Churchill Machine Tool Company
Encyclopedia
The Churchill Machine Tool Company Limited began as the manufacturing subsidiary of the machine tool
importers Charles Churchill & Company Limited founded in the early 1900s by US-born Charles Churchill (1837–1916). Created out of the personal bankruptcy of Charles Churchill, the company developed to become one of the largest British importers of machine tools from the USA and a major manufacturer of such tools, initially under licence and later of its own development.
The original business importing American machine tools into Britain began with Charles Churchill as sole proprietor and later as a partnership with two others. It became a limited company in 1889. In 1906 a separate company, The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd, was established with the purpose of adapting tools imported by Charles Churchill & Co Ltd. The former expanded, producing American tools under licence and then manufactured tools of its own design, in particular precision surface grinders and similar engineering machinery. In 1918 The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd relocated its factories onto a single site at Broadheath
, near Altrincham
.
The two companies initially remained closely linked, with common a chairman and board members
, including Arthur Chamberlain. In the early 1930s a series of board disagreements within Charles Churchill & Co Ltd led to Arthur Chamberlain resigning as chairman of that company. He remained chairman of The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd and the two companies diverged. Charles Churchill & Co Ltd changed from a sales organisation to become a manufacturer. Thereafter, both companies manufactured machine tooling, and Charles Churchill & Co Ltd became a group of companies. By the 1960s significant rationalisation took place in British manufacturing, with companies merging or being taken over in an attempt to achieve benefits from economies of scale and pooled resources. The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was taken over by the Birmingham Small Arms Company
; which merged with Alfred Herbert Ltd
, with production moving to Coventry
. Coincidentally, Charles Churchill & Co Ltd was taken over by Tube Investments (TI)
.
The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd ceased trading in the early 1970s along with several other companies in the Alfred Herbert group, during a period of huge contraction of the manufacturing sector in Britain's economy. A part of the Charles Churchill & Co Ltd group became Matrix Churchill through a convoluted corporate process.
A company using The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd name still trades; but Charles Churchill & Co Ltd no longer exists.
, on 8 July 1837. His father was Willis Churchill, described as "a mechanic of rare ability, original in the style of his goods and in his process of manufacture", who had been manufacturing brass surgical instruments at a time when such instruments were all imported to the US. Willis Churchill founded a factory manufacturing auger
drill bits which was so locally prominent that the area of Hamden in which it was situated was called Augerville.
Charles worked in his father's auger manufacturing business but when Willis went to London in 1861 to supervise the installation of wire-covering machinery being exported by Thompson, Langdon & Co of New York City, Charles soon followed and, once there, spotted a business opportunity for himself as he saw the interest that the US-made equipment generated. By the time of his death his businesses had a presence in London, Manchester
, Glasgow
, Birmingham
and Newcastle-on-Tyne and was "a giant machine-importing business".
According to historian L T C Rolt, the original installation was of machines for wire-braiding crinoline
frames; and Charles simultaneously imported metal cutting machine tools to aid his friend Hiram Maxim who was developing a machine gun. This is a moot point: the Maxim gun
was not developed for a further 20 years and it is unlikely that Maxim was in England during the 1860s; however, the Gatling Gun
was patented in 1862. Rolt claimed that Charles Churchill & Co began trading in 1865 as importers of engineering tools and is thought to have imported the first examples of Morse tapered twist drills
, self-centring drill chucks
(manufactured by Cushman
) and hand-held micrometer
s into the UK. According to Floud
, he imported agricultural implements and other non-engineering items at this time. In its early years the company traded from 28 Wilson Street, Finsbury
: sales catalogues were published certainly between 1876 and 1882 stating this address.
Charles Churchill & Co initially operated on Charles' own account
rather than as a limited company
. In his early period of operating in England he was active in patent
ing engineered items in conjunction with one of several other parties. The London Gazette
shows several announcements for protection under the terms of the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852. (See table below). Two of them were subsequently announced as voided by reason of non-payment for continuance. (To continue required that the applicant pay a stamp duty of £50 within three years subsequent to the application.)
Churchill's location is stated as being New York for the 1865 applications (Buckingham was at Westmoreland House, Walworth Common
, Surrey); for those of 1867 and 1868 he was in Norwood
, Surrey and states himself to be a merchant; still listing himself as a merchant, the 1869–70 applications show his summarised address as Darnley Crescent, Hackney
, Middlesex; and therefter as a merchant at Wilson Street, Finsbury. Willis Churchill, Clark and Gee were all shown as being of New York City; Tiffany was of Bennington, Vermont; Miller was of West Meriden, Connecticut
; and Beach of Newark, New Jersey
.
Charles Churchill living at 118 Cazenove Road, Stoke Newington
, Middlesex, with offices at 21 Cross Street, Finsbury, trading as Charles Churchill & Co was declared bankrupt
by debtors' petition on 1 September 1887. He declared himself bankrupt rather than be declared so by someone to whom he owed money. The final dividend in bankruptcy was paid in 1889 and he was released from trusteeship on 29 April 1890. He had applied earlier for discharge but it had been refused on the grounds that he
Churchill fully tooled-up—that is, installed, assembled and made ready for productive use—the Gatling Gun factory that opened in Birmingham in 1889. This was despite being an undischarged bankrupt. He had formed a partnership
with his son, Charles Henry Churchill and in 1888 he obtained another partner when John William Wright Gabriel disposed of his family's interest in a drugs manufacturer, Gabriel and Troke, and joined the Churchills. This partnership may explain how he was able to complete the work in Birmingham despite his financial status. Despite the assertion by biographer David Jeremy that J W W Gabriel disposed of the drugs manufacturing interest, a notice in The London Gazette for 1885 shows his father, John Wild Gabriel, ending a partnership with Troke, and that Troke then formed a similar arrangement with another person.
of 230% was paid on the company's share capital
of £5,500.
In an interview in the US towards the end of 1896 Churchill explained that for the financial year ending 1 September 1896 sales were £110,000, and the order book value was £30,000. He attributed much of the exceptional growth of that year to the boom in bicycling
and the consequent demand for automatic screw machines and similar machinery, and commented that he had placed orders for between 15 million and 18 million steel balls and that gas furnaces were selling well. He explained that there was little competition for the imported machinery – not even a manufacturer of chucks, as far as he was aware – because "English" firms seemed reluctant to even copy US designs, partly because of "the Englishman's desire to have and to embody his own ideas" and to what they perceived to be the high capital costs of setting up production given the price at which US machinery was sold there. A few years later he did just that.
He commented in 1901 that what he called the "hump", caused by the bicycling bubble, needed to be put into context: growth in the trade had been steady for the company both before and since that time.
This period of British-US engineering development has been the subject of analysis by economic historians. S B Saul, writing in 1960, determined that British engineering and its methods were advanced in spheres such as the manufacture of textile machinery but less so in that of light machine tools and the machinery of mass production. He argued that in these areas the response by British manufacturers to imports from the US "belatedly matured so their influence permeated back through the whole engineering trade and began a rejuvenation of old fossilised trades" in the 1890s. He broadly agreed with the contemporary opinion of Churchill that the adoption of US methods was slow in the light machine tools sector primarily because there was a perceived lack of demand and return on investment to excite the interest of British engineers. He viewed the cycle boom as the catalyst for growth in this area but pointed out that the heavy machine tool sector was one of those which had not been previously neglected by British engineers.
Economic historian Roderick Floud
's analysis, in the 1970s, of relative imports and exports led him to the conclusion that it was "unlikely that the American share of the British market was rising significantly, until the 1890s ... [it rose to] a peak in 1899 before settling back to a period of less astonishing but still considerable growth to 1913." He also advanced a hypothesis, believing Saul's analysis to be "simplified", which placed a heavier emphasis on happenings in the US than in Britain: that the US import tariff of 45% on machinery and engineered products, which was the highest in the world until 1908, protected the development of the US industry in such products while it reached a maturity which enabled its prices to fall to a level that was highly competitive in the world market.
In March 1897 Charles Churchill & Co Ltd was put into voluntary liquidation to aid capital restructuring. This comprised an increase in authorised share capital to £50,000: £30,000 was fully subscribed, £10,000 allotted as goodwill for the old company and £10,000 retained for later issue. Within two years the company advertised with contact addresses at 2 – 10 Albert Street in Birmingham, 5 Cross Street in Manchester and 52 Bothwell Street, Glasgow, and its main office at 9 – 15 Leonard Street, Finsbury. By 1902 advertisements show the Manchester address as 2 Charlotte Street, Mosley Street and an additional office had opened at Albion Buildings, St James' Street, Newcastle. There were more than 30 employees at the London premises and 8 or 9 in Birmingham.
The capital restructuring also saw the addition of Herbert Chamberlain, brother of Joseph Chamberlain
, to the board of directors. He was well connected in business terms as well as politically, having interests in Birmingham Small Arms Company
(BSA) among other things. BSA had moved into producing bicycles and components after the end of the Crimean War
, a product line it had an interest in before that event. Other members of the Chamberlain family were later involved in the company.
The new main office in Leonard Street opened around 1896 and comprised 12474 square feet (1,159 m²) over four storeys, complete with internal hydraulic lifts, an external hydraulic crane and electric lighting; the company claimed in its press release that it had more than doubled its sales compared to any previous year and that it had sales lists for in excess of 100 US machinery manufacturers.
Examples of the agency agreements in place can be found from in the American Machinist of June 1897. They include: the Hamilton Machine Tool Company of Ohio (who were advertising a 16" sliding head drill); Baker Bros of Toledo, Ohio (advertising a combined sprocket turning and boring machine); Flather & Co, Nashua, N.H. (lathes); Warner & Swasey, Cleveland, Ohio (turret engine lathes); Chas. A. Strelinger & Co, Detroit (grinding and polishing machinery and pull countershafts by Builders' Iron Foundry, Providence, R.I.); and American Gas Furnace Co, New York (oil gas plants, gas blast furnaces and high pressure blowers). He had much to say about the correct manner of packing all of this equipment.
The American Machinist not only provided information on Churchill's business activities but in January 1901 announced he (and his wife and daughter) had returned to London after a visit to the US which was not for business but rather to see his ageing mother.
In 1907 the company was seeking to wind up
the Aston Cantlow
Mill Ball and Bearing Company Ltd. Indeed, that company was wound up on 17 January 1908, although the reasons for this are unclear. Charles Henry Prideaux was appointed to represent the company on the liquidation committee for Leitner Electrical Company Ltd in 1915.
As business improved in 1904 the enterprise moved to larger premises in Pendleton
, where an annual rent of £90 was payable. On 1 January 1906, this operation became a limited company, The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd, with an authorised share capital of £50,000, split as £20,000 in ordinary shares of £1 and £30,000 in £5 preference shares. To accomplish the transfer of manufacturing operations, Charles Churchill & Co Ltd sold the Pendleton business to the new company for £15,000, of which £7,500 was in cash and a similar amount in £1 ordinary shares. The directors were Charles Churchill, J W W Gabriel, Walter Chamberlain and C H Churchill. Herbert Chamberlain had died in 1904.
In 1904 Charles Churchill & Co Ltd was engaged in an unusual commission. The Royal Navy's was one of three ships being converted to serve at Devonport
as floating workshops for the training of 200 or so engine-room artificers involving the removal of the conning tower and the deck roofed-in to form a workshop area. Bellerophon was renamed Indus III and Churchill supplied some of her workshop equipment.
The Glasgow office address changed between February 1905 and March 1906 to 9 Wellington Street.
