I write blogs as my research progresses and so the earlier ones relate to my previous project Dunkirk to D Day, although they are linked. The men of whom I wrote had feet in both camps, they stepped up as soldiers in two world wars, but then pursued careers in British manufacturing. I wrote an article on Civilian Expertise in War published in the Historian, the magazine of The Historical Association.
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The places where Manufacturing happened
Manufacturing transformed the places where it took place. Villages became towns because millennia earlier great forests had been buried and became rich seams of coal. Tiny seaside communities surviving on fishing witnessed the building of ever larger ships carrying cargoes of coal or wool and returning with exotic goods from the east. Waring barons found…
John and Charlotte Guest – GKN
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. John was succeeded by his son Thomas and in turn by his grandson also John. The iron works prospered. I tell the story of the iron…
The British in South East Asia
To the British, South East Asia was mysterious and in many ways unintelligible. It was home of ancient and sophisticated civilisations which viewed the world in a wholly different way to inhabitants of the British Isles. Trade with China goes back many centuries. We can think of the Silk Road and the trade in ceramics.…
Ronald Weeks – Vickers, Pilkington and two World Wars
It is chilling to think that many of those men born in the 1890s would serve through two world wars (if they survived) and could also be part of the step change in British manufacturing witnessed in the twentieth century. Ronald Weeks was one such man. He was the first Director-General of Army Equipment in…
Edward, Tom and Albert, and Douglas Vickers – three generations of steel makers
By the mid eighteenth century members of the Vickers family were in business at Mill Sands, Sheffield as millers. With the growth of steel, William Vickers moved to a rolling mill business nearby and entered into a partnership which would become in 1828 Naylor, Hutchinson, Vickers & Company. William’s interests turned towards the Sheffield and…
William Armstrong – hydraulics engineer and armament manufacturer
William Armstrong was born on 26 November 1810 in a three storey terrace house in Shiedfield on the edge of Pandon Dene not far from the expanding Newcastle. William Armstrong was a native of the hills surrounding Newcastle where he had become entranced by the power of water. He was by training a solicitor. His…
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Isambard, born in 1806, was the only son of Marc Brunel the celebrated engineer of the Thames Tunnel. Marc was French and as a royalist fled France after the Revolution spending six years in the USA where he built a reputation which would carry him safe through Francophobe London. He had brought with him the…
Joseph Whitworth – the world’s best mechanician
In his biography, Norman Atkinson makes the point that it is sometimes difficult to trace the early days of people who later became famous. With Joseph Whitworth, whom Atkinson describes as the ‘World’s Best Mechanician’, the problem was that contemporary writers were keen to give the great man as great a pedigree, so early biographers…
History of Education for manufacturing
Oxford and Cambridge Universities, unlike the Scots, French and Germans, rather looked down on manufacturing preferring to teach the classics and didn’t offer science degrees until after 1870. Cambridge had offered lectures on pure mathematics, but not on anything applied. Eric Hobsbawm in his book, The Age of Revolution makes the point that none of…
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British Manufacturing History 