Plymouth manufacturing history

 Set on the western approaches, Plymouth was in many ways Britain's door to the wider world. It was from Plymouth that so many of our adventurers sailed: Sir Francis Drake to the Pacific, the Pilgrim Fathers to America, James Cook to Australia and Charles Darwin to the Galapagos. I have written separately about our adventurers and explore in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World their role in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.

In the later seventeenth century the city became home to a Royal Dock known now as Devonport. The docks built many hundreds of ships and maintained the fleet. In the nineteenth century it was subject to a major extension to allow for larger ships, also the Royal William Victualling Yard was built. The Great Western Railway was linked to the docks. A regular domestic service to Brittany began. The Royal Dockyard in 1912 employed 12,000 civilians. The biggest vessel ever constructed in Devonport was the 30,600 ton Warspite launched in 1913.

Other industries arrived. Isaac Reckitt took over a Plymouth factory in 1905 and made Robin starch and washing powders. Bryant and May experimented making lucifer matches. Their factory burnt down and they moved to London to make Swan Vestas. Lever Brothers developed a presence in the city by buying soap companies.

War time bombing left Plymouth with gaping wounds and the great task of reconstruction began as early as 1942. Reckitts had been bombed and decided to concentrate their activity in Hull. Companies were encouraged to set up: C&J Clark, Slumberland mattresses and Browne & Sharpe machine tools arrived in the fifties. Tecalemit were in production by 1948 as were Berketex dress makers.

Plymouth attracted electronics companies. It is home to Plessey Semiconductors. Bush Television built a factory in Plymouth to expand on its west London premises. BAE Systems have a Systems and Equipment establishment in the city.

A good number of American owned companies have bases in Plymouth and work in life sciences, composites and other technologies. Mars Wrigley make gum in the original Wrigley factory. You can read more detail in this link to research carried out by students in Plymouth.

Burts Crisps was founded in 1999 by Richard and Linda Burt with premises in Kingsbridge. They moved to a bigger factory in Plymouth in 2006.

Kawasaki Precision Machinery has been making hydraulic equipment in Plymouth for 25 years.

The work of the former Royal Dockyard has now been passed to Babcock International at Devonport and Rosyth. Princess Yachts were founded in 1965 and manufacture high class yachts sailed the world over

Further reading:

Crispin Gill, Plymouth - A New History (Devon Books, 1993)

I wanted to explore British manufacturing history geographically, having looked at it chronologically and by sector in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. 

Follow this link to a list of the places I have explored to date.

Taunton manufacturing history

In a sense this is a story about the most simple manufacturing process, the turning of apples into cider. Yet it draws in strands of the commercial world which are common to a great many manufacturing businesses.

Apples grow well in a number of areas of the country and from early times local people have found the benefit of extracting their juice and allowing it to ferment. Being a simple industry, anyone can do it - to a degree. It is also a local industry with lovers of cider fiercely loyal to the taste of the apples they know. The same is true of breweries, except that cider can be made on a very small scale.

R.W. Holder traces the story of Taunton cider back to the Rectors of Heathfield in the early nineteenth century. Rural areas were suffering in what became known as the hungry forties, but land owners generally escaped and it was the poor who suffered. A Rector was in sense a land owner since he lived off the rents of the Glebe and the proceeds of the Tithe. The Rector of Heathfield lived in cider country and was in the financial position to exploit his product and he did so by supplying the rich and famous.

As was the case in many places it was the railway that unleashed the business of Taunton which was not served by decent roads nor by easily navigable rivers. Railways, the GWR, proved ideal to transport hogsheads of cider to London and all parts of the country. The railways also expanded the market for local food producers and Holder tells the story of Mrs Langdon who built a business supplying eggs, chicken and rabbit to the London market.

The Taunton cider business grew by building relationships with brewers and their tied houses. Slowly the number of brewers increased each having a shareholding in Taunton Cider. Mrs Langdon's business, now run by her sons, recognised the role of logistics in their business and realised that they were at heart hauliers and could compete well with the stuck-in-the-mud railways. Langdons grew and Taunton grew and eventually the former was transporting the cider of the latter in large quantities.