By June 1906 there were nearly 200 machine tools under construction at the factory and in 1907 around £5,000 was spent on enlarging the premises, although a year-on-year drop in sales of 36% in 1908 demonstrated that all was not a smooth progression. Dividends had to be suspended for that year but were resumed in 1909.
By this time the company manufactured machine tools to its own design. Rapid expansion in the use of precision grinding machines after 1910, particularly in the developing car manufacturing industry, focussed the company's efforts on producing machines of this type. Many were of a revolutionary design due to the technical flair of Harry Hales Asbridge, who had joined the company from Charles Churchill & Co Ltd at its inception. A large plain grinding machine, with a 50 inches (127 cm) swing, built and installed in Sheffield
, remained in service at least until the 1990s and was used primarily to grind the journals of large crankshafts.
Slater's Manchester, Salford & Suburban Directory of 1911 listed Charles Churchill & Co Ltd (manager Sydney H March) at 6 Oxford Street and 7 Lower Mosley Street, as "engineers and importers of American machinery and tools"; and also The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd as "engineers and manufacturers of machine and small tools" at 107 Frederick Road, Pendleton, the address of Charles Churchill & Co Ltd's works. The details were the same in the 1909 edition. Despite this, the register of members for the Institution of Mechanical Engineers
in every year between 1902 and 1915 shows Sydney Herbert March (AMIMechE, 1901, MIMechE, 1912) as being c/o Messrs Charles Churchill & Co, 2 Charlotte Street, Mosley Street, Manchester, and only from 1916 is he shown at the Oxford Street address referred to by Slater in 1909 and 1911.
As growth continued The Churchill Machine Tool Co's share capital was increased to £70,000 and in 1911 the four directors, who had not drawn a salary since its inception, were voted £25 each as remuneration. By 1913 the businesses had attained such a position with in-house manufacturing of grinding machinery that Charles Churchill was able to ignore a threat to withdraw from him, on the grounds of conflict of interest, the agency agreement with US company Brown & Sharpe
which had been set up in 1872 before his bankruptcy.
The 1915 Post Office Directory for London listed Charles Churchill & Co Ltd trading from 9 – 15 Leonard Street EC (Finsbury) in various categories: under "Emery Wheel and Machinery Makers" as agents for Norton & Co
of Worcester, Massachusetts
; under "Engineers' Machine Tool Makers", "Merchants – American", "Merchants – General", "Toolmakers and Dealers" and under "Machinery Merchants". The address was shared with Carson James & Co Ltd, machine toolmakers, and The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was also listed. The 1914 edition of the publication states Norton & Co was involved in "alundum and crystolon grinding wheels"; its appointment of Churchill as agents took place in 1910. In 1921, there was a US patent application for a lathe assigned to Churchill directors and in which James Carson living in London was cited as the inventor.
Charles Churchill suffered ill-health in his later years and retired from active involvement in the companies in 1915. His son, Charles Henry Churchill assumed the responsibilities of chairman and managing director. Charles Churchill died on 14 or 15 February 1916, his last address was 321 Seven Sisters Road, Stoke Newington
, London. His son, C H Churchill, had died six days earlier. W Chamberlain was appointed chairman and Arthur Lyman Churchill, son of Charles, stepped up from head of the small tool grinding department to become managing director and, in 1920, chairman. Willis Clark Churchill, brother of Arthur, became a board member after 30 years of association with the business but died before the end of the war.
Demand for grinding machinery and specialist knowledge in the heat treatment of metals and other areas the company had developed was so high during the years of World War I that the government ordered other British manufacturers to produce Churchill designs. One specialist area was heat treated blades used to cut the cables of sea mines. In April 1916 an increase in share capital to expand the factory further was authorised. During the war years the company was misled by a trade union such that it paid its male fitters, who were supervising female war workers, an increased wage of 48 shilling
s per week. The union told the company it was the rate paid for similar work at Armstrong-Whitworth when, it was not.
A news item in an edition of American Machinist of that year suggests that the Churchill name had a certain cachet in the US, as it warned that:
The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was a founder member of Associated British Machine Tool Makers Ltd (ABMTM)
in 1917, an organisation that might be classed as a cartel
but which was then perfectly. It was a joint-venture marketing company to develop export markets. Charles Churchill & Co Ltd continued to handle domestic sales. A further note of inter-company co-operation was informal Saturday afternoon exchange visits between local machine shops to aid the exchange of ideas and appreciate differences in development and working practice which lasted for a few years before 1923. Companies involved in this included Churchill, Mather and Platt, Hans Renold
, John Hetherington
, B & S Massey, British Westinghouse
and Browett, Linley & Co of Patricroft. In January 1919, Charles Churchill & Co Ltd bought a one-third share in Cornelius Redman & Sons Co Ltd, planer
and lathe-makers at Pioneer Works between Parkinson Lane and Warley Road in Halifax
, Yorkshire.
, near Altrincham
, from the Earl of Stamford
. By 1920 the company had relocated all its production to that site, which put it at the heart of a growing concentration of engineering businesses which included H.W. Kearns & Co, George Richards & Co, Luke & Spencer Ltd, Schaffer & Budenberg and Linotype. The single-storey factory covered 3 acres (1.2 ha), affording potential for further expansion. "It forms in fact easily the largest concern of this type in Great Britain", said American Machinist, and was under the charge of H H Asbridge with S H March as general manager. March's business address according to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers' register in 1922 was Albion Street, Gaythorn, Manchester and Fred Garbutt Anderson, AMIMechE was at the Oxford Street address; the address for Asbridge, who was MIMechE, was Broadheath.
In 1920 Charles Churchill & Co Ltd participated in a machine tool exhibition at the Olympia
exhibition centre in London between 4 and 25 September involving many manufacturers and agents. A tabulated list published at the time showed the company's stationary exhibits comprised machines for boring and drilling, centring, planing, shaping, drop forging and gear hobbing
as well as upright, radial and sensitive drills, furnaces, centre and precision lathes, "tool/cutter grinders" and twist-drill machinery. In addition it exhibited running examples of boring and turning mills, machines for broaching, gear cutting, thread milling, horizontal plain milling, universal milling and vertical milling, along with internal, surface and "cylinder/plain/universal" grinders, automatic
and "capstan/turret"
lathes. There are many notices before and subsequent to this of the company's participation in exhibitions reported in American Machinist.
The American Machinist reported in 1922 that The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was "now almost the only specialist in precision grinding machines in Great Britain" and that the uses of the process in the railway industry for the production of axle journals were by that time accepted as best practice and that the usage of it for piston rods and cylinders was being established. A summary-box to the article says that: The Carborundum Company and Pratt & Whitney
companies are referred to in the article, perhaps demonstrating that Churchill could not operate in isolation despite the "only specialist" status accorded to them early in the article. Supplying grinding machinery to railways, for use in new production and refurbishment of worn mechanisms, became an important new area of operations: post-war government sales of used machinery had flooded the domestic market for machine tools but exports, initially to Indian railways and then elsewhere, went some way towards softening the blow and the Churchill companies, whilst scarred, were able to ride out the worst of the post-war recession. Among the more unusual supplies made was a universal grinding machine used to grind the valves of trumpets for the Salvation Army
.
An office opened at 35 Victoria Street, Bristol, where Lindsay Somerville AMIMechE worked for the company. Advertising indicates that there was an office in Leeds
: the opening probably postdating Bristol possibly during 1918, as Bristol is listed in advertising without mention of the Leeds branch but citing all the other branches previously referred to.
The boards of directors were reconstituted in 1923. John Beresford Stuart Gabriel (b. 1 Aug 1888, Twickenham – d. 7 Jul 1979, Kenilworth), son of J W W Gabriel, had been assistant managing director of Charles Churchill & Co Ltd since 1920 and became joint managing director from 1923. In addition, Arthur Chamberlain (nephew of both Herbert and Walter) resigned his chairmanship of Kynoch Ltd
and became chairman of both the Churchill companies in November, and H H Asbridge became a director of The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd In March 1924 Greville Simpson Maginness followed Chamberlain from Kynoch to become managing director of The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd and in that role he was over the years to expand the export markets for the business.
The emphasis on manufacturing, especially that done under licence, became even more apparent following the imposition of a 20% duty on imported machine tools and reduced demand, both triggered by the Great Depression
. There was much innovation and many of these advances were pioneering techniques that are now universal, although from a trading perspective things were dire for the companies. In particular, The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd successfully harnessed the utility of hydraulics
in many aspects of its machinery and developed a cambering mechanism for grinding rollers used in, for example the paper industry. In 1932 H H Asbridge's "Hydrauto" bearing was introduced: this aided precision positioning of a workpiece with almost no intervening film of lubrication.
J W W Gabriel became sole managing director in 1932. The directors had been for some years working with the Cincinnati Milling Machine Co, of which Gabriel had been an employee before World War I, and in 1933 Cincinnati established an English subsidiary, with Gabriel as chairman. This worked with The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd in a joint manufacturing development project concerning precision grinders.
The machine tool company had a sales agent in Australia by 1932.
with machine tools, which had done much to assist it out of the depths of depression.
Francis Penny Burnage, son-in-law of Charles, became chairman of Charles Churchill & Co Ltd and Gabriel continued to work for that company. They moved quickly to add manufacturing capacity to what would otherwise have been just a sales organisation: in December 1934 the company took over Cornelius Redman & Sons, renaming it Churchill-Redman Ltd. The facility was used initially to manufacture American machine tools under licence, rather as the machine tool company had started out in the early 1900s. A particularly notable example of its output was the licence granted in 1937 by Jones & Lamson of Springfield
, Vermont, for the Fay automatic lathe
. It was to become a pattern for Gabriel to orchestrate take-overs of other companies but not subsume them: they would have their own management team and retain a separate corporate identity.
Up to this point the Redman investment had not been a notable success: in the decade to 1934, despite an additional capital injection by Churchill, the business had made losses in half of the years and in only one of the other years had it made any more than a modest profit. However, growth was steady after 1934, with profits of £23,000, £38,000, £54,000 and then a large jump to £139,000 in 1938. By 1939 the Redman operation alone employed 300 people, compared to around 30 in 1920. Motor industry expansion assisted in this growth, with Ford
becoming a customer and Gabriel setting up a new machine tool division at Coventry Road, South Yardley
, Birmingham in 1938 to give easy access for the industry's centre, but rearmament was the most significant factor.
to 30% but in cash terms, allowing for capital restructuring, the payment remained the same.
The economic historians Roger Lloyd-Jones and Myrrdin Lewis have analysed the company's minute books to derive the following information on profits during the inter-war period:
A further example of how innovatory the company could be is apparent in 1936, when it introduced the first electronics for control of precision grinding machines, this being a timing device.
Although there is no evidence of industrial unrest targeted at Churchill's activities until the 1970s, there was concern about the possibility during the inter-war years and the probability of none occurring at all is unlikely. The Economic League
was established as a right-wing organisation, consisting mainly of employers, to counteract the rise in communist and socialist propaganda and its associated activities the Great War. Support for the League was particularly strong among the engineering companies in the Manchester area. While workers in the cotton industries, for example, seemed not generally to take a great interest in the Communist Party, left-wing educational groups and shop-floor agitators, those in the engineering industry—perhaps mostly more intelligent—did do so and the apparent threat to capitalism and private wealth was more evident to the employers of such people. Among the League's less publicised, more nefarious activities was that of intelligence gathering and the promotion of systematic blacklisting methods. It co-operated with the police and government, infiltrated left-wing groups and used information from disaffected ex-supporters of such groups in order to obtain information about what it considered to be dangerous elements and tendencies, and disseminated the knowledge obtained, usually in a confidential manner. The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was one of several companies which during 1936–37 was a recipient of information concerning reports of meetings held by anti-capitalist groups, the past and current activities of particular workers and even the names of those specifically blacklisted. Others who received the information at this time included A V Roe, Ferranti
, Metropolitan Vickers and Fairey Aviation
.
