Hitchin manufacturing history

Hitchin is a product of its soil which is a rich loam and so ideal for growing cereals but, even more so, herbs especially lavender. The undulating countryside also offers excellent pasture for sheep. A benign climate and adequate water supply completes the picture.

For centuries there had been water mills on the river Hiz with the business of grinding grain into flour. It was a good business with a regular market. The range of cereals grown attracted dealers looking not only for bread flour but for seeds yielding oil and cattle feed, and oats for malting for the London breweries. The arrival of the railways in the mid nineteenth century encouraged the building of a new corn exchange and dealers came from as far afield as Liverpool.

In the sixteenth century, lavender plants were brought from Italy, where they grow wild, and it was found that Hitchin's soil and climate were perfect for the plant. The flowers from the lavender plant are processed and distilled to produce fragrant lavender oil for use in toiletries. There were a number of firms in the town growing and processing lavender but the largest, Perks & Llewellen, caught my eye because Perks was my mother's family name. Perks & Llewellen were successful and supplied a growing market in the nineteenth century.

If lavender and a range of cereals could be grown, what else? The answer came from a young man who, attracted by the advances in science in the nineteenth century, became apprenticed to a pharmaceutical chemist. The young man with William Ransom and he was born and bred Hitchin; the pharmaceutical chemist was in Birmingham then thriving with busy factories. In 1846 William returned to Hitchin and set up his own business. He grew medicinal plants on the family farm: Henbane, Wild Lettuce and Belladonna. Other plants, he imported from as far away a Syria. He grew lavender but not in competition with Perks & Llewellen concentrating rather on its medicinal properties. William died in 1914 and the firm was continued by his son who also took over the growing of lavender for toiletries when Perks & Llewelyn closed down. Ransom Naturals became a public company in 1969 and now grows its plants near St Ives in Huntingdonshire. It has become renowned for its natural products.

In common with many towns in agricultural areas, Hitchin had its engineers. One, Ralph E. Sanders & Son, were carriage builders, cycle manufacturers and motor car engineers. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how Harry Ricardo had praised Lanchester for producing a car that was not simply a motorised carriage. Sanders built motorised carriages in their workshop alongside carriages designed to be drawn by a horse. To me this goes a long way to explain the early car manufacturing process whereby the chassis and engine would be manufactured and a coach built body added to satisfy the particular requirements of the customer. As the motor car was made in increasing numbers and standardised forms, Sanders' business shrank although it continued as a garage until 1979.

John Whiting was a fellmonger, not unlike my own family who were fellmongers in Wheatley just to the south of Oxford and I wrote about this in my biography of my great great uncle William Smith Williams, Charlotte Bronte's Devotee. Alan Fleck and Helen Poole describe the business of fellmongers in their book Old Hitchin. It is about the hides of sheep and how they are cleaned and softened prior to tanning. They suggest that Hitchin hides may well have been used for parchment and I make that assumption for my family's business given their proximity to Oxford and its colleges. In the case of Hitchin it was fine hides used in book binding which began with the partnership of GW Russell and Henry Featherstone which took over the business from Whiting. In 1886 GW Russell & Son was formed and in 1949 it took over E&J Richardson of Newcastle and so secured the sole manufacturing rights for fine book-binding leather. The firm made the leather for the late Queen's Bible at her Coronation in 1953. The business, Russell Fine Leathers, continues in Hitchin and also in Suffolk.

Further reading:

Alan Fleck and Helen Poole, Old Hitchin (Chichester: Phillimore, 1999)

High Wycombe manufacturing history

 Cloth was the industry of this Buckinghamshire village, like so many places in Britain. Being close to the river Wye, paper mills appeared; in common with other villages in the south of the midlands straw plaiting was an occupation for women, as was lace making. It was though furniture making that would enable High Wycombe to stamp its mark, although being the Operations Control Centre of Bomber Command in the Second World War was certainly higher profile for a number of decades.

First a word about paper making. The earliest records show paper making from rags pounded to pulp in the chalky water from the river Wye in the late sixteenth century. One of these early mills, Glory Mills at Woodburn Green, was bought by Wiggins Teape in 1894. Much later Wiggins Teape would have a research centre at nearby Beaconsfield. The mill finally closed in 1999. I write more about paper making in my blog on Hemel Hempstead, also on the Wye.

I am grateful to L.J. Mayes for his book The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe for a fascinating description of the industry. Before referring to this, the Wycombe Chair Museum offers a list of furniture makers. It runs to some sixty-three pages and so offers a sense of just how widespread this activity was. Having said that, I suspect it was no more widespread than the plaiting of straw and making of hats in the dwellings of Luton or the spinners and weavers of the northwest.

