Oldham manufacturing history

 Oldham was one of the Lancashire cotton towns but the story of Oldham is perhaps a little different to that of Preston with the advantage the town took of the Joint Stock company following the passing of the Limited Liability Acts. These were intended to encourage third party investment in businesses, but in Oldham they were used to encourage the participation of the workforce in the company for which they worked. In his book Oldham Past and Present, James Middleton suggests that the idea ‘prevails more in books than in practice’, yet there were examples of mill companies being owned in this way, the Sun Mill of 1860 being just one.

For Oldham the ending of the American Civil War sparked what is termed the ‘floating mania’ as dozens of companies where formed with investment from all sections of their stakeholders. Writing in 1903, Middleton gives some figures: in the Oldham district 270 cotton mills containing twelve and a half million spindles and eighteen thousand looms. These mills absorbed about one quarter of all the cotton imported into the country. Oldham’s proficiency at spinning fine yarn was such that the cotton industry in Burnley focused on weaving, buying in yarn from Oldham.

Oldham had other skills. Iron founders, Platt Brothers moved their focus on to wool and cotton spinning and weaving machinery. They also produced machinery for the weaving of carpets.

In the 1920s, the cotton market contracted and with it the demand for textile machinery. There were six significant manufacturers, Platt Brothers and Asa Lees of Oldham, Brooks and Doxey and Hetherington of Manchester, Howard and Bullough of Accrington and Dobson Barlow of Bolton. These firms merged into Textile Machinery Makers which eventually became a division of the machinery company Stone-Platt. The company made shells during the Second World War also training some 8,000 people for employment elsewhere. This company was broken up in 1982.

Ferranti moved his electrical engineering works to Hollinwood in Oldham, and, in 1897, employed seven hundred people. The company produced all that was needed for the generation of electricity, facing competition from the two large American companies: Westinghouse which set up in Trafford Park in Manchester and British Thomson Houston which came to Rugby. In time, Ferranti found their focus on electricity meters which provided the backbone of the company's business for decades. The next focus was large transformers required by the national grid, but also switchgear where the company competed with Reyrolle of Newcastle. The spirit of Ferranti was the exploration of new areas of technology. Much of this was paid for by the profits from meters.

With the advent of radio, Ferranti needed more space and leased a factory at Stalybridge. Here the company researched the components of radio, Marconi having secured patents over most elements. Ferranti engaged engineers and scientists and importantly worked with academics, to begin with at Imperial College, London. In spite of losses, the company persevered, gaining all the time increased knowledge and skills. For Oldham this provided a remarkable cushion for the decline in its textile industry with ground breaking science taking its place. From radio, Ferranti moved to television and cathode ray tubes. They researched and produced complex valves and explored very short wave radio which led them to radar. They took a further factory at Moston.

By the time of the Second World War, the company employed 12,000 people making radio devices including a radio-marker buoy called a Jellyfish and importantly carrying on radar research in conjunction with Metro-Vock at Trafford Park. The Ministry of Supply had hitherto looked to manufacturers of valves close to London, so for example Mullard at Merton (but also at their Blackburn factory), EMI at Hayes and Cossor at Harlow. Ferranti took on a further factory at Chadderton increasing their visibility and place in Oldham's community.

Moston became home to the manufacture of guided missile systems including the Bloodhound. The Bloodhound research bore fruit in automation control systems for industry but also for BOAC’s seat reservation system.

Avro moved its production from Manchester to Woodford at the start of the Second World War. They built a new factory of one million square feet at Chadderton near Oldham. They also managed a new shadow factory at Yeadon in the outskirts of Leeds. They began with Ansons with Armstrong Siddeley Cheetah engines. Their first heavy bomber was the Manchester. Its successor was, of course, the Lancaster powered by Rolls-Royce Merlin engines; Merlins had been intended for fitment to the Supermarine Spitfire. In the event they powered both.

A total of 7,377 Lancasters were built during the war by the production group which comprised: Avro itself at Newton Heath (Manchester) and Yeadon; Armstrong Whitworth at Baginton (Coventry), Bitteswell (Lutterworth) and South Marston (Swindon); Austin Motors (Longbridge); Metropolitan-Vickers (Manchester); Vickers Armstrong (Chester and Castle Bromwich); and Victory Aircraft in Canada.

Oldham continues its engineering heritage in companies like Oldham Engineering which had offered precision engineering since 1861. There are also anumber of textile manufactures remaining in the town.

Further reading

Hartley Bateson, A Centenary History of Oldham (Oldham County Borough Council, 1949)

Belfast manufacturing history

 Ireland moved later than much of Britain away from a subsistence economy. The island as a whole was not rich in raw materials yet the climate was good for growing, spinning and weaving flax. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Belfast ranked alongside towns such as Lisburn, Lurgan, Portadown, and Dungannon. In size, the city was similar to Derry and Newry. Linen was a cottage industry with a great number of spinners and weavers in Ulster but also in Leinster and Munster (which would become part of the Republic).

Linen was also made in England, but it was over-shadowed by that imported from continental European countries. The focus of English textiles was very much on wool and cotton. Ireland's linen industry was cottage based with exports flowing via dyers through Dublin. At the end of the seventeenth century the needs of British government finance for war led to increased duties on imports and, since linen was one of the biggest imports, it was a prime target. The knock on from this was the need to increase home production and Ireland was drawn in and given preferential access to the English market, then the biggest and fastest growing in Europe. In Belfast flax spinning and weaving gathered round the rivers Forth, Farset and Blackstaff and the mills they powered taking the place of what previously had been a cottage industry in the province.