The company announced post-tax profits in 1949 of £119,909 (tax: £140,500); for 1950 the figures were £164,704 and £201,500, respectively. Total dividend for those years was 30%. By 1952 the net profit was £146,318 (tax: £347,000) and in 1953 the respective figures were £228,583 and £449,000. The dividend for both of these years was 20% but in 1953 there was also a special distribution of 2d/share for capital profits of £17,810 from sale of investments.
The company self-published its history for its golden jubilee year of 1956: The story of The Churchill Machine Tool Co. Ltd.: a history of precision grinding.
In 1959 The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd entered into an agreement to export its products to the US-based company Lapointe Machine Co, a company for which in earlier years it had held the Great Britain agency.
In 1958 the chairman, Sir Greville Maginness, who was also chairman of Roneo Ltd, reported that the two businesses combined had a workforce of at least 1,227 people. He was deputy chairman of Tube Investments (TI) but had handed over the managing director's role at Churchill to E W Honnisette in 1953.
The company was bought by BSA in 1961 at a cost of £8.5 million and became known in legal terms, as BSA-Churchill Machine Tools Ltd. In October 1962 H G Sturgeon, OBE
, previously managing director at de Havilland
Aircraft, was appointed to the same position at Churchill; he moved on in 1964 to become managing director of the BSA group's Motorcycle division. In 1966 Churchill merged in a joint-venture agreement with Alfred Herbert and became part of Herbert-BSA Ltd, the intention being that the combined concerns would gain benefits from rationalisation and symbiosis of their activities. The general expectation – held also by the Department of Trade and Industry and the stock market – of rewards from the venture did not materialise and BSA sold its entire holding in August 1971, writing off £6.9M as a consequence of the need to have cash in hand to address issues elsewhere in its activities.
The UK economy was contracting by the early 1970s and engineering businesses were rationalising their operations on a scale which raised many comments in Parliament and elsewhere. The ratio of unemployment to vacancies in engineering and the allied trades at June 1970 was more or less 1:1 but by September 1971 it was 5:1, i.e.: five people unemployed in the sector for every job available. In 1972 the Churchill factory in Altrincham was closed, despite industrial action there and at Alfred Herbert's Coventry
factory to stop this happening. There were representations against the closure from Altrincham council to the government, including a meeting in February 1972 when the council and its delegation of industry experts met the Minister for Trade and Industry and said It was said in Parliament that 1,000 people were made redundant and that in Manchester 500 machine tool fitters were now chasing 10 jobs. Production moved to Coventry as the parent group, Herbert, faced losses of £4M, although Churchill had an order book of £2.25M that could provide sufficient work to keep its 1,100 workforce in jobs through to 1974. Order book value aside, it was also said in Parliament that Churchill had lost over £1M in the previous two years.
The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was put into members' voluntary liquidation on 25 October 1973 with several other companies in the Herbert group. The company's name resurfaced only to be put into voluntary liquidation again on 15 March 1985. The winding-up resolutions on both these occasions occurred at meetings held at Canal Road, Coventry, although the appointed people were different.
A further revival of the company name took place: a company formed as Churchill Atlantic (Manchester) Co Ltd, company registration number 01469025, had been incorporated in 1979 and in 1999 was renamed The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd; two years later, in April 2001, it also failed and went into receivership. There is an Atlantic Street in Broadheath.
In 2011 the company name continued to be used: Retday Ltd, registration number 04186074, was incorporated in March 2001 and changed its name to The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd in June that year. It trades from Atlantic Works in Old Trafford
, Manchester, and it uses the slogan "A century of precision grinding machinery".
Churchill Machine Tools (Coventry) Ltd (company registration 00087969) was liquidated in 1974. The significance of this company is uncertain but the low registration number indicates that the entity, even if not using the particular name, had existed for some considerable time: by the 1950s new companies were being issued numbers around the 00500000 region, and by the 2000s this had become a series starting around 01400000.
Admiralty works in Scotswood
, Newcastle. It was intended that the Newcastle site concern itself with a range of lathes intended for the motor industry, Austin
and Vauxhall
in particular; the Halifax operation would focus on manufacture of Fay lathes which were still being licenced from the US.
The company worked on tight profit margins immediately post-war. A combination of a shortage of skilled labour, outdated batch production methods and increasing costs in materials and payroll were matched by rising overhead, a shortage of materials and issues of absenteeism. The result was that despite a booming order book Redman was struggling to fulfil its commitments to customers and gross margin
s on lathes were as low as 2.16%. The company was by no means unique in facing these difficulties but there was much urging, agonising and recriminating, by Gabriel and A K McKay, the Redman managing director since at least 1936, regarding how to deal with the issues. Some of this, perhaps inevitably as the war-time command economy reverted, was aimed at the government.
Things did improve for Churchill-Redman and the sales rose dramatically from £200,000 in 1946 to £1M by 1955. This was in part because of innovative product development at the Halifax site which ultimately produced the CR P5 and P6 profiling lathes: the conclusion of this development is described by Jeremy as being a range of "fully automatic, multi-tool and profiling lathes. A lathe with an automatic feed and delivery heralded an automatic machine tool production line." The expansion of the motor vehicle industry once again was a significant factor, driving demand for machine tools much as the bicycling boom of the 1890s had done. In 1957 the Scotswood operation moved across the River Tyne
to Blaydon
, where a factory was built especially for the manufacturing purpose intended. Among other products from that site was the Vertimax lathe, which used a vertical spindle and was of interest to motor vehicle manufacturers. This particular design originated from James Anderson, a garage owner in Glasgow, during the war and whose business was brought into the Churchill group of companies. Churchill Gear Machines Ltd was part of the group, having been established in Blaydon since 1956: the cause of its origin and the nature of its products is uncertain.
In 1950 Charles Churchill & Co Ltd, the parent company, moved its offices from London to Birmingham and in 1955 increased its share capital to £1.26M. By the financial year ending March 1962 it reported a group net profit of £575,352 and a dividend of 22.5%. Exports were up 26% and there were hopes of the sector eventually amounting to 40% of total output. Fixed assets had increased significantly: the business had taken over Newcast Foundries Ltd, Halifax-based heavy lathe manufacturer Denhams Engineering Co Ltd and Churchill-Milnes; it had spent £2M of its own resources building extensions and plant improvements to more than double its manufacturing capability compared to that in 1951. Information regarding Churchill-Milnes is lacking but a business called Henry Milnes manufactured lathes in the Bradford
area for many years and it may be that this was the target of a take-over.
A new company, Charles H. Churchill Ltd, was established in 1962 to act as a group-wide selling organisation. Charles Churchill (Canada) Ltd traded from Toronto
as a sales agency for machine tools in 1953 and by 1959 had at least one additional outlet in the country.
In a diversification from the machine tool sector, the company had a subsidiary business manufacturing glass-fibre boats. For this purpose there was an application for an Industrial Development Certificate to build premises at Tiverton in 1961. When this certificate was refused, on grounds that were somewhat contentious, the company was encouraged to seek alternative sites in Devon, including at Ilfracombe
, but instead opted to take a site on the Isle of Wight
so that it could satisfy export orders. Ralph Gabriel, son of J B S Gabriel, had become managing director by 1964, with J B S Gabriel as chairman. Ralph Gabriel loaned his 34 feet (10.4 m) sloop, the Archiv, to the Ocean Youth Trust in 1968.
J B S Gabriel announced a 14% fall in net profits for the company for the trading period 1963–64 (net £505,000; tax £419,000; dividend retained at 22.5%). Despite this the group was among the biggest machine tool organisations in the world, employing 2,000 people and having sales of £14M.
The company celebrated its centenary by commissioning a book detailing its history from 1865 to 1965.
Faced with increasing competition from Japan and elsewhere, and the need to cut labour costs and invest heavily in order to counteract this, in 1966 J B S Gabriel recommended the group be taken over. TI
made an offer to buy the company and its subsidiaries for the sterling equivalent of US$30M and in 1967, as a TI company and with the Gabriels no longer involved, it announced an export order of gear processing machine tools to the USSR worth £1.8M.
In 1968 the Applied Research and Development Division of the company based in Daventry
, demonstrated the first use of control tapes prepared by computer to control a lathe, a significant milestone in the development of CNC. This project was developed in conjunction with IBM
.
In 1972 all production at Churchill-Redman in Halifax moved to Blaydon with the consequent loss of 350 jobs. This formed a part of TI's many rationalisation measures taken in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the closure was explained as being due to the desire for greater productivity and a recognition of the low sales generated at the site. A Churchill factory at Bedford which had been operating since 1967 was closed at this time, .
Companies House has archived its information relating to the name changes asterisked and for the companies for which no detail is provided. It is notable that two of the companies listed—C Redman/Churchill-Redman and Charles Churchill Ltd (which has also lost its "and Co")—both acquired new registration numbers in March 1956.
"for export achievement; and for technological innovation in machine tools by the Applied Research and Development Division, Churchill Gear Machines Ltd., and Churchill-Redman Ltd." in 1966.
The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was awarded The Queen's Award to Industry "for export achievement and for technological innovation in air bearings in precision grinding machines" in 1969. Les Roberts, Sales Director between 1968 and 1971, wrote a highly critical account of the actions of the Alfred Herbert board of directors and their contribution by a wide range of decisions to the demise of the company. His comments include that the export award was a dubious pleasure:
Among more obviously serious matters, Roberts pointed to the Herbert board's imposition of a rule that shop-floor employees, mostly if not all male, must wear pink uniforms as being typical of its distance from reality, fad-ism and tendency to make mountains of molehills.
Sir Greville Simpson Maginness (b. 1888 – d. 23 Nov 1961), Kt. 1947, KBE 1953 was a lead delegate for the employers at the first Conference of the ILO
in Washington (1919), President of the Engineering and Allied Employers' National Federation (1944–46), President of the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce from 1938 until his death and a member of the Engineering Advisory Council, Ministry of Supply (1946–61); he became President of the British Employers' Confederation, a forerunner of the CBI
, in December 1946, when he was chairman and managing director of The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd.
The artist Richard Hamilton
was a designer at Churchill Gear Machines Ltd between 1956 and 1962. Some of his work is included in the collection of the Tate Gallery
.
Machine tool
A machine tool is a machine, typically powered other than by human muscle , used to make manufactured parts in various ways that include cutting or certain other kinds of deformation...
importers Charles Churchill & Company Limited founded in the early 1900s by US-born Charles Churchill (1837–1916). Created out of the personal bankruptcy of Charles Churchill, the company developed to become one of the largest British importers of machine tools from the USA and a major manufacturer of such tools, initially under licence and later of its own development.
The original business importing American machine tools into Britain began with Charles Churchill as sole proprietor and later as a partnership with two others. It became a limited company in 1889. In 1906 a separate company, The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd, was established with the purpose of adapting tools imported by Charles Churchill & Co Ltd. The former expanded, producing American tools under licence and then manufactured tools of its own design, in particular precision surface grinders and similar engineering machinery. In 1918 The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd relocated its factories onto a single site at Broadheath
Broadheath, Greater Manchester
Broadheath is a suburb of Altrincham in Greater Manchester, England. It is historically part of the county of Cheshire and has a Warrington postcode.At Broadheath's height as an industrial area, the industries supported perhaps 12,000 employees...
