Runcorn and Widnes manufacturing history

 These towns facing each other over the Mersey share an industrial history of chemicals manufacturing. They were joined by a transporter bridge in 1905 which was replaced by the arched Jubilee Bridge in 1961.

The opening of the Bridgewater canal in 1776 kick started industry in Runcorn. Two large soap and alkali works (Hazlehurst and the Runcorn Soap and Alkali Company) were destined to grow throughout the nineteenth century, particularly with advances in science in mid century. Proximity to the sea and canals encouraged shipbuilding and the presence of minerals underground enabled lead and copper mining.

The opening of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1895 further improved the connectivity of the town and the Castner-Kellner company (which later became part of ICI) began using the electrolytic process from which both caustic soda, bleaching powder, chlorine and hydrogen were extracted. The Hazlehurst soap business was bought by United Alkali, of which I say more below, who then sold to Lever Brothers (later Unilever) adding to their soap business. The town became home to British Dyestuffs also later part of ICI which located the headquarters of their Mond heavy chemicals division there.

ICI's Fluor produced fluorocarbons, used as refrigerants in air-conditioning systems in cars and homes, at sites in Runcorn, Japan and Louisiana. The company's Chlor's Runcorn site dated back to 1800s and the first industrial production of chlorine. Since then, regulations had tightened and the market had wilted, leaving a plant full of ageing and poorly maintained equipment. One comparison is quite eye opening. Its enormous cell room took as much electricity as the whole city of Liverpool. Both companies together with Crosfield of Warrington were bought by Ineos.

A river, a ford and a sunny south slope were the attractions of the place that became Widnes. What was a pretty village came to be a major chemical town through the initiative of John Hutchinson when the cost became prohibitive of taking raw materials (salt) from Northwich in Cheshire to St Helens where there was coal to produce soda and the potassium chlorate and bleaching powder. Widnes had local supplies of coal, easier access to the Cheshire salt fields abundant land and good communications by canal and railway. Hutchinson was joined by Gossage, making washing soda by the Leblanc process, and it was not long before huge amounts of sulphur infested chemical waste was being dumped on the Widnes wet lands. It was a German immigrant Ludwig Mond, a friend of John Brunner who worked with Hutchinson, who discovered a process capable of removing half of the waste sulphur. Soon this was widely adopted. Henry Deacon who had been working with Hutchinson formed a partnership with Gaskell to make sulphuric acid and ammonia soda used in the less polluting Solvay process with a bi-product of calcium chloride.

The pollution from the chemical works combined with inadequate sanitation led to Wides being called 'the dirtiest ugliest town in England'. The growth in population was boosted by immigration from Ireland of people fleeing the famine. The poor living conditions led to men seeking solace in alcohol and the town gained bad reputation which disappeared into memory as the town was improved.

United Alkali was formed by the merger of forty-eight alkali producers including fourteen from Widnes with the remainder based in St Helens, Tyneside, Scotland and Ireland. Old polluting plants were closed. United Alkali became part of ICI. Brunner and Mond joined together in 1873 but at Winnington near Northwich in Cheshire producing soda-ash for the cotton industry also using the ammonia soda process.

In Wides, John William Towers joined Hutchinson's laboratory in 1872. He then joined the Atlas Chemical Works set up by James Hargreaves and Thomas Robinson to exploit the salt-cake process and Towers went on to produce scientific apparatus for the chemical industry. Further chemical companies set up plants: Alumina Ltd, Peter Spence & Sons and Barium Chemicals. I write more about the consolidation of the chemical industry in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Andrew Poulson came from Wigan in 1869 to the Widnes foundry and took charge of the moulding department producing cast iron pillars which were used in pier construction amongst others, and segments for lining the London underground. The town, like others around, had copper foundries including Thomas Bolton's Mersey Copper Works producing copper rods and plates for locomotives and also rollers for calico printing; later it would supply the electrical industry. British Insulated and Helsby Cables was nearby and became part of BICC. High Speed Alloys was established in the town to produce special grades of steel, it was part of a merger of some eighteen similar businesses. Bell's Poilite and Everite Company manufactured asbestos cement of corrugated roofing.

