Britain shaped the manufacturing world. A bold assertion, but is it true? My book How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World seeks to answer this question. The next question is what happened to British manufacturing? The result of my quest to find answers to that question is in Vehicles to Vaccines. I am now exploring Manufacturing places.
My exploration of British manufacturing has been sector by sector and chronological. I am now beginning to join up the dots and explore those towns where manufacturing takes place or in some case took place.
I began an initial exploration in 2005 as part of my part time BA in Humanities at Vaughan College part of the University of Leicester. Two essays resulted:
The title of the first essay was Which urban areas did well in the inter-war period and why? I reproduce it in full and you can read it by following this link. I used population growth as an indicator and this pointed to those urban areas that attracted new industries. Most of these were around London giving evidence of the shift in manufacturing to the South East. What is interesting and as I outline in a post I am currently working on, London was where much manufacturing began.
The second essay focused on Birmingham and tells of its early development. Again you can find it in my blog piece on Birmingham by following this link. The essay and other posts on the older manufacturing town all point to characteristics of place and the proximity of raw materials.
My first book on British manufacturing history, How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, explored first the early development of British manufacturing through the prism of the Great Exhibition of 1851. In it areas of manufacturing came to be identified. Manchester and the Lancashire towns with cotton; Leeds and Yorkshire with wool; Newcastle and County Durham with iron and steel. Essentially steel making grew up in places where raw materials and coal were present, so South Wales and early on in the Weald. Sheffield was pre-eminent in steel for cutlery, but then much more. Birmingham was a city of workshops making all manner of product from metal, something that extended into the neighbouring Black Country the home to heavy iron foundries. Ships were built on the Clyde and the Tyne, Barrow-in-Furness and on many other rivers, early on on the Thames. Railway workshops spread across the country. The big American electrical engineers chose the north west and the midlands. The chemical industry had its foundations in the salt mines of Cheshire.
Communications were key. Without the turnpikes, the canals and ultimately the railways the development of places like Sheffield may well not have taken place.
My essay on the interwar years explored the new industries and the places they set up, mainly the south and the midlands. The motor industry was the beating heart of Coventry. Radio and television were made in ‘metroland’, the new suburbs of London. The biggest toy factory in the world was in south London.
Post war was the time for pharmaceuticals with production again in the London area but also in the north west. It was also the time for petrochemicals and plastics with plants often built near to refineries. The wartime infrastructure of shadow factories and Royal Ordnance Factories influenced the choice of location with governments encouraging their re-use. The new towns initiative created new factory space alongside housing and the infrastructure that modern living demanded.
In my second book on British manufacturing history, Vehicles to Vaccines, I explore first the design review for the Festival of Britain which offers a snap shot of some 24,000 products alongside their manufacturers. One feature that shines through is that products for the home were often made locally by relatively small manufacturers. Some of these became much bigger and more visible from a national viewpoint and I have been able to highlight a number of these. Another feature of the British manufacturing landscape was that the larger companies frequently bought up their smaller brethren, so GEC, for example, had a presence in a great many towns across the country and again I have tried to identify the more prominent of these.
I am publishing posts on the towns I explore. It is fascinating to see how many areas reinvent themselves. It is a work in progress and I am adding links to local websites and blogs. My aim is to gather my exploration together by region eventually covering the country.
In many ways Manchester was the home of the Industrial Revolution. The mass production of cotton fabrics began there and its was this thatdrove the British economy. I tell much more on my book How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW) . Much more was to come as I tell below
The eighteenth century saw Manchester textile merchants grow their networks of outworkers to spin and weave the cotton that was being imported in ever increasing quantities. In time a factory system emerged with incremental steps of mechanisation and I describe these in the chapter on textiles in HBSTMW. Cotton mills were visible throughout Lancashire. The Museum of Science and Industry tells much of Manchester's story. The early part was all about textiles, but then the machinery that made textiles and the other machinery that served this world.
Opinions differ on the both the significance and date of the introduction of machinery into the cotton industry and in particular the factory system. Roger Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis, who also wrote the book on Alfred Herbert which shed so much light on British machine tools, explored these questions in Manchester and the Age of the Factory. Their methodology is interesting. We are talking of a period before the census and so the first question was just how to measure the relative importance of factories compared to the warehouses that stored and distributed the production of our workers. They chose rateable values taken from the Manchester Poor Rate Assessment Books which attribute to properties a market value which the authors argue reflect economic activity. I won't go into the reasoning offered in support of this but rather refer readers to their book. I will, however draw upon their findings.
In looking at the properties in Manchester categorised as factories or warehouses and used in the cotton trade, the authors found firstly very few large businesses occupying whole buildings. Rather, the trade was fragmented with multiple occupation of both warehouses and factories. Looking at the factories, many were small workshops spinning yarn using the recently invented machinery. Weaving looms were predominantly hand operated since the early iterations of mechanisation were by their nature experimental. Manchester warehouses would act as merchants for yarn supplying the hand weavers and taking the finished product for onward sale. Spinners and weavers alike could be in the city or elsewhere in Lancashire.
