Scunthorpe manufacturing history

 The iron ore fields of north Lincolnshire attracted iron smelting to Frodingham and Appleby, two villages within what became Scunthorpe. Both companies added steel making, but Frodingham's pig iron production from the north Lincolnshire ore greatly exceeded its steel making capacity. This attracted Harry Steel, managing director of the Sheffield firm, Steel, Peech and Tozer, who, in the aftermath of the First World War, anticipated some consolidation in the industry. The two works and others were brought together in what became the United Steel Company. In the thirties both of these Scunthorpe plants were further expanded.

Lincolnshire ore was also exploited by Richard Thomas of South Wales at the Redbourn works. However, a plan to extend this into a major tinplating plant was shelved in preference for renewed investment in South Wales. Scunthorpe received further investment from John Lysaght at its Normanby Park steelworks in order to provide steel supplies for their other metal activities. John Brown of Sheffield had bought the Trent Ironworks in Scunthorpe and after the First World War moved their steel foundry to the town.

The nationalisation of the steel industry brought the Scunthorpe plants under a single umbrella. In 1972 the British Steel Corporation embarked on a ten year plan of modernisation and Scunthorpe was one of the centres identified for further investment.

In 1999 British Steel merged with the Dutch steel maker Koninklijke Hoogovens to form Corus. In 2007 Corus was bought by Tata Steel of India creating one of the world’s largest steel makers. British Steel Scunthorpe was bought from Tata Steel in 2016 and sold on to the Chinese Jingye Group in 2020.

Away from steel, Lebus Furniture built a 250,000 square foot factory in the town. I write about British furniture manufacturers in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Further reading:

J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)

York manufacturing history

 A cathedral city second only to Canterbury, York had a university only from 1963, but as I tell below it was a centre of learning. It’s early prosperity was built on the cloth trade, but this declined by the end of the fifteenth century.

It was the home of Rowntree and Terry confectionery and also railway workshops as evidenced by the National Railway Museum. The impact of these industries took off in the 1880s. Terrys were first, being well established by 1851 producing candied peel, jujubes, lozenges and sweets. Rowntree really began in 1879 taking a French invention of crystallised gums, but the business was transformed by Dutch equipment for the processing of cocoa beans which had been taken up first by Frys in Bristol and then by Cadbury in Birmingham. I write about the development of Rowntree in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Railway activity grew alongside that of confectionary with workshops for the repair of locomotives and rolling stock. The locomotive manufacturing work was first undertaken by third parties but then moved to workshops first in York and then in Darlington. York did however take full responsibility for carriages, building state of the art works in the early twentieth century.

It was not a great hub of manufacturing like Sheffield or Birmingham, yet it was chosen as the venue for the first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at the invitation of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. These societies were springing up in towns around the country, often alongside industry, exploring science for its advancement. York then had little industry, but it did have a community passionate about discovery, whether of the city’s history or the world around.

In a volume of papers to mark the 150th anniversary of that first meeting, there is a chapter exploring the path of science and technology in York over that century and a half and it highlights some of the key individuals.

Sir George Cayley (1773-1857) was the inventor of the aeroplane in the first half of the nineteenth century. I wrote about the early days of flight in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Thomas Cooke (1807-1868) was a maker of fine telescopes applying the skills of mechanical engineering to the work on lenses carried out in his workshops.

Dennis Taylor (1861-1943) was a lens designer taking forward the work of Thomas Cooke whose business diversified into clocks, machine tools, pneumatic pumps, engraving machines and optical instruments.

Henry Hunnings invented a micro-telephone, like many amateurs building on the invention by Alexander Graham Bell. After much legal wrangling, the rights to his transmitter were sold to the United Telephone Company (UK) and the American Bell Telephone Company and the design remained in use for over a century.

Further reading:

York 1831-1981, Charles Feinstein Ed. (York: William Sessions, 1981)

Huddersfield manufacturing history

 Huddersfield provided a commercial centre at its famous Cloth Hall for the many thousands of home working wool weavers in the surrounding district. 