The cider market was tough. H.P. Bulmer of Hereford was in the lead, with also Whiteways of Whimple in Devon and Gaymers of Attleborough in Norfolk close behind. The drinks market was also changing. Britvic of Chelmsford and Showerings of Shepton Mallet were transforming the image of the drink. With this background Taunton Cider was sold first to management, then floated on the London Stock Exchange until it became part of Matthew Clark plc and in turn C&C (Cantrell and Cochrane) founded in Belfast but then based in Dublin. C&C already owned Gaymers and Matthew Clark the Irish firm of Magners. The original Taunton Cider moved production elsewhere, but Heritage Cider has taken its place in the town.

Further readings:

R.W. Holder, Taunton Cider and Langdons - a West Country Story of Industrial Development (Midsummer Norton: Bookcraft, 2000)

I wanted to explore British manufacturing history geographically, having looked at it chronologically and by sector in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. 

Follow this link to a list of the places I have explored to date.

Cheltenham & Gloucester manufacturing history

 In the fifteenth century Gloucester was another centre for the wool and cloth industry. Work with iron was if anything more important with smelting from the Forest of Dean and foundries in the city. There is evidence then of further metal trades: cutlers, bladesmiths, coopers, farriers and pinners. In the thirteenth century, more towns had come to be known for their product: Lincoln for cloth (dyed green or scarlet), Grimsby for fish, Corfe for marble and Gloucester for iron.

In the sixteenth century the wool trade declined, but the city was appointed a port which went some way to increase trade, although Bristol continued to dominate. Cheltenham made its name as a Spa Town. The eighteenth century also saw Gloucester run more by the gentry, but the coming of the canals and railways, as elsewhere, brought manufacturing industry to the city.

This was in the shape of one remarkable company, the Gloucester Carriage and Wagon Company formed in 1860. Its traditional business had been fine carriages for the gentry, but the need to transport coal brought in the coal wagon for use on railways of which the company manufactured a great many. The design of wagons was developed and a greater use was made of iron and steel. Passenger carriages were produced mainly for overseas customers. The London Underground became a major customers with carriages produced for a number of lines. The company worked with English Electric on rolling stock for electrified railways. The company ceased manufacture in 1986.

In Cheltenham in 1888, Herbert Henry Martyn founded a company of wood, stone and plaster carvers, metal and glass workers. The company gained a national reputation for the excellence of their work. During the First World War, Hugh Burroughs of the Aircraft Manufacturing Company of Hendon (Airco) was looking for subcontractors to make wooden DH2 Scout aircraft. He was advised to visit Alfred Martyn who had taken over from his father. Burroughs was impressed and gave the order. Clearly a good relationship developed because Burroughs and Martyn set up a new company, the Gloucestershire Aircraft Company, owned by their respective companies.

The Gloucestershire Aircraft Company or Gloster Aircraft as it became, began by building large numbers of Bristol Fighters and Nieuport Nighthawks and, after the war ended, set about using large quantities of surplus Nighthawk parts to produce a series of planes derived from the Nighthawk which they named the Sparrowhawk and many of which were bought by the Japanese Navy. The Schneider Trophy beckoned and the company made a number of racing seaplanes. The interwar years were spent in experimentation as designs were tried out moving from wood to metal construction. This cost dear and Gloster became part of the much larger Hawker Siddeley which drew the company into the Hawker fold. A large number of aircraft were built including the Gladiator, the last bi-plane fighter.

Gloster had the distinction of being the first aircraft manufacturer in the UK or US to design, build and fly an aircraft fitted with a jet engine. I write about the development of the jet in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. The company went on to produce the highly successful Meteor.

Gloucester was home to Rotol, formed by Bristol aircraft and Rolls-Royce to manufacture propellers. Dowty Aviation with which Rotol later merged was based in Cheltenham specialising in undercarriages. The Dowty Heritage site has much more excellent detail. George Dowty, the founder of the company in 1930, had been a draughtsman at Gloster Aircraft designing internally sprung aircraft wheels in his spare time. Joe Bowstead and John Dexter joined him on their first contract for struts for the de Havilland autogyro. Soon they went full time and began building a company that would provide vital parts for the growing aircraft industry. George Dowty was a great believer in subcontracting, both to hold steady the company's employee numbers and to drawn on more specialist skills. I write more of the post war British aircraft industry in Vehicles to Vaccines.

With thanks to the Dowty Heritage Trust - Original photo in the Dowty archive at the Gloucestershire Heritage Hub

Unilever set up their Walls ice cream factory in Gloucester. In nearby Coleford, Lucazade and Ribena are produced. Ribena was produce by H.C Carter and was bought by Beecham and joined by Lucazade. They were sold by GSK to Suntori in 2013.

