Corby manufacturing history

 Corby was a rural Northampton village with a history going back before the Domesday Book. As with so many places, it was the railway that changed this settled and prosperous way of life, but in a quite different way.

The railway was being built between Kettering and Manton and accommodation had to be found for railway workers and their families, much of this in the little village of Corby. The surveyors for the railway found copious quantities of clay suitable for brick making and then iron ore but with too high a phosphorus content to make it suitable for steel making. A refinement of the Bessemer process and the addition of the Siemens/Martin open hearth process changed this and, with the discovery of really large reserves of ore, Corby was destined to become a major centre of iron and steel. In the meantime bricks were produced from the local clay for use on the railway and elsewhere.

The beginning was through the Lloyd Ironstone Company which leased reserves from the Brudenell family and ore was shipped for smelting in the West Midlands. Lloyds then built blast furnaces at Corby and during the First World War the Ministry of Munitions added a third furnace. Yet by 1920, the Corby iron industry only employed 800 people.

The sea change came when Stewarts & Lloyds bought Lloyds Ironstone and put forward a proposal for the creation of a massive integrated steel tube plant at Corby. In his book Corby Works A Town in Action R.W. Shakespeare writes of its scale: 26,000 acres, workforce of 4,000 and capacity of over a million tons of iron a year converted onsite into steel for the manufacture of steel tubes. The company built 2,000 houses for its workforces many of whom came from the Clydesdale plant it had closed. More Scots followed, making Corby sound like a Scottish lowland town.

The Corby works produced many miles of tubing for the PLUTO pipeline supplying the advance across northern France following D Day. In 1950, Corby was designated a new town and expanded to a population target of 45,000. The steel industry continued to prosper into the sixties.

I write in Vehicles to Vaccines of the painful contraction of British steel making and Corby was one of the major victims. It had come to life when demand was high and when it had comparative cost advantage. When this changed all but its tube making plant closed, initially taking steel from Teeside. Tata continue to run the tube making plant.

The closures came in 1979 just when the Thatcher government had been elected. The New Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, along with Corby Council took up the enormous challenge of recreating employment in the town. As evidenced in Shakespeare's book, a good number of businesses came to the town.

Aluminium Shapes set up in 1985 to produce bespoke aluminium extrusions. Aquascutum had set up a factory in Kettering in 1907 and added a plant in Corby in 1962. The factory was bought and traded briefly by Swaine Adeney Brigg. Baltimore Aircoil set up a factory producing evaporative condensers and this was joined by the British Institute of Management in 1982. Curver Consumer Products produced plastic housewares and Hunters Foods potato crisps. However it was Oxford University Press relocating its distribution to Corby which was the game changer. Pilkington set up a factory to make energy-saving glass known as Kappafloat and RHM Ingredients set up a cereals processing plant following Weetabix which set up an offshoot of its Burton Latimer HQ.

The image is of what remains of the Tata Tubes site.

Further reading

R.W. Shakespeare and J Lewis, Corby Works A Town in Action (Manchester: Brooke Associates, 1989)

Peterborough manufacturing history

 A city dominated by its cathedral; its life revolved around agriculture with regular markets controlled by the Dean & Chapter until the city received its charter in the late nineteenth century. As with so many places, it was the railways which changed everything.

Railway entrepreneurs were attracted by populations and Peterborough’s was growing as people moved there from the fens. The coming of the railways was a tortuous process as I told in my blogs about Doncaster, Stamford and Northampton. The key driver was the desire to get coal to London. York was the destination, it was the intermediate route that attracted debate. The beginning was of shorter routes, so that from Peterborough to Lincoln via Boston and that from Peterborough to Northampton. The line from London to Peterborough encountered problems with boggy land en route and that from Peterborough to Grantham and onward to Doncaster had the cost of tunnelling. Yet by 1850 Peterborough was connected. It is appropriate that an early trade was that of butchering for London’s Smithfield market.

In terms of industry, British Braids producing elastic web was encouraged by the Dean & Chapter to provide work for women. A steam flour mill was run by Cadge and Coleman. Bricks were made from Oxford clay and the works later joined with London Brick in the interwar years. Stanley’s iron works developed into Stanley & Barford eventually joining in Aveling Barford of Grantham in manufacturing rollers. J.P. Hall made pumps.

Peter Brotherhood came from London manufacturing high speed engines and compressors. They moved into tractor manufacture and joined in the Agricultural Engineers Group which in the twenties brought together similar businesses struggling in a tough market. Other members included Barford and Paxman which joined Ruston and Hornsby of Lincoln and Grantham when Agricultural Engineering was liquidated in 1932. In the Second World War a now independent public company Peter Brotherhood produced the Brotherhood-Ricardo diesel engine. They were later bought by Ingersol-Rand who sold out to Siemens. In 2008 they became part of Hayward Tyler supplying specialist equipment to the energy industry.

