York manufacturing history

 A cathedral city second only to Canterbury, York had a university only from 1963, but as I tell below it was a centre of learning. It’s early prosperity was built on the cloth trade, but this declined by the end of the fifteenth century.

It was the home of Rowntree and Terry confectionery and also railway workshops as evidenced by the National Railway Museum. The impact of these industries took off in the 1880s. Terrys were first, being well established by 1851 producing candied peel, jujubes, lozenges and sweets. Rowntree really began in 1879 taking a French invention of crystallised gums, but the business was transformed by Dutch equipment for the processing of cocoa beans which had been taken up first by Frys in Bristol and then by Cadbury in Birmingham. I write about the development of Rowntree in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Railway activity grew alongside that of confectionary with workshops for the repair of locomotives and rolling stock. The locomotive manufacturing work was first undertaken by third parties but then moved to workshops first in York and then in Darlington. York did however take full responsibility for carriages, building state of the art works in the early twentieth century.

It was not a great hub of manufacturing like Sheffield or Birmingham, yet it was chosen as the venue for the first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at the invitation of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. These societies were springing up in towns around the country, often alongside industry, exploring science for its advancement. York then had little industry, but it did have a community passionate about discovery, whether of the city’s history or the world around.

In a volume of papers to mark the 150th anniversary of that first meeting, there is a chapter exploring the path of science and technology in York over that century and a half and it highlights some of the key individuals.

Sir George Cayley (1773-1857) was the inventor of the aeroplane in the first half of the nineteenth century. I wrote about the early days of flight in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Thomas Cooke (1807-1868) was a maker of fine telescopes applying the skills of mechanical engineering to the work on lenses carried out in his workshops.

Dennis Taylor (1861-1943) was a lens designer taking forward the work of Thomas Cooke whose business diversified into clocks, machine tools, pneumatic pumps, engraving machines and optical instruments.

Henry Hunnings invented a micro-telephone, like many amateurs building on the invention by Alexander Graham Bell. After much legal wrangling, the rights to his transmitter were sold to the United Telephone Company (UK) and the American Bell Telephone Company and the design remained in use for over a century.

Further reading:

York 1831-1981, Charles Feinstein Ed. (York: William Sessions, 1981)

Huddersfield manufacturing history

 Huddersfield provided a commercial centre at its famous Cloth Hall for the many thousands of home working wool weavers in the surrounding district. 

The inventions of which I have written elsewhere slowly changed this settled and quite prosperous scene. In his book The Story of Huddersfield Roy Brook first points to  the error in assuming that wool and cotton were distinct industries. He makes the point that ‘Manchester Goods’ (which incidentally my father traded in East Africa in the early twentieth century and of which I wrote in my book Dunkirk to D Day. The image is of my father on Mombassa railway station in 1911) were a mix of cotton and wool. Similarly the weavers and spinners of Huddersfield almost certainly worked with cotton as well as wool. 

In terms of mechanisation, the first initiatives increased the speed of spinning and thus the weavers had somehow to keep up. I have read elsewhere that exports of thread to the Low Countries balanced the overproduction, but was not welcomed. Mechanisation of weaving had a more dramatic impact, for now factories filled with weaving machines could and did replaced the many thousands of hand weavers. The well known opposition of the Luddites was replicated across the wool weaving areas. Charlotte Bronte’s book Shirley offers a vivid account of what this might have been like. Mechanisation was in fact a gradual process with hand weavers providing cloth along side the much larger mills. 

Huddersfield did have its weaving machine manufacturers, but, for worsted cloth, manufacturers from the west of the Pennines were used, worsted having greater similarities with cotton cloth. In Huddersfield, Haighs were well known for carding engines. Whiteleys became famous for the manufacture of spinning mules and tentering machines. 

Huddersfield developed a chemical industry on the back of dye houses. Read Holliday began with dye but then moved into acids including picric acid which would become essential in the Great War as would lyddite. War also presented a challenge, for German produced materials were key in the supply chain. In time home production took the strain. The company became first part of British Dyestuffs and then of ICI. It is now run by Syngenta.

The introduction of the steam engine, about which Samuel Smiles wrote so engagingly in his Lives of Boulton and Watt, had a dramatic impact on Huddersfield as it had in other textile areas. Broadbents led the field in Huddersfield in steam powered heavy machinery. Hopkinson became well known for their ‘Indicator’ which could tell the operator how a steam engine was performing, highlighting hidden areas where problems may be arising. It was compared to stethoscope for a physician. 

