Manufacturing history of Preston and the Lancashire cotton towns

Richard Arkwright, the father of the factory system, was born in Preston on 23 December 1732. He became obsessed with the idea of spinning yarn mechanically. This was with reason, for a single loom could absorb the output of a half dozen spinners. Two centuries later a Preston engineer was chosen by Vickers-Armstrong to manufacture thousands of aircraft for the coming war.

Preston, like much of Lancashire, had a long history of spinning and weaving wool and flax, with the spinner or weaver based in his own cottage surrounded by his family most of whom helped in the enterprise. The coming of cotton initially simply added another raw material, but, as I described in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW), it soon created its own revolution.

Hargreaves had speeded up the spinning process with his spinning jenny and Crompton had added his 'mule'. Arkwright wanted more and worked tirelessly through much trial and error risking both being copied by competitors and the anger of the mob who saw in mechanisation the loss of jobs. Arkwright, in partnership with John Kay, at last succeeded and took their invention to Nottingham when Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt provided finance. However, more power was needed to drive the new spinning frame and the business moved to Cromford where there was water power a plenty.

Spinning had been mechanised and, as I described in my blog on Manchester, now outpaced the weaver. To begin with, in the Preston district this was good news for the many handloom weavers now had a good supply of cheap yarn to weave and sell providing a good living. As I suggest in HBSTMW the collapse of the market with the Napoleonic wars drove prices down and now the answer was to mechanise weaving as well.

Blackburn’s Joseph Harrison was said to be producing ‘superb power looms’ in the 1840s and in Burnley where the focus moved from spinning to weaving a number of loom manufacturers emerged. John Lowe tells in his book, Burnley, that the five main loom makers were Butterworth and Dickinson, Harling and Todd, Cooper Brothers, George Keighley and Pemberton Brothers. The growth of Burnley as a cotton town seems to have been more controlled than that of Preston with the Weavers Triangle clustered round the Leeds Liverpool canal with mills, houses, warehouses, wharves, shops and inns all together. The canal was the life blood of the town linking it as it did to America and the Mississippi cotton fields. It also cemented the shift from the use of wool as the raw material to cotton.

In his book, A History of Preston, David Hunt writes of the two major Preston spinning businesses which emerged into the nineteenth century: John Watson and Sons and John and Samuel Horrocks. Watson was very much the trail blazer and regarded as 'the leading spirit of his day in the founding of the Cotton Industry of Preston’ for his championing of new technology. Watson did become bankrupt, but his mills were bought and traded successfully well into the future. The influence of Horrocks was perhaps more enduring. Hunt quotes some figures that in 1865 the Horrocks company then run by Thomas Miller 'operated ten mills, 155,970 spindles, 2,856 looms, 12 steam engines and employed 3,000 people to spin 104,000 lbs of yard and weave 227 miles of cloth each week'.

Watson and Horrocks had been preceded by Livesey, Hargreaves and Co which, rather ahead of its time, combined a mill with bleaching grounds, a calico printing works and its own coal pit at nearby Standish. It was claimed that when the company crashed in 1788 some 20,000 people were economically dependent upon it in one way or another. The future though rested with Horrocks.

Preston grew at an alarming rate, with more mills and also a need for more housing. The lack of regulation and town planning meant that much of this was squalid, with open sewers. The absence of regulation combined with economic forces meant that child labour was rife with dreadful conditions. All of this combined with low wages led to industrial and political unrest and it was only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that matters improved. Dickens novel Hard Times is reputedly based on Preston and speaks vividly of the awful living and working conditions.

The story of Oldham is perhaps a little different with the advantage the town took of the Joint Stock company following the passing of the Limited Liability Acts. These were intended to encourage third party investment in businesses, but in Oldham they were used to encourage the participation of the workforce in the company for which they worked. In his book Oldham Past and Present, James Middleton suggests that the idea ‘prevails more in books than in practice’, yet there were examples of mill companies being owned in this way, the Sun Mill of 1860 being just one.

Preston's boom years of cotton were probably those from 1830 to 1860 when the American war and consequent cotton famine induced caution toward mill extensions. For Oldham the ending of the war sparked what is termed the ‘floating mania’ as dozens of companies where formed with investment from all sections of their stakeholders. Writing in 1903, Middleton gives some figures: in the Oldham district 270 cotton mills containing twelve and a half million spindles and eighteen thousand looms. These mills absorbed about one quarter of all the cotton imported into the country.

Oldham’s proficiency at spinning fine yarn was such that the cotton industry in Burnley focused on weaving, buying in yarn from Oldham.

