Manufacturing places - the art of re-invention

My exploration of British manufacturing has been sector by sector and chronological. I am now beginning to join up the dots and explore those towns where manufacturing takes place or in some case took place.

Here are links to some of my exploration to date: Sheffield, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Macclesfield, Lincoln, Leicester, Derby, Nottingham. The image is of Ordnance depots used in the Second World War which link to production for the war effort mirroring the spread of manufacturing.

I began an initial exploration in 2005 as part of my part time BA in Humanities at Vaughan College part of the University of Leicester. Two essays resulted:

The title of the first essay was Which urban areas did well in the inter-war period and why? I reproduce it in full and you can read it by following this link. I used population growth as an indicator and this pointed to those urban areas that attracted new industries. Most of these were around London giving evidence of the shift in manufacturing to the South East. What is interesting and as I outline in a post I am currently working on, London was where much manufacturing began.

The second essay focused on Birmingham and tells of its early development. Again you can find it in my blog piece on Birmingham by following this link. The essay and other posts on the older manufacturing town all point to characteristics of place and the proximity of raw materials.

My first book on British manufacturing history, How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, explored first the early development of British manufacturing through the prism of the Great Exhibition of 1851. In it areas of manufacturing came to be identified. Manchester and the Lancashire towns with cotton; Leeds and Yorkshire with wool; Newcastle and County Durham with iron and steel. Essentially steel making grew up in places where raw materials and coal were present, so South Wales and early on in the Weald. Sheffield was pre-eminent in steel for cutlery, but then much more. Birmingham was a city of workshops making all manner of product from metal, something that extended into the neighbouring Black Country the home to heavy iron foundries. Ships were built on the Clyde and the Tyne, Barrow-in-Furness and on many other rivers, early on on the Thames. Railway workshops spread across the country. The big American electrical engineers chose the north west and the midlands. The chemical industry had its foundations in the salt mines of Cheshire.

Communications were key. Without the turnpikes, the canals and ultimately the railways the development of places like Sheffield may well not have taken place.

My essay on the interwar years explored the new industries and the places they set up, mainly the south and the midlands. The motor industry was the beating heart of Coventry. Radio and television were made in ‘metroland’, the new suburbs of London. The biggest toy factory in the world was in south London.

Post war was the time for pharmaceuticals with production again in the London area but also in the north west. It was also the time for petrochemicals and plastics with plants often built near to refineries. The wartime infrastructure of shadow factories and Royal Ordnance Factories influenced the choice of location with governments encouraging their re-use. The new towns initiative created new factory space alongside housing and the infrastructure that modern living demanded.

In my second book on British manufacturing history, Vehicles to Vaccines, I explore first the design review for the Festival of Britain which offers a snap shot of some 24,000 products alongside their manufacturers. One feature that shines through is that products for the home were often made locally by relatively small manufacturers. Some of these became much bigger and more visible from a national viewpoint and I have been able to highlight a number of these. Another feature of the British manufacturing landscape was that the larger companies frequently bought up their smaller brethren, so GEC, for example, had a presence in a great many towns across the country and again I have tried to identify the more prominent of these.

I am publishing posts on the towns I explore. It is fascinating to see how many areas reinvent themselves. It is a work in progress and I am adding links to local websites and blogs. My aim is to gather my exploration together by region eventually covering the country. 

Manchester manufacturing history and the Museum of Science and Industry

 In many ways Manchester was the home of the Industrial Revolution. The mass production of cotton fabrics began there and its was this thatdrove the British economy. I tell much more on my book How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW) . Much more was to come as I tell below 

The eighteenth century saw Manchester textile merchants grow their networks of outworkers to spin and weave the cotton that was being imported in ever increasing quantities. In time a factory system emerged with incremental steps of mechanisation and I describe these in the chapter on textiles in HBSTMW. Cotton mills were visible throughout Lancashire. The Museum of Science and Industry tells much of Manchester's story. The early part was all about textiles, but then the machinery that made textiles and the other machinery that served this world.

Opinions differ on the both the significance and date of the introduction of machinery into the cotton industry and in particular the factory system. Roger Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis, who also wrote the book on Alfred Herbert which shed so much light on British machine tools, explored these questions in Manchester and the Age of the Factory. Their methodology is interesting. We are talking of a period before the census and so the first question was just how to measure the relative importance of factories compared to the warehouses that stored and distributed the production of our workers. They chose rateable values taken from the Manchester Poor Rate Assessment Books which attribute to properties a market value which the authors argue reflect economic activity. I won't go into the reasoning offered in support of this but rather refer readers to their book. I will, however draw upon their findings.

