Coventry on the cusp of the twentieth century

Coventry was a city of engineering skills honed on watchmaking and it attracted first bicycle makers and then the first motor vehicle companies.

Two grandsons of the pioneer machine tool maker Henry Maudslay set up in the city: Cyril Maudslay with the Maudslay Motor Company which later joined with AEC and Reginald Maudslay with his Standard Motor company which later joined with Triumph. By then Maudslay Sons & Field was ending its life having moved from machine tools to marine engines both of which it had manufactured to great acclaim. London was a centre of engineering although much had gravitated to Manchester with the demands of an increasingly mechanised textile industry. London also had a long history of shipbuilding hence the direction of Maudslay's move away from machine tools.

Another major London manufacturer of marine engines was John Penn which company attracted a young William Hillman as an apprentice. Hillman moved back to his native Leicester where he went into partnership with William Herbert making first sewings machines and then bicycles as the Premier Company. William Herbert's younger brother was Alfred who, following an apprenticeship with Jessop in Leicester, set up in partnership before moving to Coventry as managing director of a new machine tool company, Alfred Herbert Ltd, with William Herbert as chairman.

I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how other subsequently great names gathered in Coventry: Harry Lawson, Louis Coatelin, Thomas Humber and well as William Hillman and the Maudslays. The boom in bicycles attracted American tool makers which scooped the market. Coventry was thus the obvious place for a rebirth of the British machine tool industry and Alfred Herbert was ready to lead the charge. I tell Herbert's subsequent story in Vehicles to Vaccines.

In the first part of the twentieth century, Alfred Herbert steadily built his business on the back of bicycles but when war broke out Herberts like all machine tool makers around the country faced massive demands. I wrote in my book Ordnance how Alfred Herbert was one of the industrialists - the men of push and go - who stepped forward to help Lloyd George in the war effort, in Herbert's case as Director of Machine Tools. I also wrote in Ordnance of the challenges facing manufacturing in terms of the loss of skilled men to the army. Unskilled men and women were brought into the factories and trained in specific tasks. Management then had the challenge of organising the flow of work in a way that it could be done satisfactorily with these more basic skill levels. They did not always succeed as evidenced by the number of 'duds' amongst shells supplied to the western front. Companies did go to extraordinary efforts to meet the challenge, but in the end the gap between supply and demand was met by imports from the USA. A huge quantity of armaments were imported and so these machine tools merely added to the list. It would however give the Americans a further foothold in British markets.

For Herberts and Coventry, the end of the war meant first a frenzy of activity but then the reality sunk in. The industry had grown to meet war demand and now had to shrink back to peacetime levels. Yet the world was changing and manufacturers sought different and more economical ways of doing things; the tried and tested no longer worked. For Herberts the challenge was to decide which machines to produce and how much to invest in new designs. In their book Alfred Herbert and the British Machine Tool Industry, Roger Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis suggest that Sir Alfred found it hard to set a clear direction. There was also the issue of factored machines, which I discuss in Vehicles to Vaccines, which gave Herberts the option to source the more advanced machinery from third parties and so avoid both the cost of investment and the risk of failure.

You can read a fuller account of Coventry manufacturing by following this link and something on the earlier history of machine tools in this link.

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London's 19th century tool makers

For the Machine tools of various kinds had been used around the world for centuries; there is some evidence of a lathe being used in China in the middle of the second millennium before the Common Era. A paucity of records make it difficult to reach back to clear examples much further than 1700. The importance of machine tools is clear; they were fundamental to industrialisation, Winston Churchill is quoted as saying, in the context of production for the Second World War, that they were 'the ganglion nerve centre of the whole [of] supply’.

Guns at COD Greenford in WW2

The eighteenth century saw the first burst of industrialisation through mechanisation with Thomas Newcomen and his steam-engine. These were made of metal and so harder to work by hand than the wood used on most of the early machinery for textile spinning and weaving. There was thus an incentive to find ways of employing something more than manpower. In William Steeds' History of Machine Tools 1700-1910, the author points us to the process of gun-boring such that the barrel would be cast with a removable core but would then need to be worked to achieve a smooth inner surface. The same principle could be applied to small cylinders of a steam engine, although Steeds points out that once work was needed on Watts improved steam-engine, greater accuracy was demanded and a more accurate version of the boring machine produced.

