Welwyn Garden city Manufacturing History

 The founders of Welwyn had the experience of Letchworth Garden City, built some twenty years earlier, to fall back on. Work began in 1920 and the first manufacturing companies soon followed.

Of most enduring importance was Shredded Wheat, a Canadian company which had set up in Britain in 1908 in London's Aldwych. It was said that the company decided to take a considerable chance by moving to the new Garden City. Work started on the first three-storey block in 1924 and really very soon the factory was operating with great success. The business prospered and in 1928 was bought by Nabisco which added further products including Shreddies.

The next name that would become equally well known was Murphy which began in a garage making radios. As I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, demand for radios was strong and so the company grew and by the thirties had five hundred employees producing 33,000 radios a year. By 1939 it was one of the six biggest manufacturers of radios in the world. It was bought by the Rank Organisation in 1962 and in 1969 moved production to Ware and the premises was taken by Rank Xerox with a workforce of 1,400.

Nivea runs a close third. Beiersdorf took premises in Bessemer Road in 1931 and manufactured Nivea products. They then became Herts Pharmaceutical Company before becoming part of Smith + Nephew.

A big win for Welwyn was when they persuaded the American Norton Grinding Wheels to build what was then the largest factory in the town in 1931. Norton prospered in Welwyn until 1982 when manufacturing was moved abroad. Norton was another company bought by the French St Gobain, a former client of mine, and I recall a ceramics plant in Stoke on Trent.

Another American company, Lincoln Electric, began production in Welwyn in 1935. It later became part of GKN.

Under the New Towns Act of 1946, Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield were to be two distinct towns. In practice they are so close as to be a single conurbation. Sir Geoffrey de Havilland moved his aircraft company to Hatfield from Edgware in 1934. It became by a long way that town's largest employer. I tell its story in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. The company was famous for the Mosquito aircraft in the Second World War and the first commercial jet, The Comet, in the fifties.

Plastics came to Welwyn in 1938 when ICI created its Plastics Division and took a 10 acre site in Welwyn. In the next ten years it became the largest producer of plastics in the Commonwealth. In the fifites ICI relocated plastics to the north of England and the Welwyn site refocused on research.

Staying with chemicals, Hoffman La Roche manufactured Redoxin and then Librium and Valium. Smith Kline and French moved from Camberwell in 1939 and built the then tallest building in the town.

Other manufacturers include the Danish Bacon company, Allied Bakeries, Knorr soup and Suchard confectioners.

Further reading:

• Roger Filler, A History of Welwyn Garden City (Chichester: Phillimore, 1986)
• Hatfield and its people Pt 12 The Twentieth Century (The Hatfield WEA, 1964)

Letchworth manufacturing history

 Letchworth Garden City was conceived by Sir Ebenezer Howard who set out his thinking in a book, Garden Cities of Tomorrow. His aim was to combine town and city advantages. Thinking reached reality in 1902 when a company was formed to buy land and lay down designs for the new city. This was at the time of the Arts and Crafts Movement and echoes of the movement were to be found in the new city. There had to be industry providing jobs for the new population. The site chosen was on the railway line from London to Cambridge, but the route to the northern industrial areas was at nearby Hitchin. Many thought that the new town was too far from London and indeed later new towns were nearer. Writing in 2025, it may well be that a position between Cambridge and Oxford may turn out rather well.

Back to Edwardian England. The planning of a brand new conurbation required a return to first principles and the sourcing of water and also the routing of sewerage disposal. In was though 1900 and so a gas works was built. Electricity wasn't ignored but neither was it embraced. A generating station was built which provided for industrial users only DC current at 500 volts. It wasn't until the coming of the national grid in the twenties that the country as a whole adopted AC and standardise the voltage of supply.

The first company attracted to the new town was Idris, the soft drink company which was based in Camden in London. The first industries attracted to the new town were printers. A co-operative group of printers from Leicester set up Garden City Press and Joseph Dent whose company produced Everyman editions which had outgrown their factory based in Bishopsgate in the City of London. WH Smith brought to the town the Arden Press which picked up on the Arts and Crafts connection through the work of Bernard Newdigate and the type style of Eric Gill but also Morris's Kelmscott Press.