The First World War made great demands on the chemical manufacturers and iron and steel works, the latter including for masts for Marconi Radio. The twenties saw consolidation of the chemical industry with the formation of ICI. Albright & Wilson set up on the site of the former Musgrave Works and Fisons took control of Vickers Fertiliser.

In the Second World War the Central Laboratory in Widnes carried out research into Uranium in support of the nuclear bomb project. The production of artificial rubber for insulation was undertaken and the metal works made Bailey Bridges.

In the post war world, Widnes industries focused on chemicals, asbestos and gelatine for sweets,

Runcorn was designated a New Town in 1964 and attracted General Motors which then closed in 1991, Sigmatex (carbon fibre textiles) Héroux-Devtek (aircraft landing gear), Whitford (speciality coatings), Teva (pharmaceuticals), and Fresenius Kabi (medical products). Diageo also maintains a packaging plant in Runcorn. Runcorn and Widnes became part of Halton Borough Council in 1974.

Further reading:

• https://www.millbank.com/blog/chemicals-north-west-past-present-future
• Charles Nickson, History of Runcorn (London: Mackie and Co, 1887)
• George E. Diggle, A History of Widnes (Corporation of Wides, 1961)

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World 

Camborne and Redruth manufacturing history - Cornish Mining

 Mining in this central part of Cornwall had been going on long before the Christian era with miners from what would become northwest France. There is evidence of the use of Cornish tin on bronze found in the Mediterranean exported from St Michael's Mount. The image is of early mining in northwest Cornwall.

The eighteenth century saw an acceleration in mining with the coming of the industrial revolution.

'The spot we are at is the most disagreeable in the whole county. The face of the earth is broken up in ten thousand heaps of rubbish, and there is scarce a tree to be seen.'

So wrote Mrs Watt to Mrs Boulton in 1777 when her husband was supervising the installation of one of his steam engines to pump water from a mine that was becoming inoperable. Samuel Smiles wrote of this in his contemporary account of Boulton & Watt noting that the engineer faced technical challenges, but also stubborn resistance from the Cornish. I explored in my post on St Austell the issue of mines flooded with water.

Another challenge for the mines was that of transporting ore from the rock face to places where it could be smelted. Here Janet Thomas, in her book The Wheels Went Round - the Story of Camborne Town, brings in the name Trevithick. By 1803 he had designed a tram engine which was being used in Wales and was introduced to transport ore between Portreath and Poldice. Trevithick also provided machinery for lifting the ore to to the mouth of the mine.

The area between Redruth and Camborne had from early times concentrated on the mining of copper, and production increased as, in the eighteenth century, the industrial revolution got underway. The metal workers of Birmingham were demanding more and more copper and the mine owners were all too happy to oblige. As elsewhere in the revolution, the workers missed out on good fortune and suffered dreadful working conditions and poverty for their families. Mechanisation into the nineteenth century went a small way to improve their lot with better ventilation and dust suppression of which I write more below. The first part of the nineteenth century saw a boom in production and by mid century Cornwall was supplying three quarters of the copper used in the world and half of the tin. This was big business.

In Redruth, William Murdock worked at supervising the installation of Boulton & Watt steam engines. In the evenings he experimented with the use of gas emitted from coal. He discovered that it could produce a bright light and from that he devised a scheme whereby his house could be lit by this gas. This demonstration convinced his employers of the viability of the process and he was commissioned to install gas lighting in their Soho works in Birmingham.

In Camborne, it was the Holman brothers which established a business in 1839 with a foundry capable of repairing massive beam engines. There followed a dust suppressing drill delivering a water spray to the drill bit; this became known as the Cornish Rock Drill. In the late nineteenth century they were manufacturing beam engines and by the twentieth century added compressors, pumping and winding engines; electricity took over from steam power. In its heyday, they were employing 3,000 men and women in Camborne and taking on 100 apprentices each year. The Camborne School of Mines was founded in 1888.

Notwithstanding technical developments, the world was not moving in Cornwall's favour, with better mining prospects, not so much gold in California, but copper in South Australia and Lead in Illinois. This triggered emigration of miners and their families and ensured that Cornish accents were heard wherever mines were being sunk.

