Liverpool Manufacturing History

Liverpool was primarily a port and so concerned with import and export and activities in support of shipping including some shipbuilding. Other towns on Merseyside (including St Helens, Wides and Runcorn) were more defined by their role in chemical production in support of Lancashire’s textile industry; Liverpool did, though, have soap manufacturers, Hudsons.

Looking at Liverpool manufacturers, the early industries were mainly concerned with processing imports. So, there were sugar refineries eventually coming together as Tate & Lyle. There were flour mills including those of Rank. From these other food producers emerged: biscuits (Crawfords and Jacobs) and jam (Hartleys).

There was some shipbuilding. Cammell of Sheffield later merged with Laird which had begun as the Birkenhead Iron works and became a renowned shipbuilder. Ships were also built for inland water ways. In 1900 steel maker John Summers built a large new works at Hawarden Bridge and by 1920 it was one of Britain’s largest producers of sheet steel. Frank Hornby founded Meccano in the city and this later grew to encompass Dinky model vehicles and Hornby trains. Hornby later moved to Margate in Kent.

Lever Brothers, now part of Unilever, began making soap in Warrington, but then created factories at Port Sunlight and built a village for their employees. I write of its growth in both How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. The manufacture of soap and margarine from vegetable fat had the by-product of cattle feed of which the town became a major producer.

The spread of electricity generation and communication by telephone and telegraph reached all the big cities. For Liverpool this had added importance with its global shipping trade. Liverpool saw the formation of Automatic Telephone and Electric Company in 1912. In Prescot, British Insulated Cables produced cables and overhead transmission systems. Much later, but I suspect building in this heritage, Plessey set up the secret Exchange Works at Cheapside for the UK Air Defence System and a telephone factory at Edge Lane. Marconi established their first wireless service depot at Seaforth in 1903. I write more about Marconi and the development of wireless communication first with shipping in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Liverpool and Merseyside more generally became the object of governmental intervention quite early on. In the First World War this largely built on the Merseyside chemical industry and included the production of phenol at Ellesmere Port, T.N.T at Litherland and Queen's Ferry, ammunition at St Helens and a National Aircraft Factory at Aintree. In 1931 the Lancashire Industrial Development Corporation focused on support for new industries in Merseyside but also the cotton towns, Wigan and Manchester itself. This was followed in 1936 but a then unique scheme which gave to Liverpool City Council power to acquire land and build factories in the city's outskirts. The power was used initially to create two new industrial estates, one at Speke and the other at Fazakerley (renamed Aintree in 1952). The outbreak of the Second World War delayed the planned development of the estate with instead the creation of Royal Ordnance Factories. After the war, the employment situation once again became acute as did the shortage of housing caused largely by war time bomb damage. The issues were addressed by the large scale movement of people to new towns (Skelmersdale and Runcorn) and over spill areas such as Ellsemere Port.

The Rootes Group ran a shadow factory in Speke in the Second World war which was later taken over by Dunlop adding to the rubber industry in the area. Standard Triumph built a paint, trim and bodyshop. The Ford plant at nearby Halewood was second only to its Dagenham works. British Leyland built a plant at Speke which closed in 1978. Glaxo set up a secondary manufacturing plant there. Those plants designated as secondary took chemicals from their primary plants and formed them into the final medicine adding also the means of administration. Astra-Zeneca manufactures vaccines at Speke.

Lucas bought the former Royal Ordnance factory at Fazakerley was had been purpose built, opening in 1941 with a workforce of twelve thousand, 70% of whom were women, and made nearly half of the five million small arms produced during the war. It produced three quarters of a million No 4 rifles which replaced the Lee-Enfield. Courtaulds had a plant at Aintree producing artificial silk. English Electric had taken over the D. Napier & Sons aero engine factory and added a further large factory to produce a range of electrical goods. Schweppes added to their long term presence in Liverpool by building a large factory for minerals and cordials.

Kirby was the site of another Royal Ordnance Factory in the Second World War located there with a view to becoming the core of further industrial development after the war. Parkinson Cowan located a subsidiary, Fisher Bendix, in Kirby. The company was bought by Thorn in the hope of producing gas appliances for the onrush of north sea gas. In the event and despite the efforts of government, industrial unrest resulted in the closure of the plant.