, near Altrincham
Altrincham
Altrincham is a market town within the Metropolitan Borough of Trafford, in Greater Manchester, England. It lies on flat ground south of the River Mersey about southwest of Manchester city centre, south-southwest of Sale and east of Warrington...
.
The two companies initially remained closely linked, with common a chairman and board members
Board of directors
A board of directors is a body of elected or appointed members who jointly oversee the activities of a company or organization. Other names include board of governors, board of managers, board of regents, board of trustees, and board of visitors...
, including Arthur Chamberlain. In the early 1930s a series of board disagreements within Charles Churchill & Co Ltd led to Arthur Chamberlain resigning as chairman of that company. He remained chairman of The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd and the two companies diverged. Charles Churchill & Co Ltd changed from a sales organisation to become a manufacturer. Thereafter, both companies manufactured machine tooling, and Charles Churchill & Co Ltd became a group of companies. By the 1960s significant rationalisation took place in British manufacturing, with companies merging or being taken over in an attempt to achieve benefits from economies of scale and pooled resources. The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was taken over by the Birmingham Small Arms Company
Birmingham Small Arms Company
This article is not about Gamo subsidiary BSA Guns Limited of Armoury Road, Small Heath, Birmingham B11 2PP or BSA Company or its successors....
; which merged with Alfred Herbert Ltd
Alfred Herbert (company)
Alfred Herbert Ltd was one of the world's largest machine tool manufacturing businesses. It was at one time the largest British machine tool builder.-History:...
, with production moving to Coventry
Coventry
Coventry is a city and metropolitan borough in the county of West Midlands in England. Coventry is the 9th largest city in England and the 11th largest in the United Kingdom. It is also the second largest city in the English Midlands, after Birmingham, with a population of 300,848, although...
. Coincidentally, Charles Churchill & Co Ltd was taken over by Tube Investments (TI)
TI Group
TI Group plc was a holding company for specialised engineering companies. It was based in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. It was registered as Tube Investments in 1919, combining the seamless steel tube businesses of Tubes Ltd, New Credenda Tube , Simplex and Accles & Pollock. In 1928 Reynolds Tube joined...
.
The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd ceased trading in the early 1970s along with several other companies in the Alfred Herbert group, during a period of huge contraction of the manufacturing sector in Britain's economy. A part of the Charles Churchill & Co Ltd group became Matrix Churchill through a convoluted corporate process.
A company using The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd name still trades; but Charles Churchill & Co Ltd no longer exists.
Charles Churchill
Charles Churchill was born in the United States, in Hamden, ConnecticutHamden, Connecticut
Hamden is a town in New Haven County, Connecticut, United States. The town's nickname is "The Land of the Sleeping Giant." Hamden is home to Quinnipiac University. The population was 58,180 according to the Census Bureau's 2005 estimates...
, on 8 July 1837. His father was Willis Churchill, described as "a mechanic of rare ability, original in the style of his goods and in his process of manufacture", who had been manufacturing brass surgical instruments at a time when such instruments were all imported to the US. Willis Churchill founded a factory manufacturing auger
Auger
An auger is a drilling device, or drill bit, that usually includes a rotating helical screw blade called a "flighting" to act as a screw conveyor to remove the drilled out material...
drill bits which was so locally prominent that the area of Hamden in which it was situated was called Augerville.
Charles worked in his father's auger manufacturing business but when Willis went to London in 1861 to supervise the installation of wire-covering machinery being exported by Thompson, Langdon & Co of New York City, Charles soon followed and, once there, spotted a business opportunity for himself as he saw the interest that the US-made equipment generated. By the time of his death his businesses had a presence in London, Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
, Glasgow
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
, Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
and Newcastle-on-Tyne and was "a giant machine-importing business".
According to historian L T C Rolt, the original installation was of machines for wire-braiding crinoline
Crinoline
Crinoline was originally a stiff fabric with a weft of horse-hair and a warp of cotton or linen thread. The fabric first appeared around 1830, but by 1850 the word had come to mean a stiffened petticoat or rigid skirt-shaped structure of steel designed to support the skirts of a woman’s dress into...
frames; and Charles simultaneously imported metal cutting machine tools to aid his friend Hiram Maxim who was developing a machine gun. This is a moot point: the Maxim gun
Maxim gun
The Maxim gun was the first self-powered machine gun, invented by the American-born British inventor Sir Hiram Maxim in 1884. It has been called "the weapon most associated with [British] imperial conquest".-Functionality:...
was not developed for a further 20 years and it is unlikely that Maxim was in England during the 1860s; however, the Gatling Gun
Gatling gun
The Gatling gun is one of the best known early rapid-fire weapons and a forerunner of the modern machine gun. It is well known for its use by the Union forces during the American Civil War in the 1860s, which was the first time it was employed in combat...
was patented in 1862. Rolt claimed that Charles Churchill & Co began trading in 1865 as importers of engineering tools and is thought to have imported the first examples of Morse tapered twist drills
Drill bit
Drill bits are cutting tools used to create cylindrical holes. Bits are held in a tool called a drill, which rotates them and provides torque and axial force to create the hole. Specialized bits are also available for non-cylindrical-shaped holes....
, self-centring drill chucks
Chuck (engineering)
A chuck is a specialized type of clamp used to hold an object, usually an object with radial symmetry, especially a cylindrical object. It is most commonly used to hold a rotating tool or a rotating workpiece...
(manufactured by Cushman
Austin F. Cushman
Austin F. Cushman invented the self-centering Cushman universal chuck in 1862; his uncle, Simon Fairman, had previously invented the lathe chuck.-Biography:...
) and hand-held micrometer
Micrometer
A micrometer , sometimes known as a micrometer screw gauge, is a device incorporating a calibrated screw used widely for precise measurement of small distances in mechanical engineering and machining as well as most mechanical trades, along with other metrological instruments such as dial, vernier,...
s into the UK. According to Floud
Roderick Floud
Sir Roderick Castle Floud FBA is an economic historian and is currently the Provost of Gresham College. He is the son of Bernard Floud, M.P.-Career:...
, he imported agricultural implements and other non-engineering items at this time. In its early years the company traded from 28 Wilson Street, Finsbury
Finsbury
Finsbury is a district of central London, England. It lies immediately north of the City of London and Clerkenwell, west of Shoreditch, and south of Islington and City Road. It is in the south of the London Borough of Islington. The Finsbury Estate is in the western part of the district...
: sales catalogues were published certainly between 1876 and 1882 stating this address.
Charles Churchill & Co initially operated on Charles' own account
Sole proprietorship
A sole proprietorship, also known as the sole trader or simply a proprietorship, is a type of business entity that is owned and run by one individual and in which there is no legal distinction between the owner and the business. The owner receives all profits and has unlimited responsibility for...
rather than as a limited company
Private company limited by shares
A private company limited by shares, usually called a private limited company , is a type of company incorporated under the laws of England and Wales, Scotland, that of certain Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland...
. In his early period of operating in England he was active in patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
ing engineered items in conjunction with one of several other parties. The London Gazette
London Gazette
The London Gazette is one of the official journals of record of the British government, and the most important among such official journals in the United Kingdom, in which certain statutory notices are required to be published...
shows several announcements for protection under the terms of the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852. (See table below). Two of them were subsequently announced as voided by reason of non-payment for continuance. (To continue required that the applicant pay a stamp duty of £50 within three years subsequent to the application.)
| App. No. | App. Date | For | First Named | Second Named | Voided |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 859 | 25 Mar 1865 | Improvements in oil feeders or cans | James Buckingham | Charles Churchill | 26 Mar 1868 |
| 2783 | 27 Oct 1865 | Improvements in screw wrenches | James Buckingham | Charles Churchill | |
| 2782 | 27 Oct 1865 | Improvements in lathe Lathe (metal) A metal lathe or metalworking lathe is a large class of lathes designed for precisely machining relatively hard materials. They were originally designed to machine metals; however, with the advent of plastics and other materials, and with their inherent versatility, they are used in a wide range of... chucks |
James Buckingham | Charles Churchill | 28 Oct 1868 |
| 2899 | 6 Nov 1866 | An improved chuck for holding drills and other tools | Charles Churchill | Albert Beach | |
| 3696 | 27 Dec 1867 | An improved gas-burner | Charles Churchill | Willis Churchill | |
| 3173 | 15 Oct 1868 | Improvements in sporting breech-loading fire-arms and cartridges for the same | Charles Churchill | William H Miller | |
| 2018 | 2 Jul 1869 | An improved implement for drawing nails | Charles Churchill | Willis Churchill | |
| 1361 | 10 May 1870 | An improved window-fastener | Charles Churchill | William L Clark | |
| 4309 | 14 Dec 1874 | Improvements in knitting machinery | Charles Churchill | Eli Tiffany | |
| 218 | 18 Jan 1876 | An improved locking-washer for securing screw bolts and nuts | Charles Churchill | Sanford Elton Gee |
Churchill's location is stated as being New York for the 1865 applications (Buckingham was at Westmoreland House, Walworth Common
Walworth
-Places:United Kingdom* Walworth, County DurhamUnited States* Walworth County, South Dakota* Walworth County, Wisconsin* Walworth, New York* Walworth, Wisconsin, a village* Walworth , Wisconsin, a town...
, Surrey); for those of 1867 and 1868 he was in Norwood
Upper Norwood
Upper Norwood is an elevated area in south London, England within the postcode SE19. It is a residential district largely in the London Borough of Croydon although some parts extend into the London Borough of Lambeth, London Borough of Southwark and the London Borough of Bromley. Upper Norwood...
, Surrey and states himself to be a merchant; still listing himself as a merchant, the 1869–70 applications show his summarised address as Darnley Crescent, Hackney
Hackney Central
Hackney Central is the central district of the London Borough of Hackney in London, England. It comprises the area roughly surrounding, and extending north from Mare Street. It is situated north east of Charing Cross...
, Middlesex; and therefter as a merchant at Wilson Street, Finsbury. Willis Churchill, Clark and Gee were all shown as being of New York City; Tiffany was of Bennington, Vermont; Miller was of West Meriden, Connecticut
Meriden, Connecticut
Meriden is a city in New Haven County, Connecticut, United States. According to 2005 Census Bureau estimates, the population of the city is 59,653.-History:...
; and Beach of Newark, New Jersey
Newark, New Jersey
Newark is the largest city in the American state of New Jersey, and the seat of Essex County. As of the 2010 United States Census, Newark had a population of 277,140, maintaining its status as the largest municipality in New Jersey. It is the 68th largest city in the U.S...
.
Charles Churchill living at 118 Cazenove Road, Stoke Newington
Stoke Newington
Stoke Newington is a district in the London Borough of Hackney. It is north-east of Charing Cross.-Boundaries:In modern terms, Stoke Newington can be roughly defined by the N16 postcode area . Its southern boundary with Dalston is quite ill-defined too...
