Dublin manufacturing history

Dublin had been the main route for the export of the island’s textiles. At nearby Prosperous in 1780 Sir Robert Brooke attempted to set up a cotton manufacturing industry. At one time he employed 4,000 people but the business collapsed after four years. Cotton and linen manufacture continued elsewhere but never on the same scale.

At the time of partition in the 1920s, the Free State had many fewer manufacturing jobs that the much smaller Five Counties; it was reckoned that the north had one and a half times the jobs in the south. As to the south, something like half were in Dublin and two thirds were in food, drink, tobacco, textiles, clothing and footwear. Guinness was the largest employer and indeed at one time the largest brewery in the world. Chemicals featured to some degree, but this was mainly the fertiliser producer Gouldings in Cork given the overwhelmingly agricultural nature of the economy.

In the period following partition, the Free State imposed tariffs on imports and this persuaded a number of British companies to establish factories in the south. Lever Brothers were already there, as was the Ford Motor Company. New arrivals included Rowntree and Macintosh confectionary and Players and Wills cigarettes.

Metal related industries made up 15% of Ireland's manufacturing employment. Looking back to the eighteenth century, Richard Turner had been one of the true iron masters. He created the iron structure for the glass houses at the Botanical Gardens in Belfast and the Palm House at Kew in London. In 1902 Scotsman, David Frame, revived the Hammond Lane Foundry and this went on to become part of the Irish Steel Company.

The Scottish link was repeated in shipbuilding. William McMillan worked his way up from being an apprentice at Lobnitz in Renfrew and then a plater at Feling & Ferguson in Paisley before moving to Dublin in 1901 as manager at the Dublin Docks Company which had been set up by two Scots, John Smellie and Walter Scott. During his time, he worked on many ships including the Muirchu launched as Helga II in 1908 as a fisheries protection vessel. The ships built were generally coasters, tugs land barges. William left the Dublin Docks Company in 1913; its yard would later being taken on by Vickers Ireland whose principal business was the manufacture of iron barges for inland waterways to transport barrels of Guinness amongst other goods.

William set up the Ringsend Dockyard Company in 1913 in three graving docks and there repaired ships. In 1916 they built their first ship, the 62ft steam tug Zoe for the British India Steam Navigation Company for service in the East African port of Mombasa. Other tugs followed. In 1918 William expanded to become Dublin Shipbuilders. This company built coasters, but struggled financially. One of its ships served in Duneden in New Zealand, another was completed by Henry Robb of Edinburgh. The comany survived during difficult times until 1928 when it became part of Ringsend Dockyard (Dublin) Ltd. Interestingly one of the shareholders was the Leith shipbuilder Henry Robb. Another was George N Jacob whose company would achieve fame for its Cream Crackers. The company's main business was the manufacture of iron motorised barges which became known as McMillans, considered better than the Vickers competitors. By 1938, Ringsend Dockyard (Dublin) was the last remaining steel shipbuilder in Dublin, Vickers having closed. One of its first roles during the Emergency (as the Second World War was known in the Free State) was to refit the Muirchu to become the flag ship of the Irish Navy. William died in 1938 having become one of Dublin's signifcant businessmen.

Scottish born John Boyd Dunlop, whilst living in Belfast, developed the pneumatic tyre which both greatly improved the comfort of riding a bicycle but also its speed. With Harvey du Cross, he set up, in 1888, what would become the Pneumatic Tyre Company. It began producing tyres in Dublin but then moved to Coventry.

Jacobs set up in Dublin in 1852 and became the city's biggest employer after Guinness. They built a factory in Liverpool in 1914 which eventually became part of Associated Busicuits. The Dublin business became part of Irish Biscuits.

Dublin's story after partition is not strictly part of this study although it is appropriate to note the prosperity of the capital as a member of the European Union.

