Oxford manufacturing history

 Oxford is home to one of our ancient universities, until a century or so ago committed to the teaching of the classics and theology. The university stood up against any suggestions that railways may come to the city, indeed although passed by the House of Commons, the university used its influence in the House of Lords to kill the first railway bill. In time of course the railways came and began to link the city to London and other industrial centres.

The Corporation of the city had been enthusiastic when GWR suggested that they might locate their workshops in the city. Once again the university protested that they didn’t want mere mechanics. It seems they were content to accept the population of tradespeople and servants who enabled the university to run. These people were faced with poverty when the colleges broke for their annual long vacation. No wonder the city wanted to attract other employment.

Employment did come in the wake of the First World War when William Morris set up Morris Motors. I drew on the biography of Lord Nuffield to write about Morris motors in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

In her book, A History of the City of Oxford, Ruth Fasnacht offers some insightful asides. Before Morris set up his garage in 1908, the population of the City was 50,000. By 1921 it had risen to 67,000 and by 1951, 97,000.

Morris began by sourcing components largely from other companies. He obtained the axle from E.G. Wrigley and pressed steel wheels from Sankey. White & Poppe of Coventry supplied carburettors and would have built engines except that those from America were cheaper. When that supply ceased Morris turned to Hotchkiss in Coventry. Other components were obtained from two small companies, Smiths of London and Lucas of Birmingham. In time Morris made their own engines but continued with Smiths and Lucas.

In 1939 Morris employed 3,700 people and its subsidiary Morris radiators 1,000. The Pressed Steel Company, which set up alongside Morris to provide all steel bodies for the cars, employed 5,000. Morris also had operations in Coventry where the heart of motor industry was. They undertook work that required skilled labour in Coventry, leaving less skilled assembly to Oxford. In 1938/39 Morris was making one quarter of all British made cars and employed 40% of Oxford’s workforce.

Villages surrounding the city were transformed as workers migrated to the area for work with Morris. Interestingly, the people of Oxford didn’t suffer unemployment in the depression years because Morris’s performance kept pace with the availability of labour. It therefore came as a shock when production ceased on the declaration of war and didn’t resume with war work until a year later. In 1945, the transition to peacetime conditions was relatively smooth until raw material shortages hit in the early fifties. Pressed Steel diversified into refrigeration with PressCold and Morris merged with Austin to become BMC in (1951). In 1950, Morris had manufactured 150,000 cars compared with Austin at 166,000. Ford was the UK leader at 185,000 vehicles.

Of course Morris (and Pressed Steel) weren’t alone. There was the Eagle Iron Works and the Oxford University Press.

BMW now manufacture Mini in Cowley. I write of the story in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The University has spun out many successful companies from its research. Oxford University is a valued collaborator in manufacturing most recently with Astra Zeneca in vaccines but further back with Oxford Instruments which was the first commercial spin out from Oxford University in 1959.

Further reading:

Ruth Fasnacht, A History of the City of Oxford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954)

Cambridge manufacturing history

Cambridge is of course the other of our ancient universities and the offspring of Oxford whose students fled there to escape death at the command of a vengeful king.

I am grateful to F.A. Reeve for the particular angle he took in the university’s and city’s brush with manufacturing in his book entitled Cambridge.

He takes his reader back through the history of the fenland town and the emergence of the university. Later, he says this: “until 1867, no college gave a Fellowship to a scientist.” In all my researches into British manufacturing this is a constant complaint that we were at a disadvantage compared to Germany which took scientific education seriously.

The first chemical laboratory was equipped at the expense of G.D. Liveing, the Professor of Chemistry and this was replaced at the expense of St John's; the replacements continued to be used until 1914. A new chemical laboratory was added in 1889.

The Cavendish Laboratory for experimental physics was built at the expense of the Duke of Devonshire in 1872 and James Clark Maxwell had become Professor in 1871. Later, J.J. Thomson became professor at the age of 28 and in his 34 years discovered the electron. He was succeeded in 1918 by Ernest Rutherford who opened up the field of nuclear physics.

For mechanical and applied mechanics, it fell to the Professor, James Stuart, in 1875 to equip the building at his expense although the university later bought the equipment from him.

