Colchester manufacturing history

 Colchester was said to be the first English town, established before 100 BC. It was rebuilt as a model Roman town following the invasion of AD 50 only to be destroyed along with London and Verulamium by Queen Boudicca ten years later. The Romans rebuilt it and it prospered until the Legions left and the Saxons invaded. A settled existence was then eventually enjoyed until the Danes invaded. The town became part of what would become England in the first half of the tenth century only to be disturbed this time by the Normans who left their mark on the town as evidenced by common surnames.

Like so many places, wool trade and wool manufacture formed the bedrock of industry, boosted by refugees from Holland in the sixteenth century. The town gained a reputation for quality textiles. There followed a period of decline when trading took over, the town being well placed for continental trade. Throughout this time, craftsmen in the town became well regarded for their skills at clockmaking. Clockmaking prospered in Colchester and Coventry and many other provincial towns until factory production took over in London and Birmingham. Then, as with so much, clockmaking went overseas.

The 1830s saw the coming into prominence of some of the great mechanical engineers of the East of England. In Greenwich, John Penn owned the largest marine engine business in Britain. There is evidence of regular communication between him and the much younger James Paxman who made agricultural machinery in Colchester. There was a further connection with Robert Ransome in Ipswich. I write more of Penn in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and more of Ransome in my blog on Ipswich. Here the focus is on Paxman.

In his book Steam and the Road to Glory The Paxman Story, Andrew Phillips, acknowledged that by 1865, when Paxman joined with the two Davey brothers, Davey Paxman was one of the smaller manufacturers of steam engines, so dwarfed by Ransome but also by Robey of Lincoln. Electricity changed everything. Dynamos to generate electricity for Swan's incandescent lamp demanded power and in the absence of fast running water, this was provided by all manner of steam engine. Electrical engineers, of which Crompton of Chelmsford was a leader, were spoilt for choice and would use steam engines made by any one the many manufacturers. James Paxton was definitely one and he, I suggest like Joseph Ruston, was very good at nurturing relationships. He got on well with Crompton who would use his steam engines, but not uniquely. Andrew Phillips tells the story of Paxman's big break.

Paris was host to the first electrical exhibition and was followed a year later by one at London's Crystal Palace. James Paxman won a gold medal, but so did six other manufacturers. Exhibitions were the coming thing and a purpose built space had been created in South Kensington, but this could only be fully exploited if open to evening visitors and this required light. Larger manufacturers were reluctant to exhibit again so soon, but James Paxman was at hand and Phillips tells how he met with the Prince of Wales and promised a fully functional system in just ten weeks. He delivered using his energy efficient double expansion engine. In time installations increased in size and Paxman's slower engine began to lose out. The answer was found in the high speed engine developed by J.C. Peach.

Peach had been working with the Thames Ditton firm of Willans and Robinson. On Willans’ untimely death Peach went to work with Musgraves in Bolton. James Paxman had heard of the new engine and sought an opinion from a valued colleague. The opinion was positive and Peach brought his invention to Paxman and the company went on to power a good number of electrical installations.

Paxman’s other mainstay had been winding machine engines for South Africa diamond and gold mines. Like other steam engine manufacturers they embraced the oil engine.

Davey Paxman had moved to a larger site at the Standard Works and their former site was taken by Arthur Mumford who from 1877 manufactured marine pumps. Mumford joined the Weir Group in 1933. In 1887 John Ernest Cohen founded the Colchester Lathe Co which in 1954 would be bought by George Cohen's 600 Group, of which I write more in Vehicles to Vaccines. Colchester Lathe was in competition with the less successful Britannia Engineering whose works were later used by Davey Paxman to make diesel engines in the Second World War.

Davey Paxman was one of the East Anglian companies to join Agricultural Engineering in the thirties from where it entered into a relationship with Ruston and Hornsby; both companies were bought by English Electric in 1966.

