Rugby manufacturing history

 Home to Rugby Portland Cement, a famous school and a wonderful game.

The London Birmingham railway arrived in 1838 and set up goods yards and workshops around which grew small engineering works.

Willans & Robinson (later part of English Electric and then GEC) an engineering company which moved from Thames Ditton was attracted by the skills of Rugby’s railway engineers. The company used their steam turbine engines for electricity generation at the Coventry Ordnance Works.

More importantly it was the place British Thomson-Houston (BTH) chose for their first UK factory. Thomson Houston was one of the major American electrical engineers which had merged with the pioneering Thomas Edison in 1892 and became General Electric (GE). I write of them in my blog on the American Electricity Industry. They viewed the British market as attractive and set up in 1900 to compete with their major rival Westinghouse which had set up in Trafford Park in Manchester in 1897. The Rugby site began with the manufacture of incandescent light bulbs but to this was added heavy electrical engineering as more and more areas of the UK sought electrical generation.

BTH was later part of AEI and then GEC which had a major presence in the town. GEC Turbine Generators, GEC Machines and parts of GEC-Elliott instruments were all in Rugby.

The Rugby railway story continued in 1937 when Sir Nigel Gresley proposed a Railway Locomotive Testing Station funded jointly by LNER and LMS. The war delayed its opening until 1948 and then it supported the development of the railways until the final test in 1965. The building was then used for railway research until demolition in 1984. Rail research continued in Derby.

One of Britvic main manufacturing plants is here.

Continuing the engineering legacy, Technoset precision engineering is but one example of what Britain is doing so well.

In 1824, a Leeds stonemason, Joseph Aspdin, invented a method of making from limestone and clay a cement which he called Portland Cement given the similarity in colour between it and Portland stone. The Rugby Portland company was founded in 1862 and continues to produce in Rugby. It is now owned by the Mexican Cemex. It is one of the British companies to have been sold to foreign owners.

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

Chiddingfold and British glass making

 Glass makers in the area of Sussex surrounding Chiddingfofd took advantage of the wood available in the Weald, the sand under foot and the bracken growing each spring to borrow making skills from France and produced the glass needed for the great English cathedrals in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They were not alone for there is evidence of glass making in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Staffordshire and Essex.

The next push came in sixteenth century with the arrival of Huguenots from Lorraine and Normandy fleeing persecution. The key entrepreneur was Jean Carre from Antwerp, which was then a major glass producer nearly on a par with Venice. In the petition to protect his patent, the evidence was that English glass making had fallen into bad ways with no window glass and only rough objects being made. Although there were 'glasses', drinking vessels continued to be made of wood, horn or leather well into the eighteenth century. British glass was facing stiff competition from Venice where clearer and more finely designed pieces were being made. Carre's assistant, who took over the business when his master died, and further refugees from Lorraine succeeded in rejuvenating Wealden glass making.

S.E. Winbolt in his book on Wealden Glass offers a helpful description of the making of window glass. Glass on a blow iron would be spun in a pit into a large disc which would then be cut into diamond shaped panes around a central circle 'bull's eye' with the pontil mark in the centre. The diamond shaped panes would be held in place by leaded strips to created a window (as in the image). English glass makers also made muff glass whereby a cylinder of glass is blown and then cut and spread flat in the furnace to create a sheet.

The denuding of the forests in the reign of Elizabeth I was causing shortages of timber for shipbuilders and glass making had to take second place to iron smelting. The glass makers of Surrey and Sussex were predominantly of French dissent and their use of English wood to make glass, instead of forging iron caused anti-immigrant feeling. The result was that glass makers moved west and settled first in Hampshire before moving on to find fresh supplies of wood and new customers in Gloucestershire.

At this point a story I refer to in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World kicks in, as Sir Robert Mansell worked at finding ways of using coal to melt glass as Dud Dudley was seeking the same for smelting iron ore. When eventual trial and error resulted in success, the glass makers sought coal rather than wood and moved first to Stourbridge and then to Newcastle on Tyne and Sunderland.

The British Cast Plate Glass Company was founded in St Helens in the eighteenth century taking advantage of the availability of raw materials and the skills of immigrant makers. George Ravenscroft had made a number of inventions including the use of lead which resulted in clearer glass. Pilkington at St Helens would become the major British glass producer, alongside Chance Brothers in Birmingham and London makers including Whitefriars. At the same time fine glass was made in Stourbridge with Webb Corbett and Stuart Crystal, and Royal Brierley and Dartington. Today the studio glass movement has taken up the mantle with makers all round the country.

The story of glass making is now celebrated in both Stourbridge and Sunderland.

Further reading:

S.E. Winbolt, Wealden Glass - The Surrey-Sussex Glass Industry

I am grateful also to my glass designer maker wife, Maggie Williams, for her input,

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

Ripley manufacturing history

 In Derbyshire's Amber Valley in the 1790s, three Derbyshire men came together to create what would become the world's first industrial complex: a young surveyor from Alfreton, Benjamin Outran, Francis Beresford a land owned from Ashbourne, William Jessop a canal engineer and John Wright, a Nottingham banker.

With the benefit of local coal and iron, the Butterley company produced substantial iron structures; wrought iron made at their Codnor Park works was used on Telford’s Menai Straights Bridge and on Brunel’s SS. Great Britain steam ship. As well as exports of coal and pig iron, the company produced steam engines which were used in the drainage schemes for the Fens.

William Jessop was responsible for one of the most intriguing features, an underground wharf. Jessop and Outran built the Cromford canal from Arkwright's textile factory in Cromford down to the Erewash canal and onto the River Trent and the canal network. The wharf was used by the Butterley company whose first blast furnace was close by. The canal would carry Arkwright's manufactures as well as coal, pig iron and Butterley manufactures.

In 1861 Sir John Alleyne, employed as chief engineer, began the mechanisation of steel rolling mills enabling heavy pieces to be made. This process produced the massive beams supporting the roof of St Pancras station. He conceived but did not perfect the reversing mill; this was left to John Ramsbottom at the Crewe railway works.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Butterley employed 10,000 people leading to the prosperity of Ripley. Towards the end of its life the company they produced the Falkirk Wheel and the Spinnaker Tower at Portsmouth (in the image).

Brick making was a natural partner to coal mining and the company produced bricks to meet their own needs. They built accommodation for their employees in neighbouring villages. In the twentieth century, brick making became more serious and new works were built at Kirkby and Ollerton. Brick production reached 28 million in 1936. Further plants were added in Derbyshire and Leicestershire allowing a wider range of bricks to be offered. The company was bought by Hanson in 1968.

Further reading

• https://www.rdht.org.uk/
• Stuart Fisher, Canals of Britain (London: Adlard Coles Nautical, 2009)
• W.K.V. Gale, Iron and Steel (London: Longmans, 1969)

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