In looking at the properties in Manchester categorised as factories or warehouses and used in the cotton trade, the authors found firstly very few large businesses occupying whole buildings. Rather, the trade was fragmented with multiple occupation of both warehouses and factories. Looking at the factories, many were small workshops spinning yarn using the recently invented machinery. Weaving looms were predominantly hand operated since the early iterations of mechanisation were by their nature experimental. Manchester warehouses would act as merchants for yarn supplying the hand weavers and taking the finished product for onward sale. Spinners and weavers alike could be in the city or elsewhere in Lancashire.

To me this sounded like a sensible division of labour in an integrated process. Not so the reality of business in Manchester before and during the Napoleonic wars. The evidence is of a schism with the spinner selling their yarn to continental weavers. The Lancashire weavers suffered with unemployment the result. In HBSTMW I referred to the unrest and its expression in the Peterloo massacre. These were hard times.

In the aftermath of war and after much argument, the overall good of Lancashire business prevailed not least as looms became steam powered under a factory system. One line of argument was that factory based spinning was exploiting child labour just as the country was becoming aware of the damage caused by unregulated factories. In HBSTMW I noted that competition had driven down prices putting pressure on weavers to mechanise.

Looking at some of the mills, one of the biggest was owned by McConnel and Kennedy. They were spinners but later classified also as doublers. Tracing their story forward in time, they become McConnel and Co and then in 1898 were bought by the Fine Cotton Spinners and Doublers Association. This can then be traced through to Courtaulds, which, as I tell in Vehicles to Vaccines, brought together a large number of mills to secure the market for their man-made fibres.

Another mill developed into an integrated cotton manufacturer, Tootal Broadhust Lee, which carried out spinning and weaving under the same roof. The name Tootal readers may recall in the context of men's shirts. The company became part of Coates Viyella in 1991.

Mechanisation began in the factory or workplace often by the spinner or weaver making his own quite basic machinery. Larger entities could employ engineers both to maintain machinery and develop and make new. At some point between 1815 and 1825 the demand for machinery became such that separate machine making businesses set up to serve the market of spinners and weavers. Lloyd-Jones and Lewis write of such establishments being located beside the Ashton and Rochdale canals. Business names are mentioned: Peel and Williams (the subject of a chapter in the book 'Science & Technology in the Industrial Revolution' by A. E. Musson and Eric Robinson), Ebeneezer Smith, Hewes and Rwen, Richard Ormerods, Radford and Waddington, Galloway and Company and the Fairburn Engineering Company. William Fairburn also built some of the early steamships.

Lloyd-Jones and Lewis add to the metal workers, Dyers and Printers and describe all three as the 'modern sector'. We are talking about the developments in bleaching with the use of chlorine, but also the experimentation with different dyes. These then combine with the metal workers when we bring in cylinder printing machines powered by steam. In terms of production, spinners, weavers, dyers and printers sometimes combined in single businesses. Thomas Hoyle is an example of integrated dyeing and printing. The company became part of the Calico Printers Association, which employed the inventors of terylene which ICI then developed, and which later became part of Tootal. Nonetheless a good part of the business remained in small units.

Manchester had become a modern industrial economy and other developments followed.

In the nineteenth century Joseph Whitworth (located opposite Richard Ormerod) was manufacturing screws following his own design. His company expanded into arms production and as such was a rival to Armstrongs in Newcastle. The matter was settled by a merger followed in due course by a further merger with Vickers. The works at Openshaw became part of the English Steel Corporation owned by Vickers and Cammell; it was brought into British Steel on nationalisation.

Trafford Park in Manchester, built by the notorious entrepreneur ET Hooley, in 1897 became home to British Westinghouse. I write of them in my blog on the American Electricity Industry. The British market was becoming attractive and Westinghouse set out to compete with his fierce rivals British Thomson Houston and Thomas Edison who had combined in General Electric and set up in Rugby. In Manchester, British Westinghouse later became part of Metropolitan Vickers by series of financial moves which I describe in HBSTMW. It then joined with its fierce rival as part of AEI and in turn became part of GEC which had a significant presence in the city: GEC Turbine Generators and Switchgear and GEC Traction.

Trafford Park was also home to Ford UK, before the latter moved to Dagenham, and part of the Dyestuffs division of ICI which first manufactured Penicillin. Courtaulds had a chemical works on Trafford Park.

