Philip Hamlyn Williams

Financiers, some who sailed near and over the line

In my exploration of British manufacturing, I have come across many men whose technical expertise advanced the cause of British industry. There were also those who brought a different kind of expertise and perhaps a different outlook on life. George Hudson – the railway king George Hudson was one of these. He became a firm […]

London as a manufacturing place

Was London a manufacturing anomaly ? There were no raw materials, no coal and the weather didn’t favour weaving. Yet, it was the centre of power. The rich wanted beautiful things and Londoners made them. Skills emerged and developed, which attracted more skills. Above all it was the major port. The Thames offered a wonderful […]

The Thames shipbuilders

When I think of shipbuilding, I see in my minds eye the North-East or the Clyde. Yet, Thames shipyards, including four Naval Dockyards, built many thousands of ships over four centuries. We can think of East Indiamen setting sail for the spices of the east, or whalers, but more-so mail steamers, wherries and tea clippers. […]

Oliver Lucas and Peter Bennett – Lucas

Joseph Lucas was born in 1834, lived in Hockley, Birmingham and worked in tin, manufacturing lamps for ships and the new world of photography. In 1855, his wife gave birth to a son, Harry, who at the age of sixteen joined his father in the business. It was the invention and growing ownership of bicycles […]

New Book – 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 […]

Allen, John and Michael Clark – Plessey

Allen Clark, son of Byron Clark, was born in Massachusetts in 1898 and came to England in 1905. He attended Felsted School. In the First World War he served in the London Scottish and was wounded at Cambrai in 1917. He then joined the Royal Flying Corps. in 1920, Byron Clark bought Plessey Limited which […]

Keys to British manufacturing success at SPARK Lincoln

I was thrilled to have been invited to speak at the SPARK engineering festival in Lincoln Cathedral. Here is an audio and then a transcript of what I said,. Had you been among the five million visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London’s Hyde Park you would have been impressed by the vast […]

Guglielmo Marconi and some notable successors

Guglielmo Marconi, from Bolognia in Italy, at the age of 22, in 1898, set up Marconi Telegraph Company in a former mill in Chelmsford: the first wireless factory in the world. His fascination was with radio waves, and he built on earlier work, by Hertz and others, for his first patent registered in England in […]

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 […]