, Middlesex, with offices at 21 Cross Street, Finsbury, trading as Charles Churchill & Co was declared bankrupt
Bankruptcy in the United Kingdom
Bankruptcy in the United Kingdom does not have a singular law. There is one system for England and Wales, one for Northern Ireland and one for Scotland.Across the United Kingdom, bankruptcy refers only to insolvency of individuals and partnerships...
by debtors' petition on 1 September 1887. He declared himself bankrupt rather than be declared so by someone to whom he owed money. The final dividend in bankruptcy was paid in 1889 and he was released from trusteeship on 29 April 1890. He had applied earlier for discharge but it had been refused on the grounds that he
Churchill fully tooled-up—that is, installed, assembled and made ready for productive use—the Gatling Gun factory that opened in Birmingham in 1889. This was despite being an undischarged bankrupt. He had formed a partnership
General partnership
In the commercial and legal parlance of most countries, a general partnership or simply a partnership, refers to an association of persons or an unincorporated company with the following major features:...
with his son, Charles Henry Churchill and in 1888 he obtained another partner when John William Wright Gabriel disposed of his family's interest in a drugs manufacturer, Gabriel and Troke, and joined the Churchills. This partnership may explain how he was able to complete the work in Birmingham despite his financial status. Despite the assertion by biographer David Jeremy that J W W Gabriel disposed of the drugs manufacturing interest, a notice in The London Gazette for 1885 shows his father, John Wild Gabriel, ending a partnership with Troke, and that Troke then formed a similar arrangement with another person.
Early years as a limited company
In 1889 the partnership was transformed into a limited company, Charles Churchill & Co Ltd (company registration number 29931). There followed a period of exceptional growth and in 1896 a dividendDividend
Dividends are payments made by a corporation to its shareholder members. It is the portion of corporate profits paid out to stockholders. When a corporation earns a profit or surplus, that money can be put to two uses: it can either be re-invested in the business , or it can be distributed to...
of 230% was paid on the company's share capital
Share capital
Share capital or issued capital or capital stock refers to the portion of a company's equity that has been obtained by trading stock to a shareholder for cash or an equivalent item of capital value...
of £5,500.
In an interview in the US towards the end of 1896 Churchill explained that for the financial year ending 1 September 1896 sales were £110,000, and the order book value was £30,000. He attributed much of the exceptional growth of that year to the boom in bicycling
Cycling
Cycling, also called bicycling or biking, is the use of bicycles for transport, recreation, or for sport. Persons engaged in cycling are cyclists or bicyclists...
and the consequent demand for automatic screw machines and similar machinery, and commented that he had placed orders for between 15 million and 18 million steel balls and that gas furnaces were selling well. He explained that there was little competition for the imported machinery – not even a manufacturer of chucks, as far as he was aware – because "English" firms seemed reluctant to even copy US designs, partly because of "the Englishman's desire to have and to embody his own ideas" and to what they perceived to be the high capital costs of setting up production given the price at which US machinery was sold there. A few years later he did just that.
He commented in 1901 that what he called the "hump", caused by the bicycling bubble, needed to be put into context: growth in the trade had been steady for the company both before and since that time.
This period of British-US engineering development has been the subject of analysis by economic historians. S B Saul, writing in 1960, determined that British engineering and its methods were advanced in spheres such as the manufacture of textile machinery but less so in that of light machine tools and the machinery of mass production. He argued that in these areas the response by British manufacturers to imports from the US "belatedly matured so their influence permeated back through the whole engineering trade and began a rejuvenation of old fossilised trades" in the 1890s. He broadly agreed with the contemporary opinion of Churchill that the adoption of US methods was slow in the light machine tools sector primarily because there was a perceived lack of demand and return on investment to excite the interest of British engineers. He viewed the cycle boom as the catalyst for growth in this area but pointed out that the heavy machine tool sector was one of those which had not been previously neglected by British engineers.
Economic historian Roderick Floud
Roderick Floud
Sir Roderick Castle Floud FBA is an economic historian and is currently the Provost of Gresham College. He is the son of Bernard Floud, M.P.-Career:...
's analysis, in the 1970s, of relative imports and exports led him to the conclusion that it was "unlikely that the American share of the British market was rising significantly, until the 1890s ... [it rose to] a peak in 1899 before settling back to a period of less astonishing but still considerable growth to 1913." He also advanced a hypothesis, believing Saul's analysis to be "simplified", which placed a heavier emphasis on happenings in the US than in Britain: that the US import tariff of 45% on machinery and engineered products, which was the highest in the world until 1908, protected the development of the US industry in such products while it reached a maturity which enabled its prices to fall to a level that was highly competitive in the world market.
In March 1897 Charles Churchill & Co Ltd was put into voluntary liquidation to aid capital restructuring. This comprised an increase in authorised share capital to £50,000: £30,000 was fully subscribed, £10,000 allotted as goodwill for the old company and £10,000 retained for later issue. Within two years the company advertised with contact addresses at 2 – 10 Albert Street in Birmingham, 5 Cross Street in Manchester and 52 Bothwell Street, Glasgow, and its main office at 9 – 15 Leonard Street, Finsbury. By 1902 advertisements show the Manchester address as 2 Charlotte Street, Mosley Street and an additional office had opened at Albion Buildings, St James' Street, Newcastle. There were more than 30 employees at the London premises and 8 or 9 in Birmingham.
The capital restructuring also saw the addition of Herbert Chamberlain, brother of Joseph Chamberlain
Joseph Chamberlain
Joseph Chamberlain was an influential British politician and statesman. Unlike most major politicians of the time, he was a self-made businessman and had not attended Oxford or Cambridge University....
, to the board of directors. He was well connected in business terms as well as politically, having interests in Birmingham Small Arms Company
Birmingham Small Arms Company
This article is not about Gamo subsidiary BSA Guns Limited of Armoury Road, Small Heath, Birmingham B11 2PP or BSA Company or its successors....
(BSA) among other things. BSA had moved into producing bicycles and components after the end of the Crimean War
Crimean War
The Crimean War was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining...
, a product line it had an interest in before that event. Other members of the Chamberlain family were later involved in the company.
The new main office in Leonard Street opened around 1896 and comprised 12474 square feet (1,159 m²) over four storeys, complete with internal hydraulic lifts, an external hydraulic crane and electric lighting; the company claimed in its press release that it had more than doubled its sales compared to any previous year and that it had sales lists for in excess of 100 US machinery manufacturers.
Examples of the agency agreements in place can be found from in the American Machinist of June 1897. They include: the Hamilton Machine Tool Company of Ohio (who were advertising a 16" sliding head drill); Baker Bros of Toledo, Ohio (advertising a combined sprocket turning and boring machine); Flather & Co, Nashua, N.H. (lathes); Warner & Swasey, Cleveland, Ohio (turret engine lathes); Chas. A. Strelinger & Co, Detroit (grinding and polishing machinery and pull countershafts by Builders' Iron Foundry, Providence, R.I.); and American Gas Furnace Co, New York (oil gas plants, gas blast furnaces and high pressure blowers). He had much to say about the correct manner of packing all of this equipment.
The American Machinist not only provided information on Churchill's business activities but in January 1901 announced he (and his wife and daughter) had returned to London after a visit to the US which was not for business but rather to see his ageing mother.
In 1907 the company was seeking to wind up
Liquidation
In law, liquidation is the process by which a company is brought to an end, and the assets and property of the company redistributed. Liquidation is also sometimes referred to as winding-up or dissolution, although dissolution technically refers to the last stage of liquidation...
the Aston Cantlow
Aston Cantlow
Aston Cantlow is a village and civil parish in the Stratford district of Warwickshire, England, on the River Alne. It lies north-west of Stratford, and north-east of Wilmcote. The parish stretching across the valley of the Alne includes the villages of Aston Cantlow, Little Alne, Shelfield, and...
Mill Ball and Bearing Company Ltd. Indeed, that company was wound up on 17 January 1908, although the reasons for this are unclear. Charles Henry Prideaux was appointed to represent the company on the liquidation committee for Leitner Electrical Company Ltd in 1915.
Expansion
In 1901 Churchill bought a factory in Griffin Court, Chapel Street Salford, initially as a facility to tool up the imported machinery. It was not the first British company to do this, as Sharp, Stewart & Co had built American machinery under license since at least 1873.As business improved in 1904 the enterprise moved to larger premises in Pendleton
Pendleton, Greater Manchester
Pendleton is an inner city area of Salford, Greater Manchester, England. It is about from Manchester city centre. The A6 dual carriageway skirts the east of the district....
, where an annual rent of £90 was payable. On 1 January 1906, this operation became a limited company, The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd, with an authorised share capital of £50,000, split as £20,000 in ordinary shares of £1 and £30,000 in £5 preference shares. To accomplish the transfer of manufacturing operations, Charles Churchill & Co Ltd sold the Pendleton business to the new company for £15,000, of which £7,500 was in cash and a similar amount in £1 ordinary shares. The directors were Charles Churchill, J W W Gabriel, Walter Chamberlain and C H Churchill. Herbert Chamberlain had died in 1904.
In 1904 Charles Churchill & Co Ltd was engaged in an unusual commission. The Royal Navy's was one of three ships being converted to serve at Devonport
HMNB Devonport
Her Majesty's Naval Base Devonport , is one of three operating bases in the United Kingdom for the Royal Navy . HMNB Devonport is located in Devonport, in the west of the city of Plymouth in Devon, England...
as floating workshops for the training of 200 or so engine-room artificers involving the removal of the conning tower and the deck roofed-in to form a workshop area. Bellerophon was renamed Indus III and Churchill supplied some of her workshop equipment.
The Glasgow office address changed between February 1905 and March 1906 to 9 Wellington Street.
By June 1906 there were nearly 200 machine tools under construction at the factory and in 1907 around £5,000 was spent on enlarging the premises, although a year-on-year drop in sales of 36% in 1908 demonstrated that all was not a smooth progression. Dividends had to be suspended for that year but were resumed in 1909.
By this time the company manufactured machine tools to its own design. Rapid expansion in the use of precision grinding machines after 1910, particularly in the developing car manufacturing industry, focussed the company's efforts on producing machines of this type. Many were of a revolutionary design due to the technical flair of Harry Hales Asbridge, who had joined the company from Charles Churchill & Co Ltd at its inception. A large plain grinding machine, with a 50 inches (127 cm) swing, built and installed in Sheffield
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city and metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. Its name derives from the River Sheaf, which runs through the city. Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and with some of its southern suburbs annexed from Derbyshire, the city has grown from its largely...
, remained in service at least until the 1990s and was used primarily to grind the journals of large crankshafts.
Slater's Manchester, Salford & Suburban Directory of 1911 listed Charles Churchill & Co Ltd (manager Sydney H March) at 6 Oxford Street and 7 Lower Mosley Street, as "engineers and importers of American machinery and tools"; and also The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd as "engineers and manufacturers of machine and small tools" at 107 Frederick Road, Pendleton, the address of Charles Churchill & Co Ltd's works. The details were the same in the 1909 edition. Despite this, the register of members for the Institution of Mechanical Engineers
Institution of Mechanical Engineers
The Institution of Mechanical Engineers is the British engineering society based in central London, representing mechanical engineering. It is licensed by the Engineering Council UK to assess candidates for inclusion on ECUK's Register of professional Engineers...
in every year between 1902 and 1915 shows Sydney Herbert March (AMIMechE, 1901, MIMechE, 1912) as being c/o Messrs Charles Churchill & Co, 2 Charlotte Street, Mosley Street, Manchester, and only from 1916 is he shown at the Oxford Street address referred to by Slater in 1909 and 1911.
As growth continued The Churchill Machine Tool Co's share capital was increased to £70,000 and in 1911 the four directors, who had not drawn a salary since its inception, were voted £25 each as remuneration. By 1913 the businesses had attained such a position with in-house manufacturing of grinding machinery that Charles Churchill was able to ignore a threat to withdraw from him, on the grounds of conflict of interest, the agency agreement with US company Brown & Sharpe
Brown & Sharpe
Brown & Sharpe is a division of Hexagon Metrology, Inc., a multinational corporation focused mainly on metrological tools and technology. During the 19th and 20th centuries, Brown & Sharpe was one of the most well-known and influential firms in the machine tool industry...
which had been set up in 1872 before his bankruptcy.
