Harvey's perforations and the move to Margate

 

You must be thinking that I will never finish writing articles about Harveys. This will be article No.4 and I’ve never written up one of these local companies before which has run to 4 episodes.  However I thought I needed to do one more article to say what happened to them and their huge factory in the Woolwich Road. Although trying to work out where they went and what happened to them has been a bit of a marathon.

I remain impressed by Harveys and the scale of their operation. In the 1950s they were clearly still bringing out some very amazing and important things. Last week I ended with the GPO’s Antenna No1. at Goonhilly receiving station – and that huge parabolic bowl is a very impressive thing to manufacture and on such a prestige project. Also there were also these huge distillation columns which were made for oil refineries all over the world.  I am certain that I don’t know about more than a tiny fraction of what they produced –most of what I do know comes from their advertisements and some reminiscences from former workers.  There was probably much more.

I’ve looked at some of the things which they advertised later in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of it is just day-to-day things. For example there are a number of advertisements for devices for dust collection.  They say that ‘air pollution is at last recognised as a deadly serious problem’ and without clean air mankind cannot survive … more stringent laws are emerging … industry is the target’.  They have a range of devices from Torit - this is an American system which Harvey either developed or bought into for a comprehensive range of the finest dust collectors in this country’.

For instance they supplied ‘cabinet type dust collectors which filter all dust from grinding wheels and metal dust which includes sub micron size particles’. These cabinets were portable and didn’t need ‘long duct runs’. Harveys say that they would do away with the need for masks ‘as the dust is prevented from reaching their breathing areas’.  They also advertised special ‘down draft benches … which provide dust collection for polishing, sanding, grinding and snagging’. They said that with this system ‘the bench, not the worker, inhales the dust’.  The advertising leaflet I had about included a handy little packet of sample dust to show what they could collect. They also made Cyclone dust collectors ‘for chippings, shavings and sawdust’.  Then there were swing arc fume exhausters which protected workers from ‘toxic fumes, smoke and gases which arise during welding’ and thus protect from ‘lead poisoning, zinc chills and other respiratory diseases’.  Along with this work was a parallel production of fork lift trucks.

They also continued to make large and impressive items.  I have a note that in 1963, for instance, they made a 500 ton stroking press. It had a stroke of 3 ft 6ins and they had the facilities to make it all in their own workshops. There was a 100ft column for the Mobil Oil Refinery at Coryton and 70 ton boiler drums for the Komati Power Station in South Africa. In advertisements at around the same time they describe how they made all the components and various items needed to run and operate tenpin bowling alleys.  

The items including perforations continued to be made and another advert from the 1960s describes equipment and coverings provided for the Royal Tehran Hilton Hotel where they installed metal perforated panels and anodised aluminium (pattern no.954) to drawer fronts and luggage areas in the bedrooms; to the counter front of the reception area, cloak rooms and in passenger lift doors.  They advertise that they worked in sheet and plate steel and wire making heavy equipment for the petroleum and chemical industries and at the other extreme woven wire mesh ‘with 40,000 apertures to the square inch’.

They state how much they are looking forward to joining the Common Market for increased business. 

Every year they processed 25,000 tons of steel plate plus 700 tons of zinc, copper, brass and other nonferrous metals. They were however gradually producing more and more office furniture and equipped the whole new Daily Mirror building in London with it .

Throughout the 1950s there are constant advertisements for a huge numbers of workers needed in Greenwich. Many of these are posted in Irish local papers and particularly in Belfast. They include information on the pension scheme and the sports club as attractions.  

Harveys ran apprenticeship schemes. An ex apprentice described joining the firm as a technician apprentice in 1968 ‘ when I was sixteen. I spent my fist year in the 3rd floor training school along with around 50 other apprentices learning the basic engineering disciplines such as fitting, turning, welding, sheet metalwork, electrician, etc and remember doing the first aid course.  The next 4 years were a tour of the various departments such as Maintenance, Sheet metal (light cons), heavy cons, APW tool room, APW drawing office, office furniture production control and office furniture Drawing office, heavy cons drawing office and many more - it was a wonderful learning experience’.

