Portsmouth manufacturing history

 Portsmouth was one of the earliest homes of naval shipbuilding; there is some evidence that Richard the Lionheart's ships taking him on the crusades were built there. Henry VII commissioned the first dry dock in 1495. The Mary Rose was built there as Henry VIII amassed galleons to keep up with the Spanish and Portuguese.

It wasn't only naval shipping, Portsmouth's ships travelled the globe with particular emphasis on trading in spices so much so that a part of the dock area became known as spice island.

Towns which were home to naval dockyards boomed in times of war, but when peace came so did unemployment and poverty. Yet war was never far away, especially with the French who posed a constant threat. In the years following the restoration of the monarchy, in 1665 Sir Bernard de Gomme, Engineer in Chief of all the King's castles reviewed coastal defences and began a fifty year programme in Portsmouth for the defence of the crucially important dockyard. In spite of all this civil engineering, shipbuilding continued notably with the 100 gun Britannia.

Naval harbours were also changing as a result of penal policy. The number of offences punishable by transportation increased with convict numbers beyond the capacity of penal colonies and so prison hulks became a feature in many harbours over filled with inmates in appalling conditions. The first fleet for Australia left in 1787 and began to relieve the pressure just in time to the renewed pressure of war from the French Republic.

Portsmouth, at the time of the Napoleonic wars, was home to naval shipbuilding on a massive scale. There were woodworking shops powered by steam, including engines from Boulton and Watt. Marc Isambard Brunel invented machines for making the thousands of pulley blocks that the navy needed. He collaborated with Henry Maudslay who made the machine tools required. It was a huge enterprise that dominated the town. It was the first example of mass production in Britain.

We need to take a step back to understand what was happening. Naval shipbuilding was an ancient trade in which old habits died hard. Sawyers were protective of their back breaking work in the saw pit even though in other countries water powered sawmills were gaining popularity. Small businesses supplying largely hand made pulley blocks were equally protective of their lucrative contracts. The navy's demands were huge and change was needed. The right man at the right time was Samuel Bentham, the brother of the political economist and prison reformer Jeremy Bentham. Samuel was put in charge of the dock yard and set about radical changes.

1840 saw the French employ steam power for their battleships and Portsmouth needed to follow suite. A separate area was set aside and the necessary skills recruited. I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the transition to iron and steel hulls propelled by steam power.

With the navy and military the overwhelmingly dominant employer, its importance is underlined by the growth in population from 30,000 in 1801 to 260,000 in 1931.

Portsmouth docks served the Royal Navy in two world wars. In 1905 the yard launched the Dreadnaught which rendered obsolete the capital ships of the world's navies. It went on to launch one of the largest ships ever built in Portsmouth at 27,500 tons the Queen Elizabeth and the 25,000 ton Iron Duke in 1914. In recent years the building and maintenance of naval ships has fallen more and more to the private sector in companies such as Babcock International and BAE Systems Marine.

Employment in naval activity declined from some 22,000 in 1945 to 6,500 in 1985. Nevertheless, Portsmouth has attracted other major employers. Top of the list must come IBM with their UK Headquarters but followed by the Inland Revenue computer centre, the Board of Trade and Zurich Insurance.

Further reading:

James Cramer, The Book of Portsmouth (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1985)

Reading manufacturing history

 Reading enjoyed the twin advantages of being in a fertile agricultural county and being positioned on major lines of communication. It was on the river Thames and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was linked by canals to the Midlands and the West Country; the image is of a lock in the Kennet and Avon canal. Importantly Reading was on the main road route from London to Bristol when the latter was booming with overseas trade.

Links provided the people of Reading with metal products from Birmingham, pottery from Staffordshire, groceries from London and stone from Bath.

It had been a cloth producing town, but this industry had gravitated to those areas whose natural and commercial resources best favoured it. Fortunately for Reading, London was growing quickly with a thirsty population preferring beer to polluted water. Reading provided tons of malt using water transport.

For a town far from the sea, it was perhaps surprising that a Reading firm supplied the navy with the sail cloth it needed to fight the Napoleonic wars. Musgrave Lamb in Katesgrove Lane played a key part of winning the battle of Trafalgar.

