coalfields – Philip Hamlyn Williams

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How Manufacturing Shaped Britain

September 2, 2026 — 0 Comments

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 […]

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 […]