Sheffield Manufacturing History

Sheffield was to steel as Manchester was to cotton and Leeds to wool.

In the beginning it was the combination of fast flowing water and the availability of coal and iron ore. Hundreds of small furnaces would hide the skies of Hallamshire with their dark smoke. An equal number of forges would fill the air with the sound of hammer on anvil. By the streams, tens of water mills would drive grinding wheels to add a sharp edge to the knives men made. This was Sheffield in the sixteenth century, or rather its was Hallamshire – that area of north Derbyshire and south Yorkshire which now makes up greater Sheffield. It was unique in having such a high proportion of its working population engaged in one trade. The trade was centred round ‘little mesters' working in smithies. A Company of Cutlers was formed by Act of Parliament in 1624. I find myself comparing them to the spinners and weavers of Lancashire who would also work in a small family unit. The destiny of Hallamshire was to be the city of cutlers and a steel industry that would transform the world.

London, of which I write more elsewhere, was by far the largest urban area and so gathered to it essentially all the trades necessary for urban life. So it had then more cutlers than Sheffield as it had more framework knitters than the East Midland towns of Leicester, Nottingham and Derby.

The iron ore found in Hallamshire was adequate, but not the best; this came increasingly from Sweden and Russia and was worked into steel in small quantities suitable for knife making. The reign of Charles II saw the introduction of the fork alongside the knife on the tables of the wealthy and so Sheffield designs changed from the pointed, dagger style of knife to something nearer to that which we might recognise.

Two challenges faced the Sheffield cutlers: how to get their cutlery to market in an efficient and economical way and how to produce more steel of a consistently high quality able to take a truly sharp edge.

As to the first challenge, given the state of the roads, carriage by boat was the transport of choice. For Sheffield this meant an overland trip to Doncaster and the navigable river Don, but it was a long way from satisfactory.

Elsewhere in the country canals were being cut; given its topography, Sheffield would have to wait until the mid-nineteenth century for its canal to join the town to the Don. In the meantime the turnpike movement was improving roads and for Sheffield this proved a more than satisfactory stop gap before the canal and, a little later, the railway.

As to the second it is important to recognise that there was two sides to Sheffield’s steel story. The first has a focus on steel cutlery, but also silver and silver plate. The second was about the move to mass production which would transform the town of cutlers into the world’s prime producer of steel, the essential material for all manner of machine, and so fundamental to the further development of the industrial revolution. 

The then traditional cementation method of making 'blister' steel produced material of inconsistent quality and this spurred Lincolnshire watchmaker, Benjamin Hunstman, to years of experimentation to find a better method. 1742 is the date given to the new ‘hunstman crucible process' which provided quality steel in relatively small quantities suitable for fine work. Hunstman, himself, moved to Sheffield to focus on steel making.

Photo taken at the wonderful Kelham Island Museum

At about the same time Thomas Boulsover developed a method for plating copper with silver, ‘Old Sheffield Plate’.  This and Huntsman’s steel provided the raw material for a massive increase in production of all manner of small items for the home. A little later, Britannia Metal was developed as a yet cheaper material for household use.

Sheffield silversmiths found that their time had come and the town received its own assay office, at the same time as Birmingham, in 1773. Electroplating of steel with silver was championed by Elkington in Birmingham and this too found its way to Sheffield. Sheffield cutlery was to be found on dining tables across the globe. The technical developments led to larger manufacturing units and in time the introduction of steam power. The town saw companies making cutlery with workforces numbered in the hundreds: Joseph Rodgers, whose cutlery was marked by the Star and Maltese Cross, and Mappin which later became Mappin & Webb, to name but two.

The consistent quality of Huntsman steel proved suitable for use in a larger number of applications. Spear & Jackson set up their works in the town and tool making more generally took off with the increased demand from so many now involved in manufacturing of all kinds across the nation and beyond.

Photo taken at the wonderful Kelham Island Museum

Quantities of steel though were still insufficient and this spurred Henry Bessemer to explore alternative processes. He announced his invention of the Bessemer Converter in 1856 and set up in Carlisle Street, Sheffield as the Bessemer Steel Works.