Malt provided the impetus for the industry for which Reading would become famous the world over. Joseph Huntley used money made from malting to set up his biscuit shop using local flour. Later, his son, also Joseph, set up Huntley Boorne & Stevens making tins in which to sell the biscuits in prime condition. It was Joseph's other son, Thomas, who persevered with the biscuit shop.

The coming of the railways in 1840 further improved communications. One year later Thomas Huntley took his cousin George Palmer into partnership. Palmer's focus was on the mechanisation of biscuit making. This was far from straight forward and cost the young business dearly.

Biscuit making was viewed as a lowly craft with hard, barely edible ships biscuits being made by small bakers close to ports. Fancy biscuits for home consumption were again made by bakers, whose main business was bread. The advent of the Napoleonic wars put pressure on the makers of ships biscuits. The three main naval ports of Plymouth, Deptford and Gosport had their own victualling yards which now embraced biscuit making. At the Clarence yard in Gosport, advances were made in introducing machinery, yet worker resistance was such that only very small steps were possible. After the wars further advances were made but anything like continuous production was a long way off.

Continuous production was George Palmer's goal and he worked on this with a local machine manufacturer, William Exzall. Eventually the problem was solved and machinery was installed in a former silk mill close by the Thames and Kennet and Avon canal. The challenge then was to expand the market which was then only local towns. Advertising and the use of sales agents was the route chosen until full time travelling salesmen could be employed. The invention of a process to print images and patterns directly onto tins cemented the image of the company in the minds of the buying public.

It was almost a game of leapfrog. New customers were found and capacity was utilised, but then demand leapt ahead and production had to catch up. One area of the process that was still manual was the loading of the ovens; what was needed were ovens through which a conveyor could pass carrying the biscuits. Such a mechanism had been tried by the American navy. Palmer found the perfect ovens for his purposes through two London companies: A.M. Perkins and Joseph Baker. These companies would later merge to become Baker Perkins of Peterborough. In Reading, Huntley and Palmer were the dominant employer and took advantage of this by offering meagre wages. The two world wars brought manpower pressures and wages had responded, however the company remained a low pay employer until well into the twentieth century when union action brought pressure to bear.

When Thomas Huntley died, George went in to partnership with his brothers, William who ran the factory and Samuel, based in London, who sold to that ever expanding market as well as managing exports. Biscuits were now part of the nation's diet. Railway journeys were nourished by biscuits, until dining cars appeared. Other biscuit manufacturers emerged including Carrs and Peak Frean with whom Huntley and Palmer would later enjoy a more formal relationship in Associated Biscuits. The Reading factory was further enlarged. The next generation of Palmers joined the business which was incorporated as a limited company on 29 March 1898. It was still very much a family affair with the shares split between George's descendants and those of Samuel; William died a bachelor. It then employed 5,000 people. Management continued as before with family members in charge and an understanding that, depending on the time of year, the chairman would spend three days a week hunting, shooting or playing cricket. Money for the business was spent only when there was no alternative. Machines were repaired rather than being replaced with more up to date technology. Unfortunately competitors took a rather different attitude.

The twentieth century saw the company serve its country in two world wars, suffer in the depression, face competition from other biscuit makers and retailers’ own brands; nevertheless it did prosper in the fifties. Associated Biscuits was eventually bought by Nabisco. I write of United Biscuits, Associated's great rival in Vehicles to Vaccines.

But back to Reading in the 19th century. Not all the malt produced in the town left for London; local brewers met the needs of the local population, or rather they didn't. The suggestion is that they worked in a cartel keeping the quality of beer low but cheap to make. William Simonds broke ranks and his brewery became highly successful using latest technology and chemistry to improve the product. Simonds merged with Courage and Barclay in 1960.

In common with many towns in agricultural areas, Reading manufactured farm machinery. The company emerged from Reading Iron works, was successful for many decades but closed in 1887. The mantel was taken up by George Gascoigne in the twenties in his milking machine business. The agricultural theme is taken up by Sutton's seeds. The nineteenth century saw an increase in farming but also in households with gardens; all these needed seeds. Martin Hope Sutton took advantage of this and the Penny Post to circulate catalogues and then the fast improving rail service for speedy delivery of the seeds.

In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is Reading's communications but in particular its proximity to Heathrow which has grown its economy. It is now boasts Microsoft, Cisco, Ericsson, Apple and Proctor and Gamble.