The 1915 Post Office Directory for London listed Charles Churchill & Co Ltd trading from 9 – 15 Leonard Street EC (Finsbury) in various categories: under "Emery Wheel and Machinery Makers" as agents for Norton & Co
Norton Abrasives
Norton Abrasives of Worcester, Massachusetts is the world's largest manufacturer and supplier of abrasives for commercial applications, household, and automotive refinishing usage. In 1990 it was purchased by Saint-Gobain of France...
of Worcester, Massachusetts
Worcester, Massachusetts
Worcester is a city and the county seat of Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. Named after Worcester, England, as of the 2010 Census the city's population is 181,045, making it the second largest city in New England after Boston....
; under "Engineers' Machine Tool Makers", "Merchants – American", "Merchants – General", "Toolmakers and Dealers" and under "Machinery Merchants". The address was shared with Carson James & Co Ltd, machine toolmakers, and The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was also listed. The 1914 edition of the publication states Norton & Co was involved in "alundum and crystolon grinding wheels"; its appointment of Churchill as agents took place in 1910. In 1921, there was a US patent application for a lathe assigned to Churchill directors and in which James Carson living in London was cited as the inventor.
Charles Churchill suffered ill-health in his later years and retired from active involvement in the companies in 1915. His son, Charles Henry Churchill assumed the responsibilities of chairman and managing director. Charles Churchill died on 14 or 15 February 1916, his last address was 321 Seven Sisters Road, Stoke Newington
Stoke Newington
Stoke Newington is a district in the London Borough of Hackney. It is north-east of Charing Cross.-Boundaries:In modern terms, Stoke Newington can be roughly defined by the N16 postcode area . Its southern boundary with Dalston is quite ill-defined too...
, London. His son, C H Churchill, had died six days earlier. W Chamberlain was appointed chairman and Arthur Lyman Churchill, son of Charles, stepped up from head of the small tool grinding department to become managing director and, in 1920, chairman. Willis Clark Churchill, brother of Arthur, became a board member after 30 years of association with the business but died before the end of the war.
Demand for grinding machinery and specialist knowledge in the heat treatment of metals and other areas the company had developed was so high during the years of World War I that the government ordered other British manufacturers to produce Churchill designs. One specialist area was heat treated blades used to cut the cables of sea mines. In April 1916 an increase in share capital to expand the factory further was authorised. During the war years the company was misled by a trade union such that it paid its male fitters, who were supervising female war workers, an increased wage of 48 shilling
Shilling
The shilling is a unit of currency used in some current and former British Commonwealth countries. The word shilling comes from scilling, an accounting term that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times where it was deemed to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. The word is thought to derive...
s per week. The union told the company it was the rate paid for similar work at Armstrong-Whitworth when, it was not.
A news item in an edition of American Machinist of that year suggests that the Churchill name had a certain cachet in the US, as it warned that:
The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was a founder member of Associated British Machine Tool Makers Ltd (ABMTM)
Associated British Machine Tool Makers
Associated British Machine Tool Makers Ltd or ABMTM was established on 14 February 1917. Working with an initial capital of £100,000, the founding firms were all manufacturers of high-quality machines...
in 1917, an organisation that might be classed as a cartel
Cartel
A cartel is a formal agreement among competing firms. It is a formal organization of producers and manufacturers that agree to fix prices, marketing, and production. Cartels usually occur in an oligopolistic industry, where there is a small number of sellers and usually involve homogeneous products...
but which was then perfectly. It was a joint-venture marketing company to develop export markets. Charles Churchill & Co Ltd continued to handle domestic sales. A further note of inter-company co-operation was informal Saturday afternoon exchange visits between local machine shops to aid the exchange of ideas and appreciate differences in development and working practice which lasted for a few years before 1923. Companies involved in this included Churchill, Mather and Platt, Hans Renold
Hans Renold
Hans Renold was a Swiss engineer. The son of a burgher family in Aarau, Switzerland, Hans came to Manchester, England at the age of 21 and found work with a firm of machinery exporters....
, John Hetherington
John Hetherington & Sons
John Hetherington & Sons was a textile machinery manufacturer from Ancoats, Manchester in England. It was founded in 1830. Thecompany gradually expanded and acquired a number of factory buildings in Ancoats. It established the Vulcan Works on Pollard Street in around 1856 and left these buildings...
, B & S Massey, British Westinghouse
British Westinghouse
British Westinghouse Electrical and Manufacturing Company was a subsidiary of the American Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. British Westinghouse would become a subsidiary of Metropolitan-Vickers in 1919; and after Metropolitan Vickers merged with British Thomson-Houston in 1929, it...
and Browett, Linley & Co of Patricroft. In January 1919, Charles Churchill & Co Ltd bought a one-third share in Cornelius Redman & Sons Co Ltd, planer
Planing (shaping)
Planing is a manufacturing process of material removal in which the workpiece reciprocates against a stationary single-point cutting tool producing a plane or sculpted surface. Planing is analogous to shaping. The main difference between these two processes is that in shaping the tool...
and lathe-makers at Pioneer Works between Parkinson Lane and Warley Road in Halifax
Halifax, West Yorkshire
Halifax is a minster town, within the Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale in West Yorkshire, England. It has an urban area population of 82,056 in the 2001 Census. It is well-known as a centre of England's woollen manufacture from the 15th century onward, originally dealing through the Halifax Piece...
, Yorkshire.
Fallow years
In 1918 The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd bought 11.5 acres (4.7 ha) of land at BroadheathBroadheath, Greater Manchester
Broadheath is a suburb of Altrincham in Greater Manchester, England. It is historically part of the county of Cheshire and has a Warrington postcode.At Broadheath's height as an industrial area, the industries supported perhaps 12,000 employees...
, near Altrincham
Altrincham
Altrincham is a market town within the Metropolitan Borough of Trafford, in Greater Manchester, England. It lies on flat ground south of the River Mersey about southwest of Manchester city centre, south-southwest of Sale and east of Warrington...
, from the Earl of Stamford
Earl of Stamford
Earl of Stamford was a title in the Peerage of England. It was created in 1628 for Henry Grey, 2nd Baron Grey of Groby. This Grey family descended through Lord John Grey, of Pirgo, Essex, younger son of Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset, and younger brother of Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk Earl...
. By 1920 the company had relocated all its production to that site, which put it at the heart of a growing concentration of engineering businesses which included H.W. Kearns & Co, George Richards & Co, Luke & Spencer Ltd, Schaffer & Budenberg and Linotype. The single-storey factory covered 3 acres (1.2 ha), affording potential for further expansion. "It forms in fact easily the largest concern of this type in Great Britain", said American Machinist, and was under the charge of H H Asbridge with S H March as general manager. March's business address according to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers' register in 1922 was Albion Street, Gaythorn, Manchester and Fred Garbutt Anderson, AMIMechE was at the Oxford Street address; the address for Asbridge, who was MIMechE, was Broadheath.
In 1920 Charles Churchill & Co Ltd participated in a machine tool exhibition at the Olympia
Olympia, London
Olympia is an exhibition centre and conference centre in West Kensington, on the boundary between The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham, London, W14 8UX, England. It opened in the 19th century and was originally known as the National Agricultural Hall.Opened in 1886,...
exhibition centre in London between 4 and 25 September involving many manufacturers and agents. A tabulated list published at the time showed the company's stationary exhibits comprised machines for boring and drilling, centring, planing, shaping, drop forging and gear hobbing
Hobbing
Hobbing is a machining process for making gears, splines, and sprockets on a hobbing machine, which is a special type of milling machine. The teeth or splines are progressively cut into the workpiece by a series of cuts made by a cutting tool called a hob...
as well as upright, radial and sensitive drills, furnaces, centre and precision lathes, "tool/cutter grinders" and twist-drill machinery. In addition it exhibited running examples of boring and turning mills, machines for broaching, gear cutting, thread milling, horizontal plain milling, universal milling and vertical milling, along with internal, surface and "cylinder/plain/universal" grinders, automatic
Automatic lathe
An automatic lathe is a lathe whose actions are controlled automatically. Although all electronically controlled lathes are automatic, they are usually not called by that name, as explained under "General nomenclature"...
and "capstan/turret"
Turret lathe
The turret lathe is a form of metalworking lathe that is used for repetitive production of duplicate parts, which by the nature of their cutting process are usually interchangeable...
lathes. There are many notices before and subsequent to this of the company's participation in exhibitions reported in American Machinist.
The American Machinist reported in 1922 that The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was "now almost the only specialist in precision grinding machines in Great Britain" and that the uses of the process in the railway industry for the production of axle journals were by that time accepted as best practice and that the usage of it for piston rods and cylinders was being established. A summary-box to the article says that: The Carborundum Company and Pratt & Whitney
Pratt & Whitney
Pratt & Whitney is a U.S.-based aerospace manufacturer with global service operations. It is a subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation . Pratt & Whitney's aircraft engines are widely used in both civil aviation and military aviation. Its headquarters are in East Hartford, Connecticut, USA...
companies are referred to in the article, perhaps demonstrating that Churchill could not operate in isolation despite the "only specialist" status accorded to them early in the article. Supplying grinding machinery to railways, for use in new production and refurbishment of worn mechanisms, became an important new area of operations: post-war government sales of used machinery had flooded the domestic market for machine tools but exports, initially to Indian railways and then elsewhere, went some way towards softening the blow and the Churchill companies, whilst scarred, were able to ride out the worst of the post-war recession. Among the more unusual supplies made was a universal grinding machine used to grind the valves of trumpets for the Salvation Army
Salvation Army
The Salvation Army is a Protestant Christian church known for its thrift stores and charity work. It is an international movement that currently works in over a hundred countries....
.
An office opened at 35 Victoria Street, Bristol, where Lindsay Somerville AMIMechE worked for the company. Advertising indicates that there was an office in Leeds
Leeds
Leeds is a city and metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England. In 2001 Leeds' main urban subdivision had a population of 443,247, while the entire city has a population of 798,800 , making it the 30th-most populous city in the European Union.Leeds is the cultural, financial and commercial...
: the opening probably postdating Bristol possibly during 1918, as Bristol is listed in advertising without mention of the Leeds branch but citing all the other branches previously referred to.
The boards of directors were reconstituted in 1923. John Beresford Stuart Gabriel (b. 1 Aug 1888, Twickenham – d. 7 Jul 1979, Kenilworth), son of J W W Gabriel, had been assistant managing director of Charles Churchill & Co Ltd since 1920 and became joint managing director from 1923. In addition, Arthur Chamberlain (nephew of both Herbert and Walter) resigned his chairmanship of Kynoch Ltd
Kynoch
Kynoch was a manufacturer of ammunition, later incorporated into ICI but remaining as a brand name for sporting cartridges.-History:Kynoch was established in Witton in Birmingham in 1862 by Scottish entrepreneur George Kynoch when he opened a percussion cap factory in Witton. In 1895 he built an...
and became chairman of both the Churchill companies in November, and H H Asbridge became a director of The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd In March 1924 Greville Simpson Maginness followed Chamberlain from Kynoch to become managing director of The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd and in that role he was over the years to expand the export markets for the business.