Reading Steeds' history two points in particular shine out. Machine tools of whatever kind were subjected to continuous improvement including by the men whom I refer to below. As important was the fact that much of the improvement crossed national borders. A good deal started in Britain but then ideas were taken up and improved upon in the USA, France and Germany and indeed others among the growing number of industrialised nations. I noted this international flavour when exploring 'who else shaped the manufacturing world'.

Looking in a little more detail at Steeds' book, he identifies a number of different classes of machine tool: lathes including those for cutting screws, gun-boring/cylinder-boring machines, drilling machines, planers (to achieve a flat surface), milling machines. gear-cutting machines, slotting machines, shaping machines, milling machines and grinding machines. Henry Maudslay, of whom I write below, would have added the sliding-rest to hold the item being worked on. In looking at the names Steeds mentions, there are well known American engineers: Brown & Sharpe, Pratt & Whitney and Ingersoll; and companies I wrote about in Vehicles to Vaccines in terms of their influence in the second half of the twentieth century: Alfred Herbert, Charles Churchill and William Asquith. Writing about the Crewe Railway Works which brought in many machine tools in the 1860s and 1870s, the point is made that for British industry as a whole would embrace machine tools in the 1890s. This was before the birth of the motor industry which would be accompanied by these three British tools makers in particular.

I have made the point elsewhere in my writing on manufacturing that war provides an almost essential stimulus. So it was at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich that a young boy, Henry Maudslay, began to learn his trade. His father was a storeman, but young Henry had other ideas. He began as a powder monkey filling cartridges and progressed to the carpenters shop and then, because he showed more interest in metal working, the smithy. He would become, in the eyes of the celebrated Manchester engineer William Fairburn, 'one of the six engineers who completely dominated the profession between 1790 and 1830, the year before he died. The other five were John Rennie, Thomas Telford, James Watt, Joseph Bramah and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Henry took the skills he had garnered at Woolwich and took up employment with Joseph Bramah who had been looking for someone skilled enough to make the locks he was designing. In 1797, Henry set up his own smithy off Oxford Street, moving first to Cavendish Square and then to Lambeth in 1810. The ending of the Napoleonic wars resulted in a temporary set back in demand but then the business thrived as a partnership which included Henry's son and Joshua Field trading as Maudslay, Sons and Field. An early project was to produce machines to manufacture ship's pulley blocks to the design of Marc Brunel. Much, but not all of what, Maudslay did was about creating machines to do with consistent precision what would take a skilled man may hours.

Maudslay had his share of patents not least for his table engine which took the idea of the steam engine and made it compact but also reducing the number of parts needed. This leads to one of Maudslay's great legacies: the manufacturing process was as important as the invention itself. In this his insistence on the use of sliding rests in his workshop ensured consistency. They all enabled accuracy, the other great legacy. Within the context of his workshop he encouraged standardisation, for example, of screws, something taken even further by Whitworth in Manchester. Maudslay's work on screws enabled greater accuracy of measurement by the bench micrometer.

Henry Maudslay was working at the cusp of a dramatic change from craft skills to engineering process and London was the place to be with a large and growing population and with access to the Midlands via the Grand Junction Canal. Working in London at the same time were Joseph Bramah, John Penn the ship builder, John Rennie a Scot who had trained as a millwright but was principally a civil engineer as was Telford.

Many other engineers, at that time almost all self-taught, were seeking improvement. Some may have served apprenticeship, others a period of working with more experienced men. They were referred to as journeymen and indeed they embarked on journeys around the country to learn new skills. London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was becoming a magnet for people from largely rural areas looking for work. My forebears were among them and like many arrived at Charing Cross to seek their fortune in my family's case as wax and tallow chandlers. Journeymen engineers were perhaps rather more focused and set their sights not on Charing Cross but on Maudslay's works over the river at Lambeth.

In a fascinating book, Henry Maudslay and the Pioneers of the Machine Age, editors John Cantrell and Gillian Cookson draw together chapters on those engineers who learnt their trade from Maudslay.

