Colchester manufacturing history

 Colchester was said to be the first English town, established before 100 BC. It was rebuilt as a model Roman town following the invasion of AD 50 only to be destroyed along with London and Verulamium by Queen Boudicca ten years later. The Romans rebuilt it and it prospered until the Legions left and the Saxons invaded. A settled existence was then eventually enjoyed until the Danes invaded. The town became part of what would become England in the first half of the tenth century only to be disturbed this time by the Normans who left their mark on the town as evidenced by common surnames.

Like so many places, wool trade and wool manufacture formed the bedrock of industry, boosted by refugees from Holland in the sixteenth century. The town gained a reputation for quality textiles. There followed a period of decline when trading took over, the town being well placed for continental trade. Throughout this time, craftsmen in the town became well regarded for their skills at clockmaking. Clockmaking prospered in Colchester and Coventry and many other provincial towns until factory production took over in London and Birmingham. Then, as with so much, clockmaking went overseas.

The 1830s saw the coming into prominence of some of the great mechanical engineers of the East of England. In Greenwich, John Penn owned the largest marine engine business in Britain. There is evidence of regular communication between him and the much younger James Paxman who made agricultural machinery in Colchester. There was a further connection with Robert Ransome in Ipswich. I write more of Penn in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and more of Ransome in my blog on Ipswich. Here the focus is on Paxman.

In his book Steam and the Road to Glory The Paxman Story, Andrew Phillips, acknowledged that by 1865, when Paxman joined with the two Davey brothers, Davey Paxman was one of the smaller manufacturers of steam engines, so dwarfed by Ransome but also by Robey of Lincoln. Electricity changed everything. Dynamos to generate electricity for Swan's incandescent lamp demanded power and in the absence of fast running water, this was provided by all manner of steam engine. Electrical engineers, of which Crompton of Chelmsford was a leader, were spoilt for choice and would use steam engines made by any one the many manufacturers. James Paxton was definitely one and he, I suggest like Joseph Ruston, was very good at nurturing relationships. He got on well with Crompton who would use his steam engines, but not uniquely. Andrew Phillips tells the story of Paxman's big break.

Paris was host to the first electrical exhibition and was followed a year later by one at London's Crystal Palace. James Paxman won a gold medal, but so did six other manufacturers. Exhibitions were the coming thing and a purpose built space had been created in South Kensington, but this could only be fully exploited if open to evening visitors and this required light. Larger manufacturers were reluctant to exhibit again so soon, but James Paxman was at hand and Phillips tells how he met with the Prince of Wales and promised a fully functional system in just ten weeks. He delivered using his energy efficient double expansion engine. In time installations increased in size and Paxman's slower engine began to lose out. The answer was found in the high speed engine developed by J.C. Peach.

Peach had been working with the Thames Ditton firm of Willans and Robinson. On Willans’ untimely death Peach went to work with Musgraves in Bolton. James Paxman had heard of the new engine and sought an opinion from a valued colleague. The opinion was positive and Peach brought his invention to Paxman and the company went on to power a good number of electrical installations.

Paxman’s other mainstay had been winding machine engines for South Africa diamond and gold mines. Like other steam engine manufacturers they embraced the oil engine.

Davey Paxman had moved to a larger site at the Standard Works and their former site was taken by Arthur Mumford who from 1877 manufactured marine pumps. Mumford joined the Weir Group in 1933. In 1887 John Ernest Cohen founded the Colchester Lathe Co which in 1954 would be bought by George Cohen's 600 Group, of which I write more in Vehicles to Vaccines. Colchester Lathe was in competition with the less successful Britannia Engineering whose works were later used by Davey Paxman to make diesel engines in the Second World War.

Davey Paxman was one of the East Anglian companies to join Agricultural Engineering in the thirties from where it entered into a relationship with Ruston and Hornsby; both companies were bought by English Electric in 1966.

Further reading:

• Norman Jacobs, Colchester The Last Hundred Years (Lowestoft: Tyndale Press, 1989)
• Andrew Phillips, Steam and the Road to Glory The Paxman Story (Colchester: Harvey-Benham Charitable Trust, 2002)

Braintree manufacturing history - the story of silk

Like many of its neighbouring towns, Braintree was a weaving town producing heavy Anglian broadcloth. Again, like other towns, it received an influx of Flemish refugees who brought techniques enabling a lighter ‘Brockings’ cloth. A little later Huguenots arrived from France bringing with them skills in silk work. Most went to Spittlefields in east London and one such, George Courtauld, set up a factory in Pebmarsh and later moved to Braintree. It was his son, Samuel, who really began the silk business which would become a world famous textile giant.

Before looking at Courtauld, I took a step back to explore the story of Silk. It was Confucius who recorded the first evidence of this natural luxury material in 2604 BC and of course it was in China that silk worms were fed on the leaves mulberry trees, their cocoons gathered and thrown and silk thread spun for weaving into cloth. Neil Ferguson tells the story of the Princess who, in around 700 AD, stole the secret of silk and took it to neighbouring Khotan. Silk spread throughout Asia and the Romans brought it to Byzantium in time for the advance of Islam to spread silk wherever it invaded. In the thirteenth century, Marco Polo brought the secret to Venice where thrived. It prospered too in Catalonia and Lyon, the latter so much so that the King handed to the town a monopoly. James I wanted a silk industry in Britain and imported mulberry trees which grew well. There is an ancient mulberry tree in the grounds of the old Bishops Palace in Lincoln which each year would produce fruit for my wife to collect. Sadly the silk worms struggled in the cold climate. This did not put off my father whose boyhood hobby at the turn of the twentieth century was breeding silk worms in his south London bedroom; his uncle had a mulberry tree in his garden from which my father would gather leaves for his hungry worms. I tell that story in Dunkirk to D Day.

Despite the unsuitability of the British climate for silk worms, it was perfect for spinning and weaving. The coming of the Hugenots brought skills and many settled. The industry grew in London, East Anglia, Macclesfield, Congleton, Derby and Coventry with ribbons. This British industry needed protection from imported cloth and this too was forthcoming. The Industrial Revolution brought mechanisation to the industry which thrived until free trade open the flood gates to imports. Nearby Sudbury is now home to the remaining British silk weavers.

But back to Courtauld and Braintree...

In the first volume of his Courtaulds A Social and Economic History, D.C. Coleman delights his reader with the complexities of family and business relationships that led to Samuel being born in America and then spending the years from 1807 to 1816 getting into and out of the business of silk. Twelve years of trial and error then passed until in 1828 the firm of Courtauld, Taylor and Courtauld was formed. This went from silk to crepe silk for mourning dress on the death of Prince Albert to the world of artificial fibres and beyond. I write of Courtaulds in the context of the textile story in both How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

Crittall Windows were another Braintree firm to arrive on the national stage. As was the case elsewhere, it was the First World War which marked the step change for Crittall. In 1905, they had moved into a large new factory employing 500 men. By 1918, they employed 2,000 men and women, having spent the war years on munitions work. The mass production techniques learnt from this work enabled the mass production of metal windows. These were to be found in famous buildings including the BBC at Portland Place, the Shell-Mex building on the Strand and London County Hall. The company fell into the clutches of Slater Walker but then found a home in the Norcros building products group before regaining independence through a management buyout. Crittall now manufacture in nearby Witham.

Further reading:

• D.C. Coleman, Courtaulds A Social and Economic History Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969)
• John Marriage, Braintree & Brocking (Chichester: Phillimore, 1994)
• Neil Ferguson, A History of the World in a Hundred Objects
• http://www.silk.org.uk/history.php

 

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