I am approaching the manufacturing history of St Helens in a slightly different way to the other towns I have researched. My late old friend, Brian Leyland a St Helens man, wrote a book St Helen’s The Great and the Good to explore the lives of the more famous of its offspring. Amongst stories about sportsmen, entertainers and scientists, Brian includes pieces about the town’s best known manufacturers and I draw on these for the post.
David Gamble’s father set up in business in St Helens having departed Liverpool for being too polluting. At one point he was joined by Joseph Crosfields of Warrington but parted company. JC Gamble which David formed with his father started out in the mid nineteenth century making soda but then expanded into potassium chlorate and bleaching powder. In 1891 it was one of the forty eight companies (including ten from St Helens and sixteen from Widnes and Runcorn) to form the United Alkali Company which in turn in the twenties joined with Brunner Mond and others to form ICI. In his book Brian suggests that David may have been related to James Gamble who emigrated to the USA in 1819 where he met William Proctor and together formed the multinational giant.
Joseph Beecham probably had little idea that his business would also become part of a multinational giant when his father moved his chemist shop from Wigan to St Helens. Young Joseph entered the business and began a career of exceptionally hard work. He became a partner with his father and then the sole proprietor which he would remain. The business was simple: the manufacture of pills and the advertising of their remarkable curative properties. In 1887 Joseph commissioned the building of a new factory in the town to increase production to meet the extraordinary demand for the pills. In 1890 some 250 million were being sold each year and a campaign was launched to promote the pills across the English speaking world. Brian describes Joseph’s private life as chaotic as a result of which he fell out with his eldest son, Thomas, and undertook a liability which nearly stripped him of his wealth. The company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1924. Beechams was a growing part of the British pharmaceutical industry and had added Beechams Powders, a flu treatment; in the thirties they would add Enos, Venos, Maclean’s toothpaste and Lucozade. The eldest son, Sir Thomas, became one of the great conductors of the twentieth century. I write in Vehicles to Vaccines how Beechams eventually became part of GSK plc.
The greatest of St Helens’ manufacturers was surely Pilkington which began in the early nineteenth century as a wine and spirit merchant. From this they moved to the manufacture of crown glass, interestingly in partnership with Greenall, the brewer which eventually moved to Warrington. Pilkington stands out because of its unashamed focus on family. No fewer that twenty nine Pilkington directors were family members. Brian Leyland takes his readers through four generations of the family, each of which added in its own way to the company’s success.
Richard and William born either side of the turn of the nineteenth century, for me strike a personal chord since my own great-grandfather and his brother, born around the same time, share the same names. William Pilkington was the commercial go getter and Richard the steadying influence. Crucially, it was this generation that made the crucial decision to focus on plate glass and Pilkington became one of three companies supplying 75% of the window glass used in Britain. The sound business they created would be built on by the next generation which focused on Richard’s son, William. His contribution was technical, not an inventor, but someone able to spot good ideas from elsewhere. Pilkington became known as the most technically advanced manufacturer of glass.
The third generation comprised Austin and Cecil and it was Cecil who was the technical man, happy to work all night alongside his engineers. The fourth generation sported the larger than life Lord Harry Pilkington whose focus was unashamedly external, raising the profile of the company in the country and business community.
It is at this point I part company with Brian briefly to introduce a family director by marriage, Ronald Weeks. Pilkingtons had enjoyed decades of great success but were now facing stiff continental competition. It was Weeks who introduced modern management methods which brought the company into the twentieth century. He would go on to become Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the Second World War and then chairman of Vickers.
The last generation headed by Anthony Pilkington made the crucially wise decision to take on another Cambridge graduate also named Pilkington but only distantly related. Alastair Pilkington went on to invent float glass which transformed the glass making world. Pilkington glass is still made in St Helens but under the ownership of Nippon Glass and I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines. Triplex Safety Glass was made in St Helens with the support of Pilkington which eventually bought them.
Further reading:
Brian Leyland, St Helens: The Great and the Good (and a few not so good!) (Bowden: Stellar Books, 2018)
British Manufacturing History 