluted more people needed to wash. Interestingly the shortage of water restricted the use of soap, but as better water supplies were installed so the demand for soap increased.

Soap had traditionally been made from combining tallow with an alkali, normally the ash from burnt bracken. Increased demand added vegetable oils to tallow and the fruits of the Le Blanc process as a substitute for bracken ash. Soap works appeared mainly near ports where vegetable oils were imported. In the northwest there were amongst others Gossage in Widnes and Crosfield in Warrington

William joined his father in the business and in due course became a salesman and successfully developed the business into nearby Wigan. His father was impressed and invited William to join him as a partner. William knew he needed to stand out from the crowd and created the trade mark ‘Sunlight’ which he applied to soap manufactured specially for Levers.

The time came for him to take manufacturing in-house and he took a six years lease on the soap works of Wainwright, Winser & Company in Warrington. Winser and Wainwright turned out to be even more valuable than the works. Winser was a chemist and added a vital technical input. Wainwright was a soap boiler and he and his sons became the heart of the soap boiling expertise. The premises in Warrington soon became too small and so new site was needed. This was Port Sunlight between the Mersey and the Birkenhead to Chester railway. There was Bromborough Pool to receive cargoes and plenty of space for the soap works, a village for his employees with enough held in reserve for expansion.

In 1918-1919, William Lever bought the Scottish islands of Lewis and Harris and wished to support their fishing industry. This he did by giving it a clearer route to market by founding the MacFisheries chain of high street fishmongers.

In 1917, William became Baron Leverhulmne and five years later Viscount Leverhulmne. William died in 1925 and by his will created the Leverhulmne Trust which now funds a great deal of research.

The Lever Brothers business continued to grow and in 1930 combined with the Dutch Margarine Unie creating Unilever.

John, George and Richard Cadbury

The Cadbury family traces its origins to Somerset from where Richard Tapper Cadbury born in 1768 to Joel and Sarah travelled to Gloucester to be apprenticed as a draper and then to Birmingham where he started business in partnership as a draper. Joel was a woolcomber who had joined the Society of Friends

John was Richard's third son and was sent to Leeds to learn the tea trade. John returned to Birmingham and in 1824 set up as a Tea dealer and Coffee roaster. There is evidence of him trading also in cocoa. In time the cocoa business grew and he was selling a number of cocoa based products. He moved premises and began further processing of the cocoa bean extracting cocoa butter and adding sugar and other ingredients. John was an energetic man devoted to his Faith which extended to the Temperence movement. Like his father, he played his part in the Birmingham community with particular concern for the less well off. He was by any standards a good employer. In 1847, he joined with his elder brother, Benjamin Head Cadbury, in the form Cadbury Brothers which moved to yet larger premises on Bridge Street. Seven years later the business opened its first London office at 148 1/2 Fenchurch Street.

In 1855, John Cadbury's second wife, Candia, died leaving John bereft. He contracted rheumatic fever and went into decline taking the business with him. As fortune would have it, his sons Richard and George although young at 25 and 21 respectively took over the running of the business. Their commitment to sound business ethics is evidenced by their agreement to close the business should it at any time become unable to pay its creditors in full. There is a further link to Quaker communities for George worked for a time in Rowntrees in York.

It took five years of reducing losses, which they financed themselves, to turn the business round. They invested further in mechanisation, buying the latest machine from Holland which enabled them to make Cocoa Essence which proved popular. Yet more popular was pure unadulterated cocoa; 'if customers wanted to add sugar they could quite well add it themselves'.

It wasn’t until 1878 that they moved production to Bourneville, four miles from the city centre, conceived as a place where employees could live near their work, but away from the overcrowding of the city. As George Cadbury put it, “no man ought to be condemned to live where a rose cannot grow”. John Cadbury had become interested in the Model Parish Mission whose object it was to establish a parish without drinking facilities and having 'Model Schools, Villas, cottages, Farms, Allotments and Factory. For the Cadburys this took form at Bourneville. Just as an aside, its seems that many of the Cadburys had been cricket lovers; the fine pavilion at Bourneville is thus an appropriate memorial.

Joseph Rowntree

Joseph Rowntree was born in 1836, son of a York grocer and Sarah Stephenson of Manchester. The shop on the Pavement flourished. Joseph's father, also Joseph, took on apprentices who lived with the family above the shop. It was an extended family who would pursue hobbies and read widely. The family had been Quakers for generations and with this came a community. Joseph and his brother were educated at home until age eleven when they went to the Society of Friends school where Joseph blossomed. In early teenage, Joseph and his brother were taken by their father to Ireland where they witnessed the horrors of the famine, an image that would stay with Joseph for life. He would later make a study of the conditions of the poor in Britain.

