History of Trafford Park – Part I

In many ways, the history of Trafford Park is the economic history of the UK. The Park began as an audacious example of late Victorian entrepreneurship and has seen its fortunes rise and fall through the cycle of growth and recession that characterised economic progress through two world wars and the succession of global financial crises that have followed. 

Sources.

While social and economic histories cannot ever be properly disentangled, they are quite often told separately. This is true of the history of Trafford Park. The published sources can be divided between, on the one hand, the copious annual reports and accounts of businesses on the estate; the mass of marketing and advertising material they produced and the endless directories and newsletters of trade associations and industry bodies and, on the other, the much thinner, fragmentary record of the lived experience of the people who worked and lived there.

Much of the former have been compressed into a meticulously detailed book by local historian, Robert Nicholls, ‘Trafford Park: The First Hundred Years’, published in 1996. The more recent economic history of the Park has to be traced through official documents produced as part of local and regional planning processes.

The social history of the Park is confined to a slim volume of reminiscences collected as part of a project undertaken by Manchester Polytechnic in 1979 and an even slimmer volume of photographs, sketches and creative writing produced for an exhibition of a ‘day in the life of Trafford Park’ in 1992 as well as the small collection of photographs and artefacts at the Trafford Park Heritage Centre.

In writing this post and the next, I have tried to redress the balance that the weight of published material would otherwise impose but without a great deal of confidence in the result, given the familiar absence of the common voice from orthodox histories.

‘Foresight, energy and ability …’

Trafford Park Industrial Estate occupies almost exactly the area once occupied by the house, grounds and deer park of the de Trafford family who had settled there in the 1670s. While the family were complicit in the building of the Bridgewater Canal, from 1769 onwards, probably because it helped to drain the boggy areas to the south and east of the park, they strongly opposed the building of the Manchester Ship Canal along the northern boundary of the estate. First proposed in 1882, Sir Humphrey de Trafford feared that the Canal “would alter the natural boundary of his park and bring polluted water close to his residence” (Nicholls, 1996 p. 12). Sir Humphrey was able to ring some concessions as the necessary legislation was passed but from the time that work commenced on the Ship Canal in 1886, the family seat was encircled and made vulnerable to the spread of industrialisation that had already transformed Manchester and Trafford.

The family tried to sell the Park almost immediately, offering it to Manchester Corporation for recreational use, but the Corporation hesitated and on 23^rd June 1896, the Park was sold, for £360,000, to Ernest Terah Hooley, a speculator and financier. Hooley, who claimed that he had only heard of the estate a few days before he bought it, sight unseen, expressed that his intention in purchasing the Park was to make it “a centre for the cycle and rubber trade” (Nicholls, 1996 p. 20).

Hooley is an extraordinary example of Victorian commercial derring-do. He was a multi-millionaire when he bought Trafford Park, holding the patents for Dunlop’s cycle tyres amongst many other interests – including being the largest sheep owner in England. He was declared bankrupt just two years later (and again in 1923 and 1939) and was convicted of fraud in 1910 and 1924, being sent to prison on both occasions. In truth, he played a limited part in the history of the Park but it was his original purchase and perhaps more importantly, his recruitment of Marshall Stevens as Managing Director of Hooley’s fledgling Trafford Park Estates Ltd that made future developments possible. It is on Stevens’ memorial, not Hooley’s, that the reference to the ‘foresight, energy and ability’ that gave rise to Trafford Park is inscribed.

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Stevens had become the Manchester Ship Canal’s first General Manager and had seen its fortunes rise, from a difficult start, partly by excluding trades unions and the use of piece work rather than fixed wages so that costs were kept low and, crucially, lower than those operating at the other end of the Canal in Liverpool. 

Stevens’ family had a background in shipping and international trade. He had visited the USA while employed by the Canal Company and this experience was probably important in securing the arrival of the American Westinghouse company which started to build factory premises (1900-1902) for what was to be called The British Westinghouse Electric Company and later Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Co. (and later still, Metrovick). 

