gilbert!gilkes!&gordonltd!! abriefhistoryofagoodcompany history.pdf ·...

GILKES HISTORY WWW.GILKES.COM

Gilbert Gilkes & Gordon Ltd A Brief History of a Good Company Gilbert Gilkes & Gordon Ltd is a British, UK based, engineering company that has been in the same basic ownership since 1881. It has had the same venture capital investment since 1948 and still manufacturers its products in the UK. The main factory remains on the very edge of the Lake District and it has been in the same premises since 1856. It has only had 9 Chairmen in its 160-‐year history and not many more Managing Directors. Williamson Brothers Three Williamson brothers, Henry, William and Benjamin, formed the company in 1853. They were born in Kendal between 1826 and 1835. Their father was a linen draper with a shop in the Market Place in Kendal. From the evidence of a stock book valuation dated 1 July, 1853, we know that Henry and his brothers aged around 27, 21 and 18 were then established in business at Halfpenny Mill, near Stainton. The mill was on Sunday's Beck some three miles southeast of Kendal on the road to Kirkby Lonsdale (present day A65). It is now a private house. The first products of the company were considerably different from those of today. In late 1855 Williamsons published a revised catalogue of their product range, an Illustrated Price List of Agricultural Implements and Machines'. There were chaff cutters, straw cutters, corn crushers and mills, barley awners, root washers, thrashing machines, turnip drills and washing and mangling machines, accompanied by the customary testimonials. Also listed in this catalogue were a range of manure pumps, which provides evidence that Gilkes and their predecessors have been making pumps for as long as they have made water turbines, although a humble manure pump may not have been considered as prestigious as its stable mate a water turbine. Certainly the introduction to this catalogue is entirely devoted to the 'turbine' although we can be reasonably certain that Williamsons had not actually made any turbines themselves at the date of the catalogue. However, they were clearly intending to enter the market, as the following extracts will show: "Williamson Brothers in commencing their revised catalogue beg respectfully to call the attention of their Agricultural friends to the great advantage of making use of water power wherever it is practicable so to do. A small stream is amply sufficient for all farming operations especially when a reservoir can readily be constructed, and if applied to drive a 'turbine ', or horizontal water wheel, the outlay is very moderate.” It implies that Williamsons had some tentative arrangement with designers or manufacturers of the first turbines in the neighbourhood and, in fact, it would be reasonable to guess that Henry Williamson had already made contact with the designer of the Turbines, Professor James Thomson, although the first machine to be built around the time of the William sons move to Kendal may have been partially built in Belfast. July 1856 -‐The brothers left Stainton and moved to premises in Kendal, where the business remains to this day. The lease was for 21 years at an annual rental of £85. The Williamsons turned the southern warehouse into a foundry in 1860 and the northern warehouse into a machine and fitting shop. The floors were simply compacted earth with some cast iron floor plates near machinery. At some stage four smiths hearths and flues from them were built


into the wall between the two parts of the building. The main block of buildings remained substantially unaltered until 1920 when a new foundry was built. Henry Williamson acquired the designs and know-‐how for the manufacture and sale of water turbines and pumps with assistance from Professor James Thomson of Queen's College, Belfast. The collaboration between Williamson Brothers and Professor Thomson was to prove the most significant and lasting influence on the early development of the company. Professor Thomson, elder brother of Lord Kelvin, was a well-‐known hydraulic engineer. The first water turbine made by the Williamson Brothers was sold to W E Maude of Holmscales Farm, Old Hutton, and only half a mile from Halfpenny Mill where the Williamsons started in business. It was used for driving agricultural machinery for over a hundred years when the company bought it back from the then owner. It is now on loan to the Museum of Lakeland Life and Industry at Abbot Hall. In the period 1856 to 1881 the Williamsons made 440 'Vortex' turbines and an unknown number of Whirlpool pumps in addition to their range of agricultural machinery. During the Williamson period the first country house to have a hydroelectric plant was Cragside, Rothbury, Northumberland, the house of Sir William Armstrong. The plant consisted of a Vortex Turbine driving a Crompton dynamo and was used to provide electric light. In subsequent years, a considerable number of country houses and estates were provided with hydroelectric plant from the company. The most notable of these was a sale to Balmoral in 1895 that provided electric light for Queen Victoria. Gilbert Gilkes -‐ born in Dublin in 1845. Why he came to Kendal is not immediately obvious but he was educated at Stramongate School of which he was head boy. He was apprenticed to Gilkes, Wilson and Co. engineers of Middlesborough of which firm his uncle Edgar Gilkes was a partner. At the age of 21 he was engineer in charge of building the large iron bridge over the River Dee at Kirkcudbright. He worked as a railway engineer from 1865 to 1875 at his Uncle's Company, Hopkin Gilkes & Co. Gilkes bought Williamson Brothers and changed its name to Gilbert Gilkes & Co. on 31 December, 1881. We do not know how much Gilkes paid for the business. The Williamson Brothers' valuation of the plant and stock at 31 March, 1881 was £5,265 but by Gilbert Gilkes & Co.'s first stock valuation of 30 September, 1882, the figure was down to £2 ,816. When the new bridge was required to cross the River Kent in Kendal for better access to the railway station at the northern end of Kendal Gilbert Gilkes was commissioned to design the structure, which was named the Victoria Bridge, There is little doubt that water turbines were regarded as the only core business. In the period from the Gilkes takeover to about 1922, during which Gilbert Gilkes remained active in the business, over 2,600 turbines were made. Some limited attempts were made to improve the designs and widen the range of turbines, but the basis of the business remained the Thomson Vortex turbines. Seven Thomson Vortex turbines were made in the year 1924 -‐ a strong survival. In 1894 the first Pelton turbine was made, designed by Norman Wilson. Pelton turbines were widely known, having been designed by a Mr Pelton in America. In this design a jet of water impinges on buckets attached to the periphery of a disc. The design is particularly suitable for high falls of water.