Machinery manufacturers engendered skills applicable in other fields of mechanical engineering, an example being plant for the production of gas.

Karrier trucks were made here and later became part of the Rootes Group.

The introduction of electricity brought about further change and it was Ernest Brook Limited which manufactured electric motors for use in factories. In November 1950, the company produced its millionth engine.

David Brown Gears began in 1860 serving the wool industry and it grew to having fourteen factories with 10,000 employees. I write of its activity with tractors in the Second World War in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. It went on to lead Aston Martin Lagonda to great success. It continues to do great engineering as David Brown Defence.

Further reading 

Roy Brook, The Story of Huddersfield (London: MCGibbon & Kee, 1968)

Halifax Manufacturing History

 Halifax was known as a town of an hundred trades, yet its origins were similar to many other Yorkshire wool towns; it was the place that weavers from the large parish of Halifax and beyond would bring their work for sale. The urban area of Halifax was but a small part of a large rural parish in the West Riding. It was in hilly country which offered the advantage of fast running water to power machines but also the disadvantage of making the town less accessible than others by canal and railway.

In 1779 the wool traders built the beautiful Piece Hall which had the capacity to house a significant trade in woollen goods. With accessible water power the new inventions in spinning and weaving could readily be applied in a small but growing number of factories in the town. Coal was expensive to transport and so steam was late in coming to Halifax by which time Bradford had secured a lead in worsted production. Nonetheless the worsted trade prospered in the town as growing urban areas in Britain and abroad sought woollen goods. The Akroyd family stood out in the first part of the nineteenth century. John Holdsworth were noted as providing khaki and navy cloth for the armed forces.

A distinctive trade in the town was the manufacture of carpets. The Crossley family took a lease on Dean Clough Mill in 1801. The business was successful, with many thousands of employees over the years, and continued through to 1987 having joined with two Kidderminster companies to form Carpets International. Production of fine Brussels Wilton carpets continued into the 21st century.

Wool factories needed engineers and Hailfax produced a rather special breed of engineer, the maker of machine tools. I write of machine tools elsewhere in relation to London, Manchester and Coventry. Halifax and Keighley became another centre of the industry. William Asquith was founded in 1865 and became famous for their revolutionary radial drilling machine which replaced the practice of punching in constructional engineering. James Butler, a former apprentice as Crossleys, developed specialist planing machines. Butlers were instrumental in the formation of the British Tool Manufacturers Association in 1917. Cornelius Redman formed another machine tool firm which was bought by the London tool maker Charles Churchill in 1935 to form Churchill Redman.

The fine skills required for machine tool making were equally applicable to jewellery and the firm of Charles Horner became well known. Working with metal extended to boiler making and and heating apparatus. James Royston produced tons of charcoal wire for the first transatlantic cable in 1856.

John Mackintosh left Bowman's cotton mill in 1890 to open a pastrycook business with his popular product, a blend of butterscotch and American caramel. The business grew and soon employed hundreds of women wrapping toffee. Halifax became known as 'toffee town'. In the mid 1920s Mackintosh acquired A.J. Caley chocolate manufacturing business in Norwich, a marriage which produced 'Quality Street'. A fire destroyed the Norwich premises and the whole business moved to Halifax. Mackinstosh joined with Rowntree of York in 1969.

Halifax is perhaps best known now for mortgages. The building society movement began in the nineteenth century and in Halifax two main societies emerged, the Halifax Permanent and the Halifax Equitable which merged in the 1920s. The societies and indeed the local banks which were founded to finance local business attracted to their boards the great and the good of the town and wider parish.

Halifax contributed to the national effort in both world wars. Machine tool companies made all manner of war materiel and textile manufacturers were busy clothing the forces. In the interwar years, Percy Shaw invented 'cats eyes' and founded Reflecting Roadstuds Ltd to manufacture them, enjoying particularly strong demand in the blackout of the war years. In the Second World War Harold Mackinstosh became much involved in National Savings raising money to pay the cost of war. My father was invited by Sir Harold to speak in Halifax in Salute the Soldier Week in June 1944. Here is a link to what he said. The image was taken when he was being introduced.

In the years following the war, textiles enjoyed strong demand for fabric for buses and railway carriage seats. This continues within the Camira Group. Marshalls manufactured paving, but machine tools suffered the decline I described elsewhere with fierce foreign competition which also later decimated the textile industry. Nestle now manufacture Quality Street in Halifax.

Further reading:

John A. Hargreaves, Halifax (Lancaster: Carnegie, 2003)