It was the time of the early motor car enthusiast and the town attracted the Lacre Motor Company from Long Acre in Covent Garden which built chassis. A successor company went on to produce mechanical road sweepers under the name Shelvoke and Drewry. Phoenix Motor Company came from its base in Finchley. Phoenix hand built beautiful cars each carrying the Phoenix Crest. Sadly with so many other motor companies chasing customers they ceased production in 1928.

The Westinghouse Morose Chain Company set up a factory in 1920 to produce chain drive for vehicles and were bought by Borg Warner after the Second World War. Borg Warner became one of the town's biggest employers and only ceased production after the recession of the 1980s.

Herz and Falk made embroidered textiles and St Edmundsbury Weavers again picked up Arts and Crafts in their handloom produced fabrics for churches, cathedrals, country houses and theatre sets. Another textile related company was created by Californian Leslie Irvin who manufactured parachutes. It was estimated that these had saved 36,000 lives in the Second World War.

One company that was to have big impact on Letchworth was Meredew cabinet makers which also collaborated with Murphy making radios in Welwyn. During the Second World War they made glider panels.

The Spirella Company from the USA had developed a wire spring alternative to bone for corsets and these proved extremely popular to twentieth century's more active woman. They set up in temporary premises in 1910 - huts that had been used to house the workers who carried out of the groundworks for the town. Over the next three years they built a factory complex known as Castle Corset which once again drew on Arts and Crafts design. In time the company recruited an army of sales women who would achieve daily sales of 200,000 in 1950. Later the making of brasiers moved to Harlow and the Letchworth factory focused on surgical corsets.

The K&L company originated with Belgian refugees during the First World War. Led by Jacques Kryn they built a foundry and during the First World War made munitions with a workforce of 3,000. They became part of the Cohen 600 Group and by 1930 claimed they were the best equipped foundry in Britain making carbon steel castings for everything from hydraulic cylinders to bridges and cranes. During the Second World War they made secret miniature submarines. They closed operations in the 80's.

The British Tabulating Company manufactured Hollerinth machines capable of processing numerical data such as census returns. They moved to Letchworth from Lambeth and would employ some 4,000 people in their new factory. In the Second World War they were vital in helping to produce the BOMBE code breaking machines for nearby Bletchley Park. Spirella also worked on assembly. British Tabulating joined with Powers Samas and eventually became International Computers Limited ICL after they were joined by the Ferranti and the English Electric computer businesses. They left Letchworth in 1989.

Letchworth has repurposed unused buildings and is well placed to continue to support the technology sector.

Further reading:

Melvyn Miller, Letchworth Garden City (Stroud: Chalford, 1995)

Chelmsford manufacturing history

 A treat for any amateur industrial archeologist, in 1987 Stanley Wood published a booklet describing Chelmsford Industrial Trail updated by Tony Crosby and Dave Buckley in 2018. This offers the reader a wonderful taste of this late industrial town and I draw upon it in this blog piece, though far from entirely.

Chelmsford was where Marconi first manufactured and I wrote extensively of him and his business in both How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. Just a little earlier Colonel Crompton came to the town following a distinguished military career and bought a local iron works. This is at the heart of the development of electricity in Britain and, again I wrote of it in both books but also the American angle in this blog. There are many other connections with the town which I highlight below. So, to Chelmsford.

It was a Roman town as indeed was neighbouring Colchester. It was an agricultural centre opened up by the Chelmer and Blackwater navigation in 1797 and by the railway in 1843 with the opening of the Brentwood to Colchester line. The London Road Iron works was taken over by Richard Coleman in 1848 and three years later he was among the prize winners at the Great Exhibition. In 1866 the business became Coleman & Morton which produced highly regarded agricultural implements until 1907.

The Anchor Works, which Colonel Crompton bought in 1878, began life as an iron works in 1833 and was later taken over by THP Dennis another agricultural implement maker. Crompton made it a key actor in the electrification of Britain.

It was the coming of electricity and Cromptons which radically changed Chelmsford, not least because in due course its streets were lit by bright electric light. Dynamos needed power to drive them and neighbouring Colchester had James Paxman all too keen to get involved. Steam engines were a competitive market and so Cromptons developed a good number of fruitful relationships. In his Reminiscences he singles out Willans as his chief steam engine collaborator and describes the single generation unit that combined on one platform a dynamo made by Cromptons with a fast steam engine made by Willans & Robinson of Thames Ditton. Cromptons could claim credit for many prestigious installations including Lord Randolph Churchill's house and the Royal Courts of Justice. Of no less importance was the ability to use incandescent lamps in coal mines.