Richard Roberts was a Welshman who picked up skills as a turner in Staffordshire before finding work in Manchester. It was still the time of the Napoleonic wars and militia officers were seeking him. He therefore made his way to London in the hope of anonymity. This he achieved and he also found his way to Maudslay's works. He spent two years with Maudslay improving his skills as a turner and fitter but also expanding his general educuation. With the defeat of Napoleon he returned to Manchester and I continue his story in my blog piece on Manchester engineers, where he immersed himself in machinery for the textile industry.

David Napier came from a family which had worked with metal for generations. His grandfather Robert expanded their family smithy to become involved in the mechanisation of calico printing on the Clyde. Robert was succeeded by his son John who took advantage of the new Forth & Clyde canal to obtain pig iron from the Carron foundry near Falkirk for the family business now trading in Dumbarton. Robert's third son also Robert became smith and armourer to the Duke of Argyll at Inveraray where David was born in 1788 although Robert remained a partner in the family business which David joined as an apprentice in 1805. By 1814 David was working in London with Maudslay. He stayed there for two years before beginning his exploration into printing presses as employer, partner and finally on his own account. Importantly he worked with the parliamentary printer, Thomas Hansard, and produced the very successful Nay-Peer press for printing playing cards and banknotes as well as other high quality print. He also produced machines, the Imperial and Double Imperial, for newspaper printing. From this Napier went on to produce precision instruments and also skilled work for the Board of Ordnance. Their works were also in Lambeth.

Joseph Clement was born in Westmorland in 1779 and worked first as a slater before moving to metal work mainly on looms first in Glasgow and then Aberdeen when he attended courses on Natural philosophy at Marischal College. He moved to London in 1813 and worked for Alexander Galloway, a successful manufacturer less concerned with technical excellence that Braham to which he moved before joining Maudslay as chief draughtsman. In 1817 he set up on his own earning a reputation as both an excellent draughtsman and maker of fine machinery. He worked for Charles Babbage on the latter's Difference Engine but the two fell out over charges. Joseph Whitworth spent some time with Clement after leaving Maudslay and further honed his precision skills.

Joseph Whitworth was born in 1803 in Stockport son of a loom frame maker. In 1821 he became a mechanic with Crighton & Co, Manchester textile machine manufacturers. He left for London in search of self improvement and joined Maudslay working alongside the latter's most skilled me. Whitworth left Maudslay in 1828 to join Joseph Clement before returning to Manchester but with a mission for precision. He knew Tootal, William Fairburn, Charles Beyer (Peacock) and William Muir. I tell more of Whitworth in my blog on Manchester tool makers.

James Naysmith joined Maudslay for the last two years of the latter's life. There is a suggestion that Naysmith's father had had friendly dealings with Maudslay. There were though other reasons why Naysmith may have been welcomed. James was born and brought up in Edinburgh and had not excelled at school; class sizes of 200 are quoted and may well have contributed. James though was the son of an engineer who happily taught him drawing. Friends of his father, also involved in engineering taught him practical skills. These were not wasted for James soon became an accomplished model maker. These models included small steam engines which he would sell at £10 time which was put to good use in paying for his attendance at lectures on a wide variety of subjects. By 1829 when he travelled to London to join Maudslay he was already 888888. He left Maudslay's company in 1831 and returned to Manchester via a further spell in Edinburgh. I continue his story in my Manchester blog.

William Muir was another Scot and was apprenticed in Kilmarnock. He went on from there to Glasgow before heading to London where he joined Maudslay's firm only months after the the death of the founder. Muir carried out generally supervisory roles whilst refining his skills in machine making. He was with Maudslay's for five years and let to join another London engineering before moving to Manchester as foreman in Whitworth's.

As for Maudslay, they moved their focus to marine engineering and traded successfully and with technical distinction until challenging finances led to their closure at the turn of the century. A fourth generation of Maudslay (RW Maudslay) moved to Coventry to set up the Maudslay Motor Co in 1903.

