Medway towns manufacturing history

 Rochester was a cathedral city until local government changes caused the status to lapse on its joining the Medway unitary authority. Nevertheless, its cathedral is the seat of the Bishop of the Rochester Diocese dating back to the sixth century. Rochester boasts a castle whose keep is one of the best preserved in England or France. Rochester has been occupied by Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans.

Chatham in contrast was a small village on the mud flats of the Medway not far from Rochester and close to Gillingham, Strood and Rainham. It was the mud that attracted naval use. Henry VIII had built the first substantial Royal Navy including the Mary Rose, the first purpose built warship. The Medway then came into its own since the ships could safely be beached and there have their hulls cleaned, caulked and tarred.

Elizabeth I added to the navy, galleys - ships with both sail and oars. These were stationed at Chatham where they could easily be maintained. The dockyard was already bigger than Portsmouth, Deptford and Woolwich and it maintained and improved on this position through the years of war with the Dutch. The yard attracted shipwrights, carpenters, sailmakers, smiths, sawyers, riggers and mast makers.

In the early seventeenth century a new dry dock was built along with mast docks, sail loft and rope house - the latter being 1,000 feet long, the length of the longest rope. The tactic for naval ships was simple, to be massively armed to wreak destruction at short range. The massive PRINCE was an exemplar of this ship type known as the First Rate with three gun decks. These early ships would be armed by cannon cast in iron works in the nearby Weald.

With the eighteenth century came another opponent - the French - and so the centre of gravity for the navy moved westward to Portsmouth and Plymouth. More than this, the theatre of naval warfare moved from the sea between Britain and the Continent to the oceans: the Mediterranean, Caribbean and Atlantic. The ships required for this more open warfare needed to be more agile and so tended to be Third Rate with seventy-four guns or frigates with thirty-two guns. In the course of the century the Royal Navy moved to a position of increasing strength where victory was always expected. This was great credit to the men who sailed the ships and lived in the most appalling conditions, but also to the dockyards.

For Chatham, the eighteenth century meant first completion of the improvement programme, but then decline as resources were directed to Portsmouth and Plymouth. The century ended with restoration ready for the next great conflict: the Napoleonic Wars. At the end of the eighteenth century the Chatham dockyard was the largest employer in the South East with some 2,000 men.

The navy's most famous ship, the VICTORY, was built at Chatham in 1765 and had a chequered career culminating in her being fitted out as a hospital ship in 1797. Two years later she was to be converted into a prison hulk. Instead, orders were given for her to be rebuilt and she left Chatham in 1800 as a superb fighting First Rate ship. These vast ships were built from four thousand oak trees with a compliment of 850 men. The lower of three gun decks was equipped with 42-pounders, the middle deck with 24-pounders and the top deck with 12-pounders giving a broadside of 1,176 pounds. Iron guns were most likely now cast at the Carron works in Falkirk with brass cannon made by Samuel Walker in Rotherham.

The nineteenth century saw reduced employee numbers with the ending of hostilities, but also the introduction of industrial process with a steam-powered sawmill designed and built by Marc Brunel. This incorporated a canal and and overhead rail system, with seasoned uncut timber entering at one end with sawn planks emerging at the other. I wrote in my blog on Portsmouth of Brunel's other inistiative of mechanising the process of pulley production.

The new century also saw the beginning of a dramatic change with steam power taking over from wind and sail. I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the transition from wooden hulls through iron clads to iron and then steel hulled ships. Mid-century saw a major investment in Chatham as it became the only eastern yard with the closure of Woolwich (although its continuance as the army's arsenal) and of Deptford. The work was substantial with new dry and wet docks, repair and fitting out basins all demanding some 110 million bricks made on site from a 21 acre brickfield. As the century drew to a close, ships became ever bigger culminating in the Dreadnaught Class which was too big either to be built or repaired at Chatham.

Her days seemed to be numbered until the Navy decided that they needed to build the newly invented submarines alongside private contractors not least to test their costings. The yard went on to build many submarines alongside Vickers at Barrow. In the Second World War it built smaller surface vessels and refitted a great many vessels of all kinds. At its peak the yard employed 13,000 people from Chatham, Rochester, Gillingham and Strood, and further afield.