Further reading:

• Carolyn Heighway, Gloucester - A History and Guide (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985)
• Peter Dancy, British Aircraft Manufacturers since 1909, (Fonthill Media, 2014).
• The Engineer 7 October 1971

I wanted to explore British manufacturing history geographically, having looked at it chronologically and by sector in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. 

Follow this link to a list of the places I have explored to date.

Bristol manufacturing history

 In 1843 Isambard Kingdom Brunel built a revolutionary ship in Bristol’s western dock. It was iron hulled and had both steam engine and sails. The principal innovation was the screw propeller replacing the paddles used up to that point. The image is of a replica of the original propeller on the conserved SS Great Britain at its home in the dry dock in Bristol.

The ship made the trip to Australia some thirty times and ended its service coaling the British fleet in the First World War. It offered luxury

Alongside hardship

Steerage class

Bristol’s history is maritime and inevitably bound up with slavery as were so many British ports. The maritime link led to the city’s principal businesses WD and HO Wills with cigarettes and JS Fry with chocolate. The city also refined sugar. The presence of these businesses and extensive foreign trade encouraged the development of banking in the city which, until comparatively recently, prided itself on its ability to finance its own business.

Shipbuilding was important, but, like textiles and iron, Bristol didn’t have the advantages of competing northern cities. Nonetheless the city had a major cotton mill for over a century. Before this, like many parts of the country, it was a centre of the woollen cloth trade. It gained a reputation for skilled iron work. The size of the dock limited the size of ships that could be built. The same was less true of non-ferrous metals.

The Mendips had reserves of both lead and zinc. Lead was mined and smelted during the nineteenth century. The arsenic content hardened the metal making it suitable for use as shot. It was a Bristol engineer who invented the process of making shot by dropping it from a tower through a sieve into cold water thus producing perfectly spherical shot.

Zinc had many uses. Added to copper, mined in Cornwall, it made brass largely for Birmingham manufacturers. The smelting of the ore released sulphuric acid used in the production of tin in Swansea just over the Bristol channel. Zinc was also used in galvanising first iron and then steel. John Lysaght set up in Bristol to exploit this process; he added mills in Newport and Wolverhampton and eventually became part of GKN. A fourth use of zinc as an oxide is used in medical products.

Bristol's relationship with zinc came in two major phases. William Champion began exploitation in 1743 and the industry thrived and then declined as Birmingham took more of the processing. The First World War offered a resurgence. Then zinc ore was coming from Australia and was being smelted in Germany before subsequent import into Britain. Clearly the war put a stop to this and Winston Churchill commissioned a major zinc production plant on Avonside, the National Smelting Corporation, which was completed in 1923. In 1928 it became part of the Imperial Smelting Corporation and then faced a long period of decline as the demand fell back to peacetime levels. Imperial Smelting, also in Swansea, became part of RTZ.

WD and HO Wills distinguished themselves from the many other cigarette makers by their technical innovation and marketing. In 1902 they became the largest part of the new Imperial Tobacco. Both Wills and Fry had attracted packaging businesses. ES & A Robinson emerged as a leader and later merged with Dickinson of Hemel Hempstead. Printed packaging materials were needed in ever increasing quantities. The most significant manufacturer became part of Imperial which later dramatically increased production only for it to fall back as cigarette smoking declined in popularity.

The GWR connected Bristol to London in 1841, with the workshops at Swindon. Nevertheless there was room for more, and engineering came to Bristol in the form of locomotive and railway wagon builders. These were followed by trams, out of which the Bristol Aeroplane Company emerged. In the Second World War it employed over 50,000 people and built such iconic aircraft as the Blenheim. Bristol Aero Engines was later bought by Rolls-Royce; their Olympus powered Concorde. The British Aircraft Corporation, into which Bristol Aircraft merged, built their Concorde at nearby Filton. I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines. BAE Systems still manufacture aircraft at Filton where Airbus UK also carry out design work. At nearby Abbey Wood, BAE Systems manufacture combat vehicles. The Bristol Motor Company was a child of the city. The Douglas Motor Cycle company manufactured many thousands of motor bikes in the First World War. This was bought by Westinghouse Brake and Signal and made brakes and signals but also Vespa scooters.

More recently Bristol attracted service businesses and also inward investment; Hewlett Packard built a factory to the north of the city in the 1980s. The semiconductor manufacturer Inmos (later owned by Thorn EMI) had a design centre in Bristol. Bristol now thrives as a predominantly service economy.