The late eighteenth century also saw in Belfast the birth of the mechanised cotton industry. Cotton was the stuff of Lancashire, but the Irish climate was similar and the island had both labour and skills. The industry developed in East Ulster and also in the south in Waterford and in Dublin. Belfast was known for its fine fabrics, whereas the south produced the courser calicos. In the later nineteenth century Belfast took advantage of growing mechanisation to produce cheap muslins. Cotton reached its peak in the 1820s and a number of Belfast men notably Thomas Mulholland and John Hind decided to venture into mechanised flax spinning. Others followed. Linen came into it own once more when the shipping of cotton was blockaded in the American Civil War. With a market starved of cotton, what better than linen. In Belfast, spinning mills were busy and more were built. Handloom weavers moved closer to the spinners and still held the market for fine linen with coarser fabric being produced on power looms. In time these looms were improved and power looms were adopted widely with yet more mills built.

With the end of the war, cotton shipments resumed and Lancashire, adopting further mechanisation, once more undercut linen. To make matters worse international customers began to produce their own linen. The result of all this was the closure of mills and the removal of the remainder closer together in Belfast. Linen and cotton began to be processed alongside each other. Linen Union became popular as the addition of cotton made the fabric softer. The First World War increased demand for linen and the industry revived only to fall into terminal decline after a brief respite following the war.

Along with Dublin and Cork, Belfast was one of Ireland's sea ports and as the linen and cotton trades expanded so too did Belfast. Belfast was becoming increasing prosperous with developments in the textile industry. William Durgan, known in Ireland as the King of the Railways, saw the potential for growth, not only in railways, but also shipping and he undertook the digging out of the harbour. This made the docks perfect for shipbuilding, something seen clearly by Edward Harland and Gustav Wolff. This transformed Belfast in to Ireland's primary port. With shipping came shipbuilding which was also transformed mid century by the coming together of Harland and Wolff. It is worth mentioning, because it is a name that keeps appearing, that contracts with the Bibby Line were the lifeblood of the new company.

Harland & Wolff is surely the iconic image of Belfast. Anthony Slaven in his British Shipbuilding 1500-2010, praises the shipyard for its ability in the late nineteenth century to 'produce any type of vessel', having previously noted the specialisms of the other British shipbuilding areas. He does concede that the Northern Ireland yard was particularly known for its cargo liners and passenger liners. Later it was of course known as the birthplace of the Titanic but also her sister ships Olympic and Britannic. Alongside Harlands was Workman and Clark's yard founded in 1879.

Scottish born John Boyd Dunlop who, whilst living in Belfast, developed the pneumatic tyre which both greatly improved the comfort of riding a bicycle but also its speed.

Belfast played its part in the war effort in both world wars with ships and munitions and in the Second World War. Shorts of Rochester joined with Harland & Wolff in 1936 in a company known as Short & Harland and produced the Sunderland flyboat, and, from this design, the massive Stirling bomber. Production at Rochester became too vulnerable to air attack and so move to Belfast, with Austin also producing a good number. Some 2,375 were produced in all. After the war, some yards took advantage of opportunities to re-equip. Harland & Wolff took over welding shops provided by the government. Part of Shorts was bought by the American Spirit Aerosystems which in turn became part of Boeing. Another part of Shorts, then owned by Bombardier, entered into a venture with Thompson-CSF to develop the Shorts Missile System. Thompson-CSF changed its name to Thales and bought out Bombardier. Thales now manufacture ammunition in the city.

The Festival of Britain in 1951 shed light on Belfast and Northern Ireland highlighting its agriculture and linen industries. At that time manufacturing was concentrated on Belfast with some 58% of those employed in manufacturing working in the capital. It was by far the largest centre of population, some eight times that of Derry which came second with 50,000. It was primarily a manufacturing city with half the working population so employed in engineering and shipbuilding, textiles and clothing, food and drink. The Belfast Ropework Company had the largest rope making factory in the world.

Soft drinks producer Cantrell and Cochrane was founded in a shop in Belfast in 1852.

Government sponsored industrial development is important with industries established in the decade after the Second World War including aircraft (Short Brothers), precision engineering, rayon weaving, toy making and food processing.

The city welcomed investment from overseas, particularly the USA with Dow Chemicals. The DeLorean motor company set up production in 1978 but lasted only four years.

Belfast and Northern Ireland suffered from the 'troubles' - sectarian violence - which lasted until the Good Friday agreement was signed in 1998. Since then the province has prospered.

Further reading

• Anthony Slaven, British Shipbuilding 1500-2010 (Lancaster: Crucible, 2013)
• Emily Boyle and Robin Sweetnam in Belfast the Making of the City 1800-1914 (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1983)

Derry manufacturing history

 Derry had been a place of linen production from the early eighteenth century, and in the early nineteenth century it grew as Belfast moved more and more to cotton. Nothing lasts for ever and, with the subsequent decline of Irish linen production, the town rose to the challenge and redirected the skills of its people to shirt making. In the 1850s, the factory system of production had been introduced with the then new sewing machine which would dramatically increase productivity.

There had been five shirt factories in Derry in 1850 and this had grown to thirty-eight in 1902, plus a whole host of outworking. Companies of note included William Scott & Sons, Hogg & Co, Welch Margetson and Tillie & Henderson. It was the Glaswegian, Tillie, who saw the benefit in bringing all shirt making activity together under one roof, and it was he who introduced the first sewing machines, but also a steam powered cutting machine in their five storey factory with one thousand five hundred employees. The factory was significant enough for Karl Marx to reference it in Das Kapital. Shirts were supplied to the British market but also overseas.

Today, Global leaders like Du Pont and Bemis operate alongside fast-growing local firms such as HiVolt Capacitors, E&I Engineering, Fleming Agri-Products, and Seating Matters.