To me this sounded like a sensible division of labour in an integrated process. Not so the reality of business in Manchester before and during the Napoleonic wars. The evidence is of a schism with the spinner selling their yarn to continental weavers. The Lancashire weavers suffered with unemployment the result. In HBSTMW I referred to the unrest and its expression in the Peterloo massacre. These were hard times.
In the aftermath of war and after much argument, the overall good of Lancashire business prevailed not least as looms became steam powered under a factory system. One line of argument was that factory based spinning was exploiting child labour just as the country was becoming aware of the damage caused by unregulated factories. In HBSTMW I noted that competition had driven down prices putting pressure on weavers to mechanise.
Looking at some of the mills, one of the biggest was owned by McConnel and Kennedy. They were spinners but later classified also as doublers. Tracing their story forward in time, they become McConnel and Co and then in 1898 were bought by the Fine Cotton Spinners and Doublers Association. This can then be traced through to Courtaulds, which, as I tell in Vehicles to Vaccines, brought together a large number of mills to secure the market for their man-made fibres.
Another mill developed into an integrated cotton manufacturer, Tootal Broadhust Lee, which carried out spinning and weaving under the same roof. The name Tootal readers may recall in the context of men's shirts. The company became part of Coates Viyella in 1991.
Mechanisation began in the factory or workplace often by the spinner or weaver making his own quite basic machinery. Larger entities could employ engineers both to maintain machinery and develop and make new. At some point between 1815 and 1825 the demand for machinery became such that separate machine making businesses set up to serve the market of spinners and weavers. Lloyd-Jones and Lewis write of such establishments being located beside the Ashton and Rochdale canals. Business names are mentioned: Peel and Williams (the subject of a chapter in the book 'Science & Technology in the Industrial Revolution' by A. E. Musson and Eric Robinson), Ebeneezer Smith, Hewes and Rwen, Richard Ormerods, Radford and Waddington, Galloway and Company and the Fairburn Engineering Company. William Fairburn also built some of the early steamships.
Lloyd-Jones and Lewis add to the metal workers, Dyers and Printers and describe all three as the 'modern sector'. We are talking about the developments in bleaching with the use of chlorine, but also the experimentation with different dyes. These then combine with the metal workers when we bring in cylinder printing machines powered by steam. In terms of production, spinners, weavers, dyers and printers sometimes combined in single businesses. Thomas Hoyle is an example of integrated dyeing and printing. The company became part of the Calico Printers Association, which employed the inventors of terylene which ICI then developed, and which later became part of Tootal. Nonetheless a good part of the business remained in small units.
Manchester had become a modern industrial economy and other developments followed.
In the nineteenth century Joseph Whitworth (located opposite Richard Ormerod) was manufacturing screws following his own design. His company expanded into arms production and as such was a rival to Armstrongs in Newcastle. The matter was settled by a merger followed in due course by a further merger with Vickers. The works at Openshaw became part of the English Steel Corporation owned by Vickers and Cammell; it was brought into British Steel on nationalisation.
Trafford Park in Manchester, built by the notorious entrepreneur ET Hooley, in 1897 became home to British Westinghouse. I write of them in my blog on the American Electricity Industry. The British market was becoming attractive and Westinghouse set out to compete with his fierce rivals British Thomson Houston and Thomas Edison who had combined in General Electric and set up in Rugby. In Manchester, British Westinghouse later became part of Metropolitan Vickers by series of financial moves which I describe in HBSTMW. It then joined with its fierce rival as part of AEI and in turn became part of GEC which had a significant presence in the city: GEC Turbine Generators and Switchgear and GEC Traction.
Trafford Park was also home to Ford UK, before the latter moved to Dagenham, and part of the Dyestuffs division of ICI which first manufactured Penicillin. Courtaulds had a chemical works on Trafford Park.
Withenshaw to the south of Great Manchester was home to the AEI (later GEC) transformer factory. AV Roe began building aircraft in Brownfield Mill and later moved to Newton Heath where Mather & Platt's vast works produced pumps and electrical machinery.
In the Second World War, Patricroft Royal Ordnance factory was built on the site of the former Naysmith Engineering Works, originally established in 1834, by the Bridgewater Canal in Eccles on the outskirts of Manchester. Employing 3,000 people, it specialised in welding and fabrication, also making parts for Bofors guns. As a precursor to the city's role in alloys and new materials, a shadow factory run by Magnesium Elektron (now part of Luxfor Group plc and still manufacturing in Manchester) produced magnesium alloys.
The city was home to one of the early computers manufactured by Ferranti in conjunction with Manchester University. You can discover more at the Museum of Science and Industry. I tell more about the evolution of the British computer industry in Vehicles to Vaccines.
