Aberdeen manufacturing history

 Granite City, and any visitor will know immediately why Aberdeen is so called. Yet at the start of the nineteenth century this was not the case. Aberdeen like so many towns was built largely of wood. It had enjoyed a degree of prosperity since the twelfth century thanks to its agricultural hinterland. It was ready to move forward.

Communications were not good. In the city the roads were narrow, steep and poor, outside the city they were if anything worse. The saviour came in the shape of the turnpikes which transformed access to the city and inspired the city fathers to take action within the city boundaries. This they did with a revolutionary thrust. Union Street with its 135 ft bridge carved a route right through the decaying wooden dwellings; King Street too. The old and new towns were connected. Thomas Telford was at hand to advise.

These better routes for raw materials and finished goods made the way clear for growth in both woollens and linen; jute was tried but Dundee had bagged that one. The mid nineteenth century saw the cotton areas of Lancashire, the wool of Yorkshire and the linen of Belfast move ahead of the pack largely because of the economies of scale which they could enjoy. Aberdeen slipped back to concentrate on low volume and high quality.

Aberdeen had three paper mills and I wrote of Stoneywood paper mill in my book MacRobert's Reply. It was in the late nineteenth century one of the highest regarded paper mills in the world. It belonged to the Pirie family whose company became part of Wiggins Teape.

Communication improved further with massive work on the harbour which encouraged the building of fine clippers ideal for the long journey to the far east around the cape. The railways followed with a direct route to London in 1849. The city's buildings were replaced with fine granite brought in from the hinterland and cut and polished using an Aberdonian's own invention. The fine streets became lined with fine granite buildings. Even housing for the poor was granite and so much better than the brick back to backs in so many of England's industrial towns. Granite was exported as far as the USA.

Aberdeen's improved harbour proved ideal for trawlers catching herring and, later, white fish. The railways could have a catch in Billingsgate market by the following day. Cattle raised in that hinterland could be sent by rail down to Smithfield. The city began to feed the hungry nation.

The close of the nineteenth century saw further granite building not least the Marichal College

Marichal College

Aberdeen played its part in both world wars and in the second suffered from enemy bombing especially the Aberdeen Blitz of 1943.

In the 1970s Aberdeen became the onshore focus of much north sea oil production. I recall spending time on the audit of American oil drilling companies. One of my friends was designing oil rigs, Kelvin Bray, of whom I write in Vehicles to Vaccines, ran the company manufacturing the gas turbines necessary for the rigs. I explored the story further in Vehicles to Vaccines and found to my disappointment that British manufacturing had not fully exploited the opportunity oil offered. Aberdeen though was a busy and prosperous place.

Visiting recently, the granite city is looking tired with the problems facing so many high streets. However it is now home to British Energy and the move to net zero. It is a city well capable of reinvention and so the opportunity of the green revolution is likely to be grasped with accustomed energy.

Further reading:

Aberdeen in the Nineteenth Century - the Making of a Modern City John S. Smith and David Stevenson (eds.) (Aberdeen University Press, 1988)

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

Edinburgh manufacturing history

 The capital city of Scotland, with access to the sea at the port of Leith, had for centuries a closer relationship with the continent of Europe than with its land neighbour, England. This was particularly evident in Edinburgh’s principal manufacturing activity - the making of books. The first printing press came from France in 1507 when the Scottish king instructed his friend Walter Chepman and Andro Myllar, who had learnt the technique of printing in Rouen, to print the laws of Scotland. Previously Scots writers had been published and printed in Europe. Printing brought paper making and book binding as well as publishing.

The industrialisation of printing created a number of Edinburgh businesses. Oliver & Boyd were the first to combine publishing, printing and book binding in one building. T & A Constable also combined publishing and printing as did James Ballantyne which had a close relationship with Sir Walter Scott. Thomas Nelson at their Parkside Works both made paper and printed. They are now part of Harper-Collins based at Walton on Thames. R & R Clark at Brandon Street printed Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. They are now part of William Thyne whose principal business is packaging.

The Port of Leith was busy and had shipbuilders including Henry Robb, but, in contrast to the Clyde, focussed more on smaller vessels for trawling and whaling. Robbs became part of British Shipbuilders and closed in 1984. Robb became a shareholder in Ringsend Dockyard of Dublin which made similar vessels.

In the mid nineteenth century Lachlan Rose, a ships chandler from Leith, discovered a way to preserve lime juice. He bought a former sugar plantation in Dominica to grow limes and Rose’s Lime Juice reached the world, not least India. Factories were built in St Albans and on Merseyside and further estates were acquired in the Gold Coast. The company was bought by Schweppes in 1955.

Paper making from linen waste picks up Scotland’s largest export much of which was produced in Edinburgh but a good deal more further north in Dundee. Penicuik near Edinburgh was known as the paper making town with its first mill founded in the eighteenth century. An Edinburgh engineer, Bertrams of Sciennes, manufactured paper making machinery. Other engineering companies supported shipbuilding focused on Leith and more general engineering.

Cotton, which had started in the country with Scotland's first mill also at Penicuik, was important for Edinburgh but it spread throughout Scotland so to Dumfriesshire, Stirlingshire, Aberdeenshire and Perthshire using water power. The steam engine changed all this, with a migration to the coal rich areas around Glasgow and Paisley.

The wool industry in Scotland was truly a cottage industry with knitters, spinners and weavers in many counties. Edinburgh played a large part in fine cloth and also carpets. New Mills at nearby Haddington was formed in the late seventeenth century to boost Scotland's cloth production. At one time it employed 700 people carry on all the constituent tasks in woollen cloth manufacture, but all were done by hand except for fulling where a mill was driven by the local river. Gradually the mechanised industry spread to the the towns and villages to the south, so Galashiels and Hawick whose framework knitting production accounted for one eighth of British knitted hosiery. Edinburgh does lay claim to the first Paisley shawls.