Further reading:

• Malcolm Petyt (ed.) The Growth of Reading (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993)
• T.A.B. Corley, Quaker Enterprise in Biscuits - Huntley and Palmers of Reading - 1822-1972 (London: Hutchinson, 1972)

Milton Keynes manufacturing history

 'Pooleyville', the nickname for the North Bucks New City was derived from the man who brainchild it was, the then Chief Architect and Planner for Buckinghamshire County Council, Frederick Pooley. Pooley was keenly aware of the developments in architectural thinking and also the experience of new towns in Britain: the shifts from the garden city movement to places to house those made homeless by the destruction of the Second World War. New towns were to have a balance of residential and employment accommodation as well as community facilities. By the sixties further challenges needed to be met. London and the South East were becoming over populated and so new towns had to be further away albeit accessible. The motor car, which was providing freedom and employment for many, was becoming a major headache in urban areas. Towns had to be designed to accommodate the motor car without being dominated by it.

Pooley's vision was for fifty neighbourhoods of five thousand people placed around four loops enclosing open space. The line of the loops would be marked by monorail track providing free public transport accessible by all residents. Industrial areas would be to the north and south.

Pooley's vision didn't survive the politics of London centric planners or the laissez faire of the Thatcher era during which later parts were built. Nevertheless the city did become a balanced community of manual and non-manual workers, living in neighbourhoods demarcated by a grid of dual carriage way roads sandwiched between linear park land with foot paths, bridle paths and cycle ways. Areas of employment were close to residential areas and all with abundant green space and literally millions of trees. There are lakes and woodland for recreation.

Milton Keynes embraces Newport Pagnell to the north and Bletchley to the south. The Grand Union Canal meanders through it, the MI runs down the eastern side and the A5 dissects it. The London to Birmingham railway perhaps gave it birth, as the village of Wolverton now within Milton Keynes was selected at the site for the railway workshops. In ways similar to Crewe and Swindon a community grew around Wolverton and is now evidenced by rows of victorian cottages amongst the twentieth century architecture of the city.

This is though a blog about manufacturing. The first large foreign companies to come were Alps Electric, Coca Cola, Mobil and Volkswagon. UK business brought Abbey National, Argos and the Open University. The days of large manufacturing units were coming to an end. In 2000, Milton Keynes was home to 4,500 companies most employing fewer than twenty people and there was a mix between manufacturing and the service sector.

Today the city's own website highlights Red Bull Racing; other websites pick out Lockhead Martin at nearby Ampthill and Unilever Research at Sharnbrook, both of which are closer to Bedford. Milton Keynes finds itself within what is known as Motorsport Valley stretching south of Birmingham through Oxfordshire. As well as Red Bull in Milton Keynes, there is Banbury with Haas, Brackley with Mercedes and Wantage with Williams. There is then a large cluster of specialist motor sport suppliers at Silverstone Industrial Park close to the racing circuit.

The overriding story about manufacturing in Milton Keynes is that it is about small and medium sized enterprises, with a strong bias towards technology in a community where knowledge is shared for mutual benefit.

Further reading:

• Mark Clapson, A Social history of Milton Keynes
• ORTOLANO, GUY. “PLANNING THE URBAN FUTURE IN 1960s BRITAIN.” The Historical Journal, vol. 54, no. 2, 2011, pp. 477–507. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23017981. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

Slough manufacturing history

 A child of the War Office. Slough was one of many Buckinghamshire villages drawn to ever expanding London. London needed vegetables and Slough grew them. London needed houses and Slough had been making bricks for centuries; Eton College was built with Slough bricks. Slough wanted to be linked to the rest of the country by rail, but the Provost of Eton complained that the boys under his charge might use it to get away.

The Great Western Railway did come, but with no station for Slough; the nearest was in the neighbouring village of Langley. Trains did however stop in Slough, at a make-shift station, and then ran on through Langley without stopping on their way into London. The railway did slowly attract manufacturers, Slough was given its own station and trains began to stop at Langley.

James Elliman was already in the town as a linen draper and was producing his famous embrocation. He prospered and provided the town with a fire station and recreation ground. In contrast Lovegrove's chair manufactory closed. Halley's mineral water plant, the Gotha iron works and Fulbrook's engineering works all set up. Of more enduring benefit to the town, Horlicks, created in Canada but which nourished our forces in both world wars, chose to manufacture in the town. Naylor Bros. Paints came to Slough and formed the basis of ICI's paint division famously producing Dulux.