Withenshaw to the south of Great Manchester was home to the AEI (later GEC) transformer factory. AV Roe began building aircraft in Brownfield Mill and later moved to Newton Heath where Mather & Platt's vast works produced pumps and electrical machinery.

In the Second World War, Patricroft Royal Ordnance factory was built on the site of the former Naysmith Engineering Works, originally established in 1834, by the Bridgewater Canal in Eccles on the outskirts of Manchester. Employing 3,000 people, it specialised in welding and fabrication, also making parts for Bofors guns. As a precursor to the city's role in alloys and new materials, a shadow factory run by Magnesium Elektron (now part of Luxfor Group plc and still manufacturing in Manchester) produced magnesium alloys.

The city was home to one of the early computers manufactured by Ferranti in conjunction with Manchester University. You can discover more at the Museum of Science and Industry. I tell more about the evolution of the British computer industry in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Ferranti had a significant presence. In Hollinwood they made electricity meters and at Chadderton power transformers and testing equipment and also semiconductors and opto-electronics. Moston was where they made instruments, aircraft equipment and fuzes. Process control computers were made at Withenshaw and simulator, sonar and civil computer systems at Cheadle Heath. Computer systems and (post 1975) the company HQ were at Gatley. I am grateful to John F. Wilson for including this detail in his Ferranti A History. The images are of some of the early computers on display. Many of Ferranti’s buildings became part of ICL - some of their products are shown below and are on display at the museum.

Manchester is a city that does not stand still. One successful piece of exploration was graphene, and the Museum of Science and Industry describes how this thinnest possible material was ‘first isolated by scientists at the University of Manchester in 2004 using ordinary sticky tape’. The scientists involved, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, were later awarded a Nobel Prize for their work. In his paper on nano materials, Robin McIntyre from PERA sets graphene alongside other carbon-based nano materials, and other such non carbon-based materials nano titanium dioxide and nano-ceramics. These materials are already being used to enhance properties of more common materials such a concrete which graphene strengthens allowing smaller quantities to be used. I also refer to graphene as a material for use in semiconductors. Their potential uses are manifold.

Macclesfield manufacturing history

 Home to silk with reputedly two hundred mills at one time. Home also to Hovis and now Astra-Zeneca, building on the home of the ICI pharmaceutical division at Alderly Park. Neighbouring Bollington had a number of cotton mills including the Clayton Mill shown in the image. I explore the wider cotton industry in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

The story of Macclesfield offers a different perspective on the Industrial Revolution from the point of view of a medium sized town rather than one of the larger conurbations or cities.

Silk was relatively light to transport and so turnpike roads offered all that was needed. Macclesfield, set on a steep rise of land over looking the east Cheshire plane, was on the major turnpike routes and so offered access to London through which all raw silky then had to be imported and also the largest market for silk thread along with the hosiery towns of the East Midlands. Relevant skills were present through the button trade, there was also water power. So, the conditions were right for large scale silk spinning.

In the book, Silk Town: Industry and Culture in Macclesfield 1750-1835, Gail Malmgreen notes the growing population of the town after 1750 and the way the town attracted silk workers from other towns. Probably the key development was the introduction of machine spinning by John and Thomas Lombe, learnt by John in Italy and developed by both of them resulting in the silk mill in Derby. Macclesfield was one of the first of the other silk producing towns to embrace this development. An early mill was owned by Michael Daintry who employed James Brindley to repair some machinery. Brindley's reputation would grow and it was he who acted as surveyor for a number of canals not least the famous Bridgewater. It was, though, Charles Roe who took the mantle father of modern industry in the town.

Roe created a mill along the lines of the Derby original. He then sold out having other ambitions. This time it was copper using local ore and coal. All went well until the coal reserves depleted leaving not only Roe with the challenge of how to get supplies into the town. The answer was a canal, but the Duke of Bridgewater had other ideas stemming from his 'megalomaniac desire to be the "largest dealer as a carrier in Europe." The Bridgewater canal does not serve Macclesfield. For the Roe family it would result in a move away from the town.

Silk remained and grew in importance. Mills became larger and taller. Water powered, it was found that less power was lost in transmission without long horizontal shafts. In 1800 steam arrived courtesy of Boulton & Watt to replace water and increase further the size of mills and the power available. Power looms followed on the heals of powered spinning although their weight and vibration meant that long single story weaving sheds offered the only practical housing until the introduction of lighter 'throwing' machinery. Also silk being far more fragile than cotton and wool, hand looms continued for fine work until the twentieth century. Silk spinning and weaving was important in neighbouring towns and villages: Congleton, Stockport, Bollington but also smaller Wildboarclough and Gradbach.