However things were changing with the death of Sydney Harvey in 1958 and the passing of the works to his ‘whizz kid’ son.  By 1969 all was not well at Charlton with angry unions and the department dealing with the largest items came to a standstill and was closed down. 350 workers lost their jobs and then another 150 when the fusion welding plant closed. 

The social life of dinners, dances and sports continued but in 1974 the sports club ground at Hervey Road Kidbrook was sold to the Greater London Council.  They who wanted it for a school – a school which has never ever been built, the use of the ground being raised at regular intervals ever since.  It still remains empty.  The back part of the Charlton site was sold to enable the Council to build what is now Bugsbys Way. In 1976 another 200 jobs were cut.

 Within the area of the works was a small subsidiary company called Libraco which made oak helving for libraries.  It had originated n Wandsworth and come to a site on Lombard Wall in 1928.  While the Greenwich Harvey site began to be run down Libraco remained. A comment to the GIHS blog site says “when it all closed Libraco was left there almost all on its own. They relocated the Libraco offices and factory into one of the buildings next to the main entrance a couple of floors up, it was really eerily strange walking through the empty factories which used to be full of people, machines, noise and smells”.

A new facility in Margate had been opened in 1956.  This was on the Westwood Industrial Estate on the Ramsgate Road and originally to be used for assembling office furniture. It was eventually to take on much of the role of the Greenwich works and to become the main site for the Harvey part of what became Harvey Butterfield.

 

In 1970 Harveys began to discuss a merger with WP Butterfield a Yorkshire maker of tanks, dustbins amd refuse vehicles.  The two companies had the same chairman and they jointly owned Harcostar which still makes barrels and dustbins. They became Butterfield Harvey.

Harvey Butterfields gradually began to run down the Greenwich plant and it eventually closed in 1977.  Margate continued at work and but closed in 2003.  There are still some remains of it at Westwood and we are told that it ‘was cut through the middle to create an access roadway and divided into small individual units by the present owners. The original loading bay end of the factory is currently used.’

I am well aware that a lot of Harvey’s products are still made and that various parts of the business were sold on.  Harcostar, for instance, very much exists although who actually owns it now is more than I can make out from their web site.  The office furniture business was sold to a firm on the Continent, and no doubt much else.  It is very easy to see the history of the firm in a conventional ‘clogs to clogs in three generations’ format.  It had charismatic hard working founder, his son who understood his father’s ideas and worked to copy them, and a grandson who wanted to change things and upset everyone in the process.  That old world of the early 20th century factory - working to a common purpose, bolstered by an active and communal social life, young men educated to have a pride in the firm and what they did, homes near the factory, family parties and a sense of interest and welfare  and, crucially, pride in the products of the works.  All gone.

But Harvey’s did some amazing things and some big prestige projects. All of which seem to have been forgotten which adds to the belief that nothing was ever produced in Greenwich which is seen as ‘London and south east’ and thus not industrial.

With reference to Dodging the Column which I wrote up last week. I got an email from Richard who had seen my piece – and he says:.

“I remember in the 1950s seeing (what could have been) a fractionating column being transported along Charlton Park Lane ready to turn left into Shooters Hill Road.  It was possibly 60 ft long, and a couple of the spun heads as shown in your photograph would have fitted on the ends.  It was on two steerable multi-wheel bogies, and towed by two large Thorneycroft tractors, with a third at the rear.  (This was long before the days of automation, and the drivers of the tractors had to synchronise their gear changing - not easy with crash gear boxes).  I understood that the tractors and bogies were Harvey's, which would imply they had quite a large business in such products; but they may have hired them for the job.   Such a movement would involve road closures, and would have been timed to limit disruption - though there was little traffic then.  And word would get out to people who might wish to see it.  There is a wide stretch of pavement at the end of Charlton Park Lane, which the column would oversail as the corner was negotiated.  When they got to the end of Charlton Park Lane they found that since a similar previous exercise Woolwich Council had put in new lamp posts, with one right by the corner.  There was considerable delay until it was taken down.

Well – there you go as they say