In 1917, the War Office commissioned the construction of a Mechanical Transport Repair Depot on a 600 acre site on which work began in July 1918. The depot was to collect, repair and repurpose the many thousands of vehicles used by the army in the war. In the months that followed the armistice, work continued until a parliamentary committee produced a report with the recommendation that the entire site, vehicles and all, be sold.

The site was bought by a consortium of businessmen and it became owned by the Slough Trading Company. Surplus vehicles were sold and buildings completed. The first factories were let to Gillette, Johnson and Johnson and the Hygenic Ice Company; Citroen Cars followed. The infrastructure of what had now become Slough Estates Ltd was added to, and further tenants arrived. St Helens Cable and Rubber brought its workforce from Warrington. Three Scots entrepreneurs set up Bitumen Industries but of greater significance Forrester Mars set up a confectionary factory and also a plant for producing food for the nation's increasing number of pets. Crane Packing followed with an Art Deco building echoing the design of the Mars towers. Workers came to Slough from the depressed areas of the country but the town struggled to build enough housing and community facilities.

In the Second World War nearby Langley was home to Hawker Aircraft's production of Hurricane fighter planes. After the war, Langley Park became the headquarters of Radio and Allied (later GEC Radio and Television) then run by Michael Sobbell, father in law of Arnold Weinstock. Both would become part of GEC which later also had in Slough Satchwell Controls. Langley also attracted the Ford Motor Company to build its commercial vehicle plant where the first Ford Transit was made. In order to house this further growth in the population, a good number of prefabs were erected.

Was John Betjeman right when he wrote: 'Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough'? The poem is a critique of places like Slough where fields were replaced by factories and to the benefit of 'the man with the double chin' who became rich as a result. The report on the parliamentary debate on the siting of the Mechanical Transport Repair Depot quotes members as lamenting the loss of 600 acres of fine wheat land.

Slough Trading Estate is the largest industrial estate in Europe under single ownership. It has some six hundred tenants from the UK and overseas countries including USA, Germany and South Korea. The estate receives electricity and heating from a dedicated power station fuel by refuse. Tenants now include Electrolux, GSK and Azko Nobel.

Further reading:

Judith Hunter, The Story of Slough (Newbury: Local Heritage Books, 1983)

Hitchin manufacturing history

Hitchin is a product of its soil which is a rich loam and so ideal for growing cereals but, even more so, herbs especially lavender. The undulating countryside also offers excellent pasture for sheep. A benign climate and adequate water supply completes the picture.

For centuries there had been water mills on the river Hiz with the business of grinding grain into flour. It was a good business with a regular market. The range of cereals grown attracted dealers looking not only for bread flour but for seeds yielding oil and cattle feed, and oats for malting for the London breweries. The arrival of the railways in the mid nineteenth century encouraged the building of a new corn exchange and dealers came from as far afield as Liverpool.

In the sixteenth century, lavender plants were brought from Italy, where they grow wild, and it was found that Hitchin's soil and climate were perfect for the plant. The flowers from the lavender plant are processed and distilled to produce fragrant lavender oil for use in toiletries. There were a number of firms in the town growing and processing lavender but the largest, Perks & Llewellen, caught my eye because Perks was my mother's family name. Perks & Llewellen were successful and supplied a growing market in the nineteenth century.

If lavender and a range of cereals could be grown, what else? The answer came from a young man who, attracted by the advances in science in the nineteenth century, became apprenticed to a pharmaceutical chemist. The young man with William Ransom and he was born and bred Hitchin; the pharmaceutical chemist was in Birmingham then thriving with busy factories. In 1846 William returned to Hitchin and set up his own business. He grew medicinal plants on the family farm: Henbane, Wild Lettuce and Belladonna. Other plants, he imported from as far away a Syria. He grew lavender but not in competition with Perks & Llewellen concentrating rather on its medicinal properties. William died in 1914 and the firm was continued by his son who also took over the growing of lavender for toiletries when Perks & Llewelyn closed down. Ransom Naturals became a public company in 1969 and now grows its plants near St Ives in Huntingdonshire. It has become renowned for its natural products.