Bromborough had an industrial alcohol distillery run by the Distillers Company. It was also a home to some boat building. The Bromborough Port Industrial Estate was run and largely occupied by Unilever. Girling produced brakes and other motor components there.

Liverpool manufacturing in the twenty-first century includes automotive and aerospace, food and beverage and pharmaceuticals.

Further reading:

Sheila Marriner, The Economic and Social Development of Merseyside

 

Manufacturing history of Preston and the Lancashire cotton towns

Richard Arkwright, the father of the factory system, was born in Preston on 23 December 1732. He became obsessed with the idea of spinning yarn mechanically. This was with reason, for a single loom could absorb the output of a half dozen spinners. Two centuries later a Preston engineer was chosen by Vickers-Armstrong to manufacture thousands of aircraft for the coming war.

Preston, like much of Lancashire, had a long history of spinning and weaving wool and flax, with the spinner or weaver based in his own cottage surrounded by his family most of whom helped in the enterprise. The coming of cotton initially simply added another raw material, but, as I described in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW), it soon created its own revolution.

Hargreaves had speeded up the spinning process with his spinning jenny and Crompton had added his 'mule'. Arkwright wanted more and worked tirelessly through much trial and error risking both being copied by competitors and the anger of the mob who saw in mechanisation the loss of jobs. Arkwright, in partnership with John Kay, at last succeeded and took their invention to Nottingham when Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt provided finance. However, more power was needed to drive the new spinning frame and the business moved to Cromford where there was water power a plenty.

Spinning had been mechanised and, as I described in my blog on Manchester, now outpaced the weaver. To begin with, in the Preston district this was good news for the many handloom weavers now had a good supply of cheap yarn to weave and sell providing a good living. As I suggest in HBSTMW the collapse of the market with the Napoleonic wars drove prices down and now the answer was to mechanise weaving as well.

Blackburn’s Joseph Harrison was said to be producing ‘superb power looms’ in the 1840s and in Burnley where the focus moved from spinning to weaving a number of loom manufacturers emerged. John Lowe tells in his book, Burnley, that the five main loom makers were Butterworth and Dickinson, Harling and Todd, Cooper Brothers, George Keighley and Pemberton Brothers. The growth of Burnley as a cotton town seems to have been more controlled than that of Preston with the Weavers Triangle clustered round the Leeds Liverpool canal with mills, houses, warehouses, wharves, shops and inns all together. The canal was the life blood of the town linking it as it did to America and the Mississippi cotton fields. It also cemented the shift from the use of wool as the raw material to cotton.

In his book, A History of Preston, David Hunt writes of the two major Preston spinning businesses which emerged into the nineteenth century: John Watson and Sons and John and Samuel Horrocks. Watson was very much the trail blazer and regarded as 'the leading spirit of his day in the founding of the Cotton Industry of Preston’ for his championing of new technology. Watson did become bankrupt, but his mills were bought and traded successfully well into the future. The influence of Horrocks was perhaps more enduring. Hunt quotes some figures that in 1865 the Horrocks company then run by Thomas Miller 'operated ten mills, 155,970 spindles, 2,856 looms, 12 steam engines and employed 3,000 people to spin 104,000 lbs of yard and weave 227 miles of cloth each week'.

Watson and Horrocks had been preceded by Livesey, Hargreaves and Co which, rather ahead of its time, combined a mill with bleaching grounds, a calico printing works and its own coal pit at nearby Standish. It was claimed that when the company crashed in 1788 some 20,000 people were economically dependent upon it in one way or another. The future though rested with Horrocks.

Preston grew at an alarming rate, with more mills and also a need for more housing. The lack of regulation and town planning meant that much of this was squalid, with open sewers. The absence of regulation combined with economic forces meant that child labour was rife with dreadful conditions. All of this combined with low wages led to industrial and political unrest and it was only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that matters improved. Dickens novel Hard Times is reputedly based on Preston and speaks vividly of the awful living and working conditions.

The story of Oldham is perhaps a little different with the advantage the town took of the Joint Stock company following the passing of the Limited Liability Acts. These were intended to encourage third party investment in businesses, but in Oldham they were used to encourage the participation of the workforce in the company for which they worked. In his book Oldham Past and Present, James Middleton suggests that the idea ‘prevails more in books than in practice’, yet there were examples of mill companies being owned in this way, the Sun Mill of 1860 being just one.