Communications were now the key and the Macclesfield canal was completed in 1831 with a railway following in 1869 linking the town to Marple and thence to Manchester.

Alongside spinning and weaving came dyeing and printing. A crucial advantage enjoyed by the town was the clean, soft water provided by the river Bollin. Hollins Steam Laundry was set up by the river to take full advantage and served the local silk community. The laundry building was taken over by M. Adamski and F. Parker who added dyeing and printing. The company, Adamley, continues to manufacture in the town as the last remaining silk printer. It was not only silk.

Hovis flour was first milled in Macclesfield in 1898 and the Hovis Mill still stands by the canal. The business grew too big and moved to Trafford Park in Manchester in 1904.

AstraZeneca's second largest pharmaceutical manufacturing site is in Macclesfield employing 4,000 people. Only a few miles from Macclesfield is Jodrell Bank.

Further reading

Gail Malmgreen, Silk Town: Industry and Culture in Macclesfield 1750-1835 (Hull: Hull University Press, 1985)

The Silk Museum, Park Lane, Macclesfield

www.macclesfieldcanal.org 

Bradford manufacturing history

 Gary Firth's book Bradford and the Industrial Revolution takes its reader on a journey through time from a relatively settled rural scene to a town bustling with industry. I draw on this book and other sources for this post. The image is of the Black Dyke Mill with thank to the music venue it now is.

We begin with the geology of Bradfordale noting the different areas and soil types, essentially coal measures and millstone grit. These soils, taken with the wet climate, made the area unsuitable for much arable farming and not particularly productive for livestock which tended to be mainly milking cows with some poor beef cattle and sheep producing fleeces far smaller than breeds in the more productive east of England. The net result was small holdings supplementing their income with spinning and weaving of wool into worsted cloth.

Firth suggests that change came about with growing demand for food from the slowly expanding urban population of Bradford then little more that a large village. The demand for food could not be met from elsewhere given poor communications and so the challenge rested with the local tenant farmers and landlords. The process, if it can be called that, was for the steady improvement of neglected land by means of manure and lime and better husbandry. Farms increased in size and now focused on food production. Spinners and weavers gravitated to Bradford increasing further the hungry urban population. In time they were joined by spinners and weavers from elsewhere in the country with the urban population increasing by a massive 1,064 % between 1780 and 1850 to 52,493. West Yorkshire had overtaken both Norfolk and the West Country in worsted production.

The availability of raw materials was, as elsewhere, fundamental to further development. There was coal, this being the north western end of the Yorkshire coalfield. There was iron ore and limestone. Firth writes of the many kilns burning lime both for agricultural use and to make lime mortar for building. The Low Moor iron works burst into action with the introduction of blowing pumps using Boulton & Watts steam engines. These enabled blast furnaces which could use the vast coal reserves to produce iron in substantial quantities just when it was needed for armaments for the wars against Napoleon. For the next decades the iron works developed continually, taking on technical improvements as they became available. Other iron works developed alongside including the Bowling Iron works which was famed for its wrought iron boiler plate. It sent on to produce steel using Siemens Martin furnaces. Bradford became one of the most significant producers in Yorkshire.

An essential element was the availability of finance and I write about this in this blog. Bradford was similar to other places where the volume of production and trade was growing with merchants branching out into banking. Firth offers many examples of finance provided including for the Low Moor Iron Works and a number of mills including the Black Dyke.

Without better communications linking Bradford to its markets growth would be restricted and so the digging of the canals was once again key. The Aire-Calder navigation provided the link to the east coast and to markets in Holland and Germany. For the west, Firth suggests that it was the Bradford colliery owners who provided the impetus for the digging of the Leeds-Liverpool canal; the link to Bradford itself was added later. Whilst the Yorkshire collieries certainly benefitted from the Leeds-Liverpool canal, so to did those in Lancashire and it added greatly to the prosperity of the whole area.

The making of worsted cloth first became factory based in 1786 with Cockshott & Lister using water power. Steam power came in first at the Tong Park Mill using a steam engine provided by Boulton & Watt. Other mills followed but it took more than a decade for the advantages of the factory system to become evident. Ramsbottom and Murgatroyd introduced steam power into their mill at Holme in 1800.