The dockyard closed in 1981.

Rochester itself became home to Short Brothers which from 1913 manufactured flying boats or float planes was they were called at their factory at the Borstal end of the city. Their planes served with distinction during the First World War. Shorts survived the slump of the twenties by diversifying into buses, barges and motor boats. They came back into the limelight with the Shorts Singapore which in 1927 made a spectacular flight around the coast of Africa. The thirties saw the Shorts Empire operated by Imperial Airways and offering their 24 passengers a choice of cabins, births and a smoking room. From the design of the Empire came the Sunderland with innovations including a powered gun turret. Many saw service during the Second World War as did the Stirling four engine bomber of which I wrote in my book MacRoberts Reply. In 1943 the company was compulsorily purchased by the government and production dispersed to Belfast away from enemy bombing. With the return of peace, the company moved its operations to Belfast.

BAE Systems Faraday test centre and Advanced Aerospace Technologies are now based in Rochester.

In the nineteenth century Strood became home to Stewart Brothers and Spencer which extracted oil from seeds and sold the residue as cattle feed. Seeds would come by ships from as far afield as India, America and Russia.

Aveling and Porter manufactured agricultural machinery and went on to manufacture steam engines. In the thirties they became part of Agricultural Engineering and joined Barford & Perkins of Peterborough to form Aveling Barford which also took the Hornsby steam and road roller business based in Grantham.

Wingets took the Aveling site to manufacture cement mixers. Strood had attracted cement manufacturers like many sites on the Thames and Medway. Portland cement had become an essential part of building in the mid-nineteenth century. I write more about this in my piece on Dartford.

Gillingham had a history of textile manufacture with the Gillingham Silk Company in business from 1769 to 1875. There was also linen manufacture and glove making. The Copperas Works produced dyes and inks. In the late 19th century the Brennan Torpedo works was established.

Gillingham is also headquarters of Delphi Automotive Systems which had been spun out of General Motors and included AC Delco, Automotive Products of Leamington and Lucas Diesel Systems based in Gillingham. It was bought by BorgWarner which spun it into PHINIA.

Further reading:

• Philip MacDougall, The Book of Medway (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1989)
• Philip MacDougall, The Chatham Dockyard Story (Rochester: Rochester Press, 1981)
• https://www.worldcementassociation.org/about-cement/our-history

Wealden iron masters and gunfounders

 Iron had been produced in Britain since the Iron Age! wherever ore was readily available. Later, in nearly every village there were blacksmiths skilled in moulding the metal.

The Weald in Sussex and Kent was a particularly rich area. In my tour of manufacturing places I had hoped to find a single identifiable place, Heathfield perhaps, but the truth is that the iron works of the Weald were not tied to any town or indeed county. Iron was made where iron was found. There was plenty of wood for charcoal for smelting.

Things changed at the end of the fifteenth century when French iron masters arrived at Buxted with a new technique of blasting air into the smelting process. The air was pumped into the furnace by bellows driven by water wheels and the forging process to make wrought iron then required more bellows to power a large hammer. All this demanded the location of iron works close to flowing water that could be managed in large ponds to power the water wheels for long periods.

Iron works emerged in numbers estimated between 50 and 100 and many took on the skilled task of casting cannon. Periodic battles had been the story of England from time immemorial, with brief periods of peace. So there were blacksmiths who made swords, chain mail and eventually articulated armour. Fletchers made arrows, and bowmen bows. Gun powder was a sea-change. The first cannon appeared possibly in the thirteenth century, but the increased production of iron with blasting enabled more to be cast and the casting process to be improved.

England was moving towards the industrialisation of war.

The use of charcoal meant that the forests were being lost at an alarming rate and Queen Elizabeth had cried halt! She needed the wood for her navy. I write about this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. The iron masters of the Weald had served their nation well, but the discovery of a process during the seventeenth century whereby coal could be used to smelt iron ore changed all that.

