Employment – Philip Hamlyn Williams

Tag: Employment

2 Posts

Letters to the editor - unpublished!

Youth Unemployment

June 1, 2026 — 0 Comments

Letters to the editor - unpublished!

Concentrated wealth is bad for the economy, but how did it happen?

January 29, 2025 — 2 Comments

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 […]

Would you like a book version of the information on the blog?

I have drafted a 130,000 text exploring Manufacturing places by industry. Is this something that would appeal to visitors to this blog? Please leave a comment expressing your view

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 […]