The Churchill Machine Tool Company Limited began as the manufacturing subsidiaryLloyd Jones & Lewis p. 85. of the machine tool importers Charles Churchill & Company Limited founded in the early 1900s by US-born Charles Churchill (1837–1916).Rolt p. 177. Created out of the personal bankruptcy of Charles Churchill, the company developed to become one of the largest British importers of machine tools from the United States and a major manufacturer of such tools, initially under licence and later of its own development.
The original business importing American machine tools into Britain began with Charles Churchill as sole proprietor and later as a partnership with two others. It became a limited company in 1889. In 1906 a separate company, The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd, was established with the purpose of adapting tools imported by Charles Churchill & Co. The former expanded, producing American tools under licence and then manufactured tools of its own design, in particular precision surface grinders and similar engineering machinery. In 1918 The Churchill Machine Tool Co relocated its factories onto a single site at Broadheath, near Altrincham.
The two companies initially remained closely linked, with common a chairman and board members, including Arthur Chamberlain. In the early 1930s a series of board disagreements within Charles Churchill & Co led to Arthur Chamberlain resigning as chairman of that company. He remained chairman of The Churchill Machine Tool Co, and the two companies diverged. Charles Churchill & Co changed from a sales organisation to become a manufacturer. Thereafter, both companies manufactured machine tooling, and Charles Churchill & Co became a group of companies. By the 1960s significant rationalisation took place in British manufacturing, with companies merging or being taken over in an attempt to achieve benefits from economies of scale and pooled resources. The Churchill Machine Tool Co was taken over by the Birmingham Small Arms Company, which merged with Alfred Herbert Ltd, with production moving to Coventry. Coincidentally, Charles Churchill & Co was taken over by Tube Investments (TI).
The Churchill Machine Tool Co ceased trading in the early 1970s along with several other companies in the Alfred Herbert group, during a period of huge contraction of the manufacturing sector in Britain's economy. A part of the Charles Churchill & Co group became Matrix Churchill through a convoluted corporate process.
A company using The Churchill Machine Tool Co name still trades; but Charles Churchill & Co no longer exists.
History
Charles Churchill Charles Churchill was born in the United States, in Hamden, Connecticut, on 8 July 1837. His father was Willis Churchill, described as "a mechanic of rare ability, original in the style of his goods and in his process of manufacture," who had been manufacturing brass surgical instruments at a time when such instruments were all imported to the United States. Willis Churchill founded a factory manufacturing auger drill bits which was so locally prominent that the area of Hamden in which it was situated was called Augerville.
Charles worked in his father's auger manufacturing business, but when Willis went to London in 1861 to supervise the installation of wire-covering machinery being exported by Thompson, Langdon & Co of New York City, Charles soon followed and, once there, spotted a business opportunity for himself as he saw the interest that the US-made equipment generated. By the time of his death his businesses had a presence in London, Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and Newcastle-on-Tyne and was "a giant machine-importing business".
According to historian L. T. C. Rolt, the original installation was of machines for wire-braiding crinoline frames, and Charles simultaneously imported metal cutting machine tools to aid his friend Hiram Maxim who was developing a machine gun. This is a moot point: the Maxim gun was not developed for a further 20 years, and it is unlikely that Maxim was in England during the 1860s; however, the Gatling gun was patented in 1862. Rolt claimed that Charles Churchill & Co began trading in 1865 as importers of engineering tools and is thought to have imported the first examples of Morse tapered twist drills, self-centring drill chucks (manufactured by Cushman) and hand-held micrometers into the UK. According to Floud, he imported agricultural implements and other non-engineering items at this time. In its early years the company traded from 28 Wilson Street, Finsbury: sales catalogues were published certainly between 1876 and 1882 stating this address.
Charles Churchill & Co initially operated on Charles' own account rather than as a limited company. In his early period of operating in England he was active in patenting engineered items in conjunction with one of several other parties. The London Gazette shows several announcements for protection under the terms of the Patent Law Amendment Act 1852 (see table below). Two of them were subsequently announced as voided by reason of non-payment for continuance. (To continue required that the applicant pay a stamp duty of £50 within three years subsequent to the application.)
