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The history of the raincoat |
Extract from David Hunt: The History of Leyland and District, Preston, 1990, Carnegie Press, ISBN 0 948789 48 4 pp.109-114.
A trade directory of 1851 records 'William Smith, Manufacturer of waterproof cloths, piping and washers, Golden Hill Works', and in 1861 'James Quin, India Rubber Manufacturer, Golden Hill Lane.' By 1873 this firm was recorded as 'James Quin and Co Ltd (India Rubber, hose pipes, gutta percha etc) Golden Hill Lane. lt is tempting to see the early attempts to weave waterproof cloth and hosepipe as a local outgrowth from the failing handloom weaving industry which had its last local stronghold along Golden Hill Lane.
The increasing importance for local employment of the rubber industry, in which the town thus had an early lead, is clearly apparent from the census returns. Mr William Smith having recently died in 1861, his widow is listed as 'Hosepipe Manufacturer, Golden Hill Lane' with Robert Banister listed as works manager. Ralph Higham gave his occupation as 'hose-pipe weaver, and by 1871 many people in the area were employed in the industry.
James Quin (then aged forty-two) lived at Laburnum Cottage, and gave his occupation as 'India Rubber Manufacturer employing eighty-two men, five boys, twenty-six women', whilst in Peel Terrace, Cowling Lane, Mary Keeling and her four brothers and sisters are all listed as 'India Rubber Makers'. An early visitor to their factory was a certain Mr Mackintosh.
In 1898 the Leyland Rubber Co. amalgamated with Stanley Morrison and Co. of London and with the Birmingham Rubber Co. to form the Leyland and Birmingham Rubber Co. In 1906 the Palatine Heel Co. of Preston and James T Gaudie and Co. of Glasgow were incorporated in the firm. In the 1930s two employees, John King (aged seventy-two) and Kohen Cheetham (seventy-seven) were both still working for the firm and recalled:
Their recollections go back to 1872, when the works was then under the name of James Quin and Co. and was composed only of an old workhouse building. F1ax-woven hose pipes, a small quantity of packing and and the manufacture of stack and cart covers kept about fifty men occupied very busily during the summer, although during the winter-time work-was not quite so plentiful. … No water was laid on to the works and had to be brought on to the works by means of a tub slung between the shafts of a cart, which tub was filled up from a nearby brook. .. In those days, rubber arrived only from Brazil and in balls. When these were cut open it was not a surprising thing to find stones and bits of old iron in the centre:the natives would put these in the centre of the balls before wrapping them in order to increase the weight. In many cases livestock was included in the caes of rubber, and upon one occasion one of the men was bitten so badly by a centipede as to necessitate the amputation of his arm. Snakes were also a common find… Work used to start at six o'clock in the morning and finish at six o'clock every night excepting Friday, when they finished at eight o'clock. At two o'clock on Saturday afternoon our works finished for the week.
Leyland in those days was quite a small place, and probably deserved its old title - The Garden of Lancashire. One or two cotton factories only were in Leyland and the people were rather amazed at a rubber works starting in their midst. Rubber being quite unknown to them and quite an impossible sort of material with which to work. Hose makers came up from Tottenham … and these commenced the manufacture of rubber hose… When the Zulu War was on a great number of rubber pontoons of eighteen to twenty feet long were made for use of the army. During the Russo-Japanese War we made an immense quantity of rubber pipes, 21/2 feet and 3 feet diameter and 20 or 30 feet long . What these were used for neither John nor Bob can remember.
One of the buildings - the hose room - was built of very rough stone obtained from nearby quarries, and the roof was not entirely waterproof.In heavy rain the men had to be very careful and move themselves and their work across the room to places where water did not drip through. Later in the history of the firm they tell of the days when Mr James T. Goodie came to Leylandand of the meeting that was held in the hose room, when all the employees attended and Mr Goodie saidI have invested £30,000 in this Company and I am determined to make it go.
As John King said 'It has never looked back since then'.
James Quins' [sic] firm was the largest of a number of rubber companies in the town, which by 1922 included J.E. Baxter and Co. Ltd, the Victory Rubber Co. ('Manufacturers of rubber heels, soles and tips, rubber tilings and erasers') and Wood-Milne Ltd ('Manufacturer of rubber heels, soles and tips, pneumatic tyres and inner tubes for motor car and motor cycles, solid band tyres for motor vehicles, belts for motor cycles, footpumps for motor tyres, golf balls and all classes of manufactured goods'), who claimed to have been first to apply rubber to footwear manufacture. By 1932 Baxters had opened a respirator assembly factory, and the British Goodrich Rubber Co was also established, on Golden Hill Lane. In 1924 Wood Milne Ltd was acquired by an American company, which in 1934 became the British Tyre and Rubber Co, becoming BTR Industries Ltd. in 1957.
The industry also acted as a spur to the local engineering industry.
On his return from America in 1885 James Iddon was appointed chief engineer
to the then Leyland Rubber Co., and estahlished the firm of Iddon Bros in 1888. In
a directory of 1892 they are listed as 'Machine Makers and Engineers" for
rubber manufacturers' [sic]. Throughout the inter-war period L and B pioneered
the application of rubber to a wide range of uses, from bathing caps and hot-water
bottles to enormous conveyor belts used in mining industries all over the world
. One important contribution to the popular culture of the 1930s was their
extensive development of multi-coloured floorings for public buildings,
theatres and cinemas and, most spectacularly of all, the great ocean
liners of Ihe day, becoming a fundamental feature of the art-deco style
of the period.
A recent computer-based analysis of Ihe 1881 census returns has clearly identified
the expansion of the rubber industry as a major process in the town's evolution
at this time. Yet the process of urbanisation was still restricted, for as
late as 1912, when the second six-inch Ordnance Survey map of the district
was published, the rubber industry, Brook Mill and Leyland Motor Ltd occupied
a rough rectangle formed by Hough Lane, School Lane, Golden Hill Lane
and the railway. This industrial zone was thus quite separate from the tradilional
centre of the town around the cross, and the outlying mill communities
of Earnshaw Bridge and Seven Stars.
The old village and the emerging industrial zone were linked by Water Street; which still ran between broad fields to the east and west. To the west of the village the bleachworks was surrounded by fields These developments thus rather passed the old village by, enabling it to survive relatively unscathed into the later-twentieth century and the attention of the town planners.
Extract from David Hunt: The History of Leyland and District, Preston, 1990, Carnegie Press, ISBN 0 948789 48 4 pp.109-114.
