Norwich manufacturing history

The second largest city in Britain at the start of the eighteen century made wealthy by wool, Norwich, with a population of 30,000, was a city of spinners, wool-combers and weavers.

The principal product was worsted cloth. To this were added worsted made of wool and silk to make it softer and so offer competition to Indian cashmere, and later wool and cotton worsted. Norwich won business from Exeter through its lower wages, but then Yorkshire won over Norwich for the same reason. By the end of the century Norwich was dependent upon export sales via the East India company and, when these ceased in the early nineteenth century, Norwich's wool workers were destitute. They had long resisted mechanisation but eventually relented. The trade did revive but never to its former level. In 1961, there were 10,000 employed in the clothing trade around about the same number as in shoe making.

In 1800, there had been cordwainers making shoes and boots in the city for decades, but wool had always been the dominant trade. With wool's decline and increased demand for shoes from London, the colonies and the growing industrial towns, Norwich began its journey to become a centre of shoemaking, particularly for women. The earliest recorded shoe manufacturer was James Southall & Co in 1792. In terms of other activity, Gurney's Bank (later part of Barclays) was founded 1775 and Hills and Underwood vinegar maker in 1762.

In 1846 Norwich became the last major city to be connected to the growing railway net work. This facilitated further growth in shoe making, with Norwich becoming, so Frank Meeres suggests in his A History of Norwich, the fourth largest shoe city in Britain. Norvic shoes was a celebrated brand for women's footwear and one of the first to embrace advertising. This company, formed by the older Howlett and White, made many thousand of boots and shoes for the armed forces in both world wars. One Norvic speciality was sports shoes including running spikes.

The commercial strength of Norwich was in the diversity of its industry. Boulton and Paul manufactured all manner of product from wood including aircraft, at one time employing 1,300. Jewson Timber Merchants were founded in Norwich. Barnard, Bishop and Barnard invented a machine for making wire netting which sold all over the world. The company later became part of Tinsley Wire of Sheffield. Laurence, Scott and Electromotors embraced electricity and made dynamos and electric motors with a workforce at one time of 3,500. The company still manufactures in the city but was bought by the Austrian ATB in 2007 and now is financed by the Chinese Wolong. Coleman's mustard business was founded in 1804 and by 1900 had 2,000 employees. Coleman merged with the Recketts of Hull in 1938. As I told in my blog on Halifax, Mackintosh bought the Norwich chocolate maker, AJ Caley. Elsewhere the Norwich Union insurance company was founded in 1806. HMSO moved to Norwich in 1968 but closed in 1996. The publisher Jarrold moved to Norwich in 1823 and still publishes from the city.

Further reading

Frank Meers, A History of Norwich (Stroud: Phillimore, 1998)

Northampton manufacturing history

 In my perambulation around the manufacturing towns of Britain, I have normally found the presence of raw materials and water, ideally navigable. Northampton had no coal nearby and its river, the Nene, was only navigable some miles toward the sea. It was, though, on road routes from London to the north and so enjoyed the trade from passing coaches, much like Stamford. Unlike Stamford, it was the shire town and carried on all the administrative functions. It was in the middle of livestock farming country and so had a market, but also access to hides, of which more later.

Poor communications were hard to address. The Grand Junction Canal passed the town by as did the north-south railway. Anyone visiting Northampton by canal boat will know well the reason: the link from the Nene to the Grand Junction Canal demands some seventeen locks to descend one hundred and twenty feet. This link to the canal system completed in 1815 did open the town to more trade and that is where hides come in.

It was of course the shoe making industry that provided the economic growth that Northampton needed. It was a cottage industry, but quite substantial. Boots and shoes were made for the local market, but also further afield including the plantations of the West Indies. The Peninsula war created a strong demand for boots for Wellington's army. A strike by London boot makers added significantly to Northampton's business since wage rates were much lower. It wasn't only boots, it was said the Northampton lace was superior to that made in Nottingham.

The railways were a bone of contention. Land owners hated them; townsfolk knew they would be good for business. They were also not very good on steep inclines like that up from Northampton. For this reason Robert Stephenson chose to route the London Birmingham railway around the town. Nevertheless, the town did get a railway in 1845, linking it both to Peterborough and to the London Birmingham line. This enabled the cheaper import of coal and export of agricultural produce and footwear.

The footwear industry did take off, but still in small cottage units except for a very few factory employers such as William Parker and John Groom each producing 80,000 pairs of footwear a year with 800 employees. Moses Philip Manfield was not far behind. Their employees were said to be better off than their home working counterparts, given the opportunities the factories had for better ventilation of noxious fumes. Child labour was more prevalent in smaller businesses, indeed schools tried to include work based learning in their timetables.

The mid-point of the century brought to Northampton, as elsewhere, the issue of mechanisation. With footwear production it was the American invention of a sewing machine for shoes. The fear, as elsewhere, was the loss of jobs, particularly for men since the view was that women could manage sewing machines. A little later, machines for riveting soles were on offer, but not enthusiastically welcomed by masters for in the beginning they proved slower and less reliable than hand work. Finally machines to stitch soles to uppers came along and the battle was lost; the industry had become mechanised. Interestingly it seems that home working continued, but with machines in the home. It seems also that this was the case in Wellingborough and Kettering as well as Northampton and its surrounding villages.

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a great change. Home working was nearly a thing of the past. Manfield, run by Moses's sons, employed 1,000 men and women in a single story building. Crocket & Jones and Truform (part of Sears & So) employed about the same number. Charles and Edward Lewis employed nearer 1,500, whilst Barratts were still comparatively new but distinctly ambitious. Church & Co boasted 'every conceivable style and material'. William Wren made shoe polish and Horton and Arlidge, cardboard boxes. Some seven manufacturers had come together to form Northampton Shoe Machinery Co first supplying American machines but then manufacturing them under licence. Machinery also came from the International Goodyear Shoe Machinery Company.