Another engineering firm from London was Werner, Pfleiderer and Perkins which bought Joseph Baker and Aublet, Harry &Co which was already making laundry-machines in Peterborough. The combined company became Baker Perkins. Perkins, who had developed steam ovens, emigrated to England from the USA. Baker was Canadian and invented a combined flour scoop and sifter which became a market leader in the UK. Although rivals, the two companies collaborated in supplying baking equipment to the armies in the First World War. The combined company also built a plant in Michigan in Canada and are still leaders in food manufacturing machinery.

Another Perkins, Frank, started experimental work on diesel engines in 1932 with talented engineer Charles Chapman. They conceived an idea that diesels, as well as being slow work horses, could run at as high speed as their petrol rivals. As I tell in Vehicles to Vaccines the company was bought by Massey Ferguson. It later became part of Lucas Varity and is now part of Caterpillar. Perkins diesels continues its heritage of innovation.

The city was home to GEC Domestic appliances including Hotpoint and Morphy Richards.

Further reading:

H.F. Tibbs, Peterborough A History (Cambridge: The Oleander Press, 1979)

Stafford manufacturing history

 A power house of British electrical engineering, Stafford was of course a shire town but one that was soon outgrown by other towns in its county. One reason was that the man road route following the course of the Trent by-passed it. When the canals came they too passed it by until a passage was created by dredging the river Sow and adding an canalised section.

The tradespeople of Stafford carried on the common trades, but slowly a larger group emerged whose business was making shoes. The wearing of shoes had become more common in London, the growing industrial towns and the colonies and so a strengthening demand developed for Stafford's shoe makers. In his book Stafford Past, Roy Lewis suggests that one name drew ahead of the field, that of William Horton. In many ways like Manchester cotton merchants, he had a network of outworkers for whom his workshop would cut the leather for soles and uppers and the outworkers would stitch them and return them to him for payment and the next batch of leather. At one time he is said to have had one thousand outworkers. Finished shoes would be despatched by canal to the growing urban areas. The Napoleonic wars boosted demand but then competition from the lower paid Northampton shoe makers attracted trade away.

Railways did not pass Stafford by, rather the town became something of a hub for Staffordshire's part in the growing rail network. Workshops were set up and successive stations built. More significantly the town embraced massive marshalling yards where wagons arrived and were despatched right around the country. Not surprisingly locomotive manufacture took hold and W.G. Bagnall emerged as a leader.

As with the other shoe towns, the advent of American sewing machines for shoes led first to strikes as men refused to work on machine stitched leather. In time, as elsewhere, machines became a fixture along with factory production. Stafford's factories found themselves specialising in women's shoes and the firm Lotus became the best known of Stafford's factories. As elsewhere, foreign competition shrank the workforce to one or two specialised factories.

Supporting the shoe making trade, there emerged a cohort of manufacturers of the equipment needed to make shoes but also the packaging, laces and polish the wearer would need. The British United Shoe Machinery Company was set up by its American counterpart and took over the shoe related business of W.H. Dorman. This company would move into motor vehicles with the Redbridge Motor Works and aero engines with Adams. In the First World War they developed the interrupter gear that enabled machines guns to fire between the blades of a spinning propeller. After the war, the company built its first diesel engines. In 1959 it acquired W.G Bagnall and two years later became part of the English Electric. Later still it would join with Perkins diesels of Peterborough.

At the start of the twentieth century, Stafford attracted the British Siemens Brithers whose premises at Woolwich were becoming too small to house both its cable manufacture and its business of dynamos and electric motors. It was these latter two which Siemens moved to Stafford. Siemens Dynamo works later joined the group of companies which in 1919 formed English Electric. I write of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Roy Lewis writes of the arrival in 1930 of George Nelson as managing director of English Electric and how he encouraged its growth in a very hands on way, his home being through a garden gate in the factory fencing. The Second World War saw the factory produce tanks, bombs and a range of electrical equipment. In 1960 the company opened a new transformer factory and in 1968 merged with GEC. I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines. In 2015 the Stafford Grid and Power businesses became part of the American General Electric, now GE Vernova, which is working on high voltage transmission for the transition to net zero.

Stafford was also home to British Reinforced Concrete Engineering Company and in the Stafford Salt and Alkali Company.

Further reading

• Roy Lewis, Stafford Past (Chichester: Phillimore, 1997)
• J.D. Scott, Siemens Brothers 1858-1958 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958) [printed by Jarrold in Norwich]