Iron works now moved nearer to coal. Carron in Scotland began to cast cannon at a price much below the Wealden iron masters could match. In the Black Country smelters and foundries came into their own. Telford and Abraham Darby perfection of the process changed everything again and places like Dudley, Wolverhampton and of course Birmingham prospered.

Slowly the Weald's iron masters lost business both from the Board of Ordnance and for pig iron. Nonetheless they had enabled England to win nation defining battles against the Dutch, French and Americans.

Dartford and Thameside manufacturing history

 Dartford in the well-watered, sheltered valleys of the Darent and Cray invited occupation, certainly by the Romans and successive invaders. Over the centuries trades emerged and prospered. One of particular note was the making of paper from rags. John Spilman was granted a monopoly for the collection of rags for paper making. A number of paper mills followed including the Phoenix Mill of TH Saunders noted for the quality of its early machine made paper.

Armament production came to Dartford in the mid eighteenth century in the shape of a gun powder factory. This was succeeded by Vickers, Son and Maxim in the nineteenth century in Powder Mill Lane with an ammunition factory.

In 1889, Burroughs Wellcome took over a former mill for pharmaceutical manufacture and in 1914 built a new factory which was added to over the years reaching some 65 acres and over a million square feet of building. They had 2,800 employees in 1979.

A significant if lesser known manufacturer was John Hall a blacksmith who arrived in Dartford in 1785. By the time of his death in 1836 he had a iron works in Dartford, a gunpowder works in Faversham, a paper mill in Horton Kirby and a flour mill at Chislehurst. One of his apprentices was Bryan Donkin who with Hall built a works in Bermondsey to make tin cans for preserving food. I wrote of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. The Hall iron works supplied many local industries: gas works, zinc mills, paper mills and cement works. Of greatest importance was their work on refrigeration. It was said that in the Second World War 37% of the nations storage capacity was cooled by Hall's machines.

In 1886 Halls had installed their first cold air cooling machine on a large cargo ship carrying perishable foodstuffs. At that time Britain was the world's leading importer of food from Australia, South America and elsewhere and so refrigeration was essential. Cold air was better than previous methods but a better solution was needed. In 1889 Halls added carbon dioxide in a two stage compressor. To achieve yet colder temperatures, Ammonia was used and a plant was installed in Grimsby to make ice for the trawler fleet. In 1959, the company merged with Thermotank of Glasgow which made patented cooling and ventilation devices. The merged company bought Vent-Axia of Crawley in 1959 and was itself bought by APV in 1976. It is now part of the Japanese Daikin Group and continues to manufacture in Dartford.

The south bank of the Thames with its reserves of chalk and mud turned out to be the ideal location for cement manufacture.

Lime had been used for millennia in the making of mortar to join stone and brick. The Romans built lime kilns to burn limestone and produce quicklime. Such kilns were to be found across Britain where limestone was to hand. In the seventeenth century it was found that quicklime spread on fields would aid the growth of crops by reducing the acidity of the soil. The demand for quicklime kept growing.

There is evidence that as early as 8,000 BC it had been found that the addition of small amounts of volcanic ash gave the lime the capacity to set under water. In England, John Smeaton, known as the father of civil engineering, building the Eddystone lighthouse discovered that the property of hardening whilst submerged in water was linked to the clay content of the cement. In 1824, a Leeds stonemason, Joseph Aspdin, took this a stage further and invented a method of making from limestone and clay a cement which he called Portland Cement given the similarity in colour between it and Portland stone. He patented his invention and his son William exploited it further setting up a manufacturing plant in Rotherhithe. Other plants followed along the banks of the Thames and Medway using local deposits of chalk and clay taken from the mud of the river banks.

It seems likely that Portland cement was used by Marc Brunel in the construction of the Thames Tunnel in 1828. The story is that Brunel had been using the cheaper Roman Cement patented by James Parker of Northfleet in 1796, but the tunnel collapsed. Tons of Portland Cement were poured in and sealed the tunnel which could then be completed.