At this point the ‘famous names ‘of Sheffield steel come to the fore. John Brown, later known as the father of steel, was the first to embrace the Bessemer process, followed by Charles Cammell in 1861. Vickers embraced the open hearth process developed later by William Siemens.

Another famous name, Thomas Firth & Sons, made their focus on armaments and another, Jessop, is perhaps less well known now and focused on supplying the American market until Carnegie began to explore the large reserves of ore in Pennsylvania.

The demand for steel was predominantly for the construction of railways in Britain, continental Europe, North and South America. This demand weakened in the 1870s and the production of armaments took its place, both armour plating and heavy guns and their shells. Sheffield became increasingly known for speciality steels. Cammells and Browns had a focus on armour plating. It was Hadfields that explored alloys and in particular the addition of manganese to harden steel for use in armour piercing shells.

I write more about the early British steel industry in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, and the American and German steel industries on this blog. It is surely revealing that the german Krupp travelled to Sheffield to learn the Hunstman process.

At one time Sheffield was the biggest producer of steel in the world, its importance underlined by it being created a city of 1893. A final development of lasting importance was the invention of stainless steel by Harry Brearley in 1913.

The First World war was a busy time for Sheffield with the massive demand for armaments. With the coming of peace that demand collapsed. Sheffield companies responded by merging with the resulting English Steel Corporation (owned by Vickers and Cammells) and Firth Brown. English Steel was run by Edgar Redman who in the Second World War joined the RAOC to run the army centre for mechanisation at Chilwell near Nottingham. He returned to English Steel after the war where he was joined by fellow soldier Ronald Weeks who became chairman and subsequently chairman of Vickers. Davy Ashmore was another of the great steel companies and I write of it Vehicles to Vaccines in the context of its engineering. The Sheffield industry essentially followed the path of the national steel industry and I tell its story in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Sheffield now boasts the nationalised Sheffield Forgemasters which produces large precision castings; the company brought together the heritage of the Sheffield greats: Vickers, Cammell, Firth and Brown.

Sheffield still has fine silversmiths this year celebrating four centuries of the Cutlers Company.

It has a vibrant community of designer makers many of whom exhibited at Selected Space.

It is a city looking to the future with the University of Sheffield hosting the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre. It is still a place of traditional skills such as William Whiteley scissors, Chimo Holdings cutlers, Thomas Flinn woodworking tools combining traditional skills and new technology and Wolf Safety Lamps.

Further reading

David Hey, A History of Sheffield, (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 1998)

Nottingham Manufacturing History

Nottingham was the world’s centre of lace making. It had the largest manufacturer of bicycles in Britain and supplied pharmaceuticals to every British high street. How did it all begin and what happened?

The image is of the Grantham canal meeting the Trent which offered Nottingham outstanding communications 

Nottingham was one of the five Boroughs of the Danelaw along with Leicester, Derby, Lincoln and Stamford and certainly in common with the first two had an early traditional of frame knitting and I write of this more generally in my blog on Leicester manufacturing history. Duncan Gray, in his book Nottingham: Settlement to City, suggests that the knitting frame may have been invented in nearby Calverton by William Lee, but that the invention failed to catch on because of a lack of patronage from Elizabeth I. He took his machines to France but then in 1610 returned to London where the machine based manufacturing was established ; some machines made their way to Nottingham and from there the trade grew and became the town’s principal industry.

Merchants would supply yarn and rent frames to families who would knit in the upstairs room of their dwellings. With the coming of mechanisation in the spinning of yarn, production increased. The world around was changing, as, across the country, rural dwellers were moving to the new urban areas in search of work. In the countryside enclosures were reducing the amount of common land and new agricultural techniques led to fewer jobs. In the case of Nottingham, the city fathers resisted increasing the urban area which thus became more and more crowded. Poor harvests, the Napoleonic wars and the Corn Laws led to ever increasing food prices and ever squeezed incomes for the knitters. Inevitably rioting broke out and in particular a movement, the ‘Luddites’ set about destroying new larger frames used in the new low cost technique of ‘cut ups’, stockings made up of pieces cut to size. In parallel with this violence was a more reasoned movement by the Nottingham Frameworkers Association to sue parliament for better conditions. Their efforts fell on deaf ears, but slowly with the Factory Acts working conditions improved and, with the 1835 Municipal Corporation Act, common land was released for building and chronic overcrowding slowly decreased. The railways followed.