The inventions of which I have written elsewhere slowly changed this settled and quite prosperous scene. In his book The Story of Huddersfield Roy Brook first points to  the error in assuming that wool and cotton were distinct industries. He makes the point that ‘Manchester Goods’ (which incidentally my father traded in East Africa in the early twentieth century and of which I wrote in my book Dunkirk to D Day. The image is of my father on Mombassa railway station in 1911) were a mix of cotton and wool. Similarly the weavers and spinners of Huddersfield almost certainly worked with cotton as well as wool. 

In terms of mechanisation, the first initiatives increased the speed of spinning and thus the weavers had somehow to keep up. I have read elsewhere that exports of thread to the Low Countries balanced the overproduction, but was not welcomed. Mechanisation of weaving had a more dramatic impact, for now factories filled with weaving machines could and did replaced the many thousands of hand weavers. The well known opposition of the Luddites was replicated across the wool weaving areas. Charlotte Bronte’s book Shirley offers a vivid account of what this might have been like. Mechanisation was in fact a gradual process with hand weavers providing cloth along side the much larger mills. 

Huddersfield did have its weaving machine manufacturers, but, for worsted cloth, manufacturers from the west of the Pennines were used, worsted having greater similarities with cotton cloth. In Huddersfield, Haighs were well known for carding engines. Whiteleys became famous for the manufacture of spinning mules and tentering machines. 

Huddersfield developed a chemical industry on the back of dye houses. Read Holliday began with dye but then moved into acids including picric acid which would become essential in the Great War as would lyddite. War also presented a challenge, for German produced materials were key in the supply chain. In time home production took the strain. The company became first part of British Dyestuffs and then of ICI. It is now run by Syngenta.

The introduction of the steam engine, about which Samuel Smiles wrote so engagingly in his Lives of Boulton and Watt, had a dramatic impact on Huddersfield as it had in other textile areas. Broadbents led the field in Huddersfield in steam powered heavy machinery. Hopkinson became well known for their ‘Indicator’ which could tell the operator how a steam engine was performing, highlighting hidden areas where problems may be arising. It was compared to stethoscope for a physician. 

Machinery manufacturers engendered skills applicable in other fields of mechanical engineering, an example being plant for the production of gas.

Karrier trucks were made here and later became part of the Rootes Group.

The introduction of electricity brought about further change and it was Ernest Brook Limited which manufactured electric motors for use in factories. In November 1950, the company produced its millionth engine.

David Brown Gears began in 1860 serving the wool industry and it grew to having fourteen factories with 10,000 employees. I write of its activity with tractors in the Second World War in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. It went on to lead Aston Martin Lagonda to great success. It continues to do great engineering as David Brown Defence.

Further reading 

Roy Brook, The Story of Huddersfield (London: MCGibbon & Kee, 1968)

Halifax Manufacturing History

 Halifax was known as a town of an hundred trades, yet its origins were similar to many other Yorkshire wool towns; it was the place that weavers from the large parish of Halifax and beyond would bring their work for sale. The urban area of Halifax was but a small part of a large rural parish in the West Riding. It was in hilly country which offered the advantage of fast running water to power machines but also the disadvantage of making the town less accessible than others by canal and railway.

In 1779 the wool traders built the beautiful Piece Hall which had the capacity to house a significant trade in woollen goods. With accessible water power the new inventions in spinning and weaving could readily be applied in a small but growing number of factories in the town. Coal was expensive to transport and so steam was late in coming to Halifax by which time Bradford had secured a lead in worsted production. Nonetheless the worsted trade prospered in the town as growing urban areas in Britain and abroad sought woollen goods. The Akroyd family stood out in the first part of the nineteenth century. John Holdsworth were noted as providing khaki and navy cloth for the armed forces.

A distinctive trade in the town was the manufacture of carpets. The Crossley family took a lease on Dean Clough Mill in 1801. The business was successful, with many thousands of employees over the years, and continued through to 1987 having joined with two Kidderminster companies to form Carpets International. Production of fine Brussels Wilton carpets continued into the 21st century.

