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Kynoch's I C I 1800s - 1920s

Vivienne14 said:
Two more 1918 'Win the War' photos. Wondering what the letters 'O' and 'F' represent in the second photo. View attachment 86371View attachment 86372
Click to expand...

The "O F" almost certainly stands for Ordnance Factory. I don't think that this was an official title but the Company's ammunition manufacturing activities were at that time devoted wholly to Government contracts. And so the O.F. probably reflects that and also the fact that Government factories were referred to as Royal Ordnance Factories. In the years leading up to the Great War the Company had regularly moaned that they had a large facility at the disposal of the Government for this purpose but only received irregular contracts whilst significant investment was being made in the Government's own Ordnance Factories.

However patience was rewarded and the output between 1914 and 1918 was huge. Typically a WEEK'S output would be something like this:
25,000,000 rounds of rifle ammunition
700,000 rounds of revolver ammunition
5,000,000 cartridge clips
110,000 cartridge cases for field guns

The image appears to show a wide range of the above cartridge cases. Interesting that the Union flag is accompanied by the Stars & Stripes; but no French flag.

Anniversaries..........

The photograph was taken not too long after the 50th anniversary of the day in 1862 on which a young George Kynoch trundled a shed out of central Birmingham on rollers to the hamlet of Witton, there to establish his percussion cap Factory.

The move had been forced on him by the authorities becoming fed up with the regular explosions which occurred at percussion cap factories in the centre of Birmingham. These sometimes caused devastation to surrounding housing leading to death and general mayhem and pressure was exerted for activities to be moved into safer areas. Such activities, and the processes which developed out of them, were never wholly safe and explosions occurred from time to time up until the 1970s. Sometimes these hit the headlines; sometimes they were isolated incidents perhaps involving only one person. I recently started a thread on one such accident, devastating for the family but not justifying a mention in the history books.

The 100th anniversary came in 1962. The year prior to that some images were taken of the Witton site as it then was. I started (and, it appears, also finished!) a thread on this, here.

The 150th anniversary took place last year. I was pleased to hear that it had been celebrated within the company even though Kynoch Works has long since disappeared and the Company - huge and very successful - now operates out of an office block in Solihull.

Chris
 
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Dad joined Kynochs in 1927 at the age of 14 he left in 1975/6, just failing to get his 50 years in.He helped found Kynoch Cycling Club, and was an active member of the Home Guard there.
He was one of the first shop stewards in the Witton Eng W.shop.
He was an apprenticed universal miller and went on to run the time study/progress office later on.
My sister was in the Research as a tracer( pre photo copiers etc) from 1950 to 1962.
My Brother, Uncle ,Cousin were also there,
Mom worked there also before the War until the start of the family.
 
Hi

I think this is the Main Entrance near Witton station. The two large building became the Kynoch press.
The Building with Kynoch on it lead to the Engineering Workshops. The new Headquarters building to the left
was a later addition

Mike Jenks
 
Hi

Yep the Sad end

Company whose results once brought City to a halt officially passes into Dutch hands, reports Philip Aldrick

The curtain comes down today on one of the great eras of British industry. After 82 years, Imperial Chemical Industries - the erstwhile corporate titan which developed the anti-malarial drug Paludrine, invented Polythene and Perspex, and revamped domestic paints under its much-loved Dulux brand - will officially move into new ownership: Dutch rival Akzo Nobel.

Akzo's first tricky decision will be whether to retain ICI's famous brand or consign what has become an emblem of British history to the scrapheap. The decision, an Akzo spokesman said, "will not be based on emotion but on what will be the best value for the company for the future".

In Britain, where Akzo is already established and ICI's client problems five years ago ultimately led to its unravelling, an unsentimental break from the past is likely. Elsewhere, the ICI name still carries valuable currency - particularly in the former Asian colonies where Akzo has no notable presence.

"The brand still opens a lot of doors," an ICI insider said. "There's a lot of value there that they'll want to incorporate."