Of significance to machine tools, Charles Churchill had from 1865 begun importing American machine tools. In their book Alfred Herbert Ltd and the British Machine Tool Industry, 1887-1983, authors Roger Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis first look back at the passage of the nineteenth century and see as the century progressed an increased penetration of the British market by American machine tool manufacturers. In particular when the British economy start to boom in the 1890s with bicycle manufacture the demand for machine tools outstripped British supply. There were also doubts on the quality and appropriateness on British machines as well as overcapacity in the US which spurred American salesmen in the direction of Europe and Britain in particular.

The man who took up the machine tool mantle from Maudslay was Alfred Herbert and I tell his story in this link to Coventry where he set up.

Further reading:

• William Steeds, A History of Machine Tools 1700-1910 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969)
• Henry Maudslay and the Pioneers of the Machine Age, John Cantrell and Gillian Cookson (eds.) (Stroud: Tempus, 2002)

Swindon manufacturing history

Swindon would become one of the great 19th century railway towns, but at the end of the 18th century it was a place largely passed by.

Kennett and Avon canal 

The canals changed this as the ambitious link between the Thames and the Avon was debated. What became the Kennet and Avon canal was the southern link through the Vale of Pewsey. A northern route branched north near Melksham and made its way between Calne and Chippenham to pass close to Swindon on its way up to Abingdon on the Thames. Later. the north Wiltshire canal would link from Swindon to the Thames and Severn canal at Cirencester.

From next to nothing, Swindon had become an ‘epicentre’, well nearly. The impact though was real with a big drop in the price of coal from the Somerset coal fields and access to hungry urban areas for the agricultural produce of north Wiltshire farmers.

No sooner was all of this in place than Isambard Kingdom Brunel was appointed chief engineer of the yet to be built Great Western Railway. Debate followed but the route adopted would pass through Swindon after Didcot and before Chippenham and the Box tunnel through to Bath and Bristol. A little later a line would snake north west from Swindon through to Cheltenham.

A few lines of text belie the task. 1840 was in the middle of one of the 19th century’s downward economic cycles. Many railways were being built, but they were mostly short runs linking towns and neighbouring coalfields. The longer routes (The Grand Junction and the London Birmingham) were massive undertakings involving great financial risk. The GWR was no different, especially with the cost and complexity of the Box tunnel. Nevertheless it was built and opened to traffic.

The new line would need a repair workshop. John Chandler, in his Swindon - History and Guide, tells the story. Swindon was simply not suitable: it had an inadequate water supply and really no skilled labour. Surely Bristol would be better, closer to coal and with an already large population. Daniel Gooch had been appointed to create the workshops and he argued for Swindon. There were those who suggested that local landowners may have sought to influence him. Other factors also came into play. Land was available at Swindon by merging with Cheltenham railway. Swindon was also at that point along the route where a change of engine would be needed to take on the challenge of the route through the Box tunnel.

There was still no money until the idea emerged of a station at Swindon offering refreshment to passengers as the engines were changed. This resulted in grand three storey station buildings constructed along with a village of railway houses all at the builder’s expense in return for the profits from the station. Anecdotes suggest that the quality of refreshment was not great and that prices were on the steep side - perhaps nothing changes.

The building of the workshops began during the economic downturn, but by the time of the railway mania that followed, locomotives were not only being repaired but new ones were being built. The GWR had opted for a broad gauge railway in contrast to the narrow gauge adopted elsewhere. This had the advantage that locomotives could be bigger and more powerful - in 1846 a locomotive, the Great Western, could pull a full passenger train at 60 mph over a long distance. The emphasis on power and speed is born out by the contrasting comments on the Crewe works.

In terms of employee numbers, Chandler quotes 400 for 1843 growing to 1800 by 1847, but then shrinking back to 600. Towards the end of the century, tough economic conditions gave way to better times and employee numbers climbed to 11,500. Alongside a better economy, the GWR had diversified and expanded its routes. Crucially it had moved over to the new standard gauge in 1892. Possibly more important it had added a large carriage works in 1865 and was producing rolling stock built to the highest standards of luxury. Magnificent locomotives were built including the legendary Castles, Kings, Granges, Manors and Halls classes. The works expanded in area eventually covering 326 acres including 79 acres roofed over. Even in 1846 the engine shop could accommodate 36 locomotives in a building in the shape of a stable with separate stalls.