Preston's boom years of cotton were probably those from 1830 to 1860 when the American war and consequent cotton famine induced caution toward mill extensions. For Oldham the ending of the war sparked what is termed the ‘floating mania’ as dozens of companies where formed with investment from all sections of their stakeholders. Writing in 1903, Middleton gives some figures: in the Oldham district 270 cotton mills containing twelve and a half million spindles and eighteen thousand looms. These mills absorbed about one quarter of all the cotton imported into the country.

Oldham’s proficiency at spinning fine yarn was such that the cotton industry in Burnley focused on weaving, buying in yarn from Oldham.

Bolton was another town focused on spinning, not least that it was there that Crompton perfected and operated his 'mule' for the last years of his life. In his book The Cotton Mills of Burnley, James H. Longworth points to the Ashworth family as an employer placing emphasis on the cleanliness and moral welfare of their 1,000 employees. Ashworths operated both spinning mills and dye works and were one of the founding companies of the English Sewing Cotton Company. Of possibly greater note than Ashworths were Chadwicks which invested heavily in their community. Their Eagley mills were powered by a single cylinder horizontal steam engine named the ‘Iron Duke’, turning a 24 ft flywheel weighing 75 tons at 60 rpm. In 1950, the mills were still run by Chadwicks in association with United Thread Mills both then part of J.P. Coats Ltd.

Key to Preston's commercial success were communications. The town had long been well linked, but by inadequate roads; it was also a port bedevilled by silt. The coming of first the canals greatly enhanced its ability to access raw materials, coal to power the engines in its mills, but also to take its finished product to market. For canal lovers a point of interest was that the link to the Leeds and Liverpool canal was completed by means of a tram way, the proposed canal route being too expensive. Of greater long term significance were the railways which arrived in 1838. As with so much of railway mania, the town was served from time to time by a number of different railways. It was its place on the London to Glasgow line that endured. Preston boasts an astonishing viaduct which cut dramatically journey times to Wigan (for coal) Liverpool (for cotton) and Manchester to take its finished goods.

Certainly toward the turn of the century British pre-eminence in cotton began its decline. The world wars injected a surge in demand for uniforms and much more. As I write in Vehicles to Vaccines, even in 1951 the British textile industry was viewed with optimism, but by the mid sixties overseas competitors with lower costs had captured the market. Horrocks was acquired in 1919 by the Amalgamated Cotton Mills Trust and this was bought by Viyella in 1963.

For Preston, cotton was a long way from being the whole story. As was the case elsewhere, the demands of the mechanisation of the textile industry led to the growth of engineering skills and it was these that came to the fore. Joseph Foster & Sons had been formed in 1835 and manufactured heavy industrial plant at its Soho Foundry including mill engines and boilers and some of the largest rotary printing machines. Fosters also ran the Bow Lane Iron works in Blackburn.

Preston had ‘fifteen firms of millwrights and engineers, four boiler makers and three other foundries’. Interestingly, a major project to provide a full scale port on the river Ribble, built between 1884 and 1892, provided a site for Dick, Kerr of Kilmarnock to establish their first factory in the town.

Dick, Kerr's factory on the east side of Strand Road produced locomotives including tramcars for Preston itself. These were first powered by imported engines, but the establishment of the English Electric Manufacturing company on the west side of Strand Road enabled the production of complete trams. The First World War saw Dick, Kerr produce many tons of shells and then the first aircraft. The year after the armistice saw the formation of the English Electric Company through the merger of Dick, Kerr with five other companies about which I write in HBSTMW. Aircraft production resumed in the twenties but then closed until re-armament in the mid thirties.

Dick, Kerr's aircraft production came into its own in the Second World War with a contract for the assembly of bombers and fighters; employee numbers grew from 1,000 in 1938 to 13,000 in 1942. In 1939 English Electric built a shadow factory at nearby Salmesbury which manufactured Handley Page Halifax aircraft. BAE Systems now have an advanced manufacturing plant there. In 1947 English Electric moved its design and experimentation activities to nearby Warton Aerodrome. After the war, aircraft production included the Canberra jet bomber and the Lightning jet fighter. The factory became part of BAC in 1963 and is now run by BAE Systems.

Siemens Brothers in 1923 set up a factory to produce light bulbs. Good fortune brought a talented chemist, JN Aldington, to join the small work force where his influence far outweighed the size of the establishment. He explored alternatives to the incandescent bulb and importantly both taught evening classes at the Harris Technical College and encouraged young bright scientists into the business.