Most of the instruments needed for medical science were imported from Germany until the Professor of Physiology Sir Michael Foster and two of his pupils, Dew-Smith and Francis Balfour. began to design and manufacture them. This led to Dew-Smith and Horace Darwin founding Cambridge Scientific Instruments with W.T. Pye as their mechanic.

Pye's son W.G. Pye had worked with Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory and in 1896 set up to make scientific instruments. Some twenty five years later, his company moved into wireless but continued with scientific instruments and by 1976 employed 7,000 people in Cambridge. I write more about Pye Wireless in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

In the Second World War, Pye’s then owner, C O Stanley, argued strongly against setting up a shadow factory to manufacture sets, and instead set up a whole string of small production units in Cambridgeshire villages and ended up employing 14,000 people. Pye designed and made both an infantry set and tank set.

After the war, design was becoming more important, and Pye took on designer, Robin Day, moving away from ‘high-gloss finishes, radiused corners and gilt trims' that were then general in radiogram and television cabinet design. He moved Pye to an over-all geometry and eventually to a house style recognisable of the best 1950s design evident at the Festival of Britain.

Cambridge Scientific Instruments [Founded by Horace Darwin with A. G. Dew-Smith in 1881 after earlier partnership Fulcher/Drew-Smith partnership in 1878] under the guidance of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation joined with instrument makers George Kent 1968 to form Cambridge Instruments, the largest independent British manufacturer of industrial instruments. A logical progression was into minicomputers which brought the power of computing out of the mainframe room onto the factory floor. 1974 saw the company combine with the international Brown Boveri and then in 1988 it became part of ASEA Brown Boveri (ABB). ABB UK is now a major player in CADCAM.'

Cambridge is home to Life Sciences including Astra-Zeneca R&D. The University produces and nurtures wonderfully innovative manufacturers. ARM probably comes top of the list having emerged from Acorn famous for their BBC computer. With the wartime presence of so many airfields, aircraft manufacturers abounded. Marshall Aerospace has been providing services to aviation since before the First World War. Sustainable packaging Pulpex has set up here. Bayer Crop Science is based here.

Further reading:

• Cattermole, M. J. G. & Wolfe, A. F., 'Horace Darwin's shop: a history of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, 1878–1968' (Adam Hilger, 1987)
• F.A. Reeve, Cambridge (London: B.T. Batsford 1976)

Rugby manufacturing history

 Home to Rugby Portland Cement, a famous school and a wonderful game.

The London Birmingham railway arrived in 1838 and set up goods yards and workshops around which grew small engineering works.

Willans & Robinson (later part of English Electric and then GEC) an engineering company which moved from Thames Ditton was attracted by the skills of Rugby’s railway engineers. The company used their steam turbine engines for electricity generation at the Coventry Ordnance Works.

More importantly it was the place British Thomson-Houston (BTH) chose for their first UK factory. Thomson Houston was one of the major American electrical engineers which had merged with the pioneering Thomas Edison in 1892 and became General Electric (GE). I write of them in my blog on the American Electricity Industry. They viewed the British market as attractive and set up in 1900 to compete with their major rival Westinghouse which had set up in Trafford Park in Manchester in 1897. The Rugby site began with the manufacture of incandescent light bulbs but to this was added heavy electrical engineering as more and more areas of the UK sought electrical generation.

BTH was later part of AEI and then GEC which had a major presence in the town. GEC Turbine Generators, GEC Machines and parts of GEC-Elliott instruments were all in Rugby.

The Rugby railway story continued in 1937 when Sir Nigel Gresley proposed a Railway Locomotive Testing Station funded jointly by LNER and LMS. The war delayed its opening until 1948 and then it supported the development of the railways until the final test in 1965. The building was then used for railway research until demolition in 1984. Rail research continued in Derby.

One of Britvic main manufacturing plants is here.

Continuing the engineering legacy, Technoset precision engineering is but one example of what Britain is doing so well.

In 1824, a Leeds stonemason, Joseph Aspdin, invented a method of making from limestone and clay a cement which he called Portland Cement given the similarity in colour between it and Portland stone. The Rugby Portland company was founded in 1862 and continues to produce in Rugby. It is now owned by the Mexican Cemex. It is one of the British companies to have been sold to foreign owners.

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