Wool factories needed engineers and Hailfax produced a rather special breed of engineer, the maker of machine tools. I write of machine tools elsewhere in relation to London, Manchester and Coventry. Halifax and Keighley became another centre of the industry. William Asquith was founded in 1865 and became famous for their revolutionary radial drilling machine which replaced the practice of punching in constructional engineering. James Butler, a former apprentice as Crossleys, developed specialist planing machines. Butlers were instrumental in the formation of the British Tool Manufacturers Association in 1917. Cornelius Redman formed another machine tool firm which was bought by the London tool maker Charles Churchill in 1935 to form Churchill Redman.

The fine skills required for machine tool making were equally applicable to jewellery and the firm of Charles Horner became well known. Working with metal extended to boiler making and and heating apparatus. James Royston produced tons of charcoal wire for the first transatlantic cable in 1856.

John Mackintosh left Bowman's cotton mill in 1890 to open a pastrycook business with his popular product, a blend of butterscotch and American caramel. The business grew and soon employed hundreds of women wrapping toffee. Halifax became known as 'toffee town'. In the mid 1920s Mackintosh acquired A.J. Caley chocolate manufacturing business in Norwich, a marriage which produced 'Quality Street'. A fire destroyed the Norwich premises and the whole business moved to Halifax. Mackinstosh joined with Rowntree of York in 1969.

Halifax is perhaps best known now for mortgages. The building society movement began in the nineteenth century and in Halifax two main societies emerged, the Halifax Permanent and the Halifax Equitable which merged in the 1920s. The societies and indeed the local banks which were founded to finance local business attracted to their boards the great and the good of the town and wider parish.

Halifax contributed to the national effort in both world wars. Machine tool companies made all manner of war materiel and textile manufacturers were busy clothing the forces. In the interwar years, Percy Shaw invented 'cats eyes' and founded Reflecting Roadstuds Ltd to manufacture them, enjoying particularly strong demand in the blackout of the war years. In the Second World War Harold Mackinstosh became much involved in National Savings raising money to pay the cost of war. My father was invited by Sir Harold to speak in Halifax in Salute the Soldier Week in June 1944. Here is a link to what he said. The image was taken when he was being introduced.

In the years following the war, textiles enjoyed strong demand for fabric for buses and railway carriage seats. This continues within the Camira Group. Marshalls manufactured paving, but machine tools suffered the decline I described elsewhere with fierce foreign competition which also later decimated the textile industry. Nestle now manufacture Quality Street in Halifax.

Further reading:

John A. Hargreaves, Halifax (Lancaster: Carnegie, 2003)

Hull manufacturing history

 ‘It presents the eye an interesting spectacle of numerous vessels floating to and from the port of Hull: while that opulent and commercial town in its low situation close to the banks and surrounded by the masts of the shipping in the docks seems to rise like Venice from amidst the sea, the whole comprising a scene which for beauty and grandeur can scarcely be exceeded.’

This quotation from Bradshaw’s Guide had, behind it, a profound change in the lot of the British home. The railway had opened the inland but had also made accessible the shore to inland dwellers, and, in particular, had brought to the tables of ordinary people food never previously dreamed of. Hull, which had been a home of whaling, became the home of the British fishing fleet landing vast quantities of cod and haddock which would be whisked away by railway train to all parts of the country. That though is for later in the story.

Hull was first and foremost a port. In his book History of Kingston upon Hull, Hugh Calvert writes that Hull along with Liverpool were the major ports serving the Industrial Revolution and so were busy with both imports and exports. Hull at the mouth of the Humber was by the eighteenth century linked by rivers to Sheffield, Leeds, Huddersfield, Wakefield and Halifax. Soon canals would also link to Birmingham, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and Leicestershire and East Lancashire. Exports comprised iron, lead and metal goods but also pottery, hosiery and beer. Imports were of Swedish and Russian iron, timber, corn, linseed, flax, turpentine and tar. The Continent of Europe was the major destination but Hull also competed with Liverpool for the trade with America. With trade grew banking and the Smith's Bank also in Nottingham and Lincoln was just one of the progeny.

Shipbuilding had flourished in Hull since the fourteenth century or even earlier. Ships built included whalers, ships for the carriage of wine and naval vessels. The most important shipbuilder by the eighteenth century was the Blaydes family. Notoriously, a Hull shipyard built the Bounty later known for the mutiny against Captain Bligh. Steam and iron came successfully to Hull at the hands of the Earle family. In terms of shipping companies, it was the Wilson family that took pride of place.