Swindon was ever more dependent on the railway with some 80% of adults males employed there. Clothing factories were attracted by the corresponding availability of female labour: Compton employed 1,000 including the manufacture of GWR uniforms.

Employment at the GWR works grew to 14,369 in 1925 but then begun its decline to 10,000 until 1960, 5000 in 1967 and just over 1,000 before it closed in 1986. I write about the massive changes in the post war railways in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Swindon attracted other industries. It became home to a Pressed Steel factory which continues to supply bodies for the Mini. The Vickers site in Swindon first produced Spitfires in the Second World War and then was used for experimental projects. The site was then taken by Honda for their UK production base. It is currently being redeveloped once more. Plessey opened a factory in Swindon during the Second World War to meet demand from the MOD. The company also managed a number of shadow factories. The Swindon factory later specialised in hydraulics and a further factory was built at Cheney Manor in 1957 to manufacture transistors. RA Lister built a factory to manufacture farm equipment and diesel engines to add capacity to its main base at Dursley.

Further reading:

• John Chandler, Swindon - History and Guide (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992)
• Michael A. Howell, Bygone Swindon (Chichester: Phillimore)
• You can read more in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines

A town created by the railways - Crewe

 Crewe is the third town cited by Asa Briggs as created in the 19th century. It was created by the railways for the railways and Diane Drummond, in her book Crewe: Railway Town , Company and People 1840-1914, offers a precise date, 10 March 1843, when the first employees and their families were settled there.

It later became home to Rolls-Royce Motors. The image is of General Montgomery's Rolls-Royce probably manufactured in Derby (see below).

It was the Grand Junction Railway that decided Crewe was the place for its main works. It had become the place where a number of separate railway lines met what would become the west coast mainline and so it was a logical location for the factory that would maintain and manufacture locomotives and rolling stock but also rails.

Drummond offers a glimpse of the scale of railway manufacture by comparing Crewe with Swindon which was home to the works of the Great Western Railway. Crewe's initial workforce in 1843 numbered 1,150 compared to Swindon's 423. However by 1847 as a result of economic downturn, Crewe's workforce had reduced to 1,000 whereas Swindon's had increased to 1,800. Looking further ahead to 1900, Crewe employed 7,500 and Swindon 11,500.

Crewe might not have been the biggest, but it laid claim to be the most technologically advanced. Drummond suggests that, having a single customer, the works followed a path of vertical integration. At one time it made everything used in locomotive manufacture except copper piping. Famously it built its own iron and steel works being one of the first to embrace the Bessemer and then the Siemens-Martin processes. Carr and Taplin, in their History of the British Steel Industry, tell how the Chief Mechanical Engineer, John Ramsbottom was persuaded by William Siemens to instal open hearth furnaces for the conversion of old iron into new steel rails. In addition to furnaces, Ramsbotton installed a new rail-rolling mill to be added to ten years later by a second mill with an updated design by the next Chief Mechanical Engineer, Francis Webb. These two respected engineers followed in the footsteps of Francis Trevethick, son of Richard Trevethick, who set up the Crewe works.

It was said that Crewe built locomotives for economy, leaving GWR to win plaudits for power and speed. Nevertheless, Crewe earned respect for their training of young engineers among whom was Nigel Gresley. From the start, Crewe operated a division of labour with as many as nineteen different trades including: 'smiths and their strikers; moulders and their assistant dressers and casters; pattern makers and coppersmiths; boilermaking trades of platers, riveters and 'holders-up'; turners; coachbuilders and engine fitters'. Basic machine tools were employed such as lathes, 'slotting, shaping and planing machines'. Under Ramsbottom new machine tools were introduced in the 1860s and 1870s resulting in increasing standardisation using interchangeable parts. In this Crewe was perhaps twenty years ahead of the so called Machine Tool Revolution which transformed other engineering companies in the 1890s. One consequence of the increase in mechanisation was a change in the composition of the workforce with a higher proportion of general labourers and fewer skilled men.

