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.
Coming soon – How Manufacturing Shaped Britain
This book sets out to discover how manufacturing shaped this island. Why manufacturing spread across the country, how it grew, why it declined and what was left. It is looking at manufacturing through the lens of geography. Manufacturing transformed the places where it took place. Villages became towns because millennia earlier great forests had been…
The Ferranti Spirit
Sebastian de Ferranti was born in Liverpool in 1864, the son of a photographer whose family had come from Bologna. Cesar had married Juliana the daughter of artist William Scott. Juliana, born in 1825, was a musician and had been teaching music. Their ambition for their son was in the arts, but Sebastian was fascinated…
The Quaker manufacturers
English towns had grown up with trades run by guilds jealous of their position and associated with the Church of England and political establishment. Quakers and other non-conformist churches thrived in smaller growing towns and we see notable businesses emerging from that background. There was the congregationalists Titus Salt in Bradford and William Lever in…
1,000 views this week
My blog has attracted record interest in the past week. Particularly in Long Eaton where members of the Facebook page have shared their memories of F, Perks & Son which was my mother’s family building business. Also a page entitled 100 places where manufacturing shaped Britain is gaining attention.
Barnes Wallis – aircraft designer
Barnes was the second son of Charles and Edith, born in 1887 in Ripley in Derbyshire where his father had an unsuccessful medical practice and where his mother longed to be home in Woolwich. The family soon moved to New Cross where a third child, Anne, was born and where Charles contracted polio. He soldiered…
F.W. Lanchester – motor engineer
Born in 1868, Lanchester was at the centre of the transition from steam under pressure working a piston to ignited gas propelling a piston, to ignition of an evaporation of benzine. Sounds simple. With an engine bolted on to heavy concrete, vibration didn’t really matter; we are after all talking of an explosion in a…
Herbert, Lord Austin
Herbert Austin’s father was an unsuccessful Buckinghamshire farmer who had the good fortune to have as a brother the architect to Earl Fitzwilliam and the Wentworth Estate in Yorkshire. When forced to give up his own farm, Giles Austin secured the appointment as farm bailiff on the Wentworth Estate. Herbert had been born in Buckinghamshire…
William Morris – Lord Nuffield
William Richard Morris was born on 10 October 1877 in Worcester where his father, Frederick, was working as a draper. Both Frederick and William’s mother, Emily Ann, were of Oxfordshire yeoman stock and both had received a sound education. The indoor life of a draper didn’t suit Frederick and so the family returned to Oxford…
R.E. Crompton – electrical engineer
The Cromptons were a wealthy Yorkshire family with extensive estates and the young Crompton grew up knowing he was destined for career in the army or diplomatic service. It was a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851 that gave young Crompton then aged six quite different ideas. He had travelled to London on a…
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…
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British Manufacturing History 