The emphasis on manufacturing, especially that done under licence, became even more apparent following the imposition of a 20% duty on imported machine tools and reduced demand, both triggered by the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
. There was much innovation and many of these advances were pioneering techniques that are now universal, although from a trading perspective things were dire for the companies. In particular, The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd successfully harnessed the utility of hydraulics
Hydraulics
Hydraulics is a topic in applied science and engineering dealing with the mechanical properties of liquids. Fluid mechanics provides the theoretical foundation for hydraulics, which focuses on the engineering uses of fluid properties. In fluid power, hydraulics is used for the generation, control,...
in many aspects of its machinery and developed a cambering mechanism for grinding rollers used in, for example the paper industry. In 1932 H H Asbridge's "Hydrauto" bearing was introduced: this aided precision positioning of a workpiece with almost no intervening film of lubrication.
J W W Gabriel became sole managing director in 1932. The directors had been for some years working with the Cincinnati Milling Machine Co, of which Gabriel had been an employee before World War I, and in 1933 Cincinnati established an English subsidiary, with Gabriel as chairman. This worked with The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd in a joint manufacturing development project concerning precision grinders.
The machine tool company had a sales agent in Australia by 1932.
Reorganisation
Chamberlain resigned as chairman of Charles Churchill & Co Ltd amid a series of board disagreements in 1934. He took control of The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd and, with Maginness as managing director, in December of that year embarked on a scheme to expand production and replace obsolete machinery, some of it over 20 years old, in an attempt to achieve an average output figure of £40,000 per month. However, there were difficulties in decision-making and wariness as the clouds of war loomed, most notably because of the company's contracts to supply a needy Soviet UnionSoviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
with machine tools, which had done much to assist it out of the depths of depression.
Francis Penny Burnage, son-in-law of Charles, became chairman of Charles Churchill & Co Ltd and Gabriel continued to work for that company. They moved quickly to add manufacturing capacity to what would otherwise have been just a sales organisation: in December 1934 the company took over Cornelius Redman & Sons, renaming it Churchill-Redman Ltd. The facility was used initially to manufacture American machine tools under licence, rather as the machine tool company had started out in the early 1900s. A particularly notable example of its output was the licence granted in 1937 by Jones & Lamson of Springfield
Springfield, Vermont
Springfield is a town in Windsor County, Vermont, United States. The population was 9,373 at the 2010 census.-History:One of the New Hampshire grants, the township was chartered on August 20, 1761 by Governor Benning Wentworth and awarded to Gideon Lyman and 61 others...
, Vermont, for the Fay automatic lathe
Fay automatic lathe
The Fay automatic lathe was an automatic lathe tailored to cutting workpieces that were mounted on centers . It could also do chucking work...
. It was to become a pattern for Gabriel to orchestrate take-overs of other companies but not subsume them: they would have their own management team and retain a separate corporate identity.
Up to this point the Redman investment had not been a notable success: in the decade to 1934, despite an additional capital injection by Churchill, the business had made losses in half of the years and in only one of the other years had it made any more than a modest profit. However, growth was steady after 1934, with profits of £23,000, £38,000, £54,000 and then a large jump to £139,000 in 1938. By 1939 the Redman operation alone employed 300 people, compared to around 30 in 1920. Motor industry expansion assisted in this growth, with Ford
Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company is an American multinational automaker based in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. The automaker was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. In addition to the Ford and Lincoln brands, Ford also owns a small stake in Mazda in Japan and Aston Martin in the UK...
becoming a customer and Gabriel setting up a new machine tool division at Coventry Road, South Yardley
Yardley, Birmingham
Yardley is an area in east Birmingham, England. It is also a council constituency, managed by its own district committee.Birmingham Yardley is a constituency and its Member of Parliament is John Hemming.-Features:...
, Birmingham in 1938 to give easy access for the industry's centre, but rearmament was the most significant factor.
Subsequent history: The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd
Despite manufacturing developments The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd experienced a lean period from 1921 to 1934, being unable to distribute a dividend on its ordinary share capital. The commencement of European rearmament from 1935 is given as the cause of a dramatic turnaround in fortunes. A dividend of 12% was paid in that year; in the following year it was quadrupled and there a special dividend of 125%. An adjustment to the share capital was made and in 1938 the dividend was 40%, with an additional scrip bonus of 33.3%. There was a subsequent fall in the yieldDividend yield
The dividend yield or the dividend-price ratio on a company stock is the company's total annual dividend payments divided by its market capitalization, or the dividend per share, divided by the price per share. It is often expressed as a percentage...
to 30% but in cash terms, allowing for capital restructuring, the payment remained the same.
The economic historians Roger Lloyd-Jones and Myrrdin Lewis have analysed the company's minute books to derive the following information on profits during the inter-war period:
| 1922 | 1923 | 1924 | 1925 | 1926 | 1927 | 1928 | 1929 | 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1933 | 1934 | 1935 | 1936 | 1937 | 1938 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| −24.1 | −32.1 | −9.2 | 3.4 | 8 | 11.3 | 18.4 | 24.2 | 20.1 | 6.5 | 27.3 | 28.6 | 28.9 | 51.4 | 66.7 | 78.3 | 118.8 |
A further example of how innovatory the company could be is apparent in 1936, when it introduced the first electronics for control of precision grinding machines, this being a timing device.
Although there is no evidence of industrial unrest targeted at Churchill's activities until the 1970s, there was concern about the possibility during the inter-war years and the probability of none occurring at all is unlikely. The Economic League
Economic League (UK)
The Economic League was an organisation in the United Kingdom dedicated to opposing what they saw as subversion and action against free enterprise....
was established as a right-wing organisation, consisting mainly of employers, to counteract the rise in communist and socialist propaganda and its associated activities the Great War. Support for the League was particularly strong among the engineering companies in the Manchester area. While workers in the cotton industries, for example, seemed not generally to take a great interest in the Communist Party, left-wing educational groups and shop-floor agitators, those in the engineering industry—perhaps mostly more intelligent—did do so and the apparent threat to capitalism and private wealth was more evident to the employers of such people. Among the League's less publicised, more nefarious activities was that of intelligence gathering and the promotion of systematic blacklisting methods. It co-operated with the police and government, infiltrated left-wing groups and used information from disaffected ex-supporters of such groups in order to obtain information about what it considered to be dangerous elements and tendencies, and disseminated the knowledge obtained, usually in a confidential manner. The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was one of several companies which during 1936–37 was a recipient of information concerning reports of meetings held by anti-capitalist groups, the past and current activities of particular workers and even the names of those specifically blacklisted. Others who received the information at this time included A V Roe, Ferranti
Ferranti
Ferranti or Ferranti International plc was a UK electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century from 1885 until it went bankrupt in 1993. Known primarily for defence electronics, the Company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but ceased trading in 1993.The...
, Metropolitan Vickers and Fairey Aviation
Fairey Aviation
The Fairey Aviation Company Limited was a British aircraft manufacturer of the first half of the 20th century based in Hayes in Greater London and Heaton Chapel and RAF Ringway in Greater Manchester...
.
The company announced post-tax profits in 1949 of £119,909 (tax: £140,500); for 1950 the figures were £164,704 and £201,500, respectively. Total dividend for those years was 30%. By 1952 the net profit was £146,318 (tax: £347,000) and in 1953 the respective figures were £228,583 and £449,000. The dividend for both of these years was 20% but in 1953 there was also a special distribution of 2d/share for capital profits of £17,810 from sale of investments.
The company self-published its history for its golden jubilee year of 1956: The story of The Churchill Machine Tool Co. Ltd.: a history of precision grinding.
In 1959 The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd entered into an agreement to export its products to the US-based company Lapointe Machine Co, a company for which in earlier years it had held the Great Britain agency.
In 1958 the chairman, Sir Greville Maginness, who was also chairman of Roneo Ltd, reported that the two businesses combined had a workforce of at least 1,227 people. He was deputy chairman of Tube Investments (TI) but had handed over the managing director's role at Churchill to E W Honnisette in 1953.
The company was bought by BSA in 1961 at a cost of £8.5 million and became known in legal terms, as BSA-Churchill Machine Tools Ltd. In October 1962 H G Sturgeon, OBE
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...
, previously managing director at de Havilland
De Havilland
The de Havilland Aircraft Company was a British aviation manufacturer founded in 1920 when Airco, of which Geoffrey de Havilland had been chief designer, was sold to BSA by the owner George Holt Thomas. De Havilland then set up a company under his name in September of that year at Stag Lane...
Aircraft, was appointed to the same position at Churchill; he moved on in 1964 to become managing director of the BSA group's Motorcycle division. In 1966 Churchill merged in a joint-venture agreement with Alfred Herbert and became part of Herbert-BSA Ltd, the intention being that the combined concerns would gain benefits from rationalisation and symbiosis of their activities. The general expectation – held also by the Department of Trade and Industry and the stock market – of rewards from the venture did not materialise and BSA sold its entire holding in August 1971, writing off £6.9M as a consequence of the need to have cash in hand to address issues elsewhere in its activities.
The UK economy was contracting by the early 1970s and engineering businesses were rationalising their operations on a scale which raised many comments in Parliament and elsewhere. The ratio of unemployment to vacancies in engineering and the allied trades at June 1970 was more or less 1:1 but by September 1971 it was 5:1, i.e.: five people unemployed in the sector for every job available. In 1972 the Churchill factory in Altrincham was closed, despite industrial action there and at Alfred Herbert's Coventry
Coventry
Coventry is a city and metropolitan borough in the county of West Midlands in England. Coventry is the 9th largest city in England and the 11th largest in the United Kingdom. It is also the second largest city in the English Midlands, after Birmingham, with a population of 300,848, although...
factory to stop this happening. There were representations against the closure from Altrincham council to the government, including a meeting in February 1972 when the council and its delegation of industry experts met the Minister for Trade and Industry and said It was said in Parliament that 1,000 people were made redundant and that in Manchester 500 machine tool fitters were now chasing 10 jobs. Production moved to Coventry as the parent group, Herbert, faced losses of £4M, although Churchill had an order book of £2.25M that could provide sufficient work to keep its 1,100 workforce in jobs through to 1974. Order book value aside, it was also said in Parliament that Churchill had lost over £1M in the previous two years.
The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was put into members' voluntary liquidation on 25 October 1973 with several other companies in the Herbert group. The company's name resurfaced only to be put into voluntary liquidation again on 15 March 1985. The winding-up resolutions on both these occasions occurred at meetings held at Canal Road, Coventry, although the appointed people were different.
A further revival of the company name took place: a company formed as Churchill Atlantic (Manchester) Co Ltd, company registration number 01469025, had been incorporated in 1979 and in 1999 was renamed The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd; two years later, in April 2001, it also failed and went into receivership. There is an Atlantic Street in Broadheath.
In 2011 the company name continued to be used: Retday Ltd, registration number 04186074, was incorporated in March 2001 and changed its name to The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd in June that year. It trades from Atlantic Works in Old Trafford
Old Trafford
Old Trafford commonly refers to two sporting arenas:* Old Trafford, home of Manchester United F.C.* Old Trafford Cricket Ground, home of Lancashire County Cricket ClubOld Trafford can also refer to:...
, Manchester, and it uses the slogan "A century of precision grinding machinery".
Churchill Machine Tools (Coventry) Ltd (company registration 00087969) was liquidated in 1974. The significance of this company is uncertain but the low registration number indicates that the entity, even if not using the particular name, had existed for some considerable time: by the 1950s new companies were being issued numbers around the 00500000 region, and by the 2000s this had become a series starting around 01400000.
Subsequent history: Charles Churchill & Co Ltd
In 1946 Churchill-Redman Ltd bought the Longfield foundry in Halifax to provide extra production capacity and leased a part of the Vickers ArmstrongVickers Armstrong
Vickers-Armstrongs Limited was a British engineering conglomerate formed by the merger of the assets of Vickers Limited and Sir W G Armstrong Whitworth & Company in 1927...