Limestone was also used as a flux for the smelting of iron to remove the impurity of silica, which when heated combines with the lime to form slag which is then removed and used for road making.

The exact proportion of lime to clay was crucial and depended on the make up of the local deposits used. The mixing would be either using water or by grinding the dry rocks. In time, cement plants appeared across Britain exploiting local mineral deposits and the availability of coal to heat the mixture until it calcined. In 1845, Isaac Johnson, then manager of the Swanscombe Works close to Dartford, fired the mixture to a higher temperature (1400-1450C) until the mixture clinkered. This was then ground to a fine powder and is essentially the Portland cement we use today.

Cement making was a dirty process and the towns folk complained. Johnson though went ahead with larger works at Greenhithe. In time there were some thousand kilns along the banks of the Thames and Medway.

In 1900 the Associated Cement Manufacturers Company was formed bringing together some twenty four companies all but two on the Thames and Medway including two of the early plants Robin's and Swanscombe. This company became Blue Circle Cement and is now owned by the French Lafarge.

Further reading:

• Geoff Porteus, The Book of Dartford (Buckingham: Barracuda Books 1979)

Erith manufacturing history

 Erith was not on Watling Street (unlike neighbouring Crayford) and so until the arrival of the railways it was restricted in industrial activity to that enabled by the Thames, so brick works and loam quarrying principally to provide ballast for ships.

The first manufacturing industry was the engineering factory of Easton, Amos and Anderson in 1864; the last named being also Director General of Ordnance Factories and I wrote about him in the context of the modernisation of the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. The factory closed in 1904 but left well made pumping engines some of which were still working after the Second World War.

A significant early industrial newcomer was the Callender Bitumen, Telegraph and Waterproof Company in 1880. At this time electric cables were being run for telegraph and soon power transmission. A little further upstream at Woolwich, Siemens was much involved in the same area. The company became Callenders Cable and Construction Company and in 1945 merged with British Insulated and Helsby Cables itself a product of the British Insulated Wire Company which had been founded in Manchester in 1890 by Sebastian de Ferranti, Colonel Pilkington of St Helens and others. British Insulated Callender Cables or BICC (as the combined company became) and its predecessors can claim credit for much of the national grid. In 2000 BICC changed its name to that of its construction subsidiary Balfour Beatty. It had previously disposed of its cable interests.

In 1887, the Nordenfeldt Gun Company built a factory in Erith and a year later combined with Maxim at Crayford. The combined business was then bought by Vickers. The business was renamed Vickers, Sons & Maxim and manufactured many machine guns during the First World War including the heavy 'PomPom' which had been used in the Boer War. Production was moved to other Vickers factories in 1932.

Fraser and Chalmers were to be another Erith manufacturer. They had originated in the USA and had focused on the manufacture of mining machinery. They set up in Erith in 1891, but by 1903 severed all US connections and expanded their range of products into steam plants, milling machinery and general engineering. In 1918, the business was bought by GEC and its was repurposed into manufacturing turbines. In the mid twentieth century it employed 4,000 people in a site extending to thirty-four acres.

Turner's Asbestos Cement Company set up in 1912 to manufacture asbestos roofing material, guttering, piping and fireproof and thermal insulating material. The company was owned by Turner and Newall of Manchester. The subsequent discovery of the dangers of asbestos effectively ended the business.

Continuing with construction, Royal Doulton Potteries made salt glazed stoneware piping. British Plaster Board processed imported gypsum. The Hercules Powder Company and Borax Consolidated Ltd provided raw materials for glass enamel and pottery.

Further reading:

• John A Pritchard, A History of Erith Pt III 1837-1894 ( London Borough of Bexley Libraries and Museums Department 1978)
• John A Pritchard, A History of Erith Pt IV 1894-1965 ( London Borough of Bexley Libraries and Museums Department 1978)

Crayford manufacturing history

 The main route running through Crayford was Watling Street offering evidence of Roman occupation. It was also where Hiram Maxim built his first factory. In nearby Dartford Heath there is evidence of iron smelting using ores from the Weald.