In due course Joseph began to work in the shop and learn the secrets of the grocery trade. When Joseph was 23 his father died and he and his brother John took over the running of the business. Joseph also married Julia Seebohm from Bradford, they had one daughter. Tragically Julia died only three years later. Joseph married again and he and Antoinette had a son, John, a daughter and another son Benjamin Seebohm (always known as Seebohm) followed. On the birth of his first son, Joseph left the grocery business and joined his younger brother Henry in the Cocoa, Chocolate and Chicory Works.

Joseph brought his management skills to the chocolate business. Life was hard, but by the 1880s the business now called Rowntree had 200 employees and had introduced a French product of crystallised gums. Joseph also had contact with Cadbury and learnt of their Dutch machinery for chocolate making. Other companies were beginning to advertise, but Joseph was disinclined. His brother died leaving Joseph in sole charge. Joseph cared passionately about the welfare of his employees and ensured that this policy continued when growth required a move to larger premises.

I tell the later story of Rowntree in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World the role his son, Seebohm, played in developing management practice.

People in trade were looked down upon. The world had been different before the industrial revolution where the Merchant Companies had been respected. The coming of the mills changed all this; owners exploited their workers and the owners were regarded as something less than equals by those with old money. Rowntree was committed to his employees and concerned for the wider world and that was what mattered.

In 1904 Joseph set up three trusts:

• The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust
• The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust
• The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (originally the Joseph Rowntree Village Trust)

The village trust owned the land bought for the new village of New Earswick which Joseph conceived as a mixed community, but with a proportion of houses affordable by low paid workers. He strove for good conditions and amenities. L.E. Waddilove's book One Man's Vision tells the story.

Joseph died in 1925.

Joseph Fry

Joseph Fry was born into a Quaker family in Wiltshire in 1728 and arrived in Bristol in 1753 setting up as an apothecary. He sold cocoa beans for their medicinal value and as an alternative to alcohol. In time, he employed a water powered roller to crush the beans into a powder which could be added to water as a drink. Joseph died in 1787 and the business was taken over by his widow Anne and their son Joseph. They made further innovations including switching from water power to a Watt steam engine capable to producing a finer powder; a roasting machine followed. In the mid nineteenth century he combined cocoa powder with sugar and cocoa oil to produce a chocolate bar. In the 1820s, Frys accounted for 40% of the cocoa imported into Britain.

Fry and Cadbury merged in 1918, but it was only in the first decade of the twentieth century that Cadbury's sales had exceeded those of Fry.

The Fry family became involved in import of cocoa in the mid eighteenth century. Cocoa beans at that time were sourced from the Caribbean and so grown by slave labour. There is however no evidence that the Frys owned slaves. The same appears to be true of Rowntree. Slavery did of course also feature in tobacco and sugar, but most of all cotton.

Cyrus Clark

Cyrus Clark was born in 1801 son of a Quaker farmer. In 1821 he entered a partnership with Arthur Clothier as tanners, fellmongers and woolstaplers. Four years later Clothier took the tanning business leaving the remainder with Cyrus. He and his brother James became known for sheepskin rugs. From this base, using offcuts, they made sheepskin slippers known as Brown Petersburghs. By 1842, they had become popular, achieving sales of 1,000 a week. All this was done, without a factory, by outworkers.

In 1863, Cryus and James passed the business to James's youngest son William who continued to run the business with a Quaker ethos. Times were hard and William knew he had to move to factory based machine production. This he did with the help of the Quaker community. Clarks played their part and contributed generously to the Street community where the factory was set up. They provided schooling for their younger employees.

The company thrived and was passed down the generations. The 1950s proved to be the boom time with some 15 factories being added to the Street production capacity.

Further reading:

• Balgarnie, Robert, Sir Titus Salt, Baronet, his life and its lessons (London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1878)
• Vernon, Anne, A Quaker Business Man - the Life of Joseph Rowntree 1836-1925 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958)
• Wilson, Charles, The History of Unilever part 1 (London: Cassell & Company, 1954)
• The website Quakers in the World
• Williams, Iola A., The Firm of Cadbury 1831-1931 (London: Constable and Co Ltd, 1931)

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East Midlands manufacturing history

 Textiles and footwear. Engineering built on an agricultural heritage and steel based on ore in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. The image is of Lincoln Cathedral.

