Portsmouth manufacturing history

 Portsmouth was one of the earliest homes of naval shipbuilding; there is some evidence that Richard the Lionheart's ships taking him on the crusades were built there. Henry VII commissioned the first dry dock in 1495. The Mary Rose was built there as Henry VIII amassed galleons to keep up with the Spanish and Portuguese.

It wasn't only naval shipping, Portsmouth's ships travelled the globe with particular emphasis on trading in spices so much so that a part of the dock area became known as spice island.

Towns which were home to naval dockyards boomed in times of war, but when peace came so did unemployment and poverty. Yet war was never far away, especially with the French who posed a constant threat. In the years following the restoration of the monarchy, in 1665 Sir Bernard de Gomme, Engineer in Chief of all the King's castles reviewed coastal defences and began a fifty year programme in Portsmouth for the defence of the crucially important dockyard. In spite of all this civil engineering, shipbuilding continued notably with the 100 gun Britannia.

Naval harbours were also changing as a result of penal policy. The number of offences punishable by transportation increased with convict numbers beyond the capacity of penal colonies and so prison hulks became a feature in many harbours over filled with inmates in appalling conditions. The first fleet for Australia left in 1787 and began to relieve the pressure just in time to the renewed pressure of war from the French Republic.

Portsmouth, at the time of the Napoleonic wars, was home to naval shipbuilding on a massive scale. There were woodworking shops powered by steam, including engines from Boulton and Watt. Marc Isambard Brunel invented machines for making the thousands of pulley blocks that the navy needed. He collaborated with Henry Maudslay who made the machine tools required. It was a huge enterprise that dominated the town. It was the first example of mass production in Britain.

We need to take a step back to understand what was happening. Naval shipbuilding was an ancient trade in which old habits died hard. Sawyers were protective of their back breaking work in the saw pit even though in other countries water powered sawmills were gaining popularity. Small businesses supplying largely hand made pulley blocks were equally protective of their lucrative contracts. The navy's demands were huge and change was needed. The right man at the right time was Samuel Bentham, the brother of the political economist and prison reformer Jeremy Bentham. Samuel was put in charge of the dock yard and set about radical changes.

1840 saw the French employ steam power for their battleships and Portsmouth needed to follow suite. A separate area was set aside and the necessary skills recruited. I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the transition to iron and steel hulls propelled by steam power.

With the navy and military the overwhelmingly dominant employer, its importance is underlined by the growth in population from 30,000 in 1801 to 260,000 in 1931.

Portsmouth docks served the Royal Navy in two world wars. In 1905 the yard launched the Dreadnaught which rendered obsolete the capital ships of the world's navies. It went on to launch one of the largest ships ever built in Portsmouth at 27,500 tons the Queen Elizabeth and the 25,000 ton Iron Duke in 1914. In recent years the building and maintenance of naval ships has fallen more and more to the private sector in companies such as Babcock International and BAE Systems Marine.

Employment in naval activity declined from some 22,000 in 1945 to 6,500 in 1985. Nevertheless, Portsmouth has attracted other major employers. Top of the list must come IBM with their UK Headquarters but followed by the Inland Revenue computer centre, the Board of Trade and Zurich Insurance.

Further reading:

James Cramer, The Book of Portsmouth (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1985)

Reading manufacturing history

 Reading enjoyed the twin advantages of being in a fertile agricultural county and being positioned on major lines of communication. It was on the river Thames and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was linked by canals to the Midlands and the West Country; the image is of a lock in the Kennet and Avon canal. Importantly Reading was on the main road route from London to Bristol when the latter was booming with overseas trade.

Links provided the people of Reading with metal products from Birmingham, pottery from Staffordshire, groceries from London and stone from Bath.

It had been a cloth producing town, but this industry had gravitated to those areas whose natural and commercial resources best favoured it. Fortunately for Reading, London was growing quickly with a thirsty population preferring beer to polluted water. Reading provided tons of malt using water transport.