In common with many towns in agricultural areas, Hitchin had its engineers. One, Ralph E. Sanders & Son, were carriage builders, cycle manufacturers and motor car engineers. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how Harry Ricardo had praised Lanchester for producing a car that was not simply a motorised carriage. Sanders built motorised carriages in their workshop alongside carriages designed to be drawn by a horse. To me this goes a long way to explain the early car manufacturing process whereby the chassis and engine would be manufactured and a coach built body added to satisfy the particular requirements of the customer. As the motor car was made in increasing numbers and standardised forms, Sanders' business shrank although it continued as a garage until 1979.

John Whiting was a fellmonger, not unlike my own family who were fellmongers in Wheatley just to the south of Oxford and I wrote about this in my biography of my great great uncle William Smith Williams, Charlotte Bronte's Devotee. Alan Fleck and Helen Poole describe the business of fellmongers in their book Old Hitchin. It is about the hides of sheep and how they are cleaned and softened prior to tanning. They suggest that Hitchin hides may well have been used for parchment and I make that assumption for my family's business given their proximity to Oxford and its colleges. In the case of Hitchin it was fine hides used in book binding which began with the partnership of GW Russell and Henry Featherstone which took over the business from Whiting. In 1886 GW Russell & Son was formed and in 1949 it took over E&J Richardson of Newcastle and so secured the sole manufacturing rights for fine book-binding leather. The firm made the leather for the late Queen's Bible at her Coronation in 1953. The business, Russell Fine Leathers, continues in Hitchin and also in Suffolk.

Further reading:

Alan Fleck and Helen Poole, Old Hitchin (Chichester: Phillimore, 1999)

High Wycombe manufacturing history

 Cloth was the industry of this Buckinghamshire village, like so many places in Britain. Being close to the river Wye, paper mills appeared; in common with other villages in the south of the midlands straw plaiting was an occupation for women, as was lace making. It was though furniture making that would enable High Wycombe to stamp its mark, although being the Operations Control Centre of Bomber Command in the Second World War was certainly higher profile for a number of decades.

First a word about paper making. The earliest records show paper making from rags pounded to pulp in the chalky water from the river Wye in the late sixteenth century. One of these early mills, Glory Mills at Woodburn Green, was bought by Wiggins Teape in 1894. Much later Wiggins Teape would have a research centre at nearby Beaconsfield. The mill finally closed in 1999. I write more about paper making in my blog on Hemel Hempstead, also on the Wye.

I am grateful to L.J. Mayes for his book The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe for a fascinating description of the industry. Before referring to this, the Wycombe Chair Museum offers a list of furniture makers. It runs to some sixty-three pages and so offers a sense of just how widespread this activity was. Having said that, I suspect it was no more widespread than the plaiting of straw and making of hats in the dwellings of Luton or the spinners and weavers of the northwest.

Mayes offers a description of the chair making process of which I offer a precis, for my back hurts just to write it. We have to imagine an elm tree some forty feet tall. It has to be felled, stripped of its branches and bark. It then has to be sawn into planks two inches thick. This process is of course not unique to chair making; I refer to it also in relation to the naval shipyard in Portsmouth. Sawing was most often done in the wood where the tree was felled. A saw pit is dug some seven feet deep and in its stands the sawyer who will do most of the back breaking work. The prepared tree is moved over the saw pit and a second man first marks a straight line with string and chalk. He then stands on the tree holding the top end of the seven foot saw which he guides along the line whilst his mate sweats and is covered in saw dust. I was astonished to read in the context of shipbuilding that the sawyers of Portsmouth resisted the move to powered saw mills.

The plank is cut into sections to provide the seat for the chair. In order to make it into the seat of a comfortable Windsor chair, the seat has to be shaped. Next come the legs and and laths which are cut from green beech by 'bodgers' who also work within the wood from a simple shelter which they build themselves. The young tree trunks are roughly shaped and divided before being finely shaped by a simple pole lathe - a tool that has been used for centuries. All the parts including ash to be bent for the bannister are then assembled in the workshop using simple drills and chisels, everything done by experienced eye. The finished chair is stained by immersing it in liquid and then polished ready for sale. Mayes suggests that this manual process was still in use in the 1950s by a few chair-makers.