In 1895 Gilkes bought sundry patterns, and possibly the right to distribute Emerson turbines from the USA, from C L Hett of Brigg, which according to Norman Wilson "proved to be very advantageous, as he had different designs of turbines, thus greatly increasing the range of our turbine business. Although these may now appear somewhat crude from a scientific point of view, they proved of great practical utility in the carrying on of the business." Some extensions to the factory were made -‐ a pattern loft in 1902 and a smithy in 1906. In 1907 a new machine and assembly shop was built on Gilkes' freehold land, now known as No.2 shop. The land, 3875 square yards, on which this new shop was built had been bought from the neighbouring J J and W Wilson Ltd. of Castle Mills on 14 August, 1900 for £353-‐1 3s-‐8d. A strip 20ft wide bordering this land on the south side, which led from the canal to Castle Mills was retained by the vendors to give them access to the canal. Turnover in 1919 was £64,588. A significant development in the immediate post-‐war years was Eric Crewdson's invention of the Turgo Impulse Turbine. A patent for this design was applied for in May, 1920 and ranted in due course. The object of the design was to provide an impulse (or 'free jet') turbine which, on any given conditions, would run at higher speed than a single jet Pelton and cost less than a twin jet Pelton. As a general rule, a higher speed electrical generator costs less and is smaller than a lower speed machine. The Turgo machine had the advantage also over the Francis or reaction Turbine that it did not rely on fine clearances and hence was less susceptible to wear from dirty or sand laden water. Francis Turbine Designs By the early 1920s the Thomson Vortex had become very long in the tooth. The control vanes required large forces to operate. The turbine runner, a complex fabricated affair, was expensive to manufacture and had narrow passages, which were easily choked by solids in the water. The efficiency was relatively low. Some other designs were made which went by names such as Samson and Little Giant and Trent. New designs were bought from Inga Riva and Co. in Milan, with whom Eric Crewdson had worked in 1912. Further new designs were developed in-‐house. After 1934, when a turbine model testing facility was built on the site of the old foundry, an extensive programme of development testing was undertaken on Francis, Pelton and Turgo turbines. Sell Priming Pumps A very important new development of 1932 was the invention and patenting by Eric Crewdson, assisted by Ernest Jackson, of a new type of ~ water ring" self priming pump. Some of the early testing work was done on a platform at the top of the works chimney, which was a ready means of testing on a high lift, although somewhat precarious. The prototype "GGG" pump was tested at the top of the factory chimney and Eric Crewdson was able to prove that a suction lift of just over 32 feet could be guaranteed. The marketing breakthrough for the GGG pump came when the Admiralty and Gardner Engines both started to use the GGG pump Continuing development work on the pump's mechanical design has been undertaken from that time until the present day, but the basic pumping principle of a 'water ring' or 'side channel' pump is used in Gilkes modern designs. Takeovers were hardly earth shattering events but they meant that by 1930 a number of


