| Administrative History | In a Middlewich property sale of early 1889 a certain Abel Grundy of New Mills purchased Newton Farm in Middlewich together with several adjoining properties. In total this land consisted of most of the area enclosed between the Trent and Mersey Canal and the railway and between Brooks Lane and Cledford Lane. Abel Grundy then disappears from the story and by the summer of 1889 a certain George Lomas Murgatroyd is sinking a 300 feet deep brine shaft in the north west corner of this land, beside Sanderson’s Brook. Natural brine was discovered after an adit was driven southwards along the top of the rock salt bed. Murgatroyds Mid-Cheshire Salt Works was established on nearby land and actual open pan salt making had commenced by the end of 1890. The first manager of the works was Henry Seddon who in 1892 was to establish his own saltworks in Pepper Street. Henry’s father Ralph Seddon had been the proprietor of salt works at Kinderton and Pepper Street. These became part of the Salt Union in 1888.
The formation of the Salt Union in 1888 represented a merger of over 90% of the total UK salt industry and aimed to reduce the cost cutting competition in the industry. The Salt Union was thus not in favour of the establishment of any new works which would bring increased competition in the industry. The purchase of a large area of land with brine raising rights and a proven supply of brine would also interest Brunner Mond and Co since this would be a potential site for the establishment of an ammonia-soda works for which Brunner and Mond endevoured to maintain a UK monopoly. Both companies adopted a practice of buying up potential brine bearing land in order to block its use for salt and chemical manufacture and restrictive covenants were inserted in the deeds.
Little is known of George Murgatroyd’s background except that he was an engineer and that his father Joshua Murgatroyd had, as proprietor of the Stockport engineers Emerson and Murgatroyd, been responsible for the construction of the Anderton Boat Lift in 1875. We are thus left to wonder whether Murgatroyd was on his own or whether he had unnamed backers and advisors.
Within two years of the successful establishment of the salt works, plans were announced for the formation of the Murgatroyd Ammonia Soda and Salt Syndicate and an ammonia-soda works was constructed upon land adjacent to the salt works.. This was based on a French version of the ammonia-soda process.
A major shareholder in this new enterprise was Ivan Levinstein who had come to England from Germany in 1864 and established himself as a dye-maker at Blackley, Manchester. The Levinstein family were long established dye-makers in Germany and that a member of the family was already making dyes in Manchester before Ivan’s arrival.
Ivan Levinstein’s dye-works prospered and by the 1890’s had become a major part of the British dyestuff industry. Amongst Ivan’s other interests was the successful establishment with the Graesser family of a lager beer brewery at Wrexham. His interest in the ammonia-soda industry is recorded in a paper in the J. Soc. Chem. Ind. of 1886 which stresses the need for Leblanc alkali manufacturers to adopt the ammonia-soda process. He compared the weak state of British alkali to the strength of the German alkali industry.
Murgatroyd’s sudden and premature death in November 1894 led to a collapse of the Ammonia Soda Syndicate. Ivan Levinstein took over the running to the company as chairman but was forced to sell the ammonia soda works to Brunner Mond.
In a separate private deal between Levinstein and Ludwig Mond, the Murgatroyd Salt Works was to be excluded from the sale of the ammonia soda works and sold privately to Levinstein. And so the Levinstein family became saltworks proprietors. Ludwig Mond offered Levistein a place on the Brunner Mond board but the offer was declined.
[See Maurice R Fox "Dye-Makers of Great Britain 1856-1976" Published by ICI in 1987 for the role of the Levinsteins in the British dyestuff industry.]
In spite of years of campaigning by Ivan Levinstein, Britain entered the 1914 war with a textile industry heavily dependent on German dyestuffs. Government efforts to restore this inbalance led eventually to a merger of Levinsteins Ltd with other UK producers to form the British Dyestuffs Corporation. Ivan died in 1916 and he was succeeded at Levinsteins Ltd by Herbert Levinstein. Herbert also became sole proprietor of the salt works.. In 1922 the Murgatroyd’s Salt Works Company became a limited company with James Smith a co-director and Company Secretary.