Further reading:

• Pat Sweeney, Liffey Ships and Shipbuilding (Cork: Mercer Press, 2010)
• I am grateful to William McMillan's grandson, Russell Arthurton, for his research

 

Merthyr Tydfil manufacturing history

 In 1759, in Dowlais near Merthyr Tydfil, an iron works was founded by a group of iron masters. Eight years later, John Guest joined the company as works manager. Guest would later join with Keen and Nettlefold in what became one of Britain’s largest industrial companies, GKN.

The Dowlais Iron Works, under Sir John Guest, was said to be the greatest ironworks in the world in the mid nineteenth century, employing some 7,000 people. I wrote of its story in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. It wasn't alone in the Merthyr area, the Cyfarthfa Iron Works was a close rival until Dowlais powered ahead in the 1860s and 1870s. There were in all eight major iron works on the northern boundary of the South Wales coal field including Tredegar, Hirwaun, Penydarren and Ebbw Vale.

Transport was an issue for Merthyr, as iron had to be taken by horse to the port at Cardiff. In 1804, Richard Trevithic made the first steam locomotive for use on a tramway at Penydarren iron works. In time a canal was built and this was followed by a railway, vastly improving journey times. Dowlais supplied rails for the Great Western Railway, iron for Brunel's SS Great Britain built at Bristol and cannon balls for the Board of Ordnance.

Steel came to Dowlais earlier than many other iron works with the adoption of the Bessemer process making Merthyr at one time the leading steel making district in the world. The district also produced many of the great steel engineers who would take their skills elsewhere.

Merthyr suffered as other areas had access to better quality ore demanded by new processes.The Dowlais works closed in 1936 with production moving to Llanwern, combined with that of Baldwins and I write of these combinations in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Hoover manufactured cleaners in Merthyr.

Further reading:

• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)

Swansea manufacturing history

 Swansea at the mouth of the Tawe was recognised as a natural harbour by Norse pirates and came into its own with the discovery of bituminous coal which, from the sixteenth century, it was exporting by sea to other parts of Britain and further afield. In 1913 at its peak South Wales produced 56 million tons of coal.

Local deposits made Swansea and its surrounding area the principal place for smelting copper, which from the eighteenth century was much in demand from Birmingham's brass industry. Matthew Boulton and others formed the Rose Copper Company with a smelter on the banks of the Tawe. In time copper ore was brought by sea from Cornwall and Anglesea as well as from overseas to be smelted using the Welsh process and Welsh coal. In 1845, Swansea was producing 55% of the world's copper. Copper was joined by lead and zinc.

Tinplate was, though, what made Swansea's name. Locally produced iron would be dipped in locally mined tin. Tin was also brought in from Cornwall. In 1831, William Llewellyn had founded the Aberdulais Tinplate Company where iron ingots were rolled into flat plates and a thin protective layer of tin attached. It was one of hundreds of tin mills which grew up around the country. Tin was readily available, easy to work and very effective in coating iron and steel to prevent rust.

With the advent of steel, the iron ore local to Swansea had too high a phosphorous content (a problem also found elsewhere) and so ore was sourced from further east. William Siemens was determined to see his method of steel making, as opposed to that of Bessemer, embraced. The tin platers were reluctant and so Siemens set up his own state of the art plant at Landore. It proved successful for tin plate and gradually more plants took on the Siemens system. Swansea went from strength to strength in tin plate production.

Continuous strip mills were introduced alongside electroplating allowing a very thin coating of expensive tin. Demand grew as more and more food stuffs were packaged in tin cans.The producers of South Wales at one time provided three quarters of Britain's production with much going to the USA.

The coming of central heating created a demand for anthracite coal which was in plentiful supply around Swansea and which had proved less suitable for smelting. This provided a much needed boost to the economy.

Swansea had become a town long before Cardiff and residential development ran west along the shore with industry along the banks of Tawe running north. There were hundreds of small copper smelters most of which closed when the industry was consolidated. Balchin's introduction to his book has a vivid description of what remained: 'one of the most concentrated areas of industrial dereliction, desolation and decay in Britain.' Alongside this, the city has long been a cultural and intellectual centre.