Further reading:

• Norman Jacobs, Colchester The Last Hundred Years (Lowestoft: Tyndale Press, 1989)
• Andrew Phillips, Steam and the Road to Glory The Paxman Story (Colchester: Harvey-Benham Charitable Trust, 2002)

Braintree manufacturing history - the story of silk

Like many of its neighbouring towns, Braintree was a weaving town producing heavy Anglian broadcloth. Again, like other towns, it received an influx of Flemish refugees who brought techniques enabling a lighter ‘Brockings’ cloth. A little later Huguenots arrived from France bringing with them skills in silk work. Most went to Spittlefields in east London and one such, George Courtauld, set up a factory in Pebmarsh and later moved to Braintree. It was his son, Samuel, who really began the silk business which would become a world famous textile giant.

Before looking at Courtauld, I took a step back to explore the story of Silk. It was Confucius who recorded the first evidence of this natural luxury material in 2604 BC and of course it was in China that silk worms were fed on the leaves mulberry trees, their cocoons gathered and thrown and silk thread spun for weaving into cloth. Neil Ferguson tells the story of the Princess who, in around 700 AD, stole the secret of silk and took it to neighbouring Khotan. Silk spread throughout Asia and the Romans brought it to Byzantium in time for the advance of Islam to spread silk wherever it invaded. In the thirteenth century, Marco Polo brought the secret to Venice where thrived. It prospered too in Catalonia and Lyon, the latter so much so that the King handed to the town a monopoly. James I wanted a silk industry in Britain and imported mulberry trees which grew well. There is an ancient mulberry tree in the grounds of the old Bishops Palace in Lincoln which each year would produce fruit for my wife to collect. Sadly the silk worms struggled in the cold climate. This did not put off my father whose boyhood hobby at the turn of the twentieth century was breeding silk worms in his south London bedroom; his uncle had a mulberry tree in his garden from which my father would gather leaves for his hungry worms. I tell that story in Dunkirk to D Day.

Despite the unsuitability of the British climate for silk worms, it was perfect for spinning and weaving. The coming of the Hugenots brought skills and many settled. The industry grew in London, East Anglia, Macclesfield, Congleton, Derby and Coventry with ribbons. This British industry needed protection from imported cloth and this too was forthcoming. The Industrial Revolution brought mechanisation to the industry which thrived until free trade open the flood gates to imports. Nearby Sudbury is now home to the remaining British silk weavers.

But back to Courtauld and Braintree...

In the first volume of his Courtaulds A Social and Economic History, D.C. Coleman delights his reader with the complexities of family and business relationships that led to Samuel being born in America and then spending the years from 1807 to 1816 getting into and out of the business of silk. Twelve years of trial and error then passed until in 1828 the firm of Courtauld, Taylor and Courtauld was formed. This went from silk to crepe silk for mourning dress on the death of Prince Albert to the world of artificial fibres and beyond. I write of Courtaulds in the context of the textile story in both How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

Crittall Windows were another Braintree firm to arrive on the national stage. As was the case elsewhere, it was the First World War which marked the step change for Crittall. In 1905, they had moved into a large new factory employing 500 men. By 1918, they employed 2,000 men and women, having spent the war years on munitions work. The mass production techniques learnt from this work enabled the mass production of metal windows. These were to be found in famous buildings including the BBC at Portland Place, the Shell-Mex building on the Strand and London County Hall. The company fell into the clutches of Slater Walker but then found a home in the Norcros building products group before regaining independence through a management buyout. Crittall now manufacture in nearby Witham.

Further reading:

• D.C. Coleman, Courtaulds A Social and Economic History Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969)
• John Marriage, Braintree & Brocking (Chichester: Phillimore, 1994)
• Neil Ferguson, A History of the World in a Hundred Objects
• http://www.silk.org.uk/history.php

 

Ipswich manufacturing history

 Ipswich was a major port in the time before Hull and Liverpool took up the strain of the industrial revolution. It was not, however, without industry, not least some shipbuilding. The east of England was wool country and both traded wool and manufactured from it.

Nearby Sutton Hoo revealed evidence of the Anglo Saxon world of which East Anglia was very much part with trading relationships with the Nordic national but also France and through to the Mediterranean and beyond.

The agricultural revolution was the turning point, especially in the latter part where farmers struggling to feed a hungry nation turned to mechanisation in their fields.