An early industry was silk printing and in the nineteenth century David Evans won a reputation for the excellence of his product. The skill expanded into textile printing more generally. The Swaisland company was said to have made Crayford the 'Mecca of the printing industry in Britain'. The company was bought by G.P. & J. Baker which created iconic designs for their fabric printing. Their archive has been preserved in private hands and inspires some of today's fabric printers. In the nineteenth century this was big business employing massive steam driven machinery. The Calico Printers Ground became a well known place in Crayford where printing had grown out of the bleaching industry, itself the product of Hugenot weavers making their homes here.

Frederick Braby worked with sheet steel in the Euston Road in London and set up a works in Crayford in 1867 to take advantage of the transport facilitated by the Surrey Canal. The works lasted until 1964 latterly supplying the food industry.

Sir Hiram Maxim was also a Hugenot but came to Watling Street, Crayford in 1888 via Hatton Garden and America to which the family had fled. He would be best known for his machine gun, but William Carr also suggests that he took to the air in a steam powered aircraft. Nothing came of this. What did come was an amalgamation with the Nordenfeldt Gun Company which in 1887 had built a factory in nearby Erith. In 1888 Nordenfeldt and Maxim combined their businesses which results in Maxim-Nordenfeldt Gun and Ammunition Company close to St John's church in Erith. In 1897 Vickers acquired the Maxim factory and there developed the Vickers Maxim machine gun.

In the early 1900s the armament works were repurposed to manufacture Wolseley Siddeley motor cars. This came about because John Siddeley was looking for someone to put his all British 100 h.p. car on the market. To do this he joined with Wolseley, then run by Herbert Austin, and Vickers. Austin left to set up on his own and the motor business was moved to Birmingham.

Crayford closed until 1912 when Vickers reopened it for arms production. Crucially they designed a synchronising gear which enabled a machine gun to be fired through the revolving propellor of an aeroplane, also manufactured by Vickers in Erith. After the war, the Crayford factory assumed a key part of Vickers manufacturing capability and I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Of international significance, a Vickers Vimy bomber built at Crayford but modified at Weybridge made the first trans-Atlantic crossing with Alcock and Brown. The Vickers Vimy powered by a Rolls-Royce Eagle engine proved a success but then a decision was taken to focus aircraft production on Weybridge.

In the Second World War in Crayford, Vickers manufactured armaments including military fire control and aiming equipment and after the war diversified into petrol pumps and packing and bottling machinery.

Given its location much of Crayford's business derived from imports. This the Vitbe Flour Mill was in Crayford. A good deal of timber was imported and at Crayford a portion of this was made into a whole range of different plywoods by the Tucker Armour Plywood Company.

Dussek's Oil Refining and processing works, later bought by Burmah Castrol, had a range of products from which I infer a range of raw materials. Before the drilling for hydrocarbons, oil was derived from plants and seeds, from coal tar and from animal fats. Dusseks specifically used tar and, I infer from their production of putty, linseed oil. This oil is derived from flax and in the nineteenth century the seed was imported from Russia. There is evidence of its processing also in Maidstone. There was a large trade in palm oil from West Africa which was used in making margarine and soap. I wrote about this in the context of Lever Brothers and the United Africa Company in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Further reading:

• J.D. Scott, Vickers - A History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962)
• William Carr, The Spot that is called Crayford (Crayford Urban District Council, 1951, 1965)

Kingston upon Thames manufacturing history

Kingston was possibly the most important market town in Surrey. Like so many places, its history was built on the wool trade. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it supplied London first with Surrey Whitewear pottery and then with Redwear. As London grew, Kingston supplied many of its needs using the Thames as the vital transport link. Turnpikes were built, but the Thames reigned supreme until the railways arrived in 1838. This first Kingston station was in Surbiton, but Kingston was becoming a centre for the growing residential areas of Surbiton, New Malden and Chessington.

Manufacturing came in earnest in the First World War, first with Thomas Sopwith manufacturing aircraft which would become iconic for the part they played in the war effort. It was all about the internal combustion engine. Racing driver, Kenelm Lee Guinness formed the KLG spark plug company to manufacture the version of the spark plug which he had invented. Bus and lorry manufacturer, Leyland, built their vehicles for the war effort.