A potential recruit recalled her first impressions of the Westinghouse factory in 1918;

Well, the core shop consisted of girls in funny green crossover overalls pushing barrows of sand in which moulds were pressed, pushing them over to the foundries where the men were stripped to the waist feeding these foundries … And I don’t think I could have pushed the barrow. I was very tiny; and the foreman who, to me, looked about six feet tall … put his hands on his hips and looked at me and he said, “My God, are you fourteen? My God. All right, start Monday.” I said, “No, I’m not starting anytime, I’m going”. I grabbed me green card and ran for my life. It frightened me to death. It looked terrible, it looked like Hell: all those fires, these men stripped, those women pushing those barrows. It looked dreadful.

(Russell and Walker, 1979: unpaginated).

A popular term for Westinghouse locally was ‘the twisting-house’ because of the exploitation workers experienced (Russell and Walker, 1979, unpaginated).

The enormous Westinghouse factory had been built with ‘American building methods, designers and attitudes’ (Nicholls, 1996, p. 38) which had been carried into production methods and working conditions. These were enthusiastically reinforced by the Ford motor company which opened its first British plant in 1911, on Westinghouse Road, where it introduced the first production line into the UK. As in the US, workers were uniformed and trade union membership was forbidden.

The American analogy was continued in the accounts of Ford workers who described the experience as ‘worse than Alcatraz’ (McIntosh, 1995, cited in Cliff and Southern, 2003, p. 44);

It seems when you got in in the morning, at ten to eight or whenever it was, they put all the clothes up on a rack and up in the air they’d go – all your clothes went up in the air till five to twelve … so that you couldn’t go interfering in your pockets – matches or anything like that … the coats and waistcoats went up in the air. Then they were lowered down at five to twelve for dinner hour … Security men there, they used to call them commissionaires in those days, taken everything off them.

(Russell and Walker, 1997: unpaginated.)

At this point, as for much of its history, Trafford Park Estates Ltd. had largely sold land to developers and itself concentrated on building infrastructure (especially railways) rather than acting as landlords or developers in their own right. This extended to the building of 700 houses (‘The Village’), close to the Westinghouse factory between 1900 and 1903 – with the addition of schools, shops etc. shortly afterwards. 

Intended for the use of workers on the Estate, these too bore the imprint of American industrial culture, being built in a grid pattern divided between 4 Avenues, named First – Fourth Avenue that ran North to South and 12 Streets, First to Twelfth Street, that ran East to West. Far from being another Port Sunlight, the houses were similar to the acres of terraced housing in the other side of the Ship Canal with social status carefully preserved;

Then there were the ones in Fourth Avenue which we called the villas, they were pretty big. They were beautiful. They were nice houses … The doctor used to live there. We used to have the doctors, the vicar and all those people – the priest before the house was built for him .. They were a bit uppish in some ways … they had a tennis court of their own … it gave them a bit of status, you see, having the tennis court that belonged to them four houses.

(Source: Russell and Walker, 1979: unpaginated)

Differential access to recreational facilities in newly built estates is not a new phenomenon. 

Although Fords moved to Dagenham in 1931, the American influence on the Park remained such that by 1933, there were over 300 American companies based there with Harley Davidson arriving in 1916 and Kelloggs in 1938.

War and the Park

Trafford Park Estate Ltd. returned its first profit in 1909 and, with the advent of the First World War, the Park was enlarged considerably to meet the demands of the Ministry of Munitions for manufacture and especially for storage facilities where the Company invested in the development of innovative means of mechanical handling. 

As elsewhere, the number and proportion of women in the workforce grew, from 620 to 2,500 in Westinghouse alone. The constant churn in the workforce caused by enlistment into the armed services and the introduction of women further eroded what were historically poor industrial relations at Westinghouse, still the Estate’s largest employer. This led to the establishment of probably the first ‘works committee’ in the UK in February 1917. Its object was “to promote a close feeling between the management and all employees, and to work in conjunction for the mutual benefit of all”. In October of the same year, a ‘staff committee’ was established “to represent staff employees of the Company and to work in furtherance of their interests and those of the management”.