Nottinghamshire

Nottingham

One of the five towns of the Danelaw. Hosiery was centred on the East Midlands and so Nottingham along with Derby and Leicester. This led to framework knitting and then to Nottingham lace. I write about framework knitting in the page on Leicester (below). Nottingham suffered from dreadful overcrowding and this combined with a decline in the hosiery trade after the Napoleonic wars led to the action of the Luddites.

The city was home to Jesse Boot and pharmaceuticals, Raleigh Bicycles (later part of TI plc) and Stanton and Staveley steel and spun pipes (formerly part of British Steel and before that Stewarts & Lloyds). It was also home to John Player cigarettes and a good deal of Courtaulds and other textile manufacturers. Follow this link to read more about Nottingham.

Long Eaton

Long Eaton was home to lace making and furniture. In the late 19th century three large tenement lace mills were built one financed by the notorious financier Ernest Terah Hooley who was born in the town. You can read more about long Eaton manufacturing in this link.

Beeston

Just outside Nottingham, Beeston was home to Plessey Telecommunication following their purchase of Ericcson. Long before then it was home to the Humber Company before their move to Coventry. It was the vacant Humber factory that in 1901 was occupied by the National Telephone Company (later taken over by British Ericcson) to manufacture telephone equipment under licence from the American Bell and Edison. Nearby Chilwell had been home to a massive shell filling factory in the First World War and I wrote of this in Ordnance. In the Second World War it became home to the Army Centre for Mechanisation of which I wrote in War on Wheels.

Sutton in Ashfield

A coal mining town which became home to hosiery manufacturer, Pretty Polly. Parker-Knoll upholstery moved here

Mansfield

William Hollins set up its mill in Pleasley that same year, attracted by the availability of water and a climate kept damp by the number of trees. Labour was provided by a workhouse; many of the workers were children
At the Great Exhibition of 1851 I noted that William Hollins of Mansfield in Nottinghamshire exhibited both cotton and wool which when combined was patented as Viyella.

Worksop

One of the major producers of liquorice. Home also to hat making and furniture. Also Sharwoods, owned by RHM and then Premier Foods, make their famous curry sauces.

Newark

Home to British Sugar, later part of Associated British Food. Home to Worthington Simpson Pumps, later part of a joint venture between Ingersol-Rand and Dresser Pumps. Ransome and Marles Bearing Co became part of Ransome Hoffman Pollard bearings formed at the initiative of the IRC in the sixties. It became a subsidiary of Ingersol-Rand. After a management buy out, the bearings business eventually became part of the Japanese NSK.

Leicestershire

Leicester

One of the five towns of the Danelaw. Leicester embraced hosiery and foot wear from which came engineering to mechanise those industries, and then much more. Follow this link to read more of Leicester's manufacturing history and framework knitters.

Ashby de la Zouch

United Biscuits produce McVitie, Crawford and McCoy's biscuits and snacks

Hinckley

The first stocking making machine was used in the town in the mid seventeenth century. Much more recently Hinckley is home to a new factory manufacturing Triumph Motor Cycles.

Ibstock

The company began in 1825 as a colliery, but refocused on bricks with annual production of 3 million in 1914, 10 million in 1939 and 18 million in 1946. Ibstock Brick became a punlic company in 1963. By 1990 it had 5,000 employees expanded through acquisition including Redland and Tarmac brick businesses. The business weas bought by CHR but then sold to management in 2015. It was then re-floated. Its Eclipse factory near Leicester was opened in 2018.

Loughborough

Home to Brush Electric Machines . I write of the American Brush Company in my blog on American electricity. The British Brush company operated first in London but grew out of its premises and looked for a suitable place for expansion. The site selected was in Loughborough next to the Midland Railway where the Falcon Engineering Works had been built by Henry Hughes who had begun by building carriages, railways carriage and eventually steam locomotives. Brush Electrical Engineering became a major manufacturer of electric powered locomotives whilst continuing with steam locomotive particularly for export markets. Ladybird produce their children's books in the town. Nearby Mountsorrel became home in 1941 to the Alvis workforce relocated from Coventry after the bombing of 14 November 1940. After the war the factory was bought by Rolls-Royce and only closed in 1994. British Gypsum producing plasterboard is at East Leake, now owned by St Gobain.

Market Harborough

Summingtons made Liberty corsets and the famous Liberty bodice.

