A Hundred Years of Engineering Craftsmanship 1857 - 1957
The outbreak of war in 1914 at first affected Cornwall Works in only minor ways. George Tangye — 1914 found him in his eightieth
year — was anxious to keep munition work to a minimum and to refrain entirely
from any form of profiteering. It was of course impossible for such a firm not
to make some contribution to the war effort and the works were scheduled as a
controlled establishment under D.O.R.A. In due course contracts were carried
out for lathes, shells, thread milling machines, cam milling machines, cartridge capping
machines, cartridge belt fillers, trench hand pumps, vices for mobile
workshops, naval mine sinkers, and food flaking machinery for the Ministry of
Food. For the most part these caused no great upheaval in the normal running of
the works, and no great change in the type of products being manufactured.
If products and methods had changed little by the end of the war, the workers
themselves had been shaken out of many of their old ways. The growing strength
of the unions had already been shown in 1913, and to this was added a new air of independence among the men. Hours
reduced by the exigencies of wartime never returned to the 6 a.m. start. The
dining-room, devoted in earlier years to lectures and discussions, was now
licensed for music and dancing. A new emphasis on the importance of outdoor
games and recreation was met by the provision of a Works Recreation Ground in
Birmingham Road, West
Bromwich, which was laid out with tennis courts, bowling greens, cricket and
football pitches. The pavilion was built and equipped by the men themselves.
Improved apprenticeship schemes were adopted during and after the war. The
importance of thorough training to ensure a supply of good engineers for the
future had long been recognized. In December 1914 Tangyes, for the first time since the ‘eighties,
invited applications from youths of good education who desired a general
five-year training as mechanical engineer. After a three-months trial the
candidate would be bound apprentice on payment of a premium of £30 or £50. Doubtless to avoid earlier
difficulties it was particularly stressed that the apprentice ‘will be subject
in every way to the ordinary discipline of the shop, particularly as to his
time-keeping’. All departments, except the drawing office, were included in the
training, and attendance at a technical school was compulsory. These regulations
were re-issued at the end of the first war with the emendations of shorter
hours and higher premiums.
From the earliest days boys had entered the firm to learn their various trades
and many who reached the highest rank among engineers began their careers at
Tangyes. In November 1920 trade
apprenticeships were put on a more regular and satisfactory footing. ‘In the
old days,’ said the circular describing these trade apprenticeships, ‘when mass
production with the inevitable specialization of labour was practically
unknown, the ambitious lad, at a very early age, and with scanty education,
eager to learn a trade, rose at unearthly hours, and went into the factory or
workshops. Helped along frequently with more cuffs than halfpence, he made what
progress he could along the stormy path of mechanical knowledge . . . The old
conditions of training with meagre pay for a period of years is now untenable,
and Tangyes Ltd. put forward the following scheme in an endeavour to minimize
as far as possible the difficulties involved under the old apprenticeship
scheme.’
Boys were apprenticed after six months probation. They could choose from a wide
variety of trades to be trained as fitter for gas and oil engines; fitter for
steam engines or in the hydraulic and pump work; machine tool fitter; turner
(machinist); patternmaker; moulder; coremaker; brass finisher; or millwright
(plant fitter). No premium was required and the rates of pay were to be those
decided between the employers and unions. Night school was compulsory twice a
week and a bonus was to be awarded for good conduct and efficiency.
Recruitment and training in other departments and at other levels also became a
problem during the war years. In 1917 Tangyes introduced a plan for fifteen-year-old boys to enter the
Commercial Offices to receive a general office training. The salary started at
£2 a month and rose by six-monthly instalments to £6.10.0 a month at the age of twenty-and-a-half.
There seemed no reason to doubt in 1920 that nineteenth - century prosperity could be combined with a new sense
of freedom for the worker to produce the best possible world to live in. Such
hopes brought swift disillusion to many. The immediate post-war boom with its
subsequent depression, the growth of foreign competition, the uneasy recovery
of the mid-decade, led finally to the catastrophic economic collapse of the
‘thirties. For an engineering firm such as Tangyes, created and developed
against the expanding Victorian background, this was a testing time. Trade
depressions had been met and weathered by patience and retrenchment before 1914 but the crisis which now
overtook the world was previously unknown. It was unfortunate for the second
generation of the family that they were in control for the most difficult years
of the inter-war period. Under their guidance production contracted, reserves
were ploughed back, sacrifices made, and the firm kept afloat until it reached
calmer waters towards the middle ‘thirties. Understanding and sympathy between
management and men played an outstanding part throughout these lean years.