Drummond takes her reader through the essential elements of the process of constructing a railway locomotive which I simplify in the interests of highlighting the growing role of machine tools. The starting point is the foundry where the iron is made which can then be cast, or puddled to become more malleable wrought iron. The invention of steel eventually took the place of wrought iron. In the railway workshop, parts would first be moulded, that is a mould would be created and the molten metal introduced. Moulds varied massively in complexity and so the skill required in their making. Should parts need to be joined, this was then undertaken by the smithy. Welding, as we know it, came very much later. A locomotive could comprise some 5,000 parts each of which would require a degree of finishing using perhaps a lathe. This was the job of the turner. As time progressed the number of machine tools increased and so a larger proportion of the work was carried out by semi-skilled machinists. For a locomotive, the construction of the boiler was central. Again, this was a combination of skill, machine power and stamina - it was hard work. The final part of the process was down to teams of fitter-erectors who would put all the parts together; this was one of the last stages of the process to employ machine tools. (I can't help having in my minds eye, as a contrast, the robots on the production line at today's Derby works)

This was surely a complex process and one that had to be married with work in repairing locomotives. The whole was carried out in a cyclical economy presenting management with massive challenges in balancing the books. At Crewe a device of compulsory unpaid holiday was used to match the workforce with the hours needed for the work. This unsatisfactory arrangement was eventually superseded by lay-offs, inevitably met with resistance.

All this happened in a town where employment in the railway works was life for a large proportion of the population. Towns with a wider spread of employment were far less vulnerable to the foibles of the economy.

For Crewe, the years immediately preceding the Second World War brought Rolls-Royce and a factory to manufacture aero engines. (The image is of General Montgomery's Rolls-Royce probably made in the Derby factory.) After the war the factory took over the manufacture of both Rolls-Royce and Bentley motor cars, with the Derby factory giving its focus to jet aero engines. As I tell in Vehicles to Vaccines, Rolls-Royce Motors split off from the aero-engine company and continued manufacturing in Crewe. At the turn of the twentieth century the German BMW bought Rolls-Royce and built a new factory at Goodwood in Sussex, VW took the Bentley brand and upgraded the Crewe factory. Both companies continue to trade successfully under their new ownership. Bentley is now the largest private sector employer in Crewe.

Further reading:

• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)
• Diane K. Drummond, Crewe: Railway Town, Company and People 1840-1914 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995)

The towns industry created - Barrow in Furness

 Barrow is the second town which Asa Briggs mentions as a 19th century creation by the railways. F. Barnes, in his book Barrow and District, may take issue.

Barnes takes his reader through the long history of iron production in Furness dating back to the 13th century and earlier where the local population fashioned iron objects from the readily available iron ore smelted with charcoal. These were very much for their own use, with ore lying on or near the surface and with temperature high enough only to make the iron soft but not molten and filled with impurities which had to be hammered out.

Iron ore was plentiful on the Furness peninsula but wood for charcoal came to be rationed in the reign of Elizabeth I as I discussed in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. In Furness there was little option but to ship ore from Barrow to be smelted at Blackbarrow in the Lake District where wood and hence charcoal was more plentiful. Production continued on a relatively small scale without the use of blast furnaces until 1711.

The new Blackbarrow furnace was first blown in 1711/12 and was followed by other 'blown' furnaces in the area. The famous Furness name of Wilkinson (Isaac the father of John known as the 'father of the English iron trade') first appears in the building of the Low Wood Furnace near Blackbarrow. The supply of charcoal once again became an issue. This time ore was shipped to Scotland for smelting.

A dramatic change came in 1839 when H.W. Schneider and his brother purchased Whitriggs mine and began to export ore from Barrow to South Wales and Staffordshire. The building of the Furness railway in 1846 from Barrow to Kirby enabled movement but it was the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway which opened up the whole country and enabled the import of coke from Durham for use with the Furness ore and limestone. Blast furnaces were built. The iron ore was well suited to the Bessemer process for steel production and James Ramsden formed a company which merged with Schneider resulting in the Barrow Haematite and Steel Company. The plant was then the largest iron works and Bessemer plant in the world. Furnaces were opened at neighbouring Askam, Ulverston and Carnforth with production reaching its peak in 1870.

