Ipswich manufacturing history

 Ipswich was a major port in the time before Hull and Liverpool took up the strain of the industrial revolution. It was not, however, without industry, not least some shipbuilding. The east of England was wool country and both traded wool and manufactured from it.

Nearby Sutton Hoo revealed evidence of the Anglo Saxon world of which East Anglia was very much part with trading relationships with the Nordic national but also France and through to the Mediterranean and beyond.

The agricultural revolution was the turning point, especially in the latter part where farmers struggling to feed a hungry nation turned to mechanisation in their fields.

In Ipswich it was a man named Robert Ransome who was a Quaker and set up a foundry in an old malting in Ipswich in 1789. He was the son of Richard Ransome, a school master from Wells, and had served an apprenticeship with an iron monger in Norwich. It was a time when ideas were being explored for tools for the better use of land. The choice of Ispwich is interesting for the town had been suffering from the loss of the wool trade to other centres. Ipswich was, though, on the route taken by colliers and so had an ample supply of coal. Ransome's first major invention appeared in 1803 where he observed that molten iron coming into contact with a cold surface would quickly become very hard, something he adapted to the plough share making it in effect self sharpening. From this beginning he went on to develop a plough with separate interchangeable parts which gave it excellent adaptability for all kinds of land. The business prospered despite the ups and downs of the economy.

Robert took his two sons into partnership just as the agricultural depression of the early nineteenth century hit. Diversification was the order of the day and the partnership entered into a contract with the celebrated civil engineer William Cubit and extended their product range to cast bridge sections to replace Stokes bridge in Ipswich which had been destroyed. A further diversification with a much longer future for the company was grass cutting machinery.

In 1836 a young chemist, Charles May, joined the business and this accompanied a further major diversification into production for the railway boom and the work force grew to 1,000. Ipswich was now also linked by the railway to London and the north. The railway work was spilt into a new company, Ransome & Rapier, and the agricultural business continued with frequent diversifications not least into steam engines as Ransome & May. Charles May joined a London firm following the Great Exhibition at which they exhibited and the company became Ransome and Sims; Jeffries would follow later. The company developed a close relationship with the new agricultural regions of Russia and an export trade more generally. In the years up to the First World War the workforce seldom fell below 1,500.

The first half of the twentieth century saw the introduction of the internal combustion engine and the development of the grass cutting business. In the First World War the Stokes Mortar was invented by Sir Wilfred Scott-Stokes chairman of Ransome & Rapier and I write of this in Ordnance. Ransome Sims & Jefferies built aeroplanes and employed some 5,000 men and women. After the war RSJ switched its efforts to battery vehicles and trucks for factory use and fork lift trucks figured largely in its work in the Second World War. Ransome & Rapier diversified away from railways into cranes, water control gates and earth moving machinery. Grass cutting equipment is still produced under the Ransomes name.

Of course it wasn't just Ransomes. The Manganese Bronze & Brass Company built a foundry and extrusion plant in Ipswich producing high-duty brass and bronze alloys much for naval use.

Reavell & Company made compressors, one use of which was in conjunction with the engines made by Dr Diesel injecting fuel. Another use was in gas distribution and in experimental work with atomic energy. Reavells later became part of Compair of Slough.

E.R. & F. Turner manufactured portable steam engines and roller-mills for flour. Turners became part of Agricultural and General Engineers of which Bull Motors were also a part and which had moved its manufacturing to Ipswich. This comprised electric motors and generators, more specifically super-silent motors and battery powered motors for passenger vehicles. In the First World War, Turner’s expertise in rollers was put to good use in developing a lathe to manufacture shell cases. The same was used in the Second World War until American machine tools took over. Turners then focused on electric motors. With the advent of combine harvesters, Turners skills at seed cleaning came in. Turners acquired Christy Hunt of Scunthorpe and the enlarged company still manufactures in Ipswich under the name Christy Turner. The Bull Motors business eventually became part of Hawker Siddeley.

The chemical company Fisons exploited the development of super-phosphates as fertiliser from the invention by J.B. Lawes of Barking in 1839. Fisons as such only came into being a century later as the fragmented East Anglian fertiliser industry slowly gathered eventually focusing on a plant on Cliff Quay in Ipswich where it produced the sulphuric acid and superphosphate required for the fertiliser.

Cocksedge & Co was a company that combined construction (which continues to this day and here is a link) and mechanical engineering of which the most prodigious was production for two world wars. The company produced temporary bridges, Bailey Bridges and adapted tanks to carry massive bridge sections. In terms of tanks, they cast turrets weighing 3.5 tons and devised a method of carrying and laying temporary roadway for tanks following the invasion of Europe. They also carried out ship repairs. In peacetime that had produce heavy cutting machinery to process sugar beat.

Further reading:

• The History of Engineering in Ipswich (Ipswich: The Ipswich Engineering Society)
• D.R. Grace and D.C. Phillips, Ransomes of Ipswich A History of the firm and guide to its records (Institute of Agricultural History, 1975)
• Carol and Michael Weaver, Ransomes A Bicentennial Celebration, 1989

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)