Scunthorpe manufacturing history

 The iron ore fields of north Lincolnshire attracted iron smelting to Frodingham and Appleby, two villages within what became Scunthorpe. Both companies added steel making, but Frodingham's pig iron production from the north Lincolnshire ore greatly exceeded its steel making capacity. This attracted Harry Steel, managing director of the Sheffield firm, Steel, Peech and Tozer, who, in the aftermath of the First World War, anticipated some consolidation in the industry. The two works and others were brought together in what became the United Steel Company. In the thirties both of these Scunthorpe plants were further expanded.

Lincolnshire ore was also exploited by Richard Thomas of South Wales at the Redbourn works. However, a plan to extend this into a major tinplating plant was shelved in preference for renewed investment in South Wales. Scunthorpe received further investment from John Lysaght at its Normanby Park steelworks in order to provide steel supplies for their other metal activities. John Brown of Sheffield had bought the Trent Ironworks in Scunthorpe and after the First World War moved their steel foundry to the town.

The nationalisation of the steel industry brought the Scunthorpe plants under a single umbrella. In 1972 the British Steel Corporation embarked on a ten year plan of modernisation and Scunthorpe was one of the centres identified for further investment.

In 1999 British Steel merged with the Dutch steel maker Koninklijke Hoogovens to form Corus. In 2007 Corus was bought by Tata Steel of India creating one of the world’s largest steel makers. British Steel Scunthorpe was bought from Tata Steel in 2016 and sold on to the Chinese Jingye Group in 2020.

Away from steel, Lebus Furniture built a 250,000 square foot factory in the town. I write about British furniture manufacturers in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Further reading:

J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)

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)