For a town far from the sea, it was perhaps surprising that a Reading firm supplied the navy with the sail cloth it needed to fight the Napoleonic wars. Musgrave Lamb in Katesgrove Lane played a key part of winning the battle of Trafalgar.

Malt provided the impetus for the industry for which Reading would become famous the world over. Joseph Huntley used money made from malting to set up his biscuit shop using local flour. Later, his son, also Joseph, set up Huntley Boorne & Stevens making tins in which to sell the biscuits in prime condition. It was Joseph's other son, Thomas, who persevered with the biscuit shop.

The coming of the railways in 1840 further improved communications. One year later Thomas Huntley took his cousin George Palmer into partnership. Palmer's focus was on the mechanisation of biscuit making. This was far from straight forward and cost the young business dearly.

Biscuit making was viewed as a lowly craft with hard, barely edible ships biscuits being made by small bakers close to ports. Fancy biscuits for home consumption were again made by bakers, whose main business was bread. The advent of the Napoleonic wars put pressure on the makers of ships biscuits. The three main naval ports of Plymouth, Deptford and Gosport had their own victualling yards which now embraced biscuit making. At the Clarence yard in Gosport, advances were made in introducing machinery, yet worker resistance was such that only very small steps were possible. After the wars further advances were made but anything like continuous production was a long way off.

Continuous production was George Palmer's goal and he worked on this with a local machine manufacturer, William Exzall. Eventually the problem was solved and machinery was installed in a former silk mill close by the Thames and Kennet and Avon canal. The challenge then was to expand the market which was then only local towns. Advertising and the use of sales agents was the route chosen until full time travelling salesmen could be employed. The invention of a process to print images and patterns directly onto tins cemented the image of the company in the minds of the buying public.

It was almost a game of leapfrog. New customers were found and capacity was utilised, but then demand leapt ahead and production had to catch up. One area of the process that was still manual was the loading of the ovens; what was needed were ovens through which a conveyor could pass carrying the biscuits. Such a mechanism had been tried by the American navy. Palmer found the perfect ovens for his purposes through two London companies: A.M. Perkins and Joseph Baker. These companies would later merge to become Baker Perkins of Peterborough. In Reading, Huntley and Palmer were the dominant employer and took advantage of this by offering meagre wages. The two world wars brought manpower pressures and wages had responded, however the company remained a low pay employer until well into the twentieth century when union action brought pressure to bear.

When Thomas Huntley died, George went in to partnership with his brothers, William who ran the factory and Samuel, based in London, who sold to that ever expanding market as well as managing exports. Biscuits were now part of the nation's diet. Railway journeys were nourished by biscuits, until dining cars appeared. Other biscuit manufacturers emerged including Carrs and Peak Frean with whom Huntley and Palmer would later enjoy a more formal relationship in Associated Biscuits. The Reading factory was further enlarged. The next generation of Palmers joined the business which was incorporated as a limited company on 29 March 1898. It was still very much a family affair with the shares split between George's descendants and those of Samuel; William died a bachelor. It then employed 5,000 people. Management continued as before with family members in charge and an understanding that, depending on the time of year, the chairman would spend three days a week hunting, shooting or playing cricket. Money for the business was spent only when there was no alternative. Machines were repaired rather than being replaced with more up to date technology. Unfortunately competitors took a rather different attitude.

The twentieth century saw the company serve its country in two world wars, suffer in the depression, face competition from other biscuit makers and retailers’ own brands; nevertheless it did prosper in the fifties. Associated Biscuits was eventually bought by Nabisco. I write of United Biscuits, Associated's great rival in Vehicles to Vaccines.

But back to Reading in the 19th century. Not all the malt produced in the town left for London; local brewers met the needs of the local population, or rather they didn't. The suggestion is that they worked in a cartel keeping the quality of beer low but cheap to make. William Simonds broke ranks and his brewery became highly successful using latest technology and chemistry to improve the product. Simonds merged with Courage and Barclay in 1960.

