How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World

The title of my forthcoming book on the history of British manufacturing has changed to How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. 

The word ‘shaped‘ describes the story so much better than the original ‘created’. It also endures much longer. For whilst Arkwright might have created the first factory, British manufacturers have been shaping worldwide manufacturing ever since. 

Today it seems a brave, or even reckless, assertion to suggest that Britain might have shaped the manufacturing world. Yet, looking back through history, there is a grubby British thumb-print on many of the world’s manufacturing industries. In this book I try to explore the assertion by unfolding what is quite a remarkable story. In order to do this I have drawn on the detailed research of a great many people without whose work this volume would not have been possible. At the outset, I acknowledge my debt to them.

I am not saying that Britain alone shaped the manufacturing world, but, as I will explain, it almost certainly started a process that would continue over many decades. The role played by Britain diminished as that played by other nations increased, but it didn’t disappear; indeed, it remained strongly influential. 

Derby and British Manufacturing

In Derwent Mill in Derby in the 1720s a mill was established to produce silk, adopting a method that had been used in Italy. It is suggested that Arkwright may well have taken his inspiration from this. It is perhaps yet another instance where methods were developed in an unseen collaboration between people of many nations and regions. Derwent Valley Mills are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and house an exhibition of making.

That may have been Derby's first mention in the history of British manufacturing, but much more was yet to come. Here is but one illustration.

Henry Royce had run an electrical and mechanical business since 1884, and in 1904 met Charles Rolls, an old Etonian car dealer. Royce had made a car powered by his two-cylinder engine, which greatly impressed Rolls. The two agreed that four models would be made under the Rolls-Royce brand and that Rolls would have the exclusive right to sell them. The car was revealed at the Paris Motor Show of 1904. The two men needed to find a factory in which to make them. Derby offered them cheap electricity, and so they selected the site at Sinfin Lane where a factory was built to Royce’s design. 

Field Marshall Montgomery's Rolls-Royce

The Great Exhibition 1851 and my family

One of my treasured possessions is the signed cover of a copy of the catalogue of the Great Exhibition presented to my great-grandfather, Richard Williams, by the members of the Surgical and Anatomical Committee Class X, ‘as a slight token of the services rendered by him as Secretary’. 

Richard managed the business of John Weiss & Son, manufacturers of surgical instruments at 62 The Strand, and, I like to think, offered his services for the exhibition. John Weiss & Son had produced a most marvellous instrument comprising 1,851 knives. This was clearly a bit of showing off. Yet, behind the scenes, advances were being made in surgery with the work of Lister and others, and the makers of instruments were taking up the challenge to keep pace. Weiss & Son are still in business. I imagine Richard’s son, Alfred my grandfather at age nineteen, visiting the exhibition and being inspired by all he saw. He would go on to register a number of patents during his varied career, including that for a life raft for which he won a number of awards. It was an age of invention. 

The catalogue does make fascinating reading and leaves the reader wanting a first-hand account of a visit and there is one first-hand account by a visitor with whom I am very familiar, Charlotte Brontë, my great-great uncle, William Smith Williams, having worked with her at her publishers. Charlotte’s relationship with the Exhibition was perhaps characteristic of the attitudes of many people removed from industry. On 17 April 1851, she wrote to her publisher George Smith’s mother to say, ‘I was nursing a comfortable and complacent conviction that I had quite made up my mind not to go to London this year: the Great Exhibition was nothing – only a series of bazaars under a magnified hothouse.’  She did though go, as she wrote to her father on 31 May 1851:

‘Yesterday we went to the Crystal Palace – the exterior has a strange and elegant but somewhat unsubstantial effect – The interior is like a mighty Vanity Fair  - the brightest colours blaze on all sides – and wares of all kinds – from diamonds to spinning jennies and Printing Presses are there to be seen – It was very fine – gorgeous – animated – bewildering…’

The Great Exhibition drew both great praise and harsh criticism. A wonderful series of lithographs were produced by Lowes Dickinson and this is available for us to see on the British Library website. Lowes Dickinson was William Smith Williams son in law.

William Smith Williams makes no comment on this major national event, or rather any comment he may have made has been lost. The involvement of Lowes Dickinson may suggest a visit by William’s daughter, Margaret, even though she and Lowes wouldn’t marry for a further six years. This involvement and William’s earlier connection with Henry Cole with a paper he wrote On Lithography, would certainly suggest to me that William himself would have visited. The lithographer for whom William had worked, Charles Hullmandel, was an exhibiter with a demonstration of the technique. 

Richard Williams

You can read more on How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and more on the Great Exhibition 

What do we mean by manufacturing?