Mayes offers a description of the chair making process of which I offer a precis, for my back hurts just to write it. We have to imagine an elm tree some forty feet tall. It has to be felled, stripped of its branches and bark. It then has to be sawn into planks two inches thick. This process is of course not unique to chair making; I refer to it also in relation to the naval shipyard in Portsmouth. Sawing was most often done in the wood where the tree was felled. A saw pit is dug some seven feet deep and in its stands the sawyer who will do most of the back breaking work. The prepared tree is moved over the saw pit and a second man first marks a straight line with string and chalk. He then stands on the tree holding the top end of the seven foot saw which he guides along the line whilst his mate sweats and is covered in saw dust. I was astonished to read in the context of shipbuilding that the sawyers of Portsmouth resisted the move to powered saw mills.

The plank is cut into sections to provide the seat for the chair. In order to make it into the seat of a comfortable Windsor chair, the seat has to be shaped. Next come the legs and and laths which are cut from green beech by 'bodgers' who also work within the wood from a simple shelter which they build themselves. The young tree trunks are roughly shaped and divided before being finely shaped by a simple pole lathe - a tool that has been used for centuries. All the parts including ash to be bent for the bannister are then assembled in the workshop using simple drills and chisels, everything done by experienced eye. The finished chair is stained by immersing it in liquid and then polished ready for sale. Mayes suggests that this manual process was still in use in the 1950s by a few chair-makers.

Industrialisation did impact Wycombe chair-making, but indirectly. The growing number of skilled men working in manufacturing around the country were being better housed and the houses needed well made furniture. Equally mechanisation reduced the workforce in paper making and farming releasing labour who found work in chair making. Increasingly the processes were broken down in a division of labour. Steam power came in the saw mills and massively increased output compared to saw pits. Bodgers continued to bring bundles of their work to the workshops. Relatively unskilled factory work came in with chair-seat caners, many of whom were women. The assembly of the chair, though, remained a skilled occupation for many years. In terms of selling, furniture vans would leave Wycombe on a tour of towns to sell their wares. In time retailers stepped in and catalogues were produced by the larger companies.

1851 saw Wycombe master chair-maker Edmund Hutchinson awarded the title of Champion Chair of the Exhibition. Already company names were emerging ahead of the pack: Gomme, Skull, Glenister, Dancer & Hearn.

Mechanisation increased with steam powered circular saws and borers. In 1874 the output of the town was estimated at one and half million chairs worth a quarter of a million pounds. The population had trebled over a quarter of a century, but without the utilities in place to cater for it; the river Wye was filled with waste. In time matters improved.

Wycombe had gained a reputation for cheap furniture. This stung and a number of companies embraced new styles. E.G. Punnett was engaged to design pieces influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement.

The coming of war in 1914 saw an immediate fall in demand for this higher end furniture and skilled workers were redeployed on short term public projects including wood panelling the Guildhall. Demand for lower end furniture was strong with orders for the many new barracks. War meant an end to competition from German and Austrian furniture makers and so in due course skilled men found themselves back in demand. Men volunteered or were called up and so manpower shortages became an issue. As elsewhere, the end of the war saw an upturn in demand but this was short-lived and unemployment loomed.

With the challenges of the interwar years many companies were reluctant to invest in mechanisation to reduce costs, an exception being E. Gomme & Sons which went from strength to strength. Mechanisation helped but more was needed.

Aircraft were built requiring woodworking skills. Dancer & Hearn in particular formed a relationship with de Havilland (the two owners were friends) and during slack periods parts were supplied for the Mosquito. Others followed with Gomme supplying fuselages and Baker's veneers.

Ercol was set up in Wycombe in 1920 by Lucian R. Ercolani and new designs began to appear.

The Second World War saw High Wycombe identified as a place where London based manufacturers could re-locate to escape bombing. Amongst these were Cossor which manufactured radar screens and cathode ray tubes. A number of medium sized furniture manufacturers took advantage of the opportunity to leave an industry that was becoming ever more challenging. Those that remained had the challenge of utility furniture of which I wrote in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The fifties saw a change in the way furniture was marketed. Hitherto it had been the wholesalers and large retailers which had controlled what was produced. Parker-Knoll had begun their own consumer advertising and this was followed by Ercol and Gomme. Ercol chose the windsor style chair as their theme. Gomme preferred a series of furniture units which could be added to as required - G-Plan. I write of the further development of the British furniture industry in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The fifties saw consolidation among the furniture companies and the eighties and nineties closures and relocation. Glenisters closed; Gomme moved to Melksham, Parker-Knoll to Chipping Norton and Ercol to Princess Risborough.

At the beginning of this blog I referred to the Bomber Command Operations Centre. This has been written about extensively elsewhere. However the presence of the RAF and a major US Airforce base impacted on the town. Towards the end of the First World War the towns furniture makers who were busy supplying wooden components, set up The Aircraft Manufacturing Company. It came too late to contribute much, but its premises were re-purposed by woodworking tool maker, Broom and Wade, as the factory in which they manufactured pneumatic equipment amongst much else. They became the town's biggest employer and merged with Holman of Cambourne to become International Compressed Air (later Compair) in Slough. Other more recent aircraft related businesses are Springtech which manufactures precision springs, and Sabeti Wain which designs and manufactures aircraft interiors.