Admiralty works in Scotswood
Benwell and Scotswood
Benwell and Scotswood is an electoral ward of Newcastle upon Tyne in North East England. The ward encompasses the Benwell and Scotswood housing areas, as well as the Newcastle Business Park, which is located on the banks of the River Tyne and houses offices of companies such as British Airways and...
, Newcastle. It was intended that the Newcastle site concern itself with a range of lathes intended for the motor industry, Austin
Austin Motor Company
The Austin Motor Company was a British manufacturer of automobiles. The company was founded in 1905 and merged in 1952 into the British Motor Corporation Ltd. The marque Austin was used until 1987...
and Vauxhall
Vauxhall Motors
Vauxhall Motors is a British automotive company owned by General Motors and headquartered in Luton. It was founded in 1857 as a pump and marine engine manufacturer, began manufacturing cars in 1903 and was acquired by GM in 1925. It has been the second-largest selling car brand in the UK for...
in particular; the Halifax operation would focus on manufacture of Fay lathes which were still being licenced from the US.
The company worked on tight profit margins immediately post-war. A combination of a shortage of skilled labour, outdated batch production methods and increasing costs in materials and payroll were matched by rising overhead, a shortage of materials and issues of absenteeism. The result was that despite a booming order book Redman was struggling to fulfil its commitments to customers and gross margin
Gross margin
Gross margin is the difference between revenue and cost before accounting for certain other costs...
s on lathes were as low as 2.16%. The company was by no means unique in facing these difficulties but there was much urging, agonising and recriminating, by Gabriel and A K McKay, the Redman managing director since at least 1936, regarding how to deal with the issues. Some of this, perhaps inevitably as the war-time command economy reverted, was aimed at the government.
Things did improve for Churchill-Redman and the sales rose dramatically from £200,000 in 1946 to £1M by 1955. This was in part because of innovative product development at the Halifax site which ultimately produced the CR P5 and P6 profiling lathes: the conclusion of this development is described by Jeremy as being a range of "fully automatic, multi-tool and profiling lathes. A lathe with an automatic feed and delivery heralded an automatic machine tool production line." The expansion of the motor vehicle industry once again was a significant factor, driving demand for machine tools much as the bicycling boom of the 1890s had done. In 1957 the Scotswood operation moved across the River Tyne
River Tyne
The River Tyne is a river in North East England in Great Britain. It is formed by the confluence of two rivers: the North Tyne and the South Tyne. These two rivers converge at Warden Rock near Hexham in Northumberland at a place dubbed 'The Meeting of the Waters'.The North Tyne rises on the...
to Blaydon
Blaydon
Blaydon-on-Tyne is a town in the North East of England in the Metropolitan Borough of Gateshead. The former urban district, however, extends much further, its fourteen and a half square miles constituting the largest administrative district, after Newcastle, on Tyneside...
, where a factory was built especially for the manufacturing purpose intended. Among other products from that site was the Vertimax lathe, which used a vertical spindle and was of interest to motor vehicle manufacturers. This particular design originated from James Anderson, a garage owner in Glasgow, during the war and whose business was brought into the Churchill group of companies. Churchill Gear Machines Ltd was part of the group, having been established in Blaydon since 1956: the cause of its origin and the nature of its products is uncertain.
In 1950 Charles Churchill & Co Ltd, the parent company, moved its offices from London to Birmingham and in 1955 increased its share capital to £1.26M. By the financial year ending March 1962 it reported a group net profit of £575,352 and a dividend of 22.5%. Exports were up 26% and there were hopes of the sector eventually amounting to 40% of total output. Fixed assets had increased significantly: the business had taken over Newcast Foundries Ltd, Halifax-based heavy lathe manufacturer Denhams Engineering Co Ltd and Churchill-Milnes; it had spent £2M of its own resources building extensions and plant improvements to more than double its manufacturing capability compared to that in 1951. Information regarding Churchill-Milnes is lacking but a business called Henry Milnes manufactured lathes in the Bradford
Bradford
Bradford lies at the heart of the City of Bradford, a metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, in Northern England. It is situated in the foothills of the Pennines, west of Leeds, and northwest of Wakefield. Bradford became a municipal borough in 1847, and received its charter as a city in 1897...
area for many years and it may be that this was the target of a take-over.
A new company, Charles H. Churchill Ltd, was established in 1962 to act as a group-wide selling organisation. Charles Churchill (Canada) Ltd traded from Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
as a sales agency for machine tools in 1953 and by 1959 had at least one additional outlet in the country.
In a diversification from the machine tool sector, the company had a subsidiary business manufacturing glass-fibre boats. For this purpose there was an application for an Industrial Development Certificate to build premises at Tiverton in 1961. When this certificate was refused, on grounds that were somewhat contentious, the company was encouraged to seek alternative sites in Devon, including at Ilfracombe
Ilfracombe
Ilfracombe is a seaside resort and civil parish on the North Devon coast, England with a small harbour, surrounded by cliffs.The parish stretches along the coast from 'The Coastguard Cottages' in Hele Bay toward the east and 4 miles along The Torrs to Lee Bay toward the west...
, but instead opted to take a site on the Isle of Wight
Isle of Wight
The Isle of Wight is a county and the largest island of England, located in the English Channel, on average about 2–4 miles off the south coast of the county of Hampshire, separated from the mainland by a strait called the Solent...
so that it could satisfy export orders. Ralph Gabriel, son of J B S Gabriel, had become managing director by 1964, with J B S Gabriel as chairman. Ralph Gabriel loaned his 34 feet (10.4 m) sloop, the Archiv, to the Ocean Youth Trust in 1968.
J B S Gabriel announced a 14% fall in net profits for the company for the trading period 1963–64 (net £505,000; tax £419,000; dividend retained at 22.5%). Despite this the group was among the biggest machine tool organisations in the world, employing 2,000 people and having sales of £14M.
The company celebrated its centenary by commissioning a book detailing its history from 1865 to 1965.
Faced with increasing competition from Japan and elsewhere, and the need to cut labour costs and invest heavily in order to counteract this, in 1966 J B S Gabriel recommended the group be taken over. TI
TI Group
TI Group plc was a holding company for specialised engineering companies. It was based in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. It was registered as Tube Investments in 1919, combining the seamless steel tube businesses of Tubes Ltd, New Credenda Tube , Simplex and Accles & Pollock. In 1928 Reynolds Tube joined...
made an offer to buy the company and its subsidiaries for the sterling equivalent of US$30M and in 1967, as a TI company and with the Gabriels no longer involved, it announced an export order of gear processing machine tools to the USSR worth £1.8M.
In 1968 the Applied Research and Development Division of the company based in Daventry
Daventry
Daventry is a market town in Northamptonshire, England, with a population of 22,367 .-Geography:The town is also the administrative centre of the larger Daventry district, which has a population of 71,838. The town is 77 miles north-northwest of London, 13.9 miles west of Northampton and 10.2...
, demonstrated the first use of control tapes prepared by computer to control a lathe, a significant milestone in the development of CNC. This project was developed in conjunction with IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
.
In 1972 all production at Churchill-Redman in Halifax moved to Blaydon with the consequent loss of 350 jobs. This formed a part of TI's many rationalisation measures taken in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the closure was explained as being due to the desire for greater productivity and a recognition of the low sales generated at the site. A Churchill factory at Bedford which had been operating since 1967 was closed at this time, .
| Charles Churchill Ltd | Charles H Churchill Ltd | C Redman & Co Ltd | Denham Patent Bottling Machine Co Ltd | Churchill Gear Machines Ltd | Churchill Vertimax | Churchill Milnes | Newcast Foundries Ltd | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Co. Reg. No. | 00563431 | 00738913 | 00563725 | 00061504 | SC029046 | |||
| Incorporated | 26 March 1956 | 25 October 1962 | 29 March 1956 | |||||
| * | Churchill-Redman Ltd | Denhams Engineering Co Ltd | ||||||
| * | Churchill-Denhams Ltd | |||||||
| * | Charles Churchill (Bedford) Ltd | |||||||
| * | TI Matrix Tools Ltd | |||||||
| 1977 | TI Churchill Ltd | |||||||
| 1978 | TI Machine Tools Ltd | Churchill Gear Machines Ltd | ||||||
| 1983 | TI Herbert-Churchill Ltd | TI Churchill Ltd | ||||||
| 1984 | Churchill-Vertimax | |||||||
| 1985 | TI Machine Tools Ltd | TI Herbert-Churchill Ltd | ||||||
| 1987(a) | Matrix Churchill Ltd | Alfred Herbert (Fletchamstead) Ltd | Herbert Churchill Ltd | |||||
| 1987(b) | Alfred Herbert (Broadway) Ltd | |||||||
| 1988 | Alfred Herbert (Edgbaston) Ltd | |||||||
| 1992 | MC Realisations (Birmingham) Ltd | Newcast Foundries Ltd |
Companies House has archived its information relating to the name changes asterisked and for the companies for which no detail is provided. It is notable that two of the companies listed—C Redman/Churchill-Redman and Charles Churchill Ltd (which has also lost its "and Co")—both acquired new registration numbers in March 1956.
Recognition
Charles Churchill & Co Ltd was awarded The Queen's Award to IndustryQueen's Awards for Enterprise
The Queen's Awards for Enterprise is an awards programme for British businesses and other organizations who excel at international trade, innovation or sustainable development. They are the highest official UK awards for British businesses...
"for export achievement; and for technological innovation in machine tools by the Applied Research and Development Division, Churchill Gear Machines Ltd., and Churchill-Redman Ltd." in 1966.
The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd was awarded The Queen's Award to Industry "for export achievement and for technological innovation in air bearings in precision grinding machines" in 1969. Les Roberts, Sales Director between 1968 and 1971, wrote a highly critical account of the actions of the Alfred Herbert board of directors and their contribution by a wide range of decisions to the demise of the company. His comments include that the export award was a dubious pleasure:
Among more obviously serious matters, Roberts pointed to the Herbert board's imposition of a rule that shop-floor employees, mostly if not all male, must wear pink uniforms as being typical of its distance from reality, fad-ism and tendency to make mountains of molehills.
Notable staff
The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd staff included some distinguished names: Herbert (Harry) Hales Asbridge (d. 12 Jul 1946) is credited with numerous patents, assigned to the company, during his time working there and had been awarded the MBE for industry-related services during the period 1914–18.Sir Greville Simpson Maginness (b. 1888 – d. 23 Nov 1961), Kt. 1947, KBE 1953 was a lead delegate for the employers at the first Conference of the ILO
International Labour Organization
The International Labour Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations that deals with labour issues pertaining to international labour standards. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. Its secretariat — the people who are employed by it throughout the world — is known as the...
in Washington (1919), President of the Engineering and Allied Employers' National Federation (1944–46), President of the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce from 1938 until his death and a member of the Engineering Advisory Council, Ministry of Supply (1946–61); he became President of the British Employers' Confederation, a forerunner of the CBI
Confederation of British Industry
The Confederation of British Industry is a British not for profit organisation incorporated by Royal charter which promotes the interests of its members, some 200,000 British businesses, a figure which includes some 80% of FTSE 100 companies and around 50% of FTSE 350 companies.-Role:The CBI works...
, in December 1946, when he was chairman and managing director of The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd.
The artist Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton (artist)
Richard William Hamilton, CH was a British painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the...
was a designer at Churchill Gear Machines Ltd between 1956 and 1962. Some of his work is included in the collection of the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
.