In Ipswich it was a man named Robert Ransome who was a Quaker and set up a foundry in an old malting in Ipswich in 1789. He was the son of Richard Ransome, a school master from Wells, and had served an apprenticeship with an iron monger in Norwich. It was a time when ideas were being explored for tools for the better use of land. The choice of Ispwich is interesting for the town had been suffering from the loss of the wool trade to other centres. Ipswich was, though, on the route taken by colliers and so had an ample supply of coal. Ransome's first major invention appeared in 1803 where he observed that molten iron coming into contact with a cold surface would quickly become very hard, something he adapted to the plough share making it in effect self sharpening. From this beginning he went on to develop a plough with separate interchangeable parts which gave it excellent adaptability for all kinds of land. The business prospered despite the ups and downs of the economy.

Robert took his two sons into partnership just as the agricultural depression of the early nineteenth century hit. Diversification was the order of the day and the partnership entered into a contract with the celebrated civil engineer William Cubit and extended their product range to cast bridge sections to replace Stokes bridge in Ipswich which had been destroyed. A further diversification with a much longer future for the company was grass cutting machinery.

In 1836 a young chemist, Charles May, joined the business and this accompanied a further major diversification into production for the railway boom and the work force grew to 1,000. Ipswich was now also linked by the railway to London and the north. The railway work was spilt into a new company, Ransome & Rapier, and the agricultural business continued with frequent diversifications not least into steam engines as Ransome & May. Charles May joined a London firm following the Great Exhibition at which they exhibited and the company became Ransome and Sims; Jeffries would follow later. The company developed a close relationship with the new agricultural regions of Russia and an export trade more generally. In the years up to the First World War the workforce seldom fell below 1,500.

The first half of the twentieth century saw the introduction of the internal combustion engine and the development of the grass cutting business. In the First World War the Stokes Mortar was invented by Sir Wilfred Scott-Stokes chairman of Ransome & Rapier and I write of this in Ordnance. Ransome Sims & Jefferies built aeroplanes and employed some 5,000 men and women. After the war RSJ switched its efforts to battery vehicles and trucks for factory use and fork lift trucks figured largely in its work in the Second World War. Ransome & Rapier diversified away from railways into cranes, water control gates and earth moving machinery. Grass cutting equipment is still produced under the Ransomes name.

Of course it wasn't just Ransomes. The Manganese Bronze & Brass Company built a foundry and extrusion plant in Ipswich producing high-duty brass and bronze alloys much for naval use.

Reavell & Company made compressors, one use of which was in conjunction with the engines made by Dr Diesel injecting fuel. Another use was in gas distribution and in experimental work with atomic energy. Reavells later became part of Compair of Slough.

E.R. & F. Turner manufactured portable steam engines and roller-mills for flour. Turners became part of Agricultural and General Engineers of which Bull Motors were also a part and which had moved its manufacturing to Ipswich. This comprised electric motors and generators, more specifically super-silent motors and battery powered motors for passenger vehicles. In the First World War, Turner’s expertise in rollers was put to good use in developing a lathe to manufacture shell cases. The same was used in the Second World War until American machine tools took over. Turners then focused on electric motors. With the advent of combine harvesters, Turners skills at seed cleaning came in. Turners acquired Christy Hunt of Scunthorpe and the enlarged company still manufactures in Ipswich under the name Christy Turner. The Bull Motors business eventually became part of Hawker Siddeley.

The chemical company Fisons exploited the development of super-phosphates as fertiliser from the invention by J.B. Lawes of Barking in 1839. Fisons as such only came into being a century later as the fragmented East Anglian fertiliser industry slowly gathered eventually focusing on a plant on Cliff Quay in Ipswich where it produced the sulphuric acid and superphosphate required for the fertiliser.

Cocksedge & Co was a company that combined construction (which continues to this day and here is a link) and mechanical engineering of which the most prodigious was production for two world wars. The company produced temporary bridges, Bailey Bridges and adapted tanks to carry massive bridge sections. In terms of tanks, they cast turrets weighing 3.5 tons and devised a method of carrying and laying temporary roadway for tanks following the invasion of Europe. They also carried out ship repairs. In peacetime that had produce heavy cutting machinery to process sugar beat.