Further reading:

• James Rattue, High Wycombe Past (Chichester: Phillimore, 2002)
• L.J. Mayes, The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960)

Luton manufacturing history

 Luton is well known for hat making, cars and lorries and Eric Morecambe's love of the town's football club.

Hat making did of course come first and there are suggestions that the plaiting of straw and the associated making of straw hats dates back many centuries. It was said that the best hats came from Leghorn in Italy and we can once again see the hand of Napoleon in the development of British manufacturing, for Italy fell into the hands of the French and supplies were cut off. It was left to the people of Luton to improve their skills and the quality of the plait, which they did. Luton was protected by prohibitive tariffs during the Napoleonic Wars and to a reducing degree until the mid nineteenth century; in both quality and efficiency Luton could compete with the best.

The industry boomed. It was largely home based with the involvement of the whole family; there were plaiting schools where children would learn the necessary skills and, if they were lucky, also reading and writing. In time the Factory Acts put pay to to this. Luton market was a vital hub providing a place to buy straw and plait and to sell hats. In time the manufacturer/merchant appeared providing straw and collecting hats, in a way similar to Manchester's cotton merchants. Unlike the cotton industry, plaiting and hat making did not benefit from steam power, and mechanisation was limited really to the sewing machine.

Straw hat making was seasonal and in time businesses explored adding felt hat making in the quiet months of the year. Men's felt hats were made particularly in Stockport and Atherstone, but Luton attracted the making of women's felt hats. As with cotton and wool, hat making needed dyers and a number came to the town including Laporte which had originated in Shipley in Yorkshire.

Luton was not well served by communication. The Grand Junction Canal passed it by and a road journey to Leighton Buzzard was required to link to it. It looked as if railways too would pass by, with Luton having to wait until 1858 for a branch line whilst Leighton Buzzard had received their connection in 1838. When they came, the railways did of course attract industries. As well as those connected with hat making, other businesses arrived. Hayward-Tyler made soda-water machinery (soda-syphons) but also hydraulic pumps, and Balmford made boilers. The Davis Gas Stove Company moved from Scotland and became a major employer providing all that was needed for domestic heating systems.

The Luton local authority took the initiative to provide electricity rather than leaving that task to a third party, the hope being that cheaper electricity would result. It was successful and Vauxhall motors moved to Luton from the south bank of the Thames in London in 1905 attracted by the space to expand but also by cheap electricity from the Luton Electric Works which had begun generation in 1901. Vauxhall was followed by Commercial Cars (known later as Commer and part of the Rootes Group) and by George Kent which made meters for measuring the supply of water, gas, steam or oil. The Skefko Ball Bearing Company of Sweden (later known as SKF) set up to provide these essential components for motor vehicles. Electricity was perfect for hat making because it could be supplied to the houses where the makers worked in quantities appropriate to small scale production.

The impact of hat making on Luton was considerable. Len Holden, in his Vauxhall Motors and the Luton Economy 1900-2002, argues that the town's growth was comparable to that of Middlesbrough, Crewe and Barrow -in-Furness which I have written about as being towns created by the nineteenth century railways. Luton did it in hats and then added other industries to give it a more balanced economy and one able to ride out the economic cycle.

Luton played its part on both world wars. In the First World War there was a shell filling factory at Chaul End and the town's engineers turned their hands to the requirements of the war effort with Skefko employing 7,000 workers and Kents 8,000. Interestingly in the Second World War, the Board of Trade had wanted to relocate hat making to Gateshead leaving the town with capacity for the production of armaments. The town rebelled and the Board retreated. None-the-less hat making became a shadow of its former self. Of particular interest to me in the context of my first book, War on Wheels, it was Vauxhall which designed and made the Churchill Tank.

The interwar years saw Electrolux of Sweden set up manufacturing as did the Percival Aircraft Company. After the Second World War English Electric carried out research, development and production of aircraft ice protection industrial heating systems. Clothing manufacturers arrived. It was though Vauxhall which dominated the town. The New Industries Committee, which the town had set up to plan its growth away from hat making, could do little in the face of the decisions of General Motors, the owners of Vauxhall, who wanted to take advantage of the boom in UK motor manufacturing particularly in the sixties. This resulted in Vauxhall being a very large employer with plants also in neighbouring Dunstable and Ellesmere Port in Cheshire.

Like the rest of the British motor industry, indigenous volume car production declined under concerns about industrial relations, pressure from imports and foreign companies invited to set up in the UK. Commercial vehicles bucked the trend but eventually succumbed to consolidation. I write of both in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Further reading:

• James Dyer, Frank Stygall and John Dony, The Story of Luton (Luton: White Crescent Press, 1964)
• Len Holden, Vauxhall Motors and the Luton Economy 1900-2002 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press and the Bedfordshire Historical Records Society, 2003)