For Holmans, the spread of mining to other parts of the world very simply meant first exports and then the establishment of Holman plants overseas. In 1961 the company had 2,500 employees and seven years later, under the encouragement of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, merged with Broom & Wade of High Wycombe to become International Compressed Air, later CompAir with headquarters in Slough.

South Crofty mine is being redeveloped by Cornish Metals.

Further reading:

• Janet Thomas, The Wheels Went Round - the Story of Camborne Town (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran,1987)
• Samuel Smiles, Lives of Boulton & Watt (Stoud: Nonsuch Publishing, 2007 originally published 1865)
• https://cornishstory.com/2021/02/10/holman-echoes-of-an-age/

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World 

St Austell manufacturing history

 St Austell on the south coast of Cornwall nestled among the mountains of the moon, or so it looked from the back of my mum's cottage. This belay a far more muscular past; St Austell with other parts of Cornwall provided the raw material for much of Britain's industrial revolution. The mountains were of course spoil heaps from china clay extraction; much earlier the mounds would be the waste from tin and copper mining. There is evidence of tin and copper working in Cornwall from the Bronze Age; not unreasonable given that bronze is an alloy of the two metals.

Early tin mining in Cornwall was near the surface and never below a level at which a build up of water in the mine could not drain into the sea. In time attempts were made to pump water using water wheels and so enabling deeper digging. The mines would sometimes run out under the sea and miners told stories of hearing the sound of waves above them.

Queen Elizabeth I introduced German miners to work new copper mines and George I encouraged more Germans given their experience of working in deep mines with hard rock.

Thomas Newcomen made the vital breakthrough of the invention of the atmospheric steam powered pump which meant that mines could go even deeper. The first was introduced into the Polgooth mine near St Austell which at one time employed 2,000 people. Mine owner, Charles Rashleigh, built the harbour at Charlestown enabling the shipping of copper ore to be smelted in South Wales. Tin was smelted locally.

The steam engines of Boulton and Watt were introduced to reduce costs as the price of tin and copper fell. I write more about these in my blog on Camborne. There were boom times - 1856-1864 for tin, but by the end of the century other countries were undercutting Cornish produce and miners emigrated in large numbers to mineral rich places including India.

For St Austell, the existing trade of mining kaolin was to restore prosperity and prolong it for a good number of decades. The Chinese had for a thousand years or more manufactured porcelain of a whiteness and hardness far superior to any English pottery. The secret to their process was closely guarded until Marco Polo brought details back to Europe. In Cornwall it was a Kingsbridge chemist by the name of Cookworthy who in 1746 found clay and and stone deposits near St Austell and an industry was born. Josiah Wedgwood experimented with a Watt steam engine to extract the kaolin by means of pumping water and then sieving and drying. Wedgwood was joined by Minton and Spode in acquiring interests in china clay and stone setts. In time a large number of small concerns were busily occupied in supplying a market hungry for porcelain.

As was the way with industrialisation, small concerns joined others to become bigger, culminating in 1919 with the formation of English China Clays. By this time science had made its presence felt and more advanced technology was introduced: electricity in place of steam, centrifugal pumps and power hoses. The port of Par had been built and enabled the export of a million tonnes a year. The production of kaolin leaves a residue of fine sand which can either be dumped or used. ECC bought two companies which became Selleck Nichols and Williams which manufactured prefabricated industrial buildings from precast concrete using the waste sand. Kaolin wasn't only being used for making porcelain, it was part of paper making and an illicit use was to whiten flour.

In 1999 English China Clays was bought by the French Imerys which now has interests in other extractive industries across the UK:

• Kaolin is still produced in Cornwall with a reserach laboratory at Par
• Ball clay is extracted in Devon around Newton Abbot and Wareham in Dorset
• Calcium carbonate is extracted at Stoke on Trent, Lostock in Cheshire and Beverley in Yorkshire
• Calcium aluminate is extracted at Thurrock in Kent

Further reading:

Cyril Bunn, The Book of St Austell (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1978)

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World