Further reading:

• The History of Engineering in Ipswich (Ipswich: The Ipswich Engineering Society)
• D.R. Grace and D.C. Phillips, Ransomes of Ipswich A History of the firm and guide to its records (Institute of Agricultural History, 1975)
• Carol and Michael Weaver, Ransomes A Bicentennial Celebration, 1989

Corby manufacturing history

 Corby was a rural Northampton village with a history going back before the Domesday Book. As with so many places, it was the railway that changed this settled and prosperous way of life, but in a quite different way.

The railway was being built between Kettering and Manton and accommodation had to be found for railway workers and their families, much of this in the little village of Corby. The surveyors for the railway found copious quantities of clay suitable for brick making and then iron ore but with too high a phosphorus content to make it suitable for steel making. A refinement of the Bessemer process and the addition of the Siemens/Martin open hearth process changed this and, with the discovery of really large reserves of ore, Corby was destined to become a major centre of iron and steel. In the meantime bricks were produced from the local clay for use on the railway and elsewhere.

The beginning was through the Lloyd Ironstone Company which leased reserves from the Brudenell family and ore was shipped for smelting in the West Midlands. Lloyds then built blast furnaces at Corby and during the First World War the Ministry of Munitions added a third furnace. Yet by 1920, the Corby iron industry only employed 800 people.

The sea change came when Stewarts & Lloyds bought Lloyds Ironstone and put forward a proposal for the creation of a massive integrated steel tube plant at Corby. In his book Corby Works A Town in Action R.W. Shakespeare writes of its scale: 26,000 acres, workforce of 4,000 and capacity of over a million tons of iron a year converted onsite into steel for the manufacture of steel tubes. The company built 2,000 houses for its workforces many of whom came from the Clydesdale plant it had closed. More Scots followed, making Corby sound like a Scottish lowland town.

The Corby works produced many miles of tubing for the PLUTO pipeline supplying the advance across northern France following D Day. In 1950, Corby was designated a new town and expanded to a population target of 45,000. The steel industry continued to prosper into the sixties.

I write in Vehicles to Vaccines of the painful contraction of British steel making and Corby was one of the major victims. It had come to life when demand was high and when it had comparative cost advantage. When this changed all but its tube making plant closed, initially taking steel from Teeside. Tata continue to run the tube making plant.

The closures came in 1979 just when the Thatcher government had been elected. The New Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, along with Corby Council took up the enormous challenge of recreating employment in the town. As evidenced in Shakespeare's book, a good number of businesses came to the town.

Aluminium Shapes set up in 1985 to produce bespoke aluminium extrusions. Aquascutum had set up a factory in Kettering in 1907 and added a plant in Corby in 1962. The factory was bought and traded briefly by Swaine Adeney Brigg. Baltimore Aircoil set up a factory producing evaporative condensers and this was joined by the British Institute of Management in 1982. Curver Consumer Products produced plastic housewares and Hunters Foods potato crisps. However it was Oxford University Press relocating its distribution to Corby which was the game changer. Pilkington set up a factory to make energy-saving glass known as Kappafloat and RHM Ingredients set up a cereals processing plant following Weetabix which set up an offshoot of its Burton Latimer HQ.

The image is of what remains of the Tata Tubes site.

Further reading

R.W. Shakespeare and J Lewis, Corby Works A Town in Action (Manchester: Brooke Associates, 1989)

Peterborough manufacturing history

 A city dominated by its cathedral; its life revolved around agriculture with regular markets controlled by the Dean & Chapter until the city received its charter in the late nineteenth century. As with so many places, it was the railways which changed everything.

Railway entrepreneurs were attracted by populations and Peterborough’s was growing as people moved there from the fens. The coming of the railways was a tortuous process as I told in my blogs about Doncaster, Stamford and Northampton. The key driver was the desire to get coal to London. York was the destination, it was the intermediate route that attracted debate. The beginning was of shorter routes, so that from Peterborough to Lincoln via Boston and that from Peterborough to Northampton. The line from London to Peterborough encountered problems with boggy land en route and that from Peterborough to Grantham and onward to Doncaster had the cost of tunnelling. Yet by 1850 Peterborough was connected. It is appropriate that an early trade was that of butchering for London’s Smithfield market.

