Letchworth manufacturing history

 Letchworth Garden City was conceived by Sir Ebenezer Howard who set out his thinking in a book, Garden Cities of Tomorrow. His aim was to combine town and city advantages. Thinking reached reality in 1902 when a company was formed to buy land and lay down designs for the new city. This was at the time of the Arts and Crafts Movement and echoes of the movement were to be found in the new city. There had to be industry providing jobs for the new population. The site chosen was on the railway line from London to Cambridge, but the route to the northern industrial areas was at nearby Hitchin. Many thought that the new town was too far from London and indeed later new towns were nearer. Writing in 2025, it may well be that a position between Cambridge and Oxford may turn out rather well.

Back to Edwardian England. The planning of a brand new conurbation required a return to first principles and the sourcing of water and also the routing of sewerage disposal. In was though 1900 and so a gas works was built. Electricity wasn't ignored but neither was it embraced. A generating station was built which provided for industrial users only DC current at 500 volts. It wasn't until the coming of the national grid in the twenties that the country as a whole adopted AC and standardise the voltage of supply.

The first company attracted to the new town was Idris, the soft drink company which was based in Camden in London. The first industries attracted to the new town were printers. A co-operative group of printers from Leicester set up Garden City Press and Joseph Dent whose company produced Everyman editions which had outgrown their factory based in Bishopsgate in the City of London. WH Smith brought to the town the Arden Press which picked up on the Arts and Crafts connection through the work of Bernard Newdigate and the type style of Eric Gill but also Morris's Kelmscott Press.

It was the time of the early motor car enthusiast and the town attracted the Lacre Motor Company from Long Acre in Covent Garden which built chassis. A successor company went on to produce mechanical road sweepers under the name Shelvoke and Drewry. Phoenix Motor Company came from its base in Finchley. Phoenix hand built beautiful cars each carrying the Phoenix Crest. Sadly with so many other motor companies chasing customers they ceased production in 1928.

The Westinghouse Morose Chain Company set up a factory in 1920 to produce chain drive for vehicles and were bought by Borg Warner after the Second World War. Borg Warner became one of the town's biggest employers and only ceased production after the recession of the 1980s.

Herz and Falk made embroidered textiles and St Edmundsbury Weavers again picked up Arts and Crafts in their handloom produced fabrics for churches, cathedrals, country houses and theatre sets. Another textile related company was created by Californian Leslie Irvin who manufactured parachutes. It was estimated that these had saved 36,000 lives in the Second World War.

One company that was to have big impact on Letchworth was Meredew cabinet makers which also collaborated with Murphy making radios in Welwyn. During the Second World War they made glider panels.

The Spirella Company from the USA had developed a wire spring alternative to bone for corsets and these proved extremely popular to twentieth century's more active woman. They set up in temporary premises in 1910 - huts that had been used to house the workers who carried out of the groundworks for the town. Over the next three years they built a factory complex known as Castle Corset which once again drew on Arts and Crafts design. In time the company recruited an army of sales women who would achieve daily sales of 200,000 in 1950. Later the making of brasiers moved to Harlow and the Letchworth factory focused on surgical corsets.

The K&L company originated with Belgian refugees during the First World War. Led by Jacques Kryn they built a foundry and during the First World War made munitions with a workforce of 3,000. They became part of the Cohen 600 Group and by 1930 claimed they were the best equipped foundry in Britain making carbon steel castings for everything from hydraulic cylinders to bridges and cranes. During the Second World War they made secret miniature submarines. They closed operations in the 80's.

The British Tabulating Company manufactured Hollerinth machines capable of processing numerical data such as census returns. They moved to Letchworth from Lambeth and would employ some 4,000 people in their new factory. In the Second World War they were vital in helping to produce the BOMBE code breaking machines for nearby Bletchley Park. Spirella also worked on assembly. British Tabulating joined with Powers Samas and eventually became International Computers Limited ICL after they were joined by the Ferranti and the English Electric computer businesses. They left Letchworth in 1989.

Letchworth has repurposed unused buildings and is well placed to continue to support the technology sector.

Further reading:

Melvyn Miller, Letchworth Garden City (Stroud: Chalford, 1995)

Chelmsford manufacturing history

 A treat for any amateur industrial archeologist, in 1987 Stanley Wood published a booklet describing Chelmsford Industrial Trail updated by Tony Crosby and Dave Buckley in 2018. This offers the reader a wonderful taste of this late industrial town and I draw upon it in this blog piece, though far from entirely.

Chelmsford was where Marconi first manufactured and I wrote extensively of him and his business in both How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. Just a little earlier Colonel Crompton came to the town following a distinguished military career and bought a local iron works. This is at the heart of the development of electricity in Britain and, again I wrote of it in both books but also the American angle in this blog. There are many other connections with the town which I highlight below. So, to Chelmsford.

It was a Roman town as indeed was neighbouring Colchester. It was an agricultural centre opened up by the Chelmer and Blackwater navigation in 1797 and by the railway in 1843 with the opening of the Brentwood to Colchester line. The London Road Iron works was taken over by Richard Coleman in 1848 and three years later he was among the prize winners at the Great Exhibition. In 1866 the business became Coleman & Morton which produced highly regarded agricultural implements until 1907.