At that time Bradford and Halifax were pretty well neck and neck but over the next couple of decades Bradford took the lead in plain worsted cloth leaving Halifax with the more 'fancy' cloths. Wool came via the market in Wakefield from Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Kent and the Cotswolds. Customers were in the south American colonies but more importantly Germany. A strike by weavers in 1825 convinced mill owners of the need to mechanise and more and more steam driven machinery was brought into the mills. Wool consumption had risen to 6 million lbs a year by 1825. Now the clear leader in worsted production, Bradford attracted dyers but also merchants and by 1851 was the Capital of the worsted trade. I write in my blog on that city how worsted production gravitated from Leeds to Bradford leaving Leeds to focus on the making of clothing.

Samuel Lister was highly influential in Bradford textiles. He was at heart an inventor and his nib comb was said to have revolutionised the worsted industry. He branched out into other textiles and his Manningham Mill was at one time the largest silk factory in the world employing 11,000 people. Titus Salt was another famous Bradford mill owner but his fame came from leaving the crowded town and setting up a revolutionary new mill at nearby Saltaire (named after Salt). Not only was the mill state of the art but 'housing was provided of the highest quality. Each had a water supply, gas lighting, an outdoor privy, separate living and cooking spaces and several bedrooms. This compared favourably with the typical worker's cottage'.

The infrastructure of Bradford improved over the succeeding decades. Two railways made their way into the town. The Midland Railway provided access north and south. A line from from Halifax via Low Moor was opened by the Leeds & Yorkshire railway and the GNR ran a line from Leeds into Bradford. Telegraph and in time telephone then appeared with the town's fathers expressing anxiety at the wires trailing from street to street. Anxieties were addressed and a General Post Office was built. Electricity then beckoned, but, like many English towns gas had got there first and investors were reluctant to let electricity siphon off their profits. Transport within the town was an issue and the fashion for trams running on rails won the argument, but not powered by electricity; it was to be steam for Bradford. In time electricity did come into the streets and homes and to power the trams.

In terms of industry, Low Moor prospered up until the First World War when it experienced a brief surge in demand. Thereafter the story was one of decline. The worsted trade prospered for rather longer but succumbed to the pressure of cheap imports and lower wages overseas. The motor industry made its mark in Bradford with the establishment of Jowett Cars in 1906. This company went on to produced much-loved up-market cars, the Javelin and Jupiter.

Bradford is currently enjoying an economic resurgence along with neighbouring Leeds.

Further reading:

Gary Firth, Bradford and the Industrial Revolution (Halifax: Ryburn Publishing, 1990)

www.bradfordmuseums.org

Leeds manufacturing history

Leeds was a centre of wool manufacturing with most processes being outworked and the finishing and dying in the city. The skills in wool spread to flax which, whilst important, never overtook the significance of wool.

The availability of water and labour combined with the crucial availability of cheap coal made Leeds the perfect wool city. Coal was used to boil water for dying and increasingly to power machinery in spinning and weaving. However, the take-up of steam power wasn’t rapid because of uncertainty of demand particularly during the Napoleonic wars.

As with all manufacturing, good communications were key. The Aire and Calder canal provided the link to the east coast and the Leeds and Liverpool through to the west. Railways did of course follow.

With the growth in textiles, an associated engineering industry grew with machinery for spinning and weaving both wool and flax. In time the engineering skills were turned to other uses from railway locomotives to nails. It was said that Leeds was second only to the Black Country in metal working.

The mid nineteenth century saw the move away from Leeds of the making of worsted cloth to Bradford. Its place was taken by clothing factories taking advantage of the American invention of the sewing machine. John Barran was one such clothing manufacturer followed by Montague Burton and Joseph Hepworth. At one time Burton had 20,000 employees in its Leeds factories.

With the growing population, shoe manufacture grew with companies such as Stead & Simpson which would later move to Leicester.

The engineering sector continued to serve its textile brothers but also built hydraulic equipment, heavy presses and a large variety of manufacturing from wrought iron and steel.

Leeds businessmen had fingers in many pies. Richard Paley had interests in iron-founding, potash manufacture, cotton spinning and soap boiling. Cotton was perhaps a brave experiment and soon gave way to wool. Joshua Bower was involved in glass manufacturing, glue boiling and coal mining. Tetley, the brewer, also had interests in coal mining.

Looking at some of the companies more closely:

The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of a printing company run by John Waddington with a specialty of theatrical posters. It didn’t prosper until, using its skills in lithographic colour printing, it began making playing cards. These proved very popular not least in the marketing operations of many companies. From playing cards, it wasn’t a big leap to jigsaws and board games. An alliance with the American Parker company brought Monopoly; other games followed. The basic business was printing and so printed packaging was an obvious extension. Waddington was bought by the American Hasbro in 1994.