I write about the consolidation of the steel industry in Vehicles to Vaccines and this brought about the Steel Company of Wales. This new company embraced amongst others the major tin plate producer Richard Thomas with plants at Velindre and Trostre and built a massive continuous process steel plant at nearby Port Talbot. This complex produced most of Britain's sheet steel and all its tin plate.

Copper production had suffered as other countries came on stream. The same became true of tin plating. Nonetheless Swansea attracted a wide spread of metal and other industries.

Alcoa Manufacturing and British Aluminium produced cast and sheet aluminium as well as wire. Borg-Warner from the USA produced car transmissions. Also from the USA, Jefferson Chemicals produced morpholine for making rubber and Piperazine for pig and poultry feed additives. B.P. refined oil and manufactured chemicals and 3M made tape products. Imperial Metal Industries produced Titanium and Zirconium alloy. International Nickel produced nickel and Imperial Smelting (about which I write more in the context of Bristol) produced zinc and lead. Smiths Industries made watches and Ford UK, rear axles. Mettoy built a factory at Fforestfach to manufacture Corgi toys. In the seventies Morgan Crucible relocated its electric motor brush manufacturing from Battersea.

A programme of development attracted other SMEs, but more and more the economy of Swansea became dominated by service industries. It boast a university with its own wafer fab for semiconductors.

Further reading:

• Swansea and its Region, W.G.V. Balchin ed. (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1971)
• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)

Ilford manufacturing history

 The manufacturer of photographic film that shares the name of the town was founded in 1879 and moved to a larger factory in Basildon in 1976

Plessey had started out in Marylebone in London after the First World War as mechanical engineers exploiting the talents of a German born engineer, William Oscar Heyne. The first products were jigs and tools. In 1919 the company moved to Holloway with investment from American, Bryan Clark.

Marconi, through their Marconiphone company, produced valve receivers, but not many. They subcontracted manufacture to Plessey and the relationship continued successfully until Marconi established their own manufacturing in 1926, and Plessey reverted to component manufacture. In 1923 Plessey had moved to Ilford where they also manufactured telephone equipment and equipment for the RAF and motor manufacturers. In 1929 Plessey made the first television invented by John Logie Baird. They also made the first portable radio. Bryan Clark's son, Allan, introduced mass production of standard components.

Plessey took on licences to produce American aircraft equipment. In the Second World War, Plessey produced many different types of components and equipment for the war effort, including shell cases, aircraft parts, and radio equipment such as the R1155 (receiver) and T1154 (transmitter). Following bombing of their Ilford factory they moved production to unused sections of the Central Underground Line. They also opened a factory in Swindon and took on the management of shadow factories. They set up a research establishment at Caswell House near Towcester. At the end of the war they employed 11,000 people, a workforce which reduced with the coming of peace.

Allan Clark's sons, John and Michael joined the company and senior managers, John Cunningham and Raymond Brown, left Plessey to form Racal. The company made many thousands of television sets for EMI. With the growth of the hydraulics business, the company formed two separate divisions, Fuel Systems which was moved to Titchfield, Hampshire and Industrial Hydraulics which went to Swindon, Wiltshire.

The next break came with telephones. The existing system, Strowger, was ‘hopelessly out of date’ and the development of electronic exchanges still some way off. The answer was the Crossbar system which AT & E had developed. Plessey bought both Automatic Telephone & Electric (with their Liverpool and Bridgnorth factories) and Ericcson, taking over the Beeston factory, and won twenty-six out of the thirty-two orders placed. I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines.

In 1961 the company had 17,500 employees. Six years later the payroll had grown to 68,000 employees with 6,500 in research and development with R&D labs at Caswell in South Wales, Roke Manor near Romsey, Taplow in Berkshire and Havant and Poole in Hampshire and Dorset.

Plessey were important suppliers to the Ministry of Defence and I write of this in my piece on Kingston upon Thames and Isle of Wight. Plessey made a failed bid for English Electric in 1968. In the eighties they went head to head with GEC over the next generation of telephones. In the event it was Ericcson which won with their System Y as opposed to System X which was developed by Plessey and GEC. Through the machinations of corporate bids, the Plessey telecoms business ended up with Ericcson and its defence related business eventually became part of BAE Systems via its merger with Marconi (the new name of GEC). I also wrote of this in Vehicles to Vaccines.

