Philip Hamlyn Williams

Book

Vehicles to Vaccines and the 2024 budgets

September 13, 2024 — 0 Comments

Letters to the editor - unpublished!

Executive pay

August 13, 2024 — 0 Comments

Letters to the editor - unpublished!

Private Equity and the duties of company directors

August 7, 2024 — 0 Comments

News

Vehicles to Vaccines in PwC former partners magazine

July 9, 2024 — 0 Comments

Book

This Time No Mistakes – how to remake Britain

May 25, 2024 — 1 Comment

News

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 […]

Sir Alexander (Mac) and Lady Rachel MacRobert

Alexander MacRobert was born in Aberdeen in 1854. Papermaking took place in many parts of the country where there was a plentiful supply of water, but also of waste cotton. One such was Aberdeen. There were also many textile mills there: the Crombie Mills which exported fine tweeds and overcoats and Hadden & Co who […]