Joseph Watson, or Soapy Joe’s as it was known, made soap and became part of Lever Brothers when they bought Crosfield and Gossage. Unilever are still present in Leeds with their largest deodorant factory.

Charles Thackray is of particular interest to me since, as surgical instrument makers, they were in the same business as my great grandfather. They began as a chemist and for many years supplied pharmaceuticals, in the early days, of a fairly basic nature. Relationships with doctors led to the sourcing of equipment for them and in time the manufacture of that equipment at the company’s own factory in Leeds. It was very much a craft with skilled engineers working with their customers to develop the precise equipment they needed. A crucial relationship was with the leading hip replacement surgeon where both operating instruments and the artificial hips themselves were produced. In time computer aided machining was introduced to great effect. Thackray ended up having 18% of the world market for replacement hips. The problem was that increased mechanisation and fierce competition meant that a comparatively small independent company couldn’t survive and so in 1990 it was sold to a larger American competitor.

I wrote of the Royal Ordnance Factories and their role in the Second World War in How Britain Shaped The Manufacturing World. One such was based in Leeds, later bought by Vickers plc, and I wrote in Vehicles to Vaccines how the Challenger tank was made there. The broad manufacturing base continued and a shining exception is Wilson Power Solutions which is a family company now into its third generation supplying transformers for renewable and other industrial projects. Siemens Energy and Siemens Rail Systems are located near Leeds. Leeds is ranked third by size of UK manufacturing regions.

Further reading

A History of Modern Leeds, Derek Fraser ed., E.J.Connell and M. Ward, Industrial Development 1780-1914

John Chartres and Katrina Honeyman, Leeds City Business 1893-1993 (Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1993)

Wolverhampton Manufacturing History

 Wolverhampton is said not to be in the Black Country (unlike the nearby chain making town of Dudley), rather it is surrounded by Black Country coal fields. Like many towns in the West Midlands it business was metal, in the case of Wolverhampton locks and the name Chubb appears in early records. Another early name was Mander connected with the production of lacquer and known later for paint. Stretching back further, like many English towns, the wool trade dominated.

The West Midlands was well served by turnpike roads, but the advent of the canals opened the area to much needed bulk shipment. The commercial imperative was to get coal into nearby Birmingham, but the movement of finished goods and supplies of raw materials to other towns like Wolverhampton was important.

In his entertaining History of Wolverhampton, Chris Upton tells the convoluted story of the West Midlands canals. Much comes down to the terrain and geology. Towns were often built on hills and so canals would either need to tunnel under them or use precious water to climb and descend in flights of locks. James Brindley was the surveyor for the Staffordshire & Worcestershire canal which was the first to serve Wolverhampton in 1772. The Birmingham canal followed, also under Brindley. The problems were not so much technical as commercial, as canal companies competed with the amounts they charged users. Other canals followed, some much later under Thomas Telford, until a network was built that allowed Birmingham to claim more canals than Venice. The coming of the Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stour railway marked the beginning of the end for the canals as arteries of commerce, but of course opened up the area to further commercial advantage.

Wolverhampton may not have had coal mines, but it did have its specialist ironmasters and ironmongers, dealing in cheaper goods, who would supply metal to workshops and then take finished products for resale. Upton suggests that workshops were nearly always small, but that the work of the ironmongers made it, taken as a whole, mass production. In relation to the more specialised ironmasters, who were more often to be found in nearby Rugeley and Bewdley, their production would be worked into high quality locks and scythes. One manufacturer, William Wood, extended his skills into copper coinage for America. In time, manufacture began to match that of Birmingham with buttons, shoe-buckles and watch chains. In terms of mechanisation, it is said that one of the first Newcomen engines for Mr Back of Wolverhampton.

The railways would point the way for manufacturing in Wolverhampton as the GWR selected the town for their northern workshop. Here were manufactured mainly tank engines, but there was also a repair facility making it a close rival to Swindon. In terms of ‘independents’, Henry Meadows supplied gear boxes and petrol and diesel engines. The railways served major local manufacturers including steel makers Stewarts & Lloyds at Horseley Fields and Bilston. The scene must have been similar to Sheffield with blast furnaces, forges and crucibles. Wolverhampton featured in the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Following on from railways came bicycles where Wolverhampton and companies like Rudge and Sunbeam competed with the larger cycle sector in Coventry. Sunbeam moved from cycles to motor cars and became a major employer in the town with their Sunbeamland Works. It became famous for its very fast cars, synonymous with names like Malcolm Campbell. Sunbeam would later join the Rootes Group. Other Wolverhampton companies included Guy Motors which would in wartime produce vehicles for hauling heavy guns (as shown in the image). It was later bought by Jaguar. I  write more about Guy Motors and manufacturers of military vehicles more generally in War on Wheels.