Lace saved the day for Nottingham. The patent for bobbin net by John Heathcote, which adapted the frame for lacemaking, expired in 1823 and the new machines were adopted across the town leading, at least in the short term, to prosperity for merchants and knitters alike. Nottingham would become the greatest lace centre in the world. Richard Birkin stands out as a champion of lacemaking and the Nottingham Lace Market owns him and those like him its later prosperity.

The 19th century saw other industries establishing. I wrote of Raleigh bicycles in How Britain Shaped The Manufacturing World John Player founded his tobacco company in 1877 and Jesse Boot opened his first shop in 1884 and then expanded across the country both with shops and their own healthcare products. Both Raleigh and Boots lent their weight to the national effort in the First World War. In the nearby village of Chilwell a major shell filling factory was established and I wrote of this in Ordnance. In the wake of the war, Jesse Boot, seeing no family succession, sold his company to the American Louis Leggatt who continued the company’s expansion eventually selling it back to the family in 1933. In the meantime Jesse Boot had used a good proportion of his original sales proceeds to found the University of Nottingham.

In the twenties Lace suffered from foreign competition but hosiery prospered. The national strike hit the city hard not least because of the importance of coal mining to the area.

The Thirties saw further expansion of both Boots and Raleigh. William Hollins & Co, famous for Viyella, built a major factory and head office on Castle Boulevard. The former shell filling factory at Chilwell became the army centre for mechanisation and I wrote of this in War on Wheels.  In the forthcoming war both Raleigh and Boots once again rose to the challenge.

In the early postwar era, Raleigh and Boots continued expanding, Gunn & Moore made all manner of sports equipment. The Stanton iron works spun pipes for the nation’s drainage. Pretty Polly, Charnos and many more made hosiery. Speedo made sports wear. Dobson Park and Dosco (part of Hawker Siddeley) made mining equipment. At the University of Nottingham the MRI scanner was invented. I write of this post war manufacturing in Vehicles to Vaccines.

I worked in Nottingham for many years and would drive in passed the Royal Ordnance Factory to the smell of Pork Farms! It was a vibrant place.

Further reading

Duncan Gray, Nottingham: Settlement to City (Nottingham: Nottingham  cooperative society and S.R.Publishers, 1953, 1969

Sheila A. Mason, Nottingham Lace 1760s-1950s (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994)

John Beckett, The Book of Nottingham, (Buckingham: Barracuda Books Ltd, 1990)

Chris Weir, Nottingham: A History (Chichester: Phillimore, 2002)

Leicester Manufacturing History

 My exploration of British manufacturing has been sector by sector and chronological. It is time now to begin to join up the dots and explore those towns where manufacturing takes place or in some case took place. I begin with the city where I now live and seek of offer a flavour of manufacturing in this great city.

The image is of those famous sons of Leicester, David and Richard Attenborough, pictured at the University of Leicester.

Leicester’s traditional industry was hosiery with its origin in hand knitters who would work from their own homes in the city and around the county engaging the whole family in their enterprise. In this they were similar to the spinners and weavers of wool in and cotton in Lancashire.

Knitted hose began to take the place of stockings made from cloth in the Elizabethan age; Shakespeare makes reference to stockings in Henry IV (pt2, act 2, scene 2). The principal place of the trade was London close to those members of the population best able to afford that more expensive knitted product. Slowly, the hand knitted stocking gave way to the stocking knitted on a frame. In what were known as the Home Counties, framework knitters were to be found in Buckinghamshire and Surrey. Further north, into the Midlands, framework knitters began to appear in Leicester, Nottingham and Derby.