Industrialisation did impact Wycombe chair-making, but indirectly. The growing number of skilled men working in manufacturing around the country were being better housed and the houses needed well made furniture. Equally mechanisation reduced the workforce in paper making and farming releasing labour who found work in chair making. Increasingly the processes were broken down in a division of labour. Steam power came in the saw mills and massively increased output compared to saw pits. Bodgers continued to bring bundles of their work to the workshops. Relatively unskilled factory work came in with chair-seat caners, many of whom were women. The assembly of the chair, though, remained a skilled occupation for many years. In terms of selling, furniture vans would leave Wycombe on a tour of towns to sell their wares. In time retailers stepped in and catalogues were produced by the larger companies.

1851 saw Wycombe master chair-maker Edmund Hutchinson awarded the title of Champion Chair of the Exhibition. Already company names were emerging ahead of the pack: Gomme, Skull, Glenister, Dancer & Hearn.

Mechanisation increased with steam powered circular saws and borers. In 1874 the output of the town was estimated at one and half million chairs worth a quarter of a million pounds. The population had trebled over a quarter of a century, but without the utilities in place to cater for it; the river Wye was filled with waste. In time matters improved.

Wycombe had gained a reputation for cheap furniture. This stung and a number of companies embraced new styles. E.G. Punnett was engaged to design pieces influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement.

The coming of war in 1914 saw an immediate fall in demand for this higher end furniture and skilled workers were redeployed on short term public projects including wood panelling the Guildhall. Demand for lower end furniture was strong with orders for the many new barracks. War meant an end to competition from German and Austrian furniture makers and so in due course skilled men found themselves back in demand. Men volunteered or were called up and so manpower shortages became an issue. As elsewhere, the end of the war saw an upturn in demand but this was short-lived and unemployment loomed.

With the challenges of the interwar years many companies were reluctant to invest in mechanisation to reduce costs, an exception being E. Gomme & Sons which went from strength to strength. Mechanisation helped but more was needed.

Aircraft were built requiring woodworking skills. Dancer & Hearn in particular formed a relationship with de Havilland (the two owners were friends) and during slack periods parts were supplied for the Mosquito. Others followed with Gomme supplying fuselages and Baker's veneers.

Ercol was set up in Wycombe in 1920 by Lucian R. Ercolani and new designs began to appear.

The Second World War saw High Wycombe identified as a place where London based manufacturers could re-locate to escape bombing. Amongst these were Cossor which manufactured radar screens and cathode ray tubes. A number of medium sized furniture manufacturers took advantage of the opportunity to leave an industry that was becoming ever more challenging. Those that remained had the challenge of utility furniture of which I wrote in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The fifties saw a change in the way furniture was marketed. Hitherto it had been the wholesalers and large retailers which had controlled what was produced. Parker-Knoll had begun their own consumer advertising and this was followed by Ercol and Gomme. Ercol chose the windsor style chair as their theme. Gomme preferred a series of furniture units which could be added to as required - G-Plan. I write of the further development of the British furniture industry in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The fifties saw consolidation among the furniture companies and the eighties and nineties closures and relocation. Glenisters closed; Gomme moved to Melksham, Parker-Knoll to Chipping Norton and Ercol to Princess Risborough.

At the beginning of this blog I referred to the Bomber Command Operations Centre. This has been written about extensively elsewhere. However the presence of the RAF and a major US Airforce base impacted on the town. Towards the end of the First World War the towns furniture makers who were busy supplying wooden components, set up The Aircraft Manufacturing Company. It came too late to contribute much, but its premises were re-purposed by woodworking tool maker, Broom and Wade, as the factory in which they manufactured pneumatic equipment amongst much else. They became the town's biggest employer and merged with Holman of Cambourne to become International Compressed Air (later Compair) in Slough. Other more recent aircraft related businesses are Springtech which manufactures precision springs, and Sabeti Wain which designs and manufactures aircraft interiors.

Further reading:

• James Rattue, High Wycombe Past (Chichester: Phillimore, 2002)
• L.J. Mayes, The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960)

Luton manufacturing history

 Luton is well known for hat making, cars and lorries and Eric Morecambe's love of the town's football club.

Hat making did of course come first and there are suggestions that the plaiting of straw and the associated making of straw hats dates back many centuries. It was said that the best hats came from Leghorn in Italy and we can once again see the hand of Napoleon in the development of British manufacturing, for Italy fell into the hands of the French and supplies were cut off. It was left to the people of Luton to improve their skills and the quality of the plait, which they did. Luton was protected by prohibitive tariffs during the Napoleonic Wars and to a reducing degree until the mid nineteenth century; in both quality and efficiency Luton could compete with the best.