Bolton was another town focused on spinning, not least that it was there that Crompton perfected and operated his 'mule' for the last years of his life. In his book The Cotton Mills of Burnley, James H. Longworth points to the Ashworth family as an employer placing emphasis on the cleanliness and moral welfare of their 1,000 employees. Ashworths operated both spinning mills and dye works and were one of the founding companies of the English Sewing Cotton Company. Of possibly greater note than Ashworths were Chadwicks which invested heavily in their community. Their Eagley mills were powered by a single cylinder horizontal steam engine named the ‘Iron Duke’, turning a 24 ft flywheel weighing 75 tons at 60 rpm. In 1950, the mills were still run by Chadwicks in association with United Thread Mills both then part of J.P. Coats Ltd.

Key to Preston's commercial success were communications. The town had long been well linked, but by inadequate roads; it was also a port bedevilled by silt. The coming of first the canals greatly enhanced its ability to access raw materials, coal to power the engines in its mills, but also to take its finished product to market. For canal lovers a point of interest was that the link to the Leeds and Liverpool canal was completed by means of a tram way, the proposed canal route being too expensive. Of greater long term significance were the railways which arrived in 1838. As with so much of railway mania, the town was served from time to time by a number of different railways. It was its place on the London to Glasgow line that endured. Preston boasts an astonishing viaduct which cut dramatically journey times to Wigan (for coal) Liverpool (for cotton) and Manchester to take its finished goods.

Certainly toward the turn of the century British pre-eminence in cotton began its decline. The world wars injected a surge in demand for uniforms and much more. As I write in Vehicles to Vaccines, even in 1951 the British textile industry was viewed with optimism, but by the mid sixties overseas competitors with lower costs had captured the market. Horrocks was acquired in 1919 by the Amalgamated Cotton Mills Trust and this was bought by Viyella in 1963.

For Preston, cotton was a long way from being the whole story. As was the case elsewhere, the demands of the mechanisation of the textile industry led to the growth of engineering skills and it was these that came to the fore. Joseph Foster & Sons had been formed in 1835 and manufactured heavy industrial plant at its Soho Foundry including mill engines and boilers and some of the largest rotary printing machines. Fosters also ran the Bow Lane Iron works in Blackburn.

Preston had ‘fifteen firms of millwrights and engineers, four boiler makers and three other foundries’. Interestingly, a major project to provide a full scale port on the river Ribble, built between 1884 and 1892, provided a site for Dick, Kerr of Kilmarnock to establish their first factory in the town.

Dick, Kerr's factory on the east side of Strand Road produced locomotives including tramcars for Preston itself. These were first powered by imported engines, but the establishment of the English Electric Manufacturing company on the west side of Strand Road enabled the production of complete trams. The First World War saw Dick, Kerr produce many tons of shells and then the first aircraft. The year after the armistice saw the formation of the English Electric Company through the merger of Dick, Kerr with five other companies about which I write in HBSTMW. Aircraft production resumed in the twenties but then closed until re-armament in the mid thirties.

Dick, Kerr's aircraft production came into its own in the Second World War with a contract for the assembly of bombers and fighters; employee numbers grew from 1,000 in 1938 to 13,000 in 1942. In 1939 English Electric built a shadow factory at nearby Salmesbury which manufactured Handley Page Halifax aircraft. BAE Systems now have an advanced manufacturing plant there. In 1947 English Electric moved its design and experimentation activities to nearby Warton Aerodrome. After the war, aircraft production included the Canberra jet bomber and the Lightning jet fighter. The factory became part of BAC in 1963 and is now run by BAE Systems.

Siemens Brothers in 1923 set up a factory to produce light bulbs. Good fortune brought a talented chemist, JN Aldington, to join the small work force where his influence far outweighed the size of the establishment. He explored alternatives to the incandescent bulb and importantly both taught evening classes at the Harris Technical College and encouraged young bright scientists into the business.

Another famous Preston name came from neighbouring Leyland and was the bus and commercial vehicle company of that name. Leyland under the leadership of the Spurriers was a force to be reckoned with. The subsequent story of British Leyland is well known and I write about it in Vehicles and Vaccines. A significant employer for some years, Courtaulds set up a factory in Preston for viscose yarn production.

Further reading

David Hunt, A History of Preston (Preston: Carnegie Publishing, 1992)

James H. Longworth, The Cotton Mills of Bolton 1780-1985. (Bolton: Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, 1987)

John Lowe, Burnley (Chichester: Phillimore, 1985)

James Middleton, Oldham Past and Present (Rochdale: Edwards & Bryning Limited, 1903)

https://www.baesystems.com/en-uk/heritage/english-electric

The Lancashire Cotton Industry, Mary B. Rose (ed.) (Preston: Lancashire County Books, 1996)

 

Manufacturing places - the art of re-invention

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.

Here are links to some of my exploration to date: Sheffield, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Macclesfield, Lincoln, Leicester, Derby, Nottingham. The image is of Ordnance depots used in the Second World War which link to production for the war effort mirroring the spread of manufacturing.

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. 

Manchester manufacturing history and the Museum of Science and Industry

 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.