I tend to see manufacturing, as distinct from making, where there is an element of mass production and/or mechanisation. 

In historic terms, we see manufacturing appearing when textiles were produced in a manufactory such as a mill driven by water power, instead of the cottage.  Birmingham gunsmiths offer a different example with the manufacturing process split down into constituent parts with each carried out by a different person, often in a different workshop. We can see how the production line developed from this.

A related question is which pairs of hands are manufacturing and which are providing a related service. The Office of National Statistics, I think, stumbled across this issue when comparing manufacturing employment over the post war period where they saw services being outsourced and so the related employees no longer being included in the returns made by manufacturing companies. This links to an example I found on a manufacturing blog in which manufacturing companies are placed in the spotlight. I was surprised to find a component distributor included and was told that it was part of the supply chain.

There are then questions of ownership and geography. Rolls-Royce and JCB are British manufacturing companies which manufacture both in the UK and elsewhere. Nissan is a Japanese company which manufactures in many countries including Britain; the same is true of the growing number of electric vehicle related companies building manufacturing plant in Britain. Some toy manufacturers, for example, who used to manufacture in the UK now have their products made in China Are they all British manufacturers? 

What about Manufacturers and makers? This image from the Bovey Tracy Craft Fair shows a few of the two hundred stands where makers sell the pieces they have made. This is a vibrant part of the economy and can lead to manufacturing.

I have friends who design and make table wear. If a particular design attracts great interest they may ask 'manufacturing' businesses to make them. They are no longer hand made, but who is the manufacturer? An article in Monocle magazine tells of the revival in Stoke’s pottery manufacturers. Another friend told me of Somerset textile factories which are more and more undertaking contract work for makers. 

Are they all part of the bigger manufacturing picture ?

The British electronics company ARM came out of Acorn computers where it designed operating systems. These then have to be printed on silicon chips. Are both parts manufacturing? ARM decided to licence its designs for other companies to process  is it still a manufacturer? A comparison is with EMI which designed the brain scanner. They had a choice of whether to make it themselves or license the design for others to make. They chose the first route only to find themselves unable to meet demand..

You can read my take on How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World  

  

Whatever Happened to British Manufacturing

How often do we hear the lament that British manufacturing is in decline, that jobs have gone overseas? Great Britain was the workshop of the world. What has happened? In the companion volume, How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, the bold assertion in the book’s title was tested and not found wanting. In Whatever Happened to British Manufacturing, the story since the Festival of Britain of 1951 is explored: the good, the bad and the ugly.

There is much to celebrate in those brands of which this nation was rightly proud; the book takes a trip down memory lane. The stories of what happened to those brands we loved so much are uncovered . Importantly, the assumption of decline is challenged with examples of where Britain still holds its head high in the manufacturing world. It is not a story of gloom; there are some wonderful successes: JCB, Jaguar-Rover, Glaxo and John Harvey-Jones’s ICI from which Astra Zeneca was born, but also Alan Sugar’s Amstrad. There is hope for the future in manufacturing for the green revolution. Manufacturing will probably continue to employ fewer people, but more than offset by British innovation and skill.

How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World is published by and is available from Pen & Sword . My proposal for Whatever Happened to British Manufacturing has been accepted. I am delighted and look forward to producing a book that is thoroughly positive about modern British manufacturing. 

The University of Lincoln has one of the newest departments of engineering in Britain. 

Patterns of employment - both now and back to 1851

The jobs that people do change for a host of reasons. In particular, there has been a long term shift since the ends of the 1960s from manufacturing to services. Now, post Covid, a further shift is coming and a Guardian leader encouraged a glance back to Harold Wilson for a guide of how to manage this change.

Looking at headline unemployment in the sixties, it was a steady (and acceptable) 2%. Looking deeper, falling demand for coal meant that around 250,000 mining jobs disappeared in the decade, yet this did not result in an increase in the unemployment percentage. It seems that new jobs were created and people moved. Of course, it wasn't as simple as that, but, with proper attention to re-training and the provision of income in the transition period, changes in employment can be managed. 

Looking at employment in manufacturing over the long term, I was at first surprised by its ebbs and flows. On reflection it begins to make more sense. The graph in the ONS report starts in 1861, but I also have statistics from the earlier census of 1851. The largest manufacturing sector was textiles, which was the main but not the only thrust of the Industrial Revolution. It was though, at one million employees, smaller than agriculture with two million and the same size as domestic service. The role of coal in powering the revolution was crucial. In 1851, it employed two hundred thousand miners well below peak employment at the start of the Great War. 