Melton Mowbray

Promoted as the food capital of England, this market town is home to Samworth Brothers makers of sandwiches and porkpies and Clawson Dairy makers of Stilton and other cheeses. Until 2000, the neighbouring village of Old Dalby was home to the army depot maintaining our missiles. Mars chose the town for its Pedigree Petfood factory. Stanton & Stavely had an iron works manufacturing fitments and manhole covers at Holwell just outside Melton.

Derbyshire

Derby

One of the five towns of the Danelaw. Home to Rolls-Royce, railway and engineering history. I tell more about the city's manufacturing story with the help of a visit to the Derby museum of making.

Spondon

In 1923 British Cellulose had changed its name to British Celanese and by the 1930s was producing Celanese filament yarn well suited to the fashions of the twenties and thirties. Its acetate drape was being used in competition with silk. British Celanese was later bought by Courtaulds. In the Second World War, British Celanese manufactured parachutes and underclothing. By the end of the war, they employed 20,000 people. In conjunction with Courtaulds, ICI formed British Nylon Spinners to exploit the Du Pont patent of Nylon for the manufacture of parachutes.

Belper

Was home to Glowworm and Parkray boilers, part of TI plc and then Hepworth Ceramic plc.

Langley Mill

The Valley works became a shadow factory producing a variety of armaments. It was then repurposed by Vic Hallam to manufacture prefabricated buildings. Aristoc manufactured silk hosiery and GR Turner manufactured wagons.

Chesterfield

John Robinson set up a business here in 1839 making pill boxes. In the fifties the company patented the first disposable nappies and now as Robinson plc make a whole range of packaging material.

Burton on Trent

At one time it was home to thirty breweries. The Branston pickle factory was repurposed as a Central Ordnance Depot for Army clothing in the Second World War. Read more in this link.

Burnaston

Toyota built a plant here in the early 1990s to manufacture motor cars for the UK and European market

Cromford

Richard Arkwright’s water frame massively increased the speed of spinning cotton. Cromford is the site of his first factory and also John Smedley wool knitters.

Alfreton

Home to Thornton's Chocolates founded in Sheffield in 1911. Butterley was an engineering company at nearby Ripley and produced cast iron (for St Pancras Station and the Falkirk Wheel) and bricks, the latter became part of Hanson and then Heidelberg Cement. The engineering business was bought by Slater Walker and merged with Crittall. Read more in this link. Also nearby is the Denby Pottery.

High Peak

Home to Swizzles Matlow.

Northamptonshire

Northampton

New Town designated in 1968. Home to boot-making, becoming busy during the First World War with huge demand from the army. From this came shoe making which now is at the quality end of the market with Churches. The town was home to Express Lifts, Britain's largest manufacturer of lifts, and their test tower built in 1982 is now a listed building. I tell more in this blog.

Corby

A new town designated after the Second World War in 1950. Stewarts and Lloyds in effect relocated their steel making in the interwar years but steel production ceased in the eighties. Tata Steel has a presence in the town manufacturing thin walled tube. I tell more in this blog.

Kettering

This was a home to footwear manufacturing along with Northampton. Weetabix is made at nearby Burton Latimer

Wellingborough

Another footwear town also home to flour mills. Read more by following this link.

Irthlingborough

Home to Whitworth's dried fruit and to the Lantern Tower on St Peter's Church which was built as a beacon to guide travellers through the 'treacherous' Nene Valley

Daventry

Cummins Inc power systems factory was set up here and combines with their UK logistics centre. Home to DIRFT, the International Rail Freight Terminal. At nearby Long Buckby is McLaren automotive.

Peterborough

New Town designated in 1967. A deeply agricultural town which embraced engineering as I tell more in this blog.

Lincolnshire

Lincoln

The Romans installed garrisons at strategic towns across England and Lincoln was one. One of the five towns of the Danelaw. William the Conqueror built a castle and cathedral and the town was one of the largest in medieval England, wealthy from wool. More recently famous for its cathedral and relationship with the RAF and Bomber Command. Follow the link to Lincoln's manufacturing story

Grantham

An engineering town. You can read about it in this blog.

Scunthorpe

Home to United Steel Companies (Lincolnshire) now renamed British Steel and owned by the Chinese. I write more in this blog.

Stamford

One of the five towns of the Danelaw. A town famous for the Cecil family to whom we owe thanks for British patent law. The town, in its later years, attracted engineering. You can read more in this blog.

Boston

An ancient town with a busy port. In a county where chickens were grown in the hundreds of thousands Fogarty took advantage of byproduct of feathers for their pillows and duvets. Deep in farming country there is currently a plan to build a factory for a vegan food processor. Greencore produce prepared salads and vegetables.