One part of Plessey did survive intact in Plymouth as Plessey Semiconductors which also took in Marconi Semiconductors.

I am grateful to Graces Guide which supplemented the earlier research I did for my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

Burton on Trent manufacturing history

 At one time Burton was home to thirty breweries, having been connected by the Trent and Mersey canal bringing goods from Preston down to Shardlow and the navigable river Trent. We can think of Bass, Marstons (which still brews in Burton) and Ind Coupe to name but three. As long ago as the eighties Ind Coope joined with Tetley of Leeds and Ansells of Birmingham in Allied Breweries

Shardlow

Most breweries have now closed or been replaced by new technology with a fraction of the former workforce and new often overseas owners. The biggest brewery is owned by the Canadian Molson Coors. There are though a good number of small independent breweries.

Most breweries have now closed

Much architecture remains to tell of Burton’s past

Close by was the original Branston Pickle factory which became a Central Ordnance depot for army clothing. It is now a heritage site.

More recently the Toyota factory was built at Burnaston.

Unilever built its UK condiments business in Burton. Also close by at Tutbury in 1901 Nestle built a factory for the making of condensed milk. By the fifties the demand for this wained and the factory was repurposed to make instant coffee.

Oxford manufacturing history

 Oxford is home to one of our ancient universities, until a century or so ago committed to the teaching of the classics and theology. The university stood up against any suggestions that railways may come to the city, indeed although passed by the House of Commons, the university used its influence in the House of Lords to kill the first railway bill. In time of course the railways came and began to link the city to London and other industrial centres.

The Corporation of the city had been enthusiastic when GWR suggested that they might locate their workshops in the city. Once again the university protested that they didn’t want mere mechanics. It seems they were content to accept the population of tradespeople and servants who enabled the university to run. These people were faced with poverty when the colleges broke for their annual long vacation. No wonder the city wanted to attract other employment.

Employment did come in the wake of the First World War when William Morris set up Morris Motors. I drew on the biography of Lord Nuffield to write about Morris motors in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

In her book, A History of the City of Oxford, Ruth Fasnacht offers some insightful asides. Before Morris set up his garage in 1908, the population of the City was 50,000. By 1921 it had risen to 67,000 and by 1951, 97,000.

Morris began by sourcing components largely from other companies. He obtained the axle from E.G. Wrigley and pressed steel wheels from Sankey. White & Poppe of Coventry supplied carburettors and would have built engines except that those from America were cheaper. When that supply ceased Morris turned to Hotchkiss in Coventry. Other components were obtained from two small companies, Smiths of London and Lucas of Birmingham. In time Morris made their own engines but continued with Smiths and Lucas.

In 1939 Morris employed 3,700 people and its subsidiary Morris radiators 1,000. The Pressed Steel Company, which set up alongside Morris to provide all steel bodies for the cars, employed 5,000. Morris also had operations in Coventry where the heart of motor industry was. They undertook work that required skilled labour in Coventry, leaving less skilled assembly to Oxford. In 1938/39 Morris was making one quarter of all British made cars and employed 40% of Oxford’s workforce.

Villages surrounding the city were transformed as workers migrated to the area for work with Morris. Interestingly, the people of Oxford didn’t suffer unemployment in the depression years because Morris’s performance kept pace with the availability of labour. It therefore came as a shock when production ceased on the declaration of war and didn’t resume with war work until a year later. In 1945, the transition to peacetime conditions was relatively smooth until raw material shortages hit in the early fifties. Pressed Steel diversified into refrigeration with PressCold and Morris merged with Austin to become BMC in (1951). In 1950, Morris had manufactured 150,000 cars compared with Austin at 166,000. Ford was the UK leader at 185,000 vehicles.