The Earle family was also responsible for bringing the making of Roman Cement to Hull just three years before the invention of modern Portland Cement in 1824. The company would become part of the Blue Circle Group.

Manufacturing was the order of the day and Hull was not to be left out. It tried mills for both flax and cotton, but neither took off. Seeds for the oil they contained were more promising and factories for rolling and crushing seeds began to be built alongside businesses manufacturing the machinery required. In terms oil for margarine and soap, much later Unilever bought into the local industry. Oil was also used for paint, especially when combined with lead, and a paint industry emerged with Blundells, but also Reckitts which would become Reckitt and Colman manufacturing laundry starch, black lead and household polish.

The latter part of the nineteenth century saw a dramatic increase in the number of ships fishing from Hull. A rich area of fish had been discovered, growing urban areas were seeking sources of food and the technique of trawling for fish had been adopted. Ships powered by steam and then diesel added to the activity as did the invention of a means of making ice. Fish had to be kept cold from the point of being caught up to the point of sale at the fish market, and ice had been imported from Norway to achieve this. The Hull Ice Manufacturing Company began making its own ice in 1891. The Fylde Ice Company may take issue and suggest that its founder Joseph Marr, a Hull trawler man, had begun importing ice in 1860 and his son James set up the Ice Company in Fylde in 1908. That company expanded in to cold storage and still makes ice. One spin off from deep water fishing was the processing of cod liver oil, much 'loved' by those of us of a certain age.

The twentieth century saw Distillers set up plant to produce industrial alcohol and other chemical products of which I write in Vehicles to Vaccines. Smith + Nephew started out in Hull and still manufacture in the town. Hull is also still home to Ideal Heating formed in 1906. In nearby Brough, BAE Systems run the engineering centre for the Hawk trainer. This builds on the legacy of Hawker Siddeley and before then Robert Blackburn who set up the Brough factory at the start of the First World War.

Further reading:

Hugh Calvert History of Kingston upon Hull (Chichester: Phillimore, 1978)

Hartlepool manufacturing history

Hartlepool on the north east coast was a quiet market town, its heart beating in time with the agricultural community it served. A little further up the coast, the Tyne and Wear was exporting thousands of tons of coal to the hungry growing urban areas of early 19th century Britain and the Continent.

Robert Wood, in his book West Hartlepool – The Rise and Development of a Victorian New Town, in effect places at the feet of the Quakers of Darlington the sequence of railway developments that led to West Hartlepool becoming one of the great ports of the east coast. The challenge was how to bring coal from the Durham coalfields to waiting ships at the lowest cost. In the early days, transport was by packhorse, but, without the benefit of turnpike roads, at a cost that would double the price of coal every two miles travelled (p6). The alternative of a rail track along which coal wagons could be pulled by horses dramatically reduced the cost of carriage. It is hardly surprising that this incentive created stiff competition and thus a number of competing railway lines were built, the Stockton and Darlington being the best known and I write about this in my blog on Middlesbrough. In time, horses were replaced by steam locomotives and the commercial imperative to rationalise led to amalgamations of railway companies; the name George Hudson entered the picture with his North Eastern Railway.

For West Hartlepool manufacturing, the massive growth in its port business led to shipbuilding with the major player being Pile, Spence and Co, and ironworks run by West Hartlepool Rolling Mills. Much of the development of West Hartlepool had been financed by banks and the collapse of Overend and Gurney in 1866 resulted also in the closure of Pile.

The resilience of Victorian shipbuilders was such that the Pile yard was taken over and enlarged, and two well known names enter the story. Samuel Plimsoll, a Bristol man, was travelling round the shipbuilding areas of the country arguing for regulations to govern the loading of merchant vessels, something that resulted in the Plimsoll line. It was a Hartlepool builder Denton, Gray which devised the well-deck design which improved the stability of the ship. These ships were screw-steamers built of iron. In time steel would take the place of iron and engines would increase in both power and efficiency. The other name was Marcus Samuel who wanted ships to transport the oil he discovered and which would be traded under the Shell name. The Denton, Gray yard was pipped at the post by Armstrongs in Newcastle for the accolade of building the world’s first oil tanker. Denton, Gray continued to build to the specification laid down by the newly opened Suez Canal. Shipbuilding at Hartlepool reached its height just before the First World War. Gray continued in business until the sixties.