The industry boomed. It was largely home based with the involvement of the whole family; there were plaiting schools where children would learn the necessary skills and, if they were lucky, also reading and writing. In time the Factory Acts put pay to to this. Luton market was a vital hub providing a place to buy straw and plait and to sell hats. In time the manufacturer/merchant appeared providing straw and collecting hats, in a way similar to Manchester's cotton merchants. Unlike the cotton industry, plaiting and hat making did not benefit from steam power, and mechanisation was limited really to the sewing machine.

Straw hat making was seasonal and in time businesses explored adding felt hat making in the quiet months of the year. Men's felt hats were made particularly in Stockport and Atherstone, but Luton attracted the making of women's felt hats. As with cotton and wool, hat making needed dyers and a number came to the town including Laporte which had originated in Shipley in Yorkshire.

Luton was not well served by communication. The Grand Junction Canal passed it by and a road journey to Leighton Buzzard was required to link to it. It looked as if railways too would pass by, with Luton having to wait until 1858 for a branch line whilst Leighton Buzzard had received their connection in 1838. When they came, the railways did of course attract industries. As well as those connected with hat making, other businesses arrived. Hayward-Tyler made soda-water machinery (soda-syphons) but also hydraulic pumps, and Balmford made boilers. The Davis Gas Stove Company moved from Scotland and became a major employer providing all that was needed for domestic heating systems.

The Luton local authority took the initiative to provide electricity rather than leaving that task to a third party, the hope being that cheaper electricity would result. It was successful and Vauxhall motors moved to Luton from the south bank of the Thames in London in 1905 attracted by the space to expand but also by cheap electricity from the Luton Electric Works which had begun generation in 1901. Vauxhall was followed by Commercial Cars (known later as Commer and part of the Rootes Group) and by George Kent which made meters for measuring the supply of water, gas, steam or oil. The Skefko Ball Bearing Company of Sweden (later known as SKF) set up to provide these essential components for motor vehicles. Electricity was perfect for hat making because it could be supplied to the houses where the makers worked in quantities appropriate to small scale production.

The impact of hat making on Luton was considerable. Len Holden, in his Vauxhall Motors and the Luton Economy 1900-2002, argues that the town's growth was comparable to that of Middlesbrough, Crewe and Barrow -in-Furness which I have written about as being towns created by the nineteenth century railways. Luton did it in hats and then added other industries to give it a more balanced economy and one able to ride out the economic cycle.

Luton played its part on both world wars. In the First World War there was a shell filling factory at Chaul End and the town's engineers turned their hands to the requirements of the war effort with Skefko employing 7,000 workers and Kents 8,000. Interestingly in the Second World War, the Board of Trade had wanted to relocate hat making to Gateshead leaving the town with capacity for the production of armaments. The town rebelled and the Board retreated. None-the-less hat making became a shadow of its former self. Of particular interest to me in the context of my first book, War on Wheels, it was Vauxhall which designed and made the Churchill Tank.

The interwar years saw Electrolux of Sweden set up manufacturing as did the Percival Aircraft Company. After the Second World War English Electric carried out research, development and production of aircraft ice protection industrial heating systems. Clothing manufacturers arrived. It was though Vauxhall which dominated the town. The New Industries Committee, which the town had set up to plan its growth away from hat making, could do little in the face of the decisions of General Motors, the owners of Vauxhall, who wanted to take advantage of the boom in UK motor manufacturing particularly in the sixties. This resulted in Vauxhall being a very large employer with plants also in neighbouring Dunstable and Ellesmere Port in Cheshire.

Like the rest of the British motor industry, indigenous volume car production declined under concerns about industrial relations, pressure from imports and foreign companies invited to set up in the UK. Commercial vehicles bucked the trend but eventually succumbed to consolidation. I write of both in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Further reading:

• James Dyer, Frank Stygall and John Dony, The Story of Luton (Luton: White Crescent Press, 1964)
• Len Holden, Vauxhall Motors and the Luton Economy 1900-2002 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press and the Bedfordshire Historical Records Society, 2003)