Wherever new opportunities offered they were taken up with alacrity and some
promising developments began even during the slump. Experience of Tangye
hydraulic jacks in bridge-building, for example, was gained from their
increasing use in this field. Most bridges, especially large ones, need
powerful hydraulic jacks for the erection and correct stressing of the bridge
members. Large Tangye jacks are eminently suited to this work. They were
employed on the Sydney Harbour Bridge — the largest arch bridge in the world, completed in
1932. In 1936, when the Kincardine Swing Bridge was built over the
Firth of Forth, Tangye hydraulic machinery was built into the permanent
mechanism of the bridge to carry out various levelling and locking movements each
time the bridge opened and closed. Bridging work made continued progress, both
during and since the war.
The arrival of the third generation in 1935, when Sir Basil Tangye became
chairman, coincided with a gradual improvement in economic conditions. All too
soon, however, the whole picture was changed by the onset of World War II, a
conflict in which Tangyes Ltd. were to play a vital part in both armament work
and the munitions industry.
Although the British rearmament programme was only slowly getting under way
the dangers of the international situation cast oppressive shadows over the
later ‘thirties. After the Munich
crisis it was clear that there would be no time to rebuild or reorganize the
munitions industry on a large scale; industrial capacity would have to be used
where it was to be found. Rapid industrial mobilization began in September
1939, and Cornwall Works were actively and wholeheartedly engaged in the war
effort from the very beginning. For the next six years, in response to the
changing demands of the different campaigns, general engineering firms like
Tangyes proved particularly valuable for their adaptability and elasticity,
qualities which depended upon long and varied manufacturing experience, good
management, and skilled craftsmanship. It was soon found in practice that
difficult or unusual work could safely be given to these firms in addition to
orders for their own specialities.
The first and most urgent need at the outbreak of war was to spread the
manufacture of shells for the services and to increase the pace of production.
Tangyes were soon drawn into this work, and laid out two shops, for making 37
anti-aircraft shells and 92 howitzer
shells. As a safeguard against interruption of electricity supplies the
howitzer shop was entirely powered by Tangye oil engines. Women employees,
working on a two-shift basis, made hundreds of thousands of shells during the
war years.
Among the earliest war contracts was one for the production of many special
presses for the extrusion of cordite, an essential stage in the manufacture of
this explosive. The work well illustrates the important part played by private
industry in the armament field proper, for these machines were supplied to the Royal Ordnance factories.
Equally important were the hydraulic presses supplied to other firms, for
piercing steel billets for bomb manufacture, for forming the nose of the shell,
for squeezing the driving band onto the shell body, and for straightening gun
barrels.
Much of the war production at Cornwall Works was, however, an extension or
development of peacetime lines. Pumps proved outstandingly useful in many
fields. As early as £937 the Ministry of Supply was placing orders for
fire-fighting pumps, and Tangyes were entirely responsible for the design and
production of a heavy-duty pump which proved popular and reliable not only on
the home front but also with all the Services. As a result of this success the
firm was later asked to design and produce a number of special fire pumps for
use in Russia
— not an easy assignment in view of the extreme cold of Russian winters.
One of the essential requirements of troop concentrations is an adequate water
supply. Frequently it had to be obtained from a distance, and many Tangye pumps
were installed for this purpose at Army camps and Air Force stations.
Another indispensable requirement of modern armies and air forces is petrol and
oil, and it was through the manufacture of pumps for petrol that Tangyes became
associated with one of the most exciting and successful engineering
achievements of the whole war. From the first, Tangye duplex petrol pumps had
been used for delivering fuel from storage tanks to road vehicles. Later came a
new Contract for a number of large mobile treble-ram pumps to send petrol
through pipe lines. The work was duly completed but it was not for a long time
afterwards that Tangyes realized the vitally important part they had played in
the ‘Pluto’ system for pumping petrol to the front line.
Essential to a successful armament programme are adequate supplies of machine
tools. Tangyes Ltd. produced for the Ministry of Supply and the Air Ministry
many different types of lathes and boring machines. In addition the spares
service was kept at a fairly high level to maintain older Tangye machines doing
yeoman service in factories throughout the country.