There will be no hint of a dilemma over Dulux or Glidden, ICI's paints brand in the US. Akzo is already in the process of selling Crown Paints in the UK to clear European Commission competition rules.
The Dulux brand, like the Dulux dog - a marketing tradition started with the old English sheepdog Shepton Dash in 1963 - will be a key part of the new Akzo.
But aside from Dulux, few echoes will remain of the once-great ICI. On January 7, five days after the £8bn takeover becomes effective, ICI's shares will be delisted.
At its height, the company's results announcements to the London stock exchange would bring the City to a halt, so important was its performance to British industry.
ICI's decline can be traced back to 1991, when the acquisitive industrialist Lord Hanson bought a 2.8pc stake. The threat of a takeover galvanised the board and, two years later - after seeing off Lord Hanson - they decided to crystallise the value he had spotted in its fast-growing pharmaceutical arm by spinning it off as Zeneca.
By then, the remaining ICI business was in the low-growth field of bulk chemicals, an area that was dominated by cheaper producers in the Far East.
As AstraZeneca - as it is now - went from strength to strength, ICI languished. A desperate search for growth convinced management to buy Unilever's flavours and fragrances chemicals business, but ICI overpaid horribly, amassing a £4.2bn debt pile that fatally undermined its ability to innovate.
When a computer glitch at Quest, the flavours and fragrances arm on which all hopes were pinned, caused clients to desert in 2003, the writing was on the wall. An £868m pension deficit sealed its fate.
One by one the divisions were sold off until Akzo was finally able to pick up the shrunken ICI, which consisted of the adhesive and ingredient products developed under its National Starch unit, and paint.
But ICI will live on in other forms. AstraZeneca was not the only separate company the industrial giant spawned.
Imperial Metals Industry, today's IMI, was once a part of the great ICI stable, as was Brunner Mond, the alkaline chemicals group now owned by India's Tata conglomerate.
In fact, Brunner Mond was one of the four British chemical companies that were merged to create ICI in the first place, in 1926. Back then the company embodied the growth of new industries after the First World War, making a profitable living from volume chemicals with fat margins that supported both innovation and diversification.
In its glory years after the Second World War, having been vital to the war effort, ICI established itself as a formidable pioneer, testing new technologies and creating innovative products. Its plants and their miles of pipework came to dominate Britain's industrial landscape.
During the 1950s and 1960s, heavy capital investment helped it meet booming demand for the fast-growing plastic spin-offs from the petrochemical industry, while its pharmaceutical arm had breakthrough successes with the likes of beta blockers - one of the most important contributions to 20th Century medicine.
So numerous and important were its contributions that shorthand for describing the company became the all-encompassing and rather clichéd "bellwether of British industry". Sadly, the bell has tolled its final time.

mike jenks
 
As others have confirmed, Kynoch was certainly once part of ICI. In fact it was one of the founding companies when Imperial Chemical Industries was formed in 1926. Thereafter Kynoch bore a number of different names until eventully being known as ICI Ltd. Metals Division. In 1962 the split from ICI started and it was then called Imperial Metals Industries, rapidly shortened to IMI as the word "Imperial" became more and more politically incorrect; and, in 1966, there was a partial flotation and the ICI ownership was significantly diluted.

I suppose that in modern jargon ICI's motive for starting to sell off its metals interests would have involved talk of "concentrating on our core businesses" and so on. Certainly it was felt that Metals Division's activity was becoming increasingly far removed from that of ICI as a whole. This was definitely the case when it came to employee benefits, and pay in particular. To generate, say, £1m of turnover there would have been perhaps a handful of blokes turning valves at a huge chemical complex on Teesside; whilst at Witton there would have been dozens toiling in one of the mills, or a hundred or so sheet-metalworkers bashing bits of aluminium at one of the subsidiaries. Those of us at the coalface at the time knew that ICI salaries and wages could never be sustained in a totally different, labour-intensive type of business. And they weren't!

The wonderful thing is that it all worked. Against the odds ICI is now nothing more than a memory, whereas IMI has gone from strength to strength. It is now a highly successful and well-regarded FTSE-100 company, even though far fewer Brummies are now employed, the activities are totally different and the Witton site, created in 1862, has long since been abandoned.

If you want further information about this, look at "1962" in my potted history of the Company here to see how the split from ICI started.

Chris
 
Gingerjon has asked me to put on these maps showing the rail connections to the Kinoch Works to see if it brings forth any comments. The first c 1886 only has the Witton Wharf rail sidings south of the works, but by the time of the c1950 map it shows a whole rail network round the place.


map_Kynoch_works_c_1886-90.jpg



map_c1950_showing_Kynoch_works.jpg
 
The map confirms that there was in fact an extensive railway system on the Kynoch site at Witton. I did not recall a previous mention of this and people I have spoken to with experience of the site from the 1960s onwards do not remember it. There is no mention of the system in the two Company histories.

But a family member puts me right; some of his comments are conjectural:

​
Not a great deal has been published about the internal railway system at Kynoch and still less in a form that is accessible online; the January 2014 issue of Railway Bylines published by Irwell Press (P.78 "ICI Witton” by Paul Anderson) whilst sadly quite lightweight on detail, nevertheless gives some information. Certainly, when the photos it contains were taken there were at least four steam locomotives present and, given the numbering, maybe there had been at least two others.

Notes online about the preserved one show it was loaned to the plant in 1914 and purchased five years later; it would have become taken over by ICI in 1927 of course, continued in operation until 1953 when it was declared redundant and donated to the British Transport Commission since when it has been preserved. See: https://www.ribblesteam.org.uk/exhibits/steam/40-lnwr-ramsbottom-1439-1865

There are references in the article to the possible acquisition of replacement diesel shunters towards the end of the 1950s and other ICI owned systems seemed to have completed that process by 1960. Ownership would have changed again in 1962 and, not long afterwards, the steady rationalisation of the city’s freight services would have been underway, aided of course initially by a certain former ICI employee. Perhaps the better steam locos were concentrated elsewhere in the UK for a little while but most seem to have gone for scrap quite early.