Barnes offers some figures which demonstrate the shift from shipping ore to local smelting. The peak of ore exporting came in 1857 when out of 592,390 tons mined, 562,095 were exported. In 1863, one third of ore mined was smelted locally and in 1877 out of 993,912 tons mined only 42,683 was exported. The peak year was 1882 with 1,408,693 mined; this declined to 116,393 in 1938.

Fundamental to the development of Barrow were two aristocrats who invested substantially in the docks and infrastructure: the Dukes of Devonshire and Buccleuch. Much of the early iron production had focused on Furness Abbey which passed down through a number of ownerships before ending up with the Devonshire family. The Duke of Buccleugh inherited the Manors of Furness and Hawkshead and so too had a landed interest.

I came across a fascinating blog describing the housing history of Barrow. As with Middlesborough, another 19th creation mentioned by Asa Briggs, the development of the iron industry led to a dramatic increase in population which needed housing. The blog traces the housing built in the different stages of development of Barrow starting with the 28 houses existing in 1843. Clearly this was insufficient and first of all huts were built for the workers coming in. This was then followed by more substantial 'Scotch Buildings', essentially five story tenement blocks which would have been familiar to the workers coming from Scotland. These were followed by Devonshire Buildings, Maritime Gardens and then terraced Roose housing and the mock Tudor terraces of Vickerstown: the Vickers name stemming from the next chapter in Barrow's life.

Barrow did seek to diversify its manufacturing. One issue that concerned the iron masters was the fluidity of their workforce and it was thought that finding jobs for women would add stability. The route taken was jute and the Barrow and Calcutta Jute company at one time employed 2,000 women; competition from overseas and Dundee forced its closure in 1930. Barrow Paper Mills faired better staying in business until the seventies. It became part of Bowater Scott. Other later additions were British Cellophane and K Shoes.

Manufacturing in Barrow had a second focus on shipbuilding resulting from both the production of iron and the earlier export of ore. Neighbouring Ulverston was a much bigger place and attracted the earlier shipbuilders. James Fisher was established in 1847 and built a number of ships. In 1870 the Barrow Iron and Shipbuilding Company was founded, again under the direction of James Ramsden and built a good number of ships including naval craft and importantly the first submarine in 1886 designed by the Swedish T. Nordenfeldt. In 1888 the Naval Construction and Armaments Company took over the yard and eight years later Vickers bought that company and production continued under the name Vickers Sons and Maxim. I write about the development of Vickers in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. There began a long history of naval construction especially submarines. Vickers claimed a unique position of supplying naval ships complete with armaments. Vickers added the manufacture of the early airships with designs by a young Barnes Wallis and then railway wagons.

The presence of Vickers in Barrow attracted Ferranti with semi conductor manufacturing and Marconi with radar and which eventually became part of BAE Systems along with Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Limited. With a major order book of work with submarines, Barrow's future looks healthy.

Further reading:

• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)
• F. Barnes, Barrow and District (Barrow in Furness, 1968)
• J.D. Scott, Vickers - A History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962)
• John F. Wilson, Ferranti - A History (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 1999)

The towns industry created - Middlesbrough

The railways created their own revolution. The distinguished historian, Asa Briggs, highlights Middlesborough, Barrow in Furness and Crewe as towns created by the railways, each in their individual way.

Middlesborough on the River Tees was six miles closer to the sea than Stockton and could be readily accessed by coastal shipping. Stockton was at one end of the famous Stockton-Darlington railway built to transport coal from the County Durham pits. The railway owners saw in Middlesborough the ideal port to handle increases in coal production and so commissioned the extension of their railway from Stockton to Middlesborough. In 1826, Joseph Pease, the champion of the project and the leader of the 'Middlesbrough Owners', estimated that 10,000 tons of coal a year could be transported by this route. When the route opened in 1830, it carried 150,000 tons and by 1840 the annual throughput was 1.5 million. A whole new dock area had been built.