Meanwhile Herbert Levinstein was managing director of the British Dyestuffs Corporation until its merger in 1926 to become part of ICI.. He left the new conglomerate and a condition of his severance from ICI was that he should not set himself up in business to manufacture chemicals in competition with ICI.
Herbert Levinstein inherited from his father an interest in the manufacture of chemicals from salt and also searched for land with brine rights and free from covenants preventing its use for chemical manufacture.. Ivan had bought such land at Rookery Bridge near Sandbach and in 1917 Herbert sold this to the Staveley Iron and Chemical Company of Chesterfield and on this land they established the British Soda Company where salt was eventually made to supply the chlorine-caustic soda plant established at Staveley. In the 1930’s Herbert bought land at Croxton near Middlewich from the France-Hayhurst estate as potentially suitable but proved not to be so and was sold to ICI.
The Murgatroyd Project also known as the Yew Tree Project
In the early years of the war Herbert Levinstein began to think ahead about the postwar years and the possible establishment of a salt based chemical plant based on the supply of brine available at his Middlewich salt works. The saltworks site was only about 11 acres and too small for a chemical plant so it was necessary to find a larger site that could be linked to the Middlewich saltworks by brine pipeline. It was important to keep these plans secret in view of the restrictions placed on such activities by his severance agreement with ICI. It was also desirable that ICI should be unaware of plans that would endanger ICI’s monopoly position in the industry.
Privy to Levinstein’s plans was his friend James Clayton, a Director of Hardman and Holden and managing director of the Manchester Oxide Company. It was Clayton who was to do much of the detective work during the war years. In 1942 the 200 acre Yew Tree Farm at Elworth came on the market and this was purchased on Levinstein’s behalf. This purchase provided a large site between the railway and the road and canal while the railway provided a direct pipeline route to the old works in Middlewich.
With a suitable site for a new works thus available, plans for a chemical works began to be made. James Clayton’s own chemical interests provided him with cover for the negotiations which he made with chemical plant suppliers in the United States which were likely to be the only source of the necessary chemical plant in the post war years. Working together, Levinstein and Clayton gradually pieced together the type of processes and plant they were likely to need.
With the end of the war. arrangements became more concrete and ways of financing the venture had to be investigated. This was finally arranged with the Government ‘s Finance Corporation for Industry. 1947 saw the appointment of a consulting engineer and the recruitment of the first technical staff. Civil engineering work on the site had commenced by the end of the year.
Overall on a wider front the correspondence provides an insight into the politics of the chemical industry during the 1940’s. The exchanges between Clayton and Levinstein during the war years tell us little about the actual wartime conditions but a long letter from Clayton in the early part of the war contains quite accurate speculation of the conditions to be expected once peace was declared. There was no doubt expressed that the war was not to be won even though the war might last some time. The increased post war demand for chlorine was a certainty but both Levinstein and Clayton were uncertain about ICI’s own plans post war. Clayton was a member of one of the teams of experts sent to Germany in late 1945 to gather information on the German chemical industry. This was then published in the BIOS reports from British teams and the FIAT reports of the American teams. Clayton on one of these visites was made aware of Dr Walter Neumann a refugee from the Russian Zone who had been technical manager of the large chemical complex at Aussig and had considerable experience of the type of chemical plant and process envisaged by Herbert Levinstein. Strings were pulled and Dr Neumann and his wife were brought to England.
During the plant construction years the effect of post war steel rationing on plant delays is contained in the consultant engineer’s reports. The first technical staff in 1947 were Gordon Lewis as Technical Manager, Dave Titchmarsh as Chief Engineer and George Franks who was to be trained in the US about the operation of the Hooker brine electrolysis cells. All three had spent their war years producing magnesium and George Franks had been foreman of a "shadow" war-time chlorine electrolysis plant somewhere in Lancashire.
On a different plain, the correspondence files cover high level negotiations regarding possible alliances with other chemical firms such as Staveley Chemicals and the Tennant Group. Tennants were to become the selling agents for the new company.
Early in the correspondence, Levinstein and Clayton discussed the viability of the open pan salt works and the options open to Herbert Levinstein. Overriding was the value of the old works as a source of brine for chemical manufacture.. They were suspicious about ICI.s post intentions regarding what must be an inevitable contraction of the open pan industry. |