Joseph Sankey were suppliers to the motor industry and they became part of GKN. Aircraft manufacture also figured with Boulton and Paul, later Dowty Aerospace. H.M. Hobson made carburettors for aircraft and undertook the management of two shadow factories in the Second World War. It later became part of Lucas Aerospace. The American Goodyear set up tyre production in the town. Motor cycles featuresd with Villiers as boiler making did with John Thompson of which I write in Vehicles to Vaccines and which played a big part in nuclear power stations. The Electric Construction Company was another big employer specialising in generators. They later became part of Hawker Siddeley. It wasn’t only metal, Courtaulds built a factory to produce rayon and employed some 3,600 in 1936. Tarmac also had a presence in the town.

As with so many British towns, the major employers now are retailers and the NHS and University. An exception is the American Collins Aerospace which can trace its origins back to Lucas.

Take a look at my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines which look at the history of British manufacturing sector by sector and chronologically. Here is part of my  geographical exploration. 

Further reading

Chris Upton, A History of Wolverhampton (Chichester: Phillimore, 1998)

http://www.historywebsite.co.uk/Museum/metalware/sankeys/sankey01.htm

Coventry Manufacturing History

I write of the motor industry in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW) and in three chapters of Vehicles to Vaccines: Volume Car Makers, Speciality Car Makers and Commercial Vehicles and Motor Component Manufacturers. The image is of the Geneva Motor Show in 1949 where the Rootes Group, one of Coventry's finest, are seriously engaged in the post war export drive.

The city of Coventry, long associated with the story of Lady Godiva, had as its major industry the making of ribbons. This trade it shared with neighbouring Nuneaton, Bedworth and much of north Warwickshire. The trade prospered until 1860 and the passing of a law which allowed imports; thereafter Coventry and its neighbours found themselves undercut except for woven tapes. J & J Cash remains in Coventry as manufacturers of name tapes amongst much else.

The other Coventry industry, a child of the industrial revolution when time became relevant to people’s lives, was the making of clocks and watches. The city wasn’t alone in this but it was significant. Nearby Lutterworth was home to the Corrall family who started making clocks in 1727.

Kenneth Richardson in his book Twentieth Century Coventry writes of how in the nineteenth century ‘watchmaking was beginning to supplant [the ribbon trade] in the affections of young men who wished to acquire a skill’. From this grew many small workshops, working in much the same way as their counterparts in London’s Clerkenwell, but also factories such as Rotherhams and the Coventry Movement Company. The industry largely died with the impact of Swiss competition but it did equip the city with skills it would need for its push into vehicles of all kinds. In How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World I suggest that the skills employed in making sewing machines also translated into the industry of bicycle making.

Richardson does take one important step back by bringing onto centre stage Alfred Herbert. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines of the fundamental importance to manufacturing industry of machine tools. Herbert, the son of a builder, began in 1887 in general engineering but he gravitated toward machine tools and in 1914 was employing 2,000 men making him the largest machine tool maker in England. In time Coventry attracted other machine tool makers including Charles Churchill who brough American machine tool practice from his native USA. Another American, Oscar Hamer, joined Herbert as his general manager. Alfred Herbert subsequently moved to larger premises in Lutterworth.  It was taken over by the TI Group. I write more of the machine tools industry in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The manufacture of bicycles in numbers sufficient to supply the market required these machine tools but also entrepreneurs.

The Coventry Riley family had been a ribbon manufacturers but turned their hands to bicycles. From Sussex came the Starleys and George Singer. William Herbert, Alfred’s brother, joined Londoner William Hillman. Thomas Humber came from Beeston just outside Nottingham and Daniel Ridge came over from Wolverhampton. I write about the development of the bicycle industry in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

The First World War, with its insatiable demands on industry about which I wrote in Ordnance, provided a major boost to Coventry as a growing city of manufacturers. Motor cycles and motor cars followed the bicycle and the city also attracted Courtaulds for the manufacture of Rayon, and telephone and other electronics including British Thomson Houston (BTH) from neighbouring Rugby.

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 concentrated on 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.