The expansion of the little village of Middlesborough was prodigious but carefully planned. The growing population was to be housed in dwellings built on tidy streets behind the docks. A pottery set up in business and Henry Bolckow, an immigrant from Mecklenberg, financed the setting up of an iron foundry working with John Vaughan who had learnt his skills at the Dowlais iron works in South Wales. They sourced their iron ore from blast-furnaces near Bishop Auckland in the South Durham coalfield and produced rails but also small steam engines. Henry Bolckow would be very much the patrician who, along with the 'Middlesbrough Owners', financed public buildings nurturing the embryonic town. In this he is compared to Titus Salt in Bradford and John Laird at Birkenhead.

At this point the expansion of the railways could have ended the Middlesborough story, for transport of coal by rail took over from the coastal trade. However, there was another chapter to come in the story and this lay in the Cleveland hills at Eston where a rich seam of ironstone was discovered. This transformed the fortunes of Bolckow and Vaughan and attracted both other iron masters and workers from iron producing areas across the country and beyond. Production began in 1850 and by 1873 the North-Eastern iron-field, with Middlesborough as its capital, was producing 5.5 million tons of ore a year making over two million tons of pig iron, about one third of Britain's total production. A good deal was exported and the name Middlesbrough was known around the world. Middlesbrough had been incorporated in 1853 already signifying its importance.

Of the other companies involved, the Pease family took pride of place as dealers in coal, quarrying ironstone and limestone, banking and manufacturing. The Bell family from Newcastle built the Port Clarence furnaces on the north bank of the Tees using the West Hartlepool railway and Hartlepool as their docks. Furness Withy built ships in Hartlepool and had fingers in many iron related pies. In the book Middlesborough - Town and Community 1830-1950, Asa Briggs in his introduction adds the names of William Hopkins and John Snowden, the Cochranes from Staffordshire and Bernhard Samuelson from Banbury.

The coming together of iron masters from different areas brought contrasting ideas of iron making. It is difficult to comprehend the sheer scale of what was going on: blast furnaces ninety feet high and thirty feet across spitting fire into the night sky. Iron companies worked at diversification, some vertically bringing the whole making process under one roof, some horizontally embracing fabrication and shipbuilding. Companies merged, companies collapsed and new ones took their place. This was a frontier town of the late industrial revolution.

Workers came from Durham, South Wales, Staffordshire and Scotland along with labourers from Ireland. The population grew from 7,431 in 1851 to 91,302 fifty years later. The town's founding families had provided municipal buildings but the careful plan for dwellings fell by the wayside and housing in Middlesborough became no better than that in the old industrial towns. Matters were made worse by the economic cycles which brought periods of depression to the iron producing areas. Growing foreign competition particularly with steel didn't help.

Steel was taking over from puddled iron and Cleveland ore was rich in phosphorus which prevented the successful use of the Bessemer process. The Gilchrist-Thomas open hearth process developed to enable the use of ore rich in phosphorus, but Middlesborough steel would never approach the success it had achieved with mailable iron. It was with the relative newcomer Dorman Long founded in 1870 in whom the future of the town would rest. This new company began by manufacturing iron bars and angles for shipbuilding but acquired the Britannia Works from Samuelson and later combined with Bell.

So, in 1880 the Middlesbrough iron industry had metamorphosed into steel production with two giants: Bolckow and Vaughan and Dorman Long. Heavy engineering and shipbuilding grew as local customers, but there were export markets too. Dorman Long would thrive and their iron was used to build many of the great bridges across the Empire not least that at Sydney Harbour in 1924 (shown in the image). The demands of the First World War created a temporary respite but Dorman Long eventually swallowed up the surviving Middlesborough pioneers. Thereafter the struggle with overseas competition was felt in Middlesbrough as elsewhere. I write of the problems of overcapacity in Vehicles to Vaccines. In terms of employment, the now large population supported a retail sector with its related employment. For many of the people of Middlesbrough there was mass unemployment.

This chemical industry went some way to replace earlier employment in iron and steel. ICI's massive Wilton chemical plant set up in 1949 was nearby, as was Billingham set up thirty years earlier. I write much more in Vehicles to Vaccines. Further down the coast is Staithes with the former ICI potash mine.

Further reading:

• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)
• Middlesbrough Town and Community 1830-1950, A.J. Pollard (ed.) (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1996)
• Carol Kennedy, ICI - The Company That Changed Our Lives (London: Hutchinson, 1986)