Spalding

Home to vegetable processors including Greencore and FreshLinc.

Long Sutton

Home to Princes largest vegetable processing plant

Grimsby

Known for its fish as early as the thirteenth century. Fishing and fish processing dominated the town in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In nearby Caistor, Sealord (now Japanese owned) make high end fish fingers for Waitrose.

Humberside

The south bank of the Humber was and is home to much heavy chemical industry. British Titan Products built a factory on the Pyewipe industrial estate on the outskirts of Grimsby. They were followed by Laporte also with titanium dioxide, Dunlop with industrial hoses, Ciba Chemicals and Courtaulds with man made fibre. Fisons had a factory at Immingham.

Western Scotland manufacturing history

 To many this area is synonymous with the Clyde and shipbuilding. Interestingly it was also where Singer set up their first UK sewing machine factory. The image is of hydroelectric power at Fort William.

Glasgow

It is said that one half of the world's shipping was once built on the Clyde. Nearby Ardgowan had an industrial alcohol distillery run by the Distillers Company. There were and indeed are whisky distilleries in many places in Scotland. I write about how Distillers brought many of them together and diversified into industrial alcohol in Vehicles to Vaccines. You can read about Glasgow's remarkable history by following this link.

Renfrew

The American Babcock & Wilcox boiler makers established in 1895. They built tanks and other armaments in both world wars. They provided the boiler for the Battersea power station and the ICI complex at Billingham.

Inverclyde and Greenock

Texas Instruments took over the National Semi Conductor plants which manufactured in Greenock from 1970 until 2014. IBM also had a major presence in Greenock since 1953.

Prestwick

Home to Scottish Aviation, a company dating from the thirties when Prestwick airport was bought for pilot training. During the Second World War, the USAF used the airport and Scottish Aviation provided maintenance. After the war the company repurposed surplus aircraft before going on to build their own military aircraft. The factory is now part of Spirit Aerosystems and, at the time of writing, possibly Airbus.

Motherwell

Colvilles at their Motherwell works were set to become a major steel producer. In the sixties, Colvilles Ltd at Ravenscraig had the largest hot strip steel mill in western Europe. It closed in 1992. Honeywell Controls set up here after the end of the Second World War.

Lanark

David Dale founded the New Lanark mill in the late eighteenth century using imported cotton and technology borrowed from the Lancashire cotton masters. Dale was committed to provided better working conditions and this was taken further by his son in law Robert Owen.

Irvine

New Town designated in 1966. Hosted a Royal Ordnance explosives factory in the Second World War. Beecham built a factory to manufacture antibiotics.

Coatbridge

A steel town now known for Tablet, the sugar bar made by Lees of Scotland.

Kilmarnock

W.B Dick and John Kerr formed a partnership in 1875 which became Dick Kerr later merged into English Electric and then GEC. The company Dick, Kerr & Co manufactured locomotives and some ships. In time it expanded into electrical engineering and competed for generation projects. It set up a subsidiary in 1898 in Preston

Cumnock

Home to Emergency One Fire Appliances

Cumbernauld

One of the new towns designated after the Second World War in 1955. Home to Smurfit Kappa packaging and Alexander Manufacturing, one of the last remaining luxury garment manufacturers in Scotland. Burroughs later Unisys was one of the first manufacturers to set up. Honeywell were in nearby Newhouse. AG Barr manufacture Irn Bru

Paisley

90% of the world's cotton thread was made here including by Thomas Coats. The town also made imitation Cashmere shawls which bore its name. In nearby Linwood, the Rootes Group manufactured their Hillman Imp and in Inchinnan Dunlop produced tyres. Both of these investments came with the encouragement of government; neither succeeded. I offer some thoughts on government intervention in this blog.

Ardeer

The first dynamite factory was established here by Alfred Nobel, later part of ICI. I tell more of the story of Nobel and explosives in this link.

Fort William

The British Aluminium Company began production at Foyers and Kinlochleven in the late nineteenth century powered by hydroelectricity. Later Fort William hosted hydroelectricity and aluminium production.

Dumfries

Glaxo set up a primary manufacturing unit at nearby Annan. British Aluminium embarked upon a third major hydro-electric scheme in Lochaber, the first of three phases of which completed in 1924. In the late nineteenth century Britain had produced one third of the world’s total production, but other countries had caught up.

Girvan

Nestle manufacture milk chocolate crumb for incorporation into confectionary.