Further reading

• Industrial Change in Bristol since 1800 (http://historycd.uwe.ac.uk/)
• E.J. COCKS and B. WALTERS. A History of the Zinc Smelting Industry in Britain (London: George Harrap. 1968)

I wanted to explore British manufacturing history geographically, having looked at it chronologically and by sector in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. 

Follow this link to a list of the places I have explored to date.

Crawley manufacturing history

 Crawley was a village on the Weald and had played its part in the early Wealden iron industry until the seventeenth century. The Weald supplied iron ore to local and then London based foundries for the production of weapons before both trades gravitated to the coal of the West Midlands. I write more about the Wealden iron industry in a separate blog piece.

In the eighteenth century Crawley's position on the main London to Brighton road brought carriage trade which increased with Brighton's popularity. The arrival of the London to Brighton railway put pay to this, but brought Crawley closer to the ever growing London.

After the Second World War, Crawley was eventually designated a new town and prospered as a result. Manufacturers were attracted but only few larger concerns, the majority being SMEs.

Vent Axia was formed with the invention of the first electrically operated window ventilator in 1936. The company provided ventilation equipment for 10 Downing Street during the Second World War and moved to a factory in Putney in 1946. In 1957 it took a 99 year lease of a factory in Manor Royal, Crawley where it still manufactures after a short period of offshore manufacture in China. Vent Axia was bought by Halls of Dartford and the combined business became part of APV.

APV, founded in Wandsworth in 1910, set up in Crawley in the fifties. Its full name was the Aluminium Plant and Vessel Company and was working with a new way of welding aluminium. It began making heat exchangers and developed into supplying equipment for the dairy, food and chemical industries. In 1987 it merged with Baker-Perkins, but the APV business was bought be Siebe in 1997. At one time it had 1,600 employees.

The subsequent massive growth of Gatwick airport encouraged a good many supporting businesses and housing for a large number of airport employees. The Manor Royal business district has also attracted a good number of businesses, many with international connections.

In recent years Crawley had become the headquarters for Gatwick Diamond a designated economic development area comprising Crawley, Epsom & Ewell, Horsham, Mid Sussex, Reigate & Banstead and Tandridge. It is home to 45,000 businesses and claims better economic performance than similar areas: Thames Valley including Reading, South East Midlands including Milton Keynes and Enterprise M3 including Woking and Greater Medway including Chatham. It highlights Life Sciences and Knowledge Based Industry as key areas.

Further reading:

Peter Gwynne, A History of Crawley (Chichester: Phillimore, 1990)

I wanted to explore British manufacturing history geographically, having looked at it chronologically and by sector in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. 

Follow this link to a list of the places I have explored to date.

Reigate and Redhill manufacturing history

 This area of Surrey is rich in sand, chalk, clay and rock all suitable as building materials. Some of the sand is very fine and so ideal for glass making. There is also evidence of some twelve windmills dating from early times. Geared water mills had been introduced by the Romans and some 6,000 are mentioned in the Domesday Book. It was long thought that these were only for grinding grain and a good many were. However, certainly by the early Middle Ages water mills were adapted to other uses including fulling cloth, hammering hot metal and sharpening tools.

The Reigate area had the disadvantage of a lack of constantly running water. I write elsewhere of the use of ponds to regulate water flow; the solution in Reigate was the windmill and a number of the twelve mills mentioned were powered by wind. Fullers earth was also found nearby and so the application of wind mills to fulling was entirely feasible; there was also no shortage of sheep.

The Surrey Iron Railway built in 1805 was planned to go all the way to Portsmouth to facilitate transport during the Napoleonic wars, but in fact ended at Merstham just short of Reigate. Nevertheless it did serve to assist in the transport of Merstham rock and other building materials in great demand as London expanded.

One of the watermills, Salford Mill, was extensively upgraded including the installation of steam power and this was said to have been used by Dr Kellogg for the flaking of wheat until he moved his breakfast cereal business to Manchester

In 1919, the Redland Tile Works began making concrete tiles using the local reserves of sand; local chalk and clay were also available to make the necessary cement. The business was successful, given the demand for building following the war; there was also ample labour in the shape of ex-servicemen.

