Morgan Crucible

Morgan Crucible

Prior to creating a manufacturing business which would become world-renowned, the five Morgan brothers were trading as ‘Druggists Sundriesmen and Hardware Merchants’ from premises at 1 Jewin Crescent (just off Aldersgate) in the City of London.

Even then crucibles were one of the many items in their stock-in-trade: imported from Germany. However, the young head of the business was highly impresses by an American crucible, manufactured according to a new process, which he had seen at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The brothers made enquiries and having satisfied themselves that they were on to a good thing, they proceeded to negotiate the sole selling agency for the British Empire from the manufacturers, Joseph Dixon and Company, Jersey City, NJ.

These new crucibles sold well in the market, and their unusual clay and plumbago character gave the young firm an edge of their competitors. This preliminary success was such that the brothers conceived the idea of manufacturing them for themselves rather than importing them. So, in 1856 they bought the manufacturing rights from their American principals.

To make these crucibles the Morgan Brothers bought a small factory in the then rural Battersea and launched the Patent Plumbago Crucible Company. Its former owner had been a Mr William Falcke who had used it for the manufacture of porcelain, ornamental pottery and a few blacklead crucibles for the jewellery trade. The motive power for grinding the clay for the production of such objects as bird baths and fancy vases was one horse, the same horse that between times pulled the delivery cart.

The property consisted of a modest dwelling house, a small brick kiln, a mill, and some broken-down out buildings. Although the Prince Consort had once visited it and bought a couple of vases, the little firm was not prospering. Whilst the official company history describes this as ‘a secluded spot’, it is not strictly true.

By 1856 the 500 yards of river bank between Battersea Bridge and St Mary’s Church was, in reality, the scene of considerable industrial activity; near the bridge were a timber years and a boat repair yard with a small dry dock; behind this were the buildings that had held the elder Brunel’s famous sawmills and the line of machines that he set up in 1812 to make boots for the army fighting in the Napoleonic wars; next to this was the Bolingbroke Oil Works, with a small vinegar works behind it, and a few yards further upstream the buildings of the Condy’s Fluid Co., one of the few places in England where vitriol was then made; next came Falcke’s, as it was known locally and beyond that May & Barkers Chemical Works (on Garden Wharf), Green & Sons sugar factory, then flour mills, including the enormous horizontal windmill built in 1790, then a malt house and finally the church.

The partners, work began on enlarging and improving the old buildings as soon as they took possession of the site. A new kiln was christened with due solemnity in the spring of 1856, and the chain of processes of manufacture was completed.

Records are sparse of the early teething difficulties in the factory, but they were certainly encountered. Whether it was due to the pungent waters of the Thames, or the tang of Battersea air, or maybe the blithe step of the horse that ground the clay - the Morgan crucible in texture and character came to differ materially from that of its American prototype.

By 1857 the works were busy enough for the Patent Plumbago Crucible Company, as the new firm was called, to exhibit a range of crucibles at the Crystal Palace, and also for it to be fined for making smoke.

By 1862 the company was claiming for itself in an advertising leaflet that its patent plumbago crucibles were used by the English, Australian, Indian, French, Russian and other mints and by the Royal Arsenal of Woolwich and the arsenals of Brest and Toulon. The horse was soon pensioned off and was been replaced by two thirty five horsepower horizontal engines. With the increased demand for its products the works edged along the riverside. A conspicuous feature of that early development was the Italianate clock tower known in Battersea as “Morgan’s Folly”.

In August 1861 Morgan’s provided the location for one end of a tightrope which was stretched across the river to Cremorne Gardens on the Chelsea side. This was to aid the performance of an artiste calling herself “The Female Blondin” (her real name was Polly Freeman [RM: see below]). As a consequence of vandalism her first attempt proved unsuccessful. The second, a week later, was a triumphant one. The Illustrated London News published the following report together with a full page illustration of the event. Sadly for Morgan’s the gained no publicity from it whatsoever! They may also have played host to Charles Blondin in 1868.

[Note: I have since received the following from Jennifer Lovegrove:

“Regarding your Piece on Morgans crucible at Battersea, You have The Fenale Blondin as Polly Freeman, Her name was Selina Young. Numerous Public Records show it was Selina Young as does her diaries (which I hold).”

RM, 11-02-2008]

By 1872 the company purchased a pair of vertical beam engines, "smart jobs with their polished governors and cylinders neatly covered in brassbound mahogany". They drove the whole of the machinery until the late 80s when they were reinforced with a larger horizontal engine with the encouraging name of "Samson".

The staff had already passed the 150 mark and the Battersea works was known (although it did not make this claim for itself) as the largest maker of crucibles in the world. The name had been changed to the Morgan Crucible Company. The Patent Plumbago Crucible Company was considered too cumbersome a title, after it had led to a number of distortions, including, notably, a letter addressed to "The Lumbago Crucifying Company".