Harry Hawker, who was Sopwith's chief test pilot, formed his own Hawker Aircraft Company after the war and it was agreed that the companies should be joined. Tragically he died in a flying accident in 1921 the year his company merged with Sopwith. Thomas Sopwith became chairman of the combined company which continued to develop aircraft in Kingston. In 1934 Hawker Siddeley was formed which drew together Hawker, Gloster of Cheltenham, Sir William Armstrong of Elswick, Newcastle and Armstrong Siddeley of Coventry.

In the Second World War, Hawkers manufactured their equally iconic Hurricane Fighter using also factory space at Langley near Slough. Leyland manufactured lorries and also tanks including Churchills, Centaurs and Comets. They built bombs at a rate of 400,000 a month. John Perrings made radio sets in a secret workshop above his furniture shop using employees seconded from the Hoover factory at Perrivale to teach his staff the necessary skills. Siebe Gorman in nearby Chessington made rubber suits for navy divers.

After the war Hawker Siddeley went on to produce further acclaimed aircraft not least the Harrier and it became part of the British Aircraft Corporation and then British Aerospace. The successor, BAE Systems, closed the Kingston factory in 1992. I write of the post war aircraft industry in Vehicles to Vaccines. The Hawk jet, produced by BAE Systems flown by the Red Arrows, was developed under Hawker ownership.

Decca Radar had a significant presence in Chessington and Tolworth and also in nearby Addlestone. The company emerged from the Decca Record Company in 1947 and moved to Tolworth in 1951. Three years later premises were taken in Chessington. Heavy radar for air traffic control and air defence was based in Tolworth. In the mid fifties, government informed the company that any further expansion had to be outside the immediate Surrey area and a site was taken on the Isle of Wight. Heavy radar was sold to Plessey in 1964. The remaining Surrey operations were focused on marine radar and this was bought by Racal in 1979. The legacy of Decca radar is now within BAE Systems.

Further reading:

• Shaan Butters, The Book of Kingston (Cardiff: Baron Books, 1995)
• https://woottonbridgeiow.org.uk/decca-legacy/index.php

Weybridge and Brooklands manufacturing history

Brooklands Motor Racing Circuit was close to Weybridge and brought motor racing enthusiasts and manufacturers including the Itala Automobile Company. It was the first purpose built race track in the world and had banked curves, very much the place where enthusiasts of the internal combustion engine gathered whether on the track or in the air. Alliot Verdan Roe carried out his flight trials there as did Sopwith of Kingston which had a training school there.

In 1915, the Itala factory was taken by Vickers to manufacture aircraft. They began with the Bentley designed BE.2 but then the government decided on the Farnborough designed SE5a and production began with a Hispano-Souza engine. Some 1,000 were produce exceeding the number of aircraft produced by any of the National Aircraft Factories. Vickers were in the aircraft business.

In the interwar years, the Brooklands track became the venue for many races including the British Grand Prix and the British Racing Drivers Club 500 mile race. Drivers including Malcolm Campbell and John Cobb raced there.

Another arrival in the twenties was the Airscrew Company which manufactured propellors. Over the years the business developed to include propeller blades for variable pitch aircrews. An artificial wood was developed called Weyroc. The company diversified into all manner of fans.

During the Second World War, the Vickers Weybridge factory manufactured Wellesley and Wellington bombers. The airfield was also where the Hawker Hurricane was brought for testing from its Kingston factory.

The Vickers design team at Weybridge came up with one winner in particular in the post war world: the Viscount passenger aircraft which was flown by BEA and many other operators.

The Vickers research department was headed by Dr Barnes Wallis who had created the Dam Busters bomb. His team went on to design some of the early missiles.

Aircraft production came up with the Valiant as a stop gap before the V Bombers came into service and then the civil Vanguard and VC10 neither of which lived up to the success of the Viscount. The factory closed in 1986. I write much more about Vickers in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Further reading:

J.D. Scott, Vickers - A History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962)