In terms of industry, British Braids producing elastic web was encouraged by the Dean & Chapter to provide work for women. A steam flour mill was run by Cadge and Coleman. Bricks were made from Oxford clay and the works later joined with London Brick in the interwar years. Stanley’s iron works developed into Stanley & Barford eventually joining in Aveling Barford of Grantham in manufacturing rollers. J.P. Hall made pumps.

Peter Brotherhood came from London manufacturing high speed engines and compressors. They moved into tractor manufacture and joined in the Agricultural Engineers Group which in the twenties brought together similar businesses struggling in a tough market. Other members included Barford and Paxman which joined Ruston and Hornsby of Lincoln and Grantham when Agricultural Engineering was liquidated in 1932. In the Second World War a now independent public company Peter Brotherhood produced the Brotherhood-Ricardo diesel engine. They were later bought by Ingersol-Rand who sold out to Siemens. In 2008 they became part of Hayward Tyler supplying specialist equipment to the energy industry.

Another engineering firm from London was Werner, Pfleiderer and Perkins which bought Joseph Baker and Aublet, Harry &Co which was already making laundry-machines in Peterborough. The combined company became Baker Perkins. Perkins, who had developed steam ovens, emigrated to England from the USA. Baker was Canadian and invented a combined flour scoop and sifter which became a market leader in the UK. Although rivals, the two companies collaborated in supplying baking equipment to the armies in the First World War. The combined company also built a plant in Michigan in Canada and are still leaders in food manufacturing machinery.

Another Perkins, Frank, started experimental work on diesel engines in 1932 with talented engineer Charles Chapman. They conceived an idea that diesels, as well as being slow work horses, could run at as high speed as their petrol rivals. As I tell in Vehicles to Vaccines the company was bought by Massey Ferguson. It later became part of Lucas Varity and is now part of Caterpillar. Perkins diesels continues its heritage of innovation.

The city was home to GEC Domestic appliances including Hotpoint and Morphy Richards.

Further reading:

H.F. Tibbs, Peterborough A History (Cambridge: The Oleander Press, 1979)

Stafford manufacturing history

 A power house of British electrical engineering, Stafford was of course a shire town but one that was soon outgrown by other towns in its county. One reason was that the man road route following the course of the Trent by-passed it. When the canals came they too passed it by until a passage was created by dredging the river Sow and adding an canalised section.

The tradespeople of Stafford carried on the common trades, but slowly a larger group emerged whose business was making shoes. The wearing of shoes had become more common in London, the growing industrial towns and the colonies and so a strengthening demand developed for Stafford's shoe makers. In his book Stafford Past, Roy Lewis suggests that one name drew ahead of the field, that of William Horton. In many ways like Manchester cotton merchants, he had a network of outworkers for whom his workshop would cut the leather for soles and uppers and the outworkers would stitch them and return them to him for payment and the next batch of leather. At one time he is said to have had one thousand outworkers. Finished shoes would be despatched by canal to the growing urban areas. The Napoleonic wars boosted demand but then competition from the lower paid Northampton shoe makers attracted trade away.

Railways did not pass Stafford by, rather the town became something of a hub for Staffordshire's part in the growing rail network. Workshops were set up and successive stations built. More significantly the town embraced massive marshalling yards where wagons arrived and were despatched right around the country. Not surprisingly locomotive manufacture took hold and W.G. Bagnall emerged as a leader.

As with the other shoe towns, the advent of American sewing machines for shoes led first to strikes as men refused to work on machine stitched leather. In time, as elsewhere, machines became a fixture along with factory production. Stafford's factories found themselves specialising in women's shoes and the firm Lotus became the best known of Stafford's factories. As elsewhere, foreign competition shrank the workforce to one or two specialised factories.