In 1890 Morgan's became a public limited company, and the first board of directors was formed. The company was no longer a family concern; but the old spirit of partnership survived and conscious efforts were made to preserve and foster it.

By the turn of the century the company had expanded its base to include a widening range of refractory products.

Falcke’s original quarter of an acre premises soon proved insufficient and as opportunities offered, adjoining properties were acquired. By the turn of the century the works had spread over some three acres having absorbed the sites of Bolingbroke Oil Works, Condy’s and the vinegar factory. The main engine room at that time contained a pair of old beam engines, with an equally aged horizontal engine as standby, housed in an 1866 building. A small gas engine provided power for the fitters’ shop and drove a dynamo that lit part of the office. In 1902 a new power house was planned and was one of the first factories in this or any other country to obtain all its power from turbines. These used river water for cooling, and the rose on the suction intake was apt to get clogged with whitebait attracted by the warm outflow, and had to be cleared by reversing the flow.

Battersea crucibles found their way all over the world: notably to the Klondike where, in the Gold Rush of 1897, they literally sold for their weight in gold. Mean while the Company was expanding its range of products – the production of carbon brushes for motors grew from a sideline introduced to meet a demand from the infant electrical industry to a major product with agencies and subsidiary plants in five continents. The carbon arc lamps used in the rapidly increasing number of cinema projection rooms were brought to a high pitch just in team to switch production in 1939 to searchlight carbons for the Services.

The result of these developments in the Company’s business was that every year from 1907 to 1937 saw a major construction project of one sort or another. In 1930 they had bought Greens Sugar Co. to accommodate their Research & Development Dept and then in 1934, Garden Wharf, the premises of May & Baker’s their Battersea next door neighbours for almost 80 years.

Soon after the outbreak of war in 1939, a ‘shadow factory’ at Norton, near Worcester, was taken over to ensure that the vital flow of Morgan products would not be interrupted should the Battersea works be bombed, and it is to this factory that the manufacture of crucibles was finally transferred. The last Battersea-made crucible was formed on 23 November 1971, 115 years after the first.

The works having been built up in a piecemeal way over a period of almost 120 years, it is inevitable that, as engineering advances were made, they would outgrow their suitability. Thus, after a long search, a greenfield site on the new Enterprise Zone development at Morriston in Swansea was identified.

The company moved into its new site in 1969, and it was formally opened by HRH the Duchess of Kent on October 12, 1971.

But that was not the end of the Morgan Crucible story in Battersea. A local artist, Brian Barnes, painted a mural on one the vast factory walls. In 1979, when the factory was finally being demolished, here’s what happened:

The day the wall came down

It was July 7, 1979.

The crowd was so large it stopped the Queen from attending the Derby and brought south London to a halt. Battersea residents in their hundreds possibly thousands, including local MP Alf Dubs united in a desperate last stand to defend the last remnants of what had become known as Battersea Mural from the bulldozers.

This extraordinary moment in Battersea's recent history had attracted huge national media interest over the previous month, after demolition crews from Morgan Crucible Company demolished two-thirds of the huge 4000 sq ft The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mural, on the exterior wall of its defunct Battersea Bridge Road factory, to make room for a new office block.

But despite a round-the-clock vigil by residents to protect the last section, police finally arrested seven protesters, including the artist Brian Barnes, who had mounted a 12-hour protest on top of wall and officials from the Tory-run Greater London Council and bulldozers forced the crowd away, leaving the mural to be reduced to rubble in minutes.

Designed by Barnes and painted by dozens of residents including present Labour leader Tony Belton over two years from the summer of 1976, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was the biggest and brightest mural in the UK at the time, a tribute to the Battersea community and a symbol of local feeling about the spread of blocks of luxury flats, and dismay about the 1978 election of a Conservative council in Wandsworth, the traditional bastion of socialism.

Stretching 256 ft and 18 ft high, the mural's first half, The Good, had over 20 portraits of local characters from nearby shops and the bus garage opposite the wall gathered around the iconic No.19 bus, new low rise family council housing being built with direct labour, the Thameside park allotments and the new adventure playground.

In the centre, was an enormous broom, a symbol of the tenants and worker's action, "sweeping" away the Bad: Morgan's obsolete factory, the notorious polluting Garton's glucose factory, Pooh Bear and Mr Toad representing the overspill of Chelsea's chic restaurants into Battersea and a fiery water chute and burning Mickey Mouse, telling of the abortive attempt by Trust House Forte to build a Disneyland in Battersea Park.

At right angles to this long stretch, was a wall of flame (the Ugly) which showed the incineration of the Bad and the routing of the fleeing "gang of four", the leading Tory councillors of the day, including Thatcherite leader of the council Chris Chope, notorious for privatising many Wandsworth public assets, and present deputy leader Maurice Heaster.

Yet despite the council dismissing it as a "disgraceful piece of political cartoonery" after the GLC gave a £350 grant towards its painting, the Battersea Mural might be regarded not so much a protest as a document of local social history and art from ordinary people's perspective

Tom Champagne (2005)

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