After the War, there was further investment in the Village with more substantial schools, playgrounds, a library and a health clinic being built. These developments may have been in the spirit of David Lloyd George, Manchester’s most famous Welshman, and his call to make ‘Britain a fit country for heroes to live in’ (David Lloyd George, 23^rd November, 1918), although the Company had actively campaigned against Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909.

The diversity of businesses on the Park and its sheer scale limited the effects of the depression of 1926 on those who lived and worked there, although many did not escape its effects;

Well, by jove, what a waste: I know that man over there [in the queue at the Labour Exchange in Westinghouse Road], he was a, he was a good turner and a good worker; there’s a fella over there, he was a moulder … And I thought, “Here we are, and I’m sat here and I can do my job, and I know I can do my job because the firm used to send me away on repairs all over the country.” … And then when I looked round and seen these people – by jove what a waste. … Ooh, what a waste; what a waste of talent.”

(Source: Russell and Walker, 1979: unpaginated)

Families in the Village looked out, not only for those who walked from as far away as Burnley looking for work but also for their own;

Going back to the Depression years in the Park … There were probably one or two handy like, would knock a few things together – toys or something … not only that, they would go around odd-jobbing, you know, they’d whitewash your unit for you, cut your hedge, things like that, or do a bit of decorating, or your back yard … I remember John Bowens doing our house and we put papers over the windows, ‘cos he was on the dole.”

(Source: Russell and Walker, 1979: unpaginated)

In 1936 Marshall Stevens died to be succeeded by his son, Colonel T.H.G (‘Harry’) Stevens who had worked for Trafford Park Estates Ltd since 1920.

The Second World War saw the high point of employment on the Park which rose from 50,000 to 75,000 between 1939 and 1940. Heavy and light engineering factories, oil storage and chemical processing plants as well as its immense warehousing facilities ensured that the Park was able to play a significant part in the UK’s ‘war effort’; the Park even managed to supply a Home Guard contingent of 4160 men. Production of aircraft, munitions, and building materials was only briefly interrupted by the extensive damaged caused during the Manchester Blitz of December 1940.

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After the War, in 1947, Colonel Stevens, in a booklet produced to mark the 50^th anniversary of the Park wrote,

Whilst the markets of the world remain ‘sellers markets’ with buyers willing to give any price for goods, the situation of the factory is of little importance, but the time approaches when our factories will have to compete with factories more efficiently sited and employing cheap and efficient labour in China, India, Africa and elsewhere.

(Quoted in Nicholls, 1999 p. 106)

As the globalisation of trade and capital began to take shape, it would seem that Colonel Stevens had inherited his father’s foresight. 

References:

Bond, S. A., “The Impact of Enterprise Zone Tax Incentives on Local Property Markets in England: Who Actually Benefits?” Journal of Property Research 30.1 (2013): 67-86.

Chaudhary, N. and Potter, N., “Evaluation of the Local Employment Impacts of Enterprise Zones: A Critique.” Urban Studies 56.10 (2019): 2112-159. Web.

Cliff, K. and Southern, P. (2003) Images of England: Trafford Park. Tempus Publishing Ltd., Stroud, UK.

Frey, C.B. (2019) The Technology Trap; Capital, Labor and Power in the Age of Automation. Princeton University Press, Oxford and Princeton, USA.

Nicholls, R. (1996) Trafford Park: The First Hundred Years. Butler and Tanner Ltd., London and Frome.

Russell, D. and Walker, G. (Eds.) (1979) Trafford Park 1896-1939, Manchester Studies, Manchester Polytechnic, UK.

Trafford Park Arts (1992) Third Avenue: Dawn ’til Dusk. Trafford Park Arts, St. Anthony’s Centre, Trafford Park, UK.