Of possibly as great importance there is a story of Crompton himself inspiring the young Sebastian de Ferranti whose influence in the British electrical engineering industry would exceed that of Crompton and I write of it in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Whilst Crompton acknowledges his possible influence on Ferranti he spells out the fact that they were on different sides of The Battle of the Systems. I describe that in the USA between Edison and Westinghouse in the blog piece I referred to earler. In Britain it was in London that Ferranti championed high voltage AC current from his Deptford power station, whereas Crompton made money out of more local schemes using a lower voltage DC. Crompton were great adapters.

Cromptons moved to a much larger factory in 1896 whose vast assembly bays enabled the company to build the big generators, transformers and switchgear needed by the new national grid in the twenties. After a period of investment by Armstrong Siddeley, Crompton merged with Parkinson of Leeds to become Crompton Parkinson which would later join their earlier rival Brush becoming part of Hawker Siddeley.

Of interest to me but perhaps less so to Chelmsford, Colonel Crompton was a champion of motorised transport for the army, first in India but then in the First World War. Crompton tells in his Reminiscences his role in the development of the tank. I wrote about the development of the tank in Ordnance but omitted a reference to Crompton in connection with the smaller, faster Whippet. As with so many inventions, there were many hands and brains involved.

The Marriage family had been millers in and around Chelmsford for many years, and in 1898 took the plunge into the twentieth century by building Chelmer Steam Mill with modern rollers rather than millstones.

Ernst Gustav Hoffmann's invention of an automatic lathe for making ball bearings was sufficient incentive for the building, also in 1898, of the Hoffmann Works for the production of ball bearings. In 1970, Hoffmann merged with Ransomes and Marles Bearing Co, a Newark business with a connection with the Ransomes of Ipswich, and the Pollard Ball and Roller Bearing Co of Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire to form RHP plc in Newark on the River Trent in Nottinghamshire.

Guglielmo Marconi at the age of 22, again in 1898, set up in a former mill in Chelmsford the first wireless factory in the world. The mill had worked with silk but closed in 1863 when French imports flooded the market. The mill was revived briefly by Samuel Courtauld of nearby Braintree. For Marconi the beginning was all about wireless communication with ships but it grew to become serious competition to the cable operators. In 1901, he famously transmitted a signal from Poldhu in Cornwall to Signal Hill in Newfoundland. I noted elsewhere that the electricity powering the signal was generated by a Hornsby engine. Marconi developed radio transmission and after the First World War would transmit programmes from Chelmsford to the small number of radio enthusiasts. The formation of the BBC by a group of radio manufacturers including Marconi in 1922 would accelerate the growth of broadcast radio in Britain.

The next Marconi connection with Chelmsford was radar where it manufactured many sets and components before, during and after the Second World War. Related to radar was television and it was the Marconi-EMI system that was adopted by the BBC and subsequent commercial channels. A research facility was built at Great Baddow on the outskirts of the town. The company designed and built studio and broadcast equipment in its New Street factory. The adjacent factory was built for the production magnetrons for radar and after the war was occupied by the English Electric Valve company manufacturing a whole range of electronic tubes. I write at greater length about Marconi and broadcasting in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

In the postwar era, Marconi became part of English Electric and expanded in aeronautical, marine and broadcasting. English Electric became part of GEC on the breakup of which the Marconi defence business joined with British Aerospace to become BAE Systems which still have a research facility at Great Baddow.

Away from electronics, Britvic opened a new factory in 1955 but moved its headquarters to Hemel Hempstead in 2012 and closed the Chelmsford factory.

The Chelmsford Industrial Trail includes a description of what happened to some of the factories mentioned. Marconi International Marine became a car showroom and Britvic a retail park. The new Marconi factory became a Homebase DIY store. This is a pattern seen in most former industrial towns. We know from the statistics that manufacturing has reduced in size, these specifics bring this home. It is of course brought home much more starkly to those many thousands of men and women who saw their jobs disappear.

Further reading

• W.J. Baker, A History of the Marconi Company (London: Methuen, 1970).
• Stanley Wood, Chelmsford Industrial Trail updated by Tony Crosby and Dave Buckley (Essex Society for Archaeology and History, 1987, 2018)
• R.E. Crompton, Reminiscences (London: Constable & Co, 1928)