small competitive companies had been bought up and if nothing else materialised, an increased business in spare parts resulted. The most important was undoubtedly the purchase in January, 1928 of the water power business of James Gordon and Co. James Gordon was paid £3,000 for goodwill and patterns and a commission on the increase in Gilkes' profits over the average of the three years before the deal. James Gordon was not a manufacturer but imported water turbines from a Swedish firm, Fynshyttans AB. They made small and medium sized turbines. James Gordon's principal asset was a very good collection of overseas agents whom Gilkes took on. Probably the most valuable of these was Stewart and Lloyds of South Africa Ltd. from whom a significant volume of turbine and, to a lesser extent, pump business, was obtained for a number of years. As a result, Gilkes' export sales became and remained a very important part of the business. By the year end in 1945 the turnover had risen to £199,000. 1960's -‐ The review of the foundry operation revealed that it was no longer economic to maintain our casting capacity in house. Our foundry produced only grey iron castings, admittedly of a specialised nature. The larger turbines, which we were starting to make, tended to be made from welded steel construction. The castings which we now required were in a wide variety of materials. Castings were in bronze of several specifications, carbon steels, stainless steels and aluminum alloys. These could only be obtained from specialist foundries. We had succeeded in modernizing our own iron foundry and could produce high quality iron castings to tight specifications but the scale on which it operated was uneconomic. Additionally the investigation into our stores, painting and packing faci lities showed that the space occupied by the foundry could be more profitably used for other purposes. So after slightly over a hundred years of operation the foundry was closed in November 1960. In July 1969 the company was given the Queen's Award for Industry for its export performance over the preceding three years. The company's export performance was truly impressive. It exported over one third of its output directly to more than 83 countries. In its own field it had acquired a worldwide reputation and a profound knowledge of the dangers, the difficulties and the complexities of international trade. Turbines had to be installed in power stations sited in every sort of location and climate wherever natural conditions provided a suitable supply of water. They were to be found inside the Arctic Circle in Iceland, ten thousand feet up in the Andes, in snow-‐laden Canada and in the stinking heat of tropical Guyana. Our erectors had to contend with earthquakes in Turkey and Peru, guerrilla activity in the Philippines and full-‐scale civil war in Nigeria. 1970's -‐ As the hydro market continued to prosper so the Company invested significantly in its design and production facilities. We had already moved into the computer era and the 1977 Honeywell machine was replaced with a more modern DPS4 unit. Our designers, however, did not want to be left behind relying on their slide rules so the decision was made, in May 1982, to buy a Hewlett Packard desktop "HP9845" computer for the sum of £13,000. By modern standards this was a feeble device but it enabled our designers to perform marathon calculations far more easily. At the very end of the 80's we were approached by Biwater with a view to Gilkes buying their waterpower business. Although nothing came of this approach it was perhaps a "preview" of the transaction, which took place almost 10 years later!


Turnover had risen, during the late 80's to around £6m -‐ £7m but profits were still hard to come by despite the apparent vigour of most of our markets. A certain amount of belt tightening was necessary and we decided to sell Aynam Lodge to the Company's pension fund with Gilkes remaining as the tenant. This overture from 'Biwater was to lead to Gilkes making the largest acquisition in its history and to only the second occasion when Gilkes had a manufacturing facility outside Kendal. The Wall win range of pumps had been absorbed into the Biwater Group some years before but had a well established reputation with many water companies as the "unchokeable pump". The wide application of the pumps in sewage transfer duties had led Biwater to create a division based in Oldbury, near Birmingham which would take on all aspects of sewage pumping station construction and refurbishment. The majority of the work was done for Anglian Water. Biwater's hydropower business which was based on the Armfield range which Biwater had acquired previously and had been a traditional competitor of Gilkes. The Oldbury manufacturing facility also made electrical switchgear and panels which could be used for the sewage pumping stations and for hydro generators. Thus there appeared to be a good "fit" between Gilkes and these three parts of the Biwater operation. On the 17th August 1998 the deal was completed and Gilkes had moved back into the sewage business. The Oldbury site could not be used and so Gilkes sought a new site. This new site was based in the Midlands and was at Cornwallis Road , West Bromwich and in the best Gilkes tradition this site is also on the banks of a canal -‐ the main line of the Birmingham Canal Navigation. This business was subsequently sold in 2005. A new product had been developed in Kendal for fire fighting and clearance of flammable noxious liquids after accidents, a water driven pump ‘turbo pump' for short. It appeared likely that a good market existed for this product in the multitude of oil refineries, petrochemical plant and related industries in Texas. We took an 80% interest in a small American outfit called Acme Turbo Power Inc. and arranged to share premises and change the name to Gilkes Inc. As often happens in life, the original intention was wide of the mark and Gilkes Inc. became the spearhead for pump and turbine sales in the USA but sold hardly any turbo pumps. All pumps tend to wear and replacement parts are needed at regular intervals. Gilkes policy has always been to design pumps [and especially the marine pumps] for the maximum life possible before major repairs are needed. After extended service at sea or in a giant earth mover Gilkes pumps eventually need a complete overhaul. Caterpillar launched their CatReman programme in 2001 and the decision was made that all Gilkes pumps would be returned to Gilkes Inc's workshop in Texas where the pumps would be completely refurbished. This has subsequently turned into a major business for Gilkes Inc and has enabled a move to a brand new purpose built factory. The Company has continued to make progress, Engine Cooling Pump sales have grown from circa £2 .5 million in 2003 to £16 million in 2012. The Hydropower business has continued to grow with orders from a variety of countries like Japan, Guatemala, New Zealand, the USA and, of course, the UK. In 2008, the Company established Gilkes Energy Ltd in order to help our clients develop and finance hydropower projects.


Turnover in 2011/12 was £29.8 million of which almost 60% was exported.

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