Grantham manufacturing history

 A good deal of the manufacturing history of this Lincolnshire town revolves round one family and really one man, Richard Hornsby, who on completing his wheelwright apprenticeship at Barnetby-le-Wold joined with blacksmith Richard Seaman of Barrowby. I write of him along with the other pioneering engineers in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

The business manufactured agricultural implements to enable farmers to meet the growing demands for food from England’s increasing urban areas. Importantly, Grantham was linked to Nottingham and the Trent by a canal (in the image) which gave a quicker route to market for agricultural produce and a cheaper way to bring the coal that industry needed. To agricultural implements were added steam engines. It was said of Hornsby that ‘he didn’t invent the portable steam engine, but he developed it so successfully that, for some years, he had a virtual monopoly in its manufacture’. I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how oil engines were then embraced through the patent of Akroyd-Stuart.

The business, now based in Spittlegate in Grantham, made a big impression next to the Great Northern Railway which had arrived in 1852. Hornsby steam and oil engines were known across the world. Company reached its peak with 2,000 employees. In the First World War the factory was taken over by the Admiralty for war work.

The aftermath of war saw the end of government work and, as I tell in my blog on Peterborough, a number of companies came together in the Agricultural Engineering Company. Hornsby chose, or were chosen as their partner by, Ruston & Proctor of Lincoln. I write more about Ruston and Hornsby in my blog on Lincoln, not least their role in the development of the tank.

The new company Ruston and Hornsby took on the combined steam and oil engine business. Thirty acres of the Spittlegate site was taken by two companies which had been part of Agricultural Engineering: Aveling & Porter of Rochester and Barford & Perkins of Peterborough. They formed Aveling Barford which also took the Hornsby steam and road roller business. Agricultural implements went to Ransome Sims & Jefferies of Ipswich, another Agricultural Engineering member.

The Hornsby factory, although smaller, remained busy especially during the Second World War when it supplied generators far and wide. Rustons combined with Davey Paxman of Colchester who developed a vertical oil engine. Hornsby took on its manufacture particularly for overseas development projects. The Hornsby factory finally closed in the sixties and Aveling Barford a little later.

Grantham was of course the birthplace of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher under whose watch the manufacturing sector shrank and many famous businesses closed their doors.

Grantham experienced a resurgence with food processing. Fenland Foods was set up by Northern Foods to supply Marks & Spencer. With the ending of the contract, the plant was closed. Other food processing remains in the town.

Further reading:

• Michael Pointer, Horsbys of Grantham (Bygone Grantham 1978)
• Michael Pointer, Ruston & Hornsby (Bygone Grantham, 1977)

Scunthorpe manufacturing history

 The iron ore fields of north Lincolnshire attracted iron smelting to Frodingham and Appleby, two villages within what became Scunthorpe. Both companies added steel making, but Frodingham's pig iron production from the north Lincolnshire ore greatly exceeded its steel making capacity. This attracted Harry Steel, managing director of the Sheffield firm, Steel, Peech and Tozer, who, in the aftermath of the First World War, anticipated some consolidation in the industry. The two works and others were brought together in what became the United Steel Company. In the thirties both of these Scunthorpe plants were further expanded.

Lincolnshire ore was also exploited by Richard Thomas of South Wales at the Redbourn works. However, a plan to extend this into a major tinplating plant was shelved in preference for renewed investment in South Wales. Scunthorpe received further investment from John Lysaght at its Normanby Park steelworks in order to provide steel supplies for their other metal activities. John Brown of Sheffield had bought the Trent Ironworks in Scunthorpe and after the First World War moved their steel foundry to the town.

The nationalisation of the steel industry brought the Scunthorpe plants under a single umbrella. In 1972 the British Steel Corporation embarked on a ten year plan of modernisation and Scunthorpe was one of the centres identified for further investment.

In 1999 British Steel merged with the Dutch steel maker Koninklijke Hoogovens to form Corus. In 2007 Corus was bought by Tata Steel of India creating one of the world’s largest steel makers. British Steel Scunthorpe was bought from Tata Steel in 2016 and sold on to the Chinese Jingye Group in 2020.

Away from steel, Lebus Furniture built a 250,000 square foot factory in the town. I write about British furniture manufacturers in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Further reading:

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

York manufacturing history

 A cathedral city second only to Canterbury, York had a university only from 1963, but as I tell below it was a centre of learning. It’s early prosperity was built on the cloth trade, but this declined by the end of the fifteenth century.

It was the home of Rowntree and Terry confectionery and also railway workshops as evidenced by the National Railway Museum. The impact of these industries took off in the 1880s. Terrys were first, being well established by 1851 producing candied peel, jujubes, lozenges and sweets. Rowntree really began in 1879 taking a French invention of crystallised gums, but the business was transformed by Dutch equipment for the processing of cocoa beans which had been taken up first by Frys in Bristol and then by Cadbury in Birmingham. I write about the development of Rowntree in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Railway activity grew alongside that of confectionary with workshops for the repair of locomotives and rolling stock. The locomotive manufacturing work was first undertaken by third parties but then moved to workshops first in York and then in Darlington. York did however take full responsibility for carriages, building state of the art works in the early twentieth century.

It was not a great hub of manufacturing like Sheffield or Birmingham, yet it was chosen as the venue for the first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at the invitation of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. These societies were springing up in towns around the country, often alongside industry, exploring science for its advancement. York then had little industry, but it did have a community passionate about discovery, whether of the city’s history or the world around.

In a volume of papers to mark the 150th anniversary of that first meeting, there is a chapter exploring the path of science and technology in York over that century and a half and it highlights some of the key individuals.

Sir George Cayley (1773-1857) was the inventor of the aeroplane in the first half of the nineteenth century. I wrote about the early days of flight in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Thomas Cooke (1807-1868) was a maker of fine telescopes applying the skills of mechanical engineering to the work on lenses carried out in his workshops.

Dennis Taylor (1861-1943) was a lens designer taking forward the work of Thomas Cooke whose business diversified into clocks, machine tools, pneumatic pumps, engraving machines and optical instruments.

Henry Hunnings invented a micro-telephone, like many amateurs building on the invention by Alexander Graham Bell. After much legal wrangling, the rights to his transmitter were sold to the United Telephone Company (UK) and the American Bell Telephone Company and the design remained in use for over a century.

Further reading:

York 1831-1981, Charles Feinstein Ed. (York: William Sessions, 1981)