The production of tartan became a serious industry following the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822 when Sir Walter Scott made much of Highland tradition. A number of Edinburgh mills joined in production but now the main producers of tartan cloth are Lochcarron Mills and Harris Tweed Hebrides. Marton Mills of Wharfdale in Yorkshire also include tartan in their range. For the other famous Scots cloth, tweed, it is necessary to visit the isles of Harris and Lewis.

Edinburgh was also near to coal reserves and so coal mines were sunk near to the city. Coal was used to produce glass which became another Edinburgh industry. It began with green bottle glass, but then advanced into crown glass for windows and fine glass for cutting - the famous Edinburgh Crystal. The company, Edinburgh and Leith Flint Glass was bought by Webb Corbett of Stourbridge in 1921. The company turned its production to the war effort in both world wars, and in the Second produced cathode ray tubes for radar.

Coal was also used to smelt iron ore, for example at the Cramond Iron works run by the Cadell family which had been joint founders the Carron works in Falkirk. Thomas Edington became manager of the Cramond works in 1765 and married Christian Cadell seven years later. Edington and the Cadells then looked to Glasgow for supplies of pig iron to replaced the existing imported supplies.

The mid nineteenth century saw the foundation of the Scottish Vulcanite Company. Vulcanite was a hard form of rubber invented by Charles Goodyear in 1839 but patented in England in 1844 by Thomas Hancock of Charles Mackintosh of Manchester. Goodyear obtained his Scottish patent in 1843 and a licence was taken by the American Norris & Co to begin manufacture in Edinburgh. This started with four Norris employees from New York coming to Edinburgh to teach the necessary skills to the local workforce. They went on to boot and shoe production and then tyres for steam traction engines. The company became the North British Rubber Company and went on to produce car tyres (renamed Uniroyal) and boots (renamed Hunter Boots). The original Fountainbridge plant closed in the sixties with the opening of a Uniroyal plant at Newbridge. Boot and shoe manufacture moved to Dumfries and production was transferred abroad in 2008.

During the Second World War, Ferranti viewed their manufacturing base in Manchester as vulnerable to air attack and so moved some activities to Scotland. Ferranti made military electronic systems at Crewe Toll, inertial systems and cockpit displays at Silverknowes and Electro-optic systems at Robertson Avenue. The company was employing 5,000 people in Edinburgh by 1963 as the city's largest employer. Electronics probably transformed Edinburgh; other electronics companies followed Ferranti's lead. Much later, Amazon set up their only software development centre outside the USA and Rock Star computer games are created here. I write about Ferranti's latter days in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Glaxo had a presence in the city through their purchase of Edinburgh Pharmaceutical Industries.

Further reading:

• Christopher A. Whatley, The Industrial Revolution in Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
• Albert Mackie, An Industrial History of Edinburgh (Glasgow: McKenzie, Vincent & Co, 1963)

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

Falkirk manufacturing history

 In 1759, William Cadell in partnership with Dr John Roebuck and Samuel Garbett founded the Falkirk Iron Works with his son also William as general manager until 1769. A year later, the business changed its name to the Carron Company and the Cadells swapped their holding in Carron for the Cramond Works in Edinburgh. (I continue this aspect of the story in my blog on Edinburgh).

The first blast furnace at Carron came into production on the day following Christmas in 1760 and a second a year later. Dr Roebuck, who seems to have been the driving force, won from the Board of Ordnance a contract to cast cannon for the Royal Navy. Hitherto guns had been cast in the iron works of the Weald but the advances made by the introduction of the blast furnace and then Abraham Darby's invention of the use of coal to smelt iron ore opened the field to newcomers. Darby himself as a Quaker would not bid and the contract came to Scotland. It seems that the guns turned out to be of insufficient quality and the contract was lost, I suspect to foundries at Moorfields in London, where guns were cast before the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich took over in the nineteenth century. Roebuck was a distinguished engineer and had developed a process for the production of sulphuric acid. This, I suspect, had brought him into contact with the Board of Ordnance.

Carron were an integrated business with both iron and coal. They had a deep coal mine that was flooded and so needed a steam engine capable of pumping water from a greater depth than the Newcomen engine could achieve. Dr Roebuck heard of James Watt's experiments with steam engines and provided financial backing with a view to having his mine pumped free of water. Watt struggled with his health, but also with the design of the better engine, finding time and again that practice simply did not match theory. Eventually Roebuck's money ran out and Watt was left with his idea and a prototype that didn't yet work. The story then moves to Birmingham, the Soho Works and Matthew Boulton. The very brief account is taken from the very engaging book Lives of Boulton & Watt by the nineteenth century author Samuel Smiles.

The Carron iron works became something of a hot bed of invention. Henry Cort visited, as did John Seaton the civil engineer. The business of gun casting continued in spite of the lack of orders from the Board of Ordnance and a new gun effective at close range, the Carronade, was invented and eventually supplied to the Royal Navy.

The Carron business continued to develop into steel and remained a producer until receivership in 1982. At one time it cast pillar boxes for the Post Office. The name though continues in a number of related products.

Falkirk was also home to bus builder Alexander Dennis. The company now building buses for the net zero world may move all production to England (Guildford)

To mark the millennium a remarkable lifting bridge (shown in the image) was built to connect the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal.

Further reading:

• https://falkirklocalhistory.club/around-the-area/industry/ironfounding/carron-ironworks/carron-company/
• Samuel Smiles, the Lives of Boulton and Watt (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2007 first published 1865)
• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)

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