Another famous Preston name came from neighbouring Leyland and was the bus and commercial vehicle company of that name. Leyland under the leadership of the Spurriers was a force to be reckoned with. The subsequent story of British Leyland is well known and I write about it in Vehicles and Vaccines. A significant employer for some years, Courtaulds set up a factory in Preston for viscose yarn production.

Further reading

David Hunt, A History of Preston (Preston: Carnegie Publishing, 1992)

James H. Longworth, The Cotton Mills of Bolton 1780-1985. (Bolton: Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, 1987)

John Lowe, Burnley (Chichester: Phillimore, 1985)

James Middleton, Oldham Past and Present (Rochdale: Edwards & Bryning Limited, 1903)

https://www.baesystems.com/en-uk/heritage/english-electric

The Lancashire Cotton Industry, Mary B. Rose (ed.) (Preston: Lancashire County Books, 1996)

 

Manufacturing places - the art of re-invention

My exploration of British manufacturing has been sector by sector and chronological. I am now beginning to join up the dots and explore those towns where manufacturing takes place or in some case took place.

Here are links to some of my exploration to date: Sheffield, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Macclesfield, Lincoln, Leicester, Derby, Nottingham. The image is of Ordnance depots used in the Second World War which link to production for the war effort mirroring the spread of manufacturing.

I began an initial exploration in 2005 as part of my part time BA in Humanities at Vaughan College part of the University of Leicester. Two essays resulted:

The title of the first essay was Which urban areas did well in the inter-war period and why? I reproduce it in full and you can read it by following this link. I used population growth as an indicator and this pointed to those urban areas that attracted new industries. Most of these were around London giving evidence of the shift in manufacturing to the South East. What is interesting and as I outline in a post I am currently working on, London was where much manufacturing began.

The second essay focused on Birmingham and tells of its early development. Again you can find it in my blog piece on Birmingham by following this link. The essay and other posts on the older manufacturing town all point to characteristics of place and the proximity of raw materials.

My first book on British manufacturing history, How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, explored first the early development of British manufacturing through the prism of the Great Exhibition of 1851. In it areas of manufacturing came to be identified. Manchester and the Lancashire towns with cotton; Leeds and Yorkshire with wool; Newcastle and County Durham with iron and steel. Essentially steel making grew up in places where raw materials and coal were present, so South Wales and early on in the Weald. Sheffield was pre-eminent in steel for cutlery, but then much more. Birmingham was a city of workshops making all manner of product from metal, something that extended into the neighbouring Black Country the home to heavy iron foundries. Ships were built on the Clyde and the Tyne, Barrow-in-Furness and on many other rivers, early on on the Thames. Railway workshops spread across the country. The big American electrical engineers chose the north west and the midlands. The chemical industry had its foundations in the salt mines of Cheshire.

Communications were key. Without the turnpikes, the canals and ultimately the railways the development of places like Sheffield may well not have taken place.

My essay on the interwar years explored the new industries and the places they set up, mainly the south and the midlands. The motor industry was the beating heart of Coventry. Radio and television were made in ‘metroland’, the new suburbs of London. The biggest toy factory in the world was in south London.

Post war was the time for pharmaceuticals with production again in the London area but also in the north west. It was also the time for petrochemicals and plastics with plants often built near to refineries. The wartime infrastructure of shadow factories and Royal Ordnance Factories influenced the choice of location with governments encouraging their re-use. The new towns initiative created new factory space alongside housing and the infrastructure that modern living demanded.

In my second book on British manufacturing history, Vehicles to Vaccines, I explore first the design review for the Festival of Britain which offers a snap shot of some 24,000 products alongside their manufacturers. One feature that shines through is that products for the home were often made locally by relatively small manufacturers. Some of these became much bigger and more visible from a national viewpoint and I have been able to highlight a number of these. Another feature of the British manufacturing landscape was that the larger companies frequently bought up their smaller brethren, so GEC, for example, had a presence in a great many towns across the country and again I have tried to identify the more prominent of these.

I am publishing posts on the towns I explore. It is fascinating to see how many areas reinvent themselves. It is a work in progress and I am adding links to local websites and blogs. My aim is to gather my exploration together by region eventually covering the country.