In common with many towns in agricultural areas, Reading manufactured farm machinery. The company emerged from Reading Iron works, was successful for many decades but closed in 1887. The mantel was taken up by George Gascoigne in the twenties in his milking machine business. The agricultural theme is taken up by Sutton's seeds. The nineteenth century saw an increase in farming but also in households with gardens; all these needed seeds. Martin Hope Sutton took advantage of this and the Penny Post to circulate catalogues and then the fast improving rail service for speedy delivery of the seeds.

In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is Reading's communications but in particular its proximity to Heathrow which has grown its economy. It is now boasts Microsoft, Cisco, Ericsson, Apple and Proctor and Gamble.

Further reading:

• Malcolm Petyt (ed.) The Growth of Reading (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993)
• T.A.B. Corley, Quaker Enterprise in Biscuits - Huntley and Palmers of Reading - 1822-1972 (London: Hutchinson, 1972)

Milton Keynes manufacturing history

 'Pooleyville', the nickname for the North Bucks New City was derived from the man who brainchild it was, the then Chief Architect and Planner for Buckinghamshire County Council, Frederick Pooley. Pooley was keenly aware of the developments in architectural thinking and also the experience of new towns in Britain: the shifts from the garden city movement to places to house those made homeless by the destruction of the Second World War. New towns were to have a balance of residential and employment accommodation as well as community facilities. By the sixties further challenges needed to be met. London and the South East were becoming over populated and so new towns had to be further away albeit accessible. The motor car, which was providing freedom and employment for many, was becoming a major headache in urban areas. Towns had to be designed to accommodate the motor car without being dominated by it.

Pooley's vision was for fifty neighbourhoods of five thousand people placed around four loops enclosing open space. The line of the loops would be marked by monorail track providing free public transport accessible by all residents. Industrial areas would be to the north and south.

Pooley's vision didn't survive the politics of London centric planners or the laissez faire of the Thatcher era during which later parts were built. Nevertheless the city did become a balanced community of manual and non-manual workers, living in neighbourhoods demarcated by a grid of dual carriage way roads sandwiched between linear park land with foot paths, bridle paths and cycle ways. Areas of employment were close to residential areas and all with abundant green space and literally millions of trees. There are lakes and woodland for recreation.

Milton Keynes embraces Newport Pagnell to the north and Bletchley to the south. The Grand Union Canal meanders through it, the MI runs down the eastern side and the A5 dissects it. The London to Birmingham railway perhaps gave it birth, as the village of Wolverton now within Milton Keynes was selected at the site for the railway workshops. In ways similar to Crewe and Swindon a community grew around Wolverton and is now evidenced by rows of victorian cottages amongst the twentieth century architecture of the city.

This is though a blog about manufacturing. The first large foreign companies to come were Alps Electric, Coca Cola, Mobil and Volkswagon. UK business brought Abbey National, Argos and the Open University. The days of large manufacturing units were coming to an end. In 2000, Milton Keynes was home to 4,500 companies most employing fewer than twenty people and there was a mix between manufacturing and the service sector.

Today the city's own website highlights Red Bull Racing; other websites pick out Lockhead Martin at nearby Ampthill and Unilever Research at Sharnbrook, both of which are closer to Bedford. Milton Keynes finds itself within what is known as Motorsport Valley stretching south of Birmingham through Oxfordshire. As well as Red Bull in Milton Keynes, there is Banbury with Haas, Brackley with Mercedes and Wantage with Williams. There is then a large cluster of specialist motor sport suppliers at Silverstone Industrial Park close to the racing circuit.

The overriding story about manufacturing in Milton Keynes is that it is about small and medium sized enterprises, with a strong bias towards technology in a community where knowledge is shared for mutual benefit.

Further reading:

• Mark Clapson, A Social history of Milton Keynes
• ORTOLANO, GUY. “PLANNING THE URBAN FUTURE IN 1960s BRITAIN.” The Historical Journal, vol. 54, no. 2, 2011, pp. 477–507. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23017981. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.