Carter Wilkinson engineers invented a tile making machine that dramatically speeded up the process and it became a subsidiary of Redland which then exploited the invention through granting licences in many countries. The Redland Engineering business remained in Reigate, but tile making moved to the Moorhouse Tile Works in Kent. In time Redland opened tile works at Syston in Leicestershire and elsewhere across the country. It bought small local brick companies, and in 1984 bought the famous traditional tile manufacturer, Rosemary Roof Tiles. Redland expanded considerably in the seventies and eighties. A revolutionary flat roof system, Icopal invented by David Anderson, had followed the concrete roof tile in 1923 with a factory in Trafford Park in Manchester. Redland was acquired in 1997 by the French Lafarge. The Anglo-Irish company BMI now owns both Redland and Icopal.

A survivor from early times was the British Wax Refining Company of Redhill which purifies and bleaches beeswax. Beecham Research Laboratories were at nearby Brockham Park

The Monotype works at Salfords, near Redhill, was founded in 1899 to manufacture compositing machines for the rapidly expanding printing industry. Monotype Corporation originated in the USA and owner Tolbert Lanston invented a method of mechanical hot metal typeset whereby a typed script could be automatically converted into metal characters. As the twentieth century progressed, the style of type face became more and more important and different families of fonts were devised, for example the well known Times New Roman. Monotype Ltd was very much a partner with its US parent being as involved in developing technology and design. The UK company was floated on the London Stock Exchange with a British board of directors including Harold Macmillan of the publishing house of the same name. Monotype expanded and bought the rival system Linotype which worked with lines of text rather than individual characters.

Reigate, Redhill and the surrounding area are now predominantly residential.

Further reading:

• Derek Stidder, A Guide to the Industrial History of Reigate and Banstead (Reigate: Surrey Industrial History Group, 1996)
• Derek Stidder, A Guide to the Industrial Archaeology of Reigate and Banstead District (Reigate: Surrey Industrial History Group, 1979)

I wanted to explore British manufacturing history geographically, having looked at it chronologically and by sector in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. 

Follow this link to a list of the places I have explored to date.

Maidstone manufacturing history

 A market town and the county town of Kent, the 'Garden of England', Maidstone was home to manufacturers exploiting local produce. Kent is known for hops and so breweries flourished. The county is also known for its fruit and so Grants Cherry Brandy but also jam and confectionary makers most notably Sharp's Toffee. Sharps were bought by Trebor which had started out in South London, set up a factory in Chesterfield to escape enemy bombing during the Second World War and became the fourth largest confectionary manufacturer with main competitors Cadbury and Rowntree. Cadbury bought the expanded Trebor in 1989 and the Maidstone factory closed in 2000. The Maidstone factory was known as the Kreemy Works, the largest toffee factory in the world.

It is a town on the Medway and so had a plentiful supply of water for paper making both for specialist uses and newsprint. Hayle Mill made the renowned Bockingford water colour paper.

It is not far from London and so took on a role in support of the metropolis in terms of homes for commuters but also manufacturers to support the London infrastructure. WA Stevens experimented converting a motor car to electric power. In conjunction with London bus company Tilling this developed a drive system whereby a petrol engine powered an electric motor which in turn drove the front wheels of a bus. For a bus driver this held the advantage over a crash gearbox before synchromesh was invented. London bus operator Thomas Tilling bought Stevens in 1910 and the invention was exploited to good effect. However, experience in the First World War taught an increasing number of drivers how to manage a crash gearbox and so the Tilling-Stevens option lost some of its attraction.

In the interwar period the motor car was gaining popularity and the Maidstone based Rootes company had built an astonishing position as the top motor retailer in Britain. They already provided service and repair back up for their sales but expanded this by building charabancs on Tilling-Stevens chassis. As I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, Rootes explored manufacturing options elsewhere including the Humber company as shown in the image, but also bought Tilling-Stevens in 1950.

In nearby Harrietsham, Marley Concrete roofing tiles were introduced after the First World War when building materials were in short supply. Owen Aisher was building bungalows in Kent, but found he was being held up by supply shortages. He took the initiative and began using an adapted second-hand machine to produce concrete roof tiles. The availability of cement further up the Medway clearly made this cost effective. Manufacturing techniques developed, and a number of factories were built around the country to improve access to customers. By the time of the Second World War, Marley was producing two hundred million tiles a year. In the fifties, demand continued to grow, manufacturing techniques were further developed, and more factories built. Marley added floor tiles, including those made from vinyl to their range. Later, they produced whole roofing systems and more recently integrated solar panels. In 2022, the business was sold with roofing being bought by Marshalls plc.

Further reading:

Peter Clark and Lyn Murfin, The History of Maidstone (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995)