As always, one of the most universally useful tools, taken everywhere and taken
for granted, was the unassuming hydraulic jack. Fighting services, civil
defence services, the munitions industry, all required a constant supply of
these indispensable tools. As a result, tens of thousands were manufactured —
many of them specially designed for special jobs. Such was the bridging jack
developed, in conjunction with Sir Donald Bailey at the Bridging Establishment
at Christchurch,
for lifting Bailey bridges. This highly successful jack is still used for
lifting bridges of this type today.
Normal diesel-engine production almost ceased during the war, but experience in
this work proved invaluable in building many hundred diesel-engine generating
sets mostly for mobile units to supply electricity to radar sets.
In addition to this solid core of production at Cornwall Works some interesting
and unusual contracts, sometimes as sub-contracts, sometimes direct from the
Government, were undertaken from time to time. Because they were out of the
ordinary run these jobs tested the initiative and skill of those engaged on
them. Much of the work was, of course, machining such articles as anti-aircraft
gun cradles, gun-sight mountings, submarine pistons, and wheels for tanks. A
contract of special interest was for the manufacture of corvette rudders by
welded construction. At the period when the submarine menace
was at its height the demand for corvettes for the antisubmarine campaign
outran the capacity of the shipyards. By using this new method of fabrication
the work could be spread among firms far away from the coast, enabling the
corvette programme to be enormously speeded up.
At Cornwall Works an important part of the war effort was the protection of the
people and the machines making the tools of war. Air-raid precautions were
introduced early — in April 1938 — with voluntary recruitment, a training
scheme, the establishment of a decontamination squad, and the construction of
air-raid shelters. By January 1940 the
organization was well advanced with the full complement of air-raid wardens,
auxiliary fire services, the Tangye Division of the St. John Ambulance Brigade,
and rescue decontamination squads. The Cornwall Works dispensary was extended
and adapted as a cleansing and dressing station. A large Home Guard unit was
also regularly on duty night and day, and contributed to the general morale.
Throughout the war the excellent spirit of Cornwall Works was shown by the
voluntary staffing of all these A.R.P. services. Each night a considerable
number of the men had to be on duty to keep an adequate watch on the 20 acres of buildings and yards
where fire might start from incendiaries or high explosive bombs, and to deal
with casualties and any other emergencies. The impression those years have left
is less of danger and difficulty than of the personal comradeship which grows
out of adversity, as the following account from one who shared the duties
shows.
The memories of those nights are not only of air-raids, but of warm fellowship
between those on duty, often forty or fifty members of the different services.
We got to know and appreciate one another in a way which had never happened
before. Unfortunately there seems no way in normal times of achieving quite
that degree of mutual understanding which takes place under the stress of war
conditions.
Apart from this close contact with each other, most of us also got to know the
factory in a way we never had before. With dim torches or no light at all we
were able to move quickly about the buildings, using basements, passages and
rung ladders which in normal times we seldom noticed. The factory roof itself
was another world, nearly 15 acres,
mostly of “Belfast”
construction. Whilst having the advantage that you could go anywhere on it, the
fire risk was high, and consequently a complete organization of hydrants,
outside staircases, and firefighting points was set up at this level. Many will
remember the exhilaration of nights spent on fire duty when they have forgotten
the times of weariness and anxiety.
Cornwall Works was lucky to suffer no direct hits although surrounded by
factories, railways, gas works, and so on, and despite the fact that, as we
found later on, it was marked prominently on the German pilots’ photographic
maps as an important target. There were many hectic nights of near-misses, not
least the night when the land mines came down on their parachutes. The terrific
explosions which occurred long after the aircraft had passed did extensive
damage in the Smethwick area and displaced many of our roofs and walls.
Smethwick gas works, our next-door neighbour,
had one of the largest gas-holders in the country. Many employed at Cornwall
Works, and indeed, at other factories in the area, viewed this with
considerable apprehension, and in spite of official assurances that, even if
there was a direct hit, no explosion would result, some people were not so
sure. Anyway, one night a bomb went straight through the centre of this
gas-holder and proved the officials to be right. The most
impressive feature was an enormous column of flame which roared up into the night
sky, lighting up the whole area. Hearing the German planes cruising around
admiring their handiwork we felt very vulnerable, but nothing more happened.
The occasion was also memorable for the brave action of the N.F.S. men who
succeeded in putting out the flame by pushing plates over the hole made by the
bomb.’