In 1915 GEC bought the Copeswood estate at Stoke in Coventry to build a new factory. Six years later it moved its Peel-Conner telephone manufacturing operations from Manchester to the site, a move that coincided with the BPO (Post Office) standardising their accepted telephone designs. Over the years the company expanded, taking over a number of former Coventry factories producing a large proportion of the Strowger telephone system for the UK. By 1970 GEC, which had combined with AEI and English Electric, had seven factories in the city employing 30,000 people. Its production of the Strowger system ceased in Coventry in 1974. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines of the struggle for supremacy in the subsequent electronic telephone systems. GEC Telecommunications in Coventry was a keen contender.

Like so many British cities, Coventry played a major role in equipping the forces in the First World War, so much so that the city council claimed :

‘It is safe to say that no English city was so completely absorbed in munitions production as Coventry…It was not merely a question of adaptability of existing facilities. New factories sprang up in such numbers and on such a scale as to change the whole face of the city in the matter of a few months. New suburbs grew up like mushrooms, thousands of strangers of both sexes flocked to Coventry from all parts of England in answer to the call for munitions.’

The Coventry Ordnance Factory built beside the Coventry canal manufactured guns so big that machine tools were moved to them rather than the more conventional production line. I write of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and my book on army supply in WW1, Ordnance.

Motor car manufacture grew like topsy following the end of the war. By 1931 there were eleven separate motor companies and forty that had tried and failed in the same period. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of how Daimler was first but with Lanchester, Siddeley-Deasy close behind. Morris bought the French Hotchkiss. The Rootes brothers combined Humber and Hillman. Vickers had a presence in Coventry through their Wolseley subsidiary later bought by Morris. William Lyons brought the Swallow Sidecar company to the city where it became Jaguar. The Rover company had made bicycles but under the guidance of the Wilkes brothers became producers of luxury cars and, after the Second World War, the Land Rover.

It wasn’t just the main manufacturers, components companies came. Birmingham’s Dunlop bought a wheel and rim manufacturer in the city and added to this its Aviation and Engineering Divisions. White and Poppe made engines and Carbodies was established by a former Daimler employee.

The Second World War presented yet further challenges for the manufacturers of the city. As I argue elsewhere, the war for the manufacturers began in the mid thirties with the building of the shadow factories for aircraft production and I write about this major initiative in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. As well as providing vital capacity for the motor companies to supplement the production of the main aircraft companies, they provided space for the motor companies and others to expand when, after the war, the nation was desperate for exports to pay for imports of food and materials.

Between 1939 and 1945, BTH in Coventry and Leicester provided 500,000 magnetos for the RAF. J.D Siddeley expanded his aircraft production at nearby Bagington. T.G  John of Alvis became in effect a subcontractor to Rolls-Royce for the repair of engines. GEC manufactured the VHF radio link for the RAF enabling the Squadron Leader to communicate in flight with all his aircraft. Alfred Herbert manufactured some 65,000 machine tools and Gauge and Tool provided measuring devices for the huge armament industry.

The Second World War also brought a devastating night of enemy bombing on 14 November 1940 which destroyed the greater part of the cathedral and many factories including old cycle factories: the Coventry Machinists’ Works, the Rover Meteor Works and the Triumph factory. I write in War on Wheels how the people of the city rose to the challenge of the disaster.

Aviation came to Coventry with the shadow factories. Armstrong-Whitworth moved their aero business to the old RAF airfield at Whitley a little outside the city where they built a supersonic wind tunnel linked to a Ferranti Pegasus computer. Hawker Siddeley chose the site at Baginton that would become Coventry Airport for their production. Lucas aerospace had a presence in the city. I write of post-war aviation in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Sir Frank Whittle and the invention of the jet engine belongs to Midlands manufacturing towns. One of the two prototype engines was made by BTH at Lutterworth; the other by Metrovick in Manchester. Subsequent development through the company Power Jets was based at Whetstone just south of Leicester. I write of the early development of the jet engine in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Coventry thrived with this combination of machine tools, motor cars, aeroplanes, manmade fibres and electronics. For a whole variety of different reasons of which I write in Vehicles to Vaccines, the city’s manufacturing shrunk but did not disappear. Jaguar Land Rover have their corporate office at Whitley, the Manufacturing Technology Centre is based at Ansty Park and Aston Martin Lagonda is at Gaydon.

Further reading

Kenneth Richardson, Twentieth Century Coventry (London: Macmillan, 1972)

Graces Guide

https://www.britishtelephones.com/