Of course Morris (and Pressed Steel) weren’t alone. There was the Eagle Iron Works and the Oxford University Press.

BMW now manufacture Mini in Cowley. I write of the story in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The University has spun out many successful companies from its research. Oxford University is a valued collaborator in manufacturing most recently with Astra Zeneca in vaccines but further back with Oxford Instruments which was the first commercial spin out from Oxford University in 1959.

Further reading:

Ruth Fasnacht, A History of the City of Oxford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954)

Cambridge manufacturing history

Cambridge is of course the other of our ancient universities and the offspring of Oxford whose students fled there to escape death at the command of a vengeful king.

I am grateful to F.A. Reeve for the particular angle he took in the university’s and city’s brush with manufacturing in his book entitled Cambridge.

He takes his reader back through the history of the fenland town and the emergence of the university. Later, he says this: “until 1867, no college gave a Fellowship to a scientist.” In all my researches into British manufacturing this is a constant complaint that we were at a disadvantage compared to Germany which took scientific education seriously.

The first chemical laboratory was equipped at the expense of G.D. Liveing, the Professor of Chemistry and this was replaced at the expense of St John's; the replacements continued to be used until 1914. A new chemical laboratory was added in 1889.

The Cavendish Laboratory for experimental physics was built at the expense of the Duke of Devonshire in 1872 and James Clark Maxwell had become Professor in 1871. Later, J.J. Thomson became professor at the age of 28 and in his 34 years discovered the electron. He was succeeded in 1918 by Ernest Rutherford who opened up the field of nuclear physics.

For mechanical and applied mechanics, it fell to the Professor, James Stuart, in 1875 to equip the building at his expense although the university later bought the equipment from him.

Most of the instruments needed for medical science were imported from Germany until the Professor of Physiology Sir Michael Foster and two of his pupils, Dew-Smith and Francis Balfour. began to design and manufacture them. This led to Dew-Smith and Horace Darwin founding Cambridge Scientific Instruments with W.T. Pye as their mechanic.

Pye's son W.G. Pye had worked with Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory and in 1896 set up to make scientific instruments. Some twenty five years later, his company moved into wireless but continued with scientific instruments and by 1976 employed 7,000 people in Cambridge. I write more about Pye Wireless in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

In the Second World War, Pye’s then owner, C O Stanley, argued strongly against setting up a shadow factory to manufacture sets, and instead set up a whole string of small production units in Cambridgeshire villages and ended up employing 14,000 people. Pye designed and made both an infantry set and tank set.

After the war, design was becoming more important, and Pye took on designer, Robin Day, moving away from ‘high-gloss finishes, radiused corners and gilt trims' that were then general in radiogram and television cabinet design. He moved Pye to an over-all geometry and eventually to a house style recognisable of the best 1950s design evident at the Festival of Britain.

Cambridge Scientific Instruments [Founded by Horace Darwin with A. G. Dew-Smith in 1881 after earlier partnership Fulcher/Drew-Smith partnership in 1878] under the guidance of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation joined with instrument makers George Kent 1968 to form Cambridge Instruments, the largest independent British manufacturer of industrial instruments. A logical progression was into minicomputers which brought the power of computing out of the mainframe room onto the factory floor. 1974 saw the company combine with the international Brown Boveri and then in 1988 it became part of ASEA Brown Boveri (ABB). ABB UK is now a major player in CADCAM.'

Cambridge is home to Life Sciences including Astra-Zeneca R&D. The University produces and nurtures wonderfully innovative manufacturers. ARM probably comes top of the list having emerged from Acorn famous for their BBC computer. With the wartime presence of so many airfields, aircraft manufacturers abounded. Marshall Aerospace has been providing services to aviation since before the First World War. Sustainable packaging Pulpex has set up here. Bayer Crop Science is based here.

Further reading:

• Cattermole, M. J. G. & Wolfe, A. F., 'Horace Darwin's shop: a history of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, 1878–1968' (Adam Hilger, 1987)
• F.A. Reeve, Cambridge (London: B.T. Batsford 1976)