Supporting the shoe making trade, there emerged a cohort of manufacturers of the equipment needed to make shoes but also the packaging, laces and polish the wearer would need. The British United Shoe Machinery Company was set up by its American counterpart and took over the shoe related business of W.H. Dorman. This company would move into motor vehicles with the Redbridge Motor Works and aero engines with Adams. In the First World War they developed the interrupter gear that enabled machines guns to fire between the blades of a spinning propeller. After the war, the company built its first diesel engines. In 1959 it acquired W.G Bagnall and two years later became part of the English Electric. Later still it would join with Perkins diesels of Peterborough.

At the start of the twentieth century, Stafford attracted the British Siemens Brithers whose premises at Woolwich were becoming too small to house both its cable manufacture and its business of dynamos and electric motors. It was these latter two which Siemens moved to Stafford. Siemens Dynamo works later joined the group of companies which in 1919 formed English Electric. I write of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Roy Lewis writes of the arrival in 1930 of George Nelson as managing director of English Electric and how he encouraged its growth in a very hands on way, his home being through a garden gate in the factory fencing. The Second World War saw the factory produce tanks, bombs and a range of electrical equipment. In 1960 the company opened a new transformer factory and in 1968 merged with GEC. I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines. In 2015 the Stafford Grid and Power businesses became part of the American General Electric, now GE Vernova, which is working on high voltage transmission for the transition to net zero.

Stafford was also home to British Reinforced Concrete Engineering Company and in the Stafford Salt and Alkali Company.

Further reading

• Roy Lewis, Stafford Past (Chichester: Phillimore, 1997)
• J.D. Scott, Siemens Brothers 1858-1958 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958) [printed by Jarrold in Norwich]

Norwich manufacturing history

The second largest city in Britain at the start of the eighteen century made wealthy by wool, Norwich, with a population of 30,000, was a city of spinners, wool-combers and weavers.

The principal product was worsted cloth. To this were added worsted made of wool and silk to make it softer and so offer competition to Indian cashmere, and later wool and cotton worsted. Norwich won business from Exeter through its lower wages, but then Yorkshire won over Norwich for the same reason. By the end of the century Norwich was dependent upon export sales via the East India company and, when these ceased in the early nineteenth century, Norwich's wool workers were destitute. They had long resisted mechanisation but eventually relented. The trade did revive but never to its former level. In 1961, there were 10,000 employed in the clothing trade around about the same number as in shoe making.

In 1800, there had been cordwainers making shoes and boots in the city for decades, but wool had always been the dominant trade. With wool's decline and increased demand for shoes from London, the colonies and the growing industrial towns, Norwich began its journey to become a centre of shoemaking, particularly for women. The earliest recorded shoe manufacturer was James Southall & Co in 1792. In terms of other activity, Gurney's Bank (later part of Barclays) was founded 1775 and Hills and Underwood vinegar maker in 1762.

In 1846 Norwich became the last major city to be connected to the growing railway net work. This facilitated further growth in shoe making, with Norwich becoming, so Frank Meeres suggests in his A History of Norwich, the fourth largest shoe city in Britain. Norvic shoes was a celebrated brand for women's footwear and one of the first to embrace advertising. This company, formed by the older Howlett and White, made many thousand of boots and shoes for the armed forces in both world wars. One Norvic speciality was sports shoes including running spikes.

The commercial strength of Norwich was in the diversity of its industry. Boulton and Paul manufactured all manner of product from wood including aircraft, at one time employing 1,300. Jewson Timber Merchants were founded in Norwich. Barnard, Bishop and Barnard invented a machine for making wire netting which sold all over the world. The company later became part of Tinsley Wire of Sheffield. Laurence, Scott and Electromotors embraced electricity and made dynamos and electric motors with a workforce at one time of 3,500. The company still manufactures in the city but was bought by the Austrian ATB in 2007 and now is financed by the Chinese Wolong. Coleman's mustard business was founded in 1804 and by 1900 had 2,000 employees. Coleman merged with the Recketts of Hull in 1938. As I told in my blog on Halifax, Mackintosh bought the Norwich chocolate maker, AJ Caley. Elsewhere the Norwich Union insurance company was founded in 1806. HMSO moved to Norwich in 1968 but closed in 1996. The publisher Jarrold moved to Norwich in 1823 and still publishes from the city.

Further reading

Frank Meers, A History of Norwich (Stroud: Phillimore, 1998)