Other businesses made cycles and motor cars. Mulliner made the bespoke car bodies for manufacturers to add to their engine and chassis. Bassett-Loake made beautiful model trains and yachts. Importantly for the future, Smith, Major and Stevens made lifts.

The First World War saw Mulliner's factory producing munitions and military vehicles. Of far more significance, the Northampton shoe companies produced 23 million pairs of footwear for British, French and Belgian forces including infantry boots, flying boots, ski boots and canvas shoes. The other shoe manufacturers in the county topped this production at 24 million and together they made up two thirds of the British footwear output between 1914-1918.

The 1930s saw Express Lifts of Leicester buy Smith, Major and Stevens but to continue to manufacture in Northampton. Other arrivals included Rest Assured with beds and Mettoy which later manufactured Corgi toys. Mettoy was encouraged to come to Northampton by Bassett-Loake whose owners played a major role in the civic community which was keen to reduce the town's dependence on shoe making.

The Second World War saw shoe factories producing an ever increasing range of footwear, including shoes designed for deception, so flying boots which could have their uppers removed to reveal ordinary well worn shoes should their wearer be shot down in enemy territory. The Birmingham British Timken company set up a shadow factory near Northampton and this reverted to peacetime work after the war.

The post war years saw the growth of earth moving equipment supplier Blackwood Hodge (owned by house builder Bernard Sunley), but the steady decline of the mass production of shoes. Manfield was bought by the British Shoe Corporation of Leicester and I write in my blog on Leicester of the gathering of former brands into this company owned by the property developer, Charles Clore.

Avon Cosmetics was encouraged to the town in the sixties a little before its designation as a 'new town' under the third wave of such towns in the post-war era. A good number of businesses came to the 'new town'. Black & Decker, set up warehousing and distribution, as did MFI; Henry Telfer employed 2,000 in food manufacturing. The Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation helped to fund the Blackwood Hodge Management Centre at Nene College.

In 1960 Electronics Weekly reported that 'the extended factory of Plessey Nucleonics at Northampton, officially opened in 1959, has doubled facilities for R&D is this rapidly growing field. During the year, Plessey Nucleonics received an order from the UKAEA for the supply of all nuclear instrumentation for the advanced gas-cooled reactor at Windscale.' This business eventually became part of Ultra Energy. Plessey also manufactured Connectors in their subsidiary Plessey Interconnect.

At the time of writing there are shoe factories still manufacturing in Northampton and neighbouring towns. In the town itself there are Church & Co, Crocket & Jones, Trickers, Edward Green and Jeffery-West. Outside Northampton there are Dr Martens in Wollaston, Grenson in Rushden and Barker in Earls Barton all just outside Wellingborough; then Loake in Kettering and Joseph Cheaney in nearby Desborough.

Express Lifts still has a presence in the town through its lift testing tower built in the seventies and shown in the image.

Further reading:

Cynthia Brown, Northampton 1835-1985: Shoe Town, New Town (Chichester: Phillimore, 1990)

Stamford manufacturing history

Stamford was in sheep country and townsfolk traded in wool and also manufactured woollen cloth and garments. The town, on the river Welland marking the border between Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, was one of the five boroughs of the Danelaw along with Leicester, Derby, Nottingham and Lincoln. Unlike them it did not become a shire town, that part to the south of the Welland looking to Northampton and that to the north to Lincoln and its cathedral. Its fortunes changed somewhat when the woollen cloth trade moved more to the Cotswolds and Yorkshire. Yet, Stamford remained important being on routes both east-west as well as north-south, having the Great North Road running through it (although no longer).

William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth I's most trusted adviser, was the son and grandson of Stamford burgesses and became the first Baron Burghley. Of central interest to British manufacturing, he master-minded British patent law which provided protection to those who wished to exploit their inventions here. Many chose Britain in preference to their native land for this reason. The law gave British manufacturers vital protection for the early years of their invention. I wrote of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. The image is of Burghley House, the home of the Cecils.

In the decades following the civil war, Stamford became a fashionable place for the gentry to live, but at the same time a bustling hub for all kinds of trade. Looking at the occupations of freemen at the time, textiles remained the largest but far from dominant.

The nineteenth century almost passed Stamford by. The town failed to get the north-south railway to pass through the town, the railway company choosing the Peterborough to Grantham route instead. Stamford was eventually linked by the Peterborough to Leicester line. With the exception of Blackstones, the town failed to embrace the steam age, once again yielding the advantage to Peterborough. The other downside of the railways was the much reduced coach traffic and associated spending through the town.

In the twentieth century, Blackstones was producing diesel engines, competing with Hornsby of Grantham (later Rustons & Hornsby) and Ransomes of Ipswich. Hayes & Sons manufactured coaches and JH Pick produced motor cars until 1925. In 1969 Blackstones merged with Mirrlees of Stockport keeping production in both towns under the ownership of Hawker Siddelely as Mirrlees Blackstone

Northern Electric Wireless and General Engineering Company was founded in Manchester in 1935 and shortened its name to Newage Engineers. This company bought Stamford Electrical and moved its generator business to Stamford where, in 1967, it manufactured the world's first brushless alternator. In the 1990s the company spun off its transmission business into Newage Transmissions which became an independently quoted company. Newage Engineers eventually became part of Cummins Inc.

Further reading:

Alan Rogers, The Book of Stamford (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1983)