In Henson’s History of the Framework Knitters, it is suggested that by the mid-eighteenth century, a move had taken place towards the midland towns with the number of frames in Leicester exceeding those in London. It is suggested that wage costs were the significant driver and further moves would have taken place but for the demands of fashion. For the elegant in London it was essential that stockings should be a perfect colour match, something achievable only with the cloth and hosiery trades side by side. Frames were used to knit hosiery from wool, cotton and silk, with the latter producing the finest garments. By the mid nineteenth century, Nottingham had outgrown Leicester and Derby was fast catching up.

Leicester suffered from stiff competition from America where a degree of mechanisation had been introduced. We can see mechanisation seeping into the Leicester industry a little later than its northern counterparts essentially because of the greater complexity of knitting a stocking. When it came, it was from over the Atlantic where Americans had found solutions. In terms of local industry, Siobham Begley, in her book The Story of Leicester, writes how the Loughborough firm of Paget introduced power-run frames, Leicester’s Matthew Townsend invented the latch needle and Loughborough man, William Cotton, built on these developments with his Cotton Patent machine. Slowly machines were introduced and frame workers began to work in groups in a workshop setting. Pay for frame workers was bad until Corah built their factory at St Margaret’s, where, it was said, rates were 25% higher. Further impetus to the factory system came with the Education Acts where child labour was restricted and so home working became less economically viable.

Following on from hosiery came shoe making, especially for children’s shoes. This trade had prospered in nearby Northampton where it concentrated on men’s boots. Employment in Leicester’s shoe industry gradually grew and eventually overtook that in Northampton. As with hosiery, mechanisation crept in. Begley singles out Thomas Crick in Leicester making a breakthrough by riveting soles to shoes instead of stitching them. He went on to produce a machine which was later steam powered. Factory based production followed, boosted by the move of Leeds based Stead and Simpson to Leicester using an American invention, the Blake sewer, which could produce three hundred pairs of shoes a day. Leicester held on to the tradition of outworking, long embraced in hosiery, until the push of mechanisation from American essentially forced the move to factory working by the end of the nineteenth century.

In the mid nineteenth century ancillary businesses began to appear producing gussets and elastic web. More significantly, engineering businesses emerged with a focus on machinery for hosiery and shoe manufacture. Richard Rodger, in Leicester A Modern History, writes of some 7,000 male engineering workers in 1900. He lists some of the companies. Pegg’s dyeworks equipment, Phoenix Foundry for heavy casting for railways, Gimson’s Vulcan foundry on Welford Road, Gent’s clocks, Taylor & Hobson lenses and optical equipment, Pearson & Bennion boot and shoes machinery which became part of the British United Boot and Shoe Company, Wolsey Hopkins, Bentley Engineering and Mellor Bromley machines. It is fair to assume that these engineering skills encouraged Imperial Typewriters to set up in Leicester. Machine tool manufacturers Jones & Shipman set up in Leicester as did Wadkin which specialised in wood working tools. Later additions to the Leicester manufacturing scene include Thorn Lighting.

The city is also famous for Walkers Crisps and Foxes Glacier Mints.

I tell in Vehicles to Vaccines how the British commitment to excellence in textiles is evidenced by the presence of colleges devoted to teaching skills to those employed in the industry. One such was the School of Textiles in Leicester which celebrated its centenary in 1983-84 with the publication of a short history. The focus was on knitting, and the founding of the college was initiated by yarn merchants witnessing the quality of continental competitors which benefitted from formal technical education. In the second half of the twentieth century the focus moved to artificial fibres, machinery capable of producing whole garments, and textile and knitwear design. Textile manufacturing continues in Leicester albeit in reduced volumes given to move to sourcing from low wage economies.

Further reading:

Gravenor Henson, Civil, Political and Mechanical History of the Framework Knitters in Europe and America (Nottingham: Richard Sutton, 1831, reprinted 1970)
Siobhan Begley, The Story of Leicester (Brimscombe: The History Press, 2013), p.122.
Richard Rodger and Rebecca Madgin Ed’s. Leicester a Modern History (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2016)