ONS sector analysis goes back to 1928 when manufacturing employed a quarter of all employees. This was two years before the total employment rate reached an all time low of just 61% of those between 16 and 64. The previous peak figure was 76% in 1872 and the subsequent peak of the same percentage came in 1943. Looking more closely at manufacturing, the interwar years saw the percentage share of manufacturing at around 25%. Post war, with the export drive, this increased to 29% through the fifties and sixties before falling back to 22% by the end of the seventies. The eighties witnessed as further fall to 15% with the nineties coming in at just 10%. 

The ONS also gives figures for the value of output, and here manufacturing does rather better as the benefits of mechanisation are felt. Manufacturing output at the end of the sixties made up 30% of national output, essentially on a par with the share of employment. By the end of the seventies it had fallen to 23% and to 17% at the end of the eighties, just nudging ahead of employment. The nineties saw a fall to 15%, comfortably ahead employment. 

David Edgerton, in his book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, makes the point that Britain's manufacturing success in the fifties and sixties was laudable; it was just that other countries were doing better. Today, even though productivity has increased, Britain still lags behind nations who have embraced technology more wholeheartedly. In 2014, the website Drives and Controls suggested that in terms of output, manufacturing was then producing as much as it had in the 1970s. The ONS report on which this article was based may be found by following this link. 

The signs are good, with almost daily announcements of investment in leading edge technology, not least with British manufacturers of both electric and hydrogen powered buses. 

Alexander Dennis and NFI Group

 

Manufacturing Nostalgia

 “I am passionate about British manufacturing.” 

These were the words I heard myself uttering in a shoe shop as I declined to buy a shoe made in India at half the price of one made in Northampton. They were both handmade by wonderful craftsmen; quite possibly the craftsman in Northampton was of Indian extraction. I found myself muttering something about the carbon footprint of the Indian made shoe. 

I walked away from the shop unable to make up my mind, which instead wandered to a graph I had been studying and which depicted the rise and fall of manufacturing employment in this country (fig 2a if you follow this link to the ONS paper). The peak of 30% was in the 1960s, reducing to something like 8% in 2016. (The graph includes in secondary employment both manufacturing and construction, the latter being fairly constant at 8-10%)

What was I seeking to resurrect? Some golden age of manufacturing? The fifties and the sixties are referred to by some as The Golden Age.

Surely not the cotton mills of Victorian times? What about the early steel works? More probably railway workshops or my great grandfather’s surgical instruments business. This thinking led smoothly to Rolls-Royce and hand-built Merlin engines for Spitfires, to handcrafted Humbers whose doors 'opened and closed like the case of a good watch'. But then what about ICI and the plants making Perspex for Spitfire cockpits? This led me via the later wartime production line manufacture of aero engines to the factories in postwar Coventry. 

I remember visiting the dark, noisy Avon Rubber factory in Melksham in the 1970s, and as a young auditir running the gauntlet of rows of women workers in Nottinghamshire textile factories. But then those fading photos of factories at clocking off time and the neighbouring streets flooded with cloth capped figures on bicycles? 

What am I longing for? 

First a reality check. Mechanisation has eliminated many repetitive tasks but also the associated employment. The employment that remains is ever more skilled and fulfilling. 

The moving of labour intensive manufacturing to countries with lower labour costs once seemed attractive. The drawbacks of lack of responsiveness but, more so, the environmental cost surely brings this practice into question. The production of untold tons of cheap cotton or man-made-fibre garments is simply adding to the environmental bill, as are the containers full of cheap plastic toys eating up sea miles en route from China. 

Is my nostalgia turning green?

I do jar when I read a list of air source heating manufacturers and fail to find any made in Britain (I have since unearthed Dimplex but also Kensa who focus on ground source). On the other hand I thrill when my son tells me about British manufacturers of electric and hydrogen powered buses (Dennis , Arrival and Wrightbus. When I visit the Rolls-Royce website, I delight in the story they tell of wonderful engineering that is happening now. I am warmed by anecdotes of companies like JCB who applied their machinery and skills to produce equipment to help the NHS fight COVID. I am warmed by JCB generally as I see yellow tractors and diggers on neighbouring farms, as well as in heavy construction.

On social media there are great champions of British manufacturing and the story they tell is positive and I am thinking of FactoryNOW and The Manufacturer.  

We will not return to manufacturing making up one third of the workforce, but it will continue to contribute significantly to the country's output. Not least with the input of universities such as Lincoln. The whole issue of employment in the 21st century was explored at a symposium with the University.

The timeline of Lincoln Engineering at the celebration of Lincoln Engineering in Lincoln Cathedral

My book, How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World was published by Pen & Sword in June 2022 and is available to buy from them, Amazon and others.