Iron and Steel was the other industry to take root in Hartlepool. The source was the same as Middlesbrough and Consett: the Cleveland Hills. Thomas Richardson, an iron master and engineer, moved to the Hartlepool Iron Works in 1847 and built a substantial business. The Furness shipping company combined with the Hartlepool shipbuilder Edward Withy to form Furness Withy and this in turn in 1898 formed the South Durham Steel Company to buy Stockton Malleable Ironworks and West Hartlepool Steel and Iron. The ensuing story is one of the rule of the economic cycle combined with the need constantly to upgrade and improve. Steel making in West Hartlepool survived and received much need investment after the Second World War to become a major player in steel plate production. After the sixties, the world of steel began to change with the British industry suffering greatly. The South Durham Steel and Iron Co closed in 1977.

Furness Withy later focused on transport and containerisation.

Further reading:

• Robert Wood, West Hartlepool – the Rise and Development of a Victorian New Town (West Hartlepool Corporation, 1967)
• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)
• How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

Doncaster manufacturing history

Doncaster, in the early nineteenth century, was a town that had escaped the ravages of industrialisation. It had no iron or steel as had its neighbour Sheffield and had avoided the building of mills for cotton or wool. This was despite one of the town's clock makers, Benjamin Huntsman, inventing the crucible process for steel making and Thomas Cartwright the mechanical weaving machine; both men had taken their inventions elsewhere. The town was well laid out with fine houses and an acclaimed race course; it was a good place to live.

The town had long been a place through which travellers passed; it was on the Great North Road. When the railways came, no fewer than seven eventually linked to the town and its surroundings. One of these was the Great North Eastern which ran the route from London to Edinburgh. It seems to have been good fortune or skilled argument that persuaded the directors to adopt the route close to the Great North Road rather than it rival through Lincoln and Gainsborough. The process of merger had resulted in the Great North Eastern Railway having a route from Peterborough through Spalding and Boston and on to Lincoln, and its first main workshop was in Boston. The re-routing prompted the directors to move the workshops to Doncaster where they became a major employer.

I have written elsewhere about the railway workshops at Swindon and Crewe. At Doncaster, Ernest Phillips writes in The Story of Doncaster that there were 'forges, smithies, foundries, turning shops, erecting shops, joiners', cabinet makers', and wheelwrights' shops' manufacuring at the rate of a locomotive each week. In 1920, under the Chief Engineer, Mr H.N. Gresley, the workshop produced a giant engine weighing 71 tons capable of pulling 800 tons at 70 mph. Famously the workshop then built the Flying Scotsman and the Mallard. The Flying Scotsman was the first steam passenger locomotive to travel at over one hundred miles per hour and the Mallard holds the record of one hundred and thirteen miles on hour for the fastest steam locomotive in the world. This was engineering of the highest order.

In the twenties everything changed, for a rich coal seem had been discovered running far below the town and surrounding villages. The seem was deep but modern technology enabled pits to be sunk 900 yards or more. The sleepy villages around the town grew pit heads and gathered populations in their thousands, with trams linking the villages to the town. The once pristine streets became grimy with coal dust and the shops busy with miner's wives. The railways came into their own with pits each producing up to 4,000 tons of coal a day which needed transport.

Some years ago I explored population increases in the interwar years and Doncaster was in the list with 34% alongside towns which were all in the south. I attributed the Doncaster growth to boundary changes which were on reflection were clearly the result of the burgeoning of coal mining.

Ancillary industries developed such as Cementation for the construction of pit shafts and British Ropes (now Bridon). Other industries came to the town. Pilkington and Rockware set up glass making and a Lancashire firm established weaving. International Harvester began tractor production in 1934; the plant was closed in 2007.

The image is of contemporary Doncaster manufacturing is with thanks to Ben Harrison and Visit Doncaster

Further reading:

• Ernest Phillips, The Story of Doncaster (London: Pitman, 1921)