More photos of the site are on the Britain from the Air site of course. One is attached. Equally, the fact that sidings served the works and were then still much used can be detected in the slides taken by Harry Myers in 1961 and online here: https://www.staffshomeguard.co.uk/KOtherInformationKynochV2Eimages.htm (image 5) It would be reasonable to assume that these were connected to both the ICI internal railway and the main line network via Witton Goods Yard (I don’t think Perry Barr had any goods facilities).

Another photo I have seen online shows a blue-liveried Class 47 diesel drawing a rake of empty fuel tank wagons out of the yard as late as 1972 and it’s perhaps the case that things lasted a little later still, railway-wise.

The main line alongside was an early fixture as the Grand Junction opened in 1837; it seems that Perry Bar (sic) station opened with the line but Witton was opened quite a lot later: https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/lms/witton.htm The dates in that link show that (public) Goods facilities opened in the 1880s but perhaps the Kynoch works (and others nearby, e.g. Crawfords is mentioned here) had private siding connections earlier. The canals might also have played a part in moving materials inwards and out of the site. The GEC works next door also had rail connections and my brother and I saw those sidings in use in the mid 1960s with AC Electric locomotives in for attention well before such overhead wires reached the city.

For the real anoraks, I noticed references to a book on the ICI-owned industrial locomotive fleet and perhaps that offers a little more detail if a copy can be tracked down via a library.​


Acknowledgements to JRCM, Britain from the Air and Ribble Steam Railway
 

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WWGoing back to other years there are no large scale maps available of the works (except for one marked 1938 where, as is so common around WW2 rail lines come to a dead end at a large open space), but smaller scale maps show (assuming they are accurate and remembering that dates are publication dates and probably then refer to about 2-3 years previously) that the system was very similar in c1921, c1938 and c1966.


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These are fascinating! It looks like in 1921 Kynoch's was on the edge of the city, surrounded by fields? I'm trying to get a clearer picture of the Witton area in the first decades of the century as My GGrandfather worked at Kynoch's from around 1900 until retiring in 1929 aged 72, we still have the retirement watch he was presented with (see photo). Sadly he had little time to enjoy his retirement as he passed away later the same year.
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I think that the reason that the factory was located there was that it was in the countryside but near enough for employees to get there. Also next to the River Tame there would have been a good supply of water should there have been a fire/explosion.
My Grandmother told me that as a girl she used to watch wagon (horse driven of course) drivers tickle trout from the river where the road crossed the river at Witton, there was a ford there before the present bridge.
 
In the 1850s there were several manufacturers of explosive devices and material in the city centre. A series of explosions caused significant injury and damage. One in 1859, at Pearsall and Phillips in Whittall Street, manufacturers of percussion caps where George Kynoch was an employee, was especially catastrophic, killing 17 employees including children and devastating the surrounding area. It was obvious that such dangerous activities had no place in a built-up area and so the Company, now controlled by Kynoch, moved to a 4 acre site in rural Witton in 1862. The factory grew rapidly, eventually after many decades being surrounded by the advancing city; but by then was so large that any subsequent incident (of which there were a few over the years, despite a generally good safety record) did not impinge on the surrounding area.

Chris
 
Thanks, Pimpernel, there was in fact a thread on this subject last year - here: https://birminghamhistory.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=43330 - but it's good to be reminded of this wonderful footage.

Whilst it is no doubt the presence of the camera which prompts much of the joy and laughing, we do get the impression that working there was not the miserable, unremitting, Victorian hard labour which we might have imagined.

What it would be if someone could identify at least one face in this vast crowd!

Chris
 
Hi, carrying on thread about Munition workers, I have a query....My Great, Grandmother worked as one of these workers, but she died in 1910, before first world war, so where or what war would she have done this for, I am a little confused..x
 
A point to note about Kynoch ammunition production is that it was not confined to major wars. The whole history of Kynoch involved ammunition manufacture, from the very beginning in the 1860s until the post-WW2 years. Obviously production peaked in both the Great War and WW2 but it was a continuous activity at all times, in fulfilling UK Government contracts and no doubt those of other nations.

Chris
 
This is one of Kynoch's loco s. It was loaned (1914) to Kynoch's but they eventually bought it (1919). As it's numbered 4, I presume there were at least 3 others. But was Kynoch's a private railway ? I read somewhere that there was an extensive internal railway at Kynoch's but can't find anything out about it except that they loaned, then bought this loco. Viv.

image.jpeg

Information from the National Railway Museum, York
 
The Kynoch private railway connected with the LNWR/LMS/BR at Witton. 12 steam locomotives and 2 diesels handled the internal traffic there. The first locomotives (3) were supplied by Aveling & Porter.
 
IMG_1533.jpg

This is a clip from August 1915..."The Tradition at Kynochs."

I just wonder how much time the Rev Warwick Adams, Vicar of Wall, actually spent working at Kynochs, and what he actually did. It is quite a way to travel from Wall.
 
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