The Anchor Works, which Colonel Crompton bought in 1878, began life as an iron works in 1833 and was later taken over by THP Dennis another agricultural implement maker. Crompton made it a key actor in the electrification of Britain.

It was the coming of electricity and Cromptons which radically changed Chelmsford, not least because in due course its streets were lit by bright electric light. Dynamos needed power to drive them and neighbouring Colchester had James Paxman all too keen to get involved. Steam engines were a competitive market and so Cromptons developed a good number of fruitful relationships. In his Reminiscences he singles out Willans as his chief steam engine collaborator and describes the single generation unit that combined on one platform a dynamo made by Cromptons with a fast steam engine made by Willans & Robinson of Thames Ditton. Cromptons could claim credit for many prestigious installations including Lord Randolph Churchill's house and the Royal Courts of Justice. Of no less importance was the ability to use incandescent lamps in coal mines.

Of possibly as great importance there is a story of Crompton himself inspiring the young Sebastian de Ferranti whose influence in the British electrical engineering industry would exceed that of Crompton and I write of it in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Whilst Crompton acknowledges his possible influence on Ferranti he spells out the fact that they were on different sides of The Battle of the Systems. I describe that in the USA between Edison and Westinghouse in the blog piece I referred to earler. In Britain it was in London that Ferranti championed high voltage AC current from his Deptford power station, whereas Crompton made money out of more local schemes using a lower voltage DC. Crompton were great adapters.

Cromptons moved to a much larger factory in 1896 whose vast assembly bays enabled the company to build the big generators, transformers and switchgear needed by the new national grid in the twenties. After a period of investment by Armstrong Siddeley, Crompton merged with Parkinson of Leeds to become Crompton Parkinson which would later join their earlier rival Brush becoming part of Hawker Siddeley.

Of interest to me but perhaps less so to Chelmsford, Colonel Crompton was a champion of motorised transport for the army, first in India but then in the First World War. Crompton tells in his Reminiscences his role in the development of the tank. I wrote about the development of the tank in Ordnance but omitted a reference to Crompton in connection with the smaller, faster Whippet. As with so many inventions, there were many hands and brains involved.

The Marriage family had been millers in and around Chelmsford for many years, and in 1898 took the plunge into the twentieth century by building Chelmer Steam Mill with modern rollers rather than millstones.

Ernst Gustav Hoffmann's invention of an automatic lathe for making ball bearings was sufficient incentive for the building, also in 1898, of the Hoffmann Works for the production of ball bearings. In 1970, Hoffmann merged with Ransomes and Marles Bearing Co, a Newark business with a connection with the Ransomes of Ipswich, and the Pollard Ball and Roller Bearing Co of Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire to form RHP plc in Newark on the River Trent in Nottinghamshire.

Guglielmo Marconi at the age of 22, again in 1898, set up in a former mill in Chelmsford the first wireless factory in the world. The mill had worked with silk but closed in 1863 when French imports flooded the market. The mill was revived briefly by Samuel Courtauld of nearby Braintree. For Marconi the beginning was all about wireless communication with ships but it grew to become serious competition to the cable operators. In 1901, he famously transmitted a signal from Poldhu in Cornwall to Signal Hill in Newfoundland. I noted elsewhere that the electricity powering the signal was generated by a Hornsby engine. Marconi developed radio transmission and after the First World War would transmit programmes from Chelmsford to the small number of radio enthusiasts. The formation of the BBC by a group of radio manufacturers including Marconi in 1922 would accelerate the growth of broadcast radio in Britain.

The next Marconi connection with Chelmsford was radar where it manufactured many sets and components before, during and after the Second World War. Related to radar was television and it was the Marconi-EMI system that was adopted by the BBC and subsequent commercial channels. A research facility was built at Great Baddow on the outskirts of the town. The company designed and built studio and broadcast equipment in its New Street factory. The adjacent factory was built for the production magnetrons for radar and after the war was occupied by the English Electric Valve company manufacturing a whole range of electronic tubes. I write at greater length about Marconi and broadcasting in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

In the postwar era, Marconi became part of English Electric and expanded in aeronautical, marine and broadcasting. English Electric became part of GEC on the breakup of which the Marconi defence business joined with British Aerospace to become BAE Systems which still have a research facility at Great Baddow.

Away from electronics, Britvic opened a new factory in 1955 but moved its headquarters to Hemel Hempstead in 2012 and closed the Chelmsford factory.

The Chelmsford Industrial Trail includes a description of what happened to some of the factories mentioned. Marconi International Marine became a car showroom and Britvic a retail park. The new Marconi factory became a Homebase DIY store. This is a pattern seen in most former industrial towns. We know from the statistics that manufacturing has reduced in size, these specifics bring this home. It is of course brought home much more starkly to those many thousands of men and women who saw their jobs disappear.

Further reading

• W.J. Baker, A History of the Marconi Company (London: Methuen, 1970).
• Stanley Wood, Chelmsford Industrial Trail updated by Tony Crosby and Dave Buckley (Essex Society for Archaeology and History, 1987, 2018)
• R.E. Crompton, Reminiscences (London: Constable & Co, 1928)

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)