Ferranti had a significant presence. In Hollinwood they made electricity meters and at Chadderton power transformers and testing equipment and also semiconductors and opto-electronics. Moston was where they made instruments, aircraft equipment and fuzes. Process control computers were made at Withenshaw and simulator, sonar and civil computer systems at Cheadle Heath. Computer systems and (post 1975) the company HQ were at Gatley. I am grateful to John F. Wilson for including this detail in his Ferranti A History. The images are of some of the early computers on display. Many of Ferranti’s buildings became part of ICL - some of their products are shown below and are on display at the museum.
Manchester is a city that does not stand still. One successful piece of exploration was graphene, and the Museum of Science and Industry describes how this thinnest possible material was ‘first isolated by scientists at the University of Manchester in 2004 using ordinary sticky tape’. The scientists involved, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, were later awarded a Nobel Prize for their work. In his paper on nano materials, Robin McIntyre from PERA sets graphene alongside other carbon-based nano materials, and other such non carbon-based materials nano titanium dioxide and nano-ceramics. These materials are already being used to enhance properties of more common materials such a concrete which graphene strengthens allowing smaller quantities to be used. I also refer to graphene as a material for use in semiconductors. Their potential uses are manifold.
Home to silk with reputedly two hundred mills at one time. Home also to Hovis and now Astra-Zeneca, building on the home of the ICI pharmaceutical division at Alderly Park. Neighbouring Bollington had a number of cotton mills including the Clayton Mill shown in the image. I explore the wider cotton industry in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.
The story of Macclesfield offers a different perspective on the Industrial Revolution from the point of view of a medium sized town rather than one of the larger conurbations or cities.
Silk was relatively light to transport and so turnpike roads offered all that was needed. Macclesfield, set on a steep rise of land over looking the east Cheshire plane, was on the major turnpike routes and so offered access to London through which all raw silky then had to be imported and also the largest market for silk thread along with the hosiery towns of the East Midlands. Relevant skills were present through the button trade, there was also water power. So, the conditions were right for large scale silk spinning.
In the book, Silk Town: Industry and Culture in Macclesfield 1750-1835, Gail Malmgreen notes the growing population of the town after 1750 and the way the town attracted silk workers from other towns. Probably the key development was the introduction of machine spinning by John and Thomas Lombe, learnt by John in Italy and developed by both of them resulting in the silk mill in Derby. Macclesfield was one of the first of the other silk producing towns to embrace this development. An early mill was owned by Michael Daintry who employed James Brindley to repair some machinery. Brindley's reputation would grow and it was he who acted as surveyor for a number of canals not least the famous Bridgewater. It was, though, Charles Roe who took the mantle father of modern industry in the town.
Roe created a mill along the lines of the Derby original. He then sold out having other ambitions. This time it was copper using local ore and coal. All went well until the coal reserves depleted leaving not only Roe with the challenge of how to get supplies into the town. The answer was a canal, but the Duke of Bridgewater had other ideas stemming from his 'megalomaniac desire to be the "largest dealer as a carrier in Europe." The Bridgewater canal does not serve Macclesfield. For the Roe family it would result in a move away from the town.
Silk remained and grew in importance. Mills became larger and taller. Water powered, it was found that less power was lost in transmission without long horizontal shafts. In 1800 steam arrived courtesy of Boulton & Watt to replace water and increase further the size of mills and the power available. Power looms followed on the heals of powered spinning although their weight and vibration meant that long single story weaving sheds offered the only practical housing until the introduction of lighter 'throwing' machinery. Also silk being far more fragile than cotton and wool, hand looms continued for fine work until the twentieth century. Silk spinning and weaving was important in neighbouring towns and villages: Congleton, Stockport, Bollington but also smaller Wildboarclough and Gradbach.
Communications were now the key and the Macclesfield canal was completed in 1831 with a railway following in 1869 linking the town to Marple and thence to Manchester.
Alongside spinning and weaving came dyeing and printing. A crucial advantage enjoyed by the town was the clean, soft water provided by the river Bollin. Hollins Steam Laundry was set up by the river to take full advantage and served the local silk community. The laundry building was taken over by M. Adamski and F. Parker who added dyeing and printing. The company, Adamley, continues to manufacture in the town as the last remaining silk printer. It was not only silk.
Hovis flour was first milled in Macclesfield in 1898 and the Hovis Mill still stands by the canal. The business grew too big and moved to Trafford Park in Manchester in 1904.
AstraZeneca's second largest pharmaceutical manufacturing site is in Macclesfield employing 4,000 people. Only a few miles from Macclesfield is Jodrell Bank.
Further reading
Gail Malmgreen, Silk Town: Industry and Culture in Macclesfield 1750-1835 (Hull: Hull University Press, 1985)
.jpg)