+ Summary of patent applications involving Charles Churchill announced in The London Gazette App. No. App. date For First named Second named Voided 859 25 Mar 1865 Improvements in oil feeders or cans James Buckingham Charles Churchill 26 Mar 1868 2783 27 Oct 1865 Improvements in screw wrenches James Buckingham Charles Churchill 2782 27 Oct 1865 Improvements in lathe chucks James Buckingham Charles Churchill 28 Oct 1868 2899 6 Nov 1866 An improved chuck for holding drills and other tools Charles Churchill Albert Beach 3696 27 Dec 1867 An improved gas-burner Charles Churchill Willis Churchill 3173 15 Oct 1868 Improvements in sporting breech-loading fire-arms and cartridges for the same Charles Churchill William H Miller 2018 2 Jul 1869 An improved implement for drawing nails Charles Churchill Willis Churchill 1361 10 May 1870 An improved window-fastener Charles Churchill William L Clark 4309 14 Dec 1874 Improvements in knitting machinery Charles Churchill Eli Tiffany 218 18 Jan 1876 An improved locking-washer for securing screw bolts and nuts Charles Churchill Sanford Elton Gee
Churchill's location is stated as being New York City for the 1865 applications (Buckingham was at Westmoreland House, Walworth Common, Surrey); for those of 1867 and 1868 he was in Norwood, Surrey, and states himself to be a merchant; still listing himself as a merchant, the 1869–70 applications show his summarised address as Darnley Crescent, Hackney, Middlesex; and thereafter as a merchant at Wilson Street, Finsbury. Willis Churchill, Clark and Gee were all shown as being of New York City; Tiffany was of Bennington, Vermont; Miller was of West Meriden, Connecticut; and Beach of Newark, New Jersey.
Charles Churchill, then living at 118 Cazenove Road, Stoke Newington, Middlesex, with offices at 21 Cross Street, Finsbury, trading as Charles Churchill & Co, was declared bankrupt by debtors' petition on 1 September 1887. He declared himself bankrupt rather than be declared so by someone to whom he owed money. The final dividend in bankruptcy was paid in 1889, and he was released from trusteeship on 29 April 1890. He had applied earlier for discharge but it had been refused on the grounds that he
Churchill fully tooled-up—that is, installed, assembled and made ready for productive use—the Gatling Gun factory that opened in Birmingham in 1889.Davenport-Hines p. 324. This was despite being an undischarged bankrupt. He had formed a partnership with his son, Charles Henry Churchill, and in 1888 he obtained another partner when John William Wright Gabriel disposed of his family's interest in a drugs manufacturer, Gabriel and Troke, and joined the Churchills. This partnership may explain how he was able to complete the work in Birmingham despite his financial status. Despite the assertion by biographer David Jeremy that J W W Gabriel disposed of the drugs manufacturing interest, a notice in The London Gazette for 1885 shows his father, John Wild Gabriel, ending a partnership with Troke, and that Troke then formed a similar arrangement with another person.
Early years as a limited company In 1889 the partnership was transformed into a limited company, Charles Churchill & Co Ltd (company registration number 29931). There followed a period of exceptional growth, and in 1896 a dividend of 230% was paid on the company's share capital of £5,500.Floud pp. 73 & 91.
In an interview in the US towards the end of 1896 Churchill explained that for the financial year ending 1 September 1896 sales were £110,000, and the order book value was £30,000. He attributed much of the exceptional growth of that year to the boom in bicycling and the consequent demand for automatic screw machines and similar machinery, and commented that he had placed orders for between 15 million and 18 million steel balls and that gas furnaces were selling well. He explained that there was little competition for the imported machinery – not even a manufacturer of chucks, as far as he was aware – because "English" firms seemed reluctant to even copy US designs, partly because of "the Englishman's desire to have and to embody his own ideas" and to what they perceived to be the high capital costs of setting up production given the price at which US machinery was sold there. A few years later he did just that.
He commented in 1901 that what he called the "hump", caused by the bicycling bubble, needed to be put into context: growth in the trade had been steady for the company both before and since that time.
This period of British-US engineering development has been the subject of analysis by economic historians. S B Saul, writing in 1960, determined that British engineering and its methods were advanced in spheres such as the manufacture of textile machinery but less so in that of light machine tools and the machinery of mass production. He argued that in these areas the response by British manufacturers to imports from the US "belatedly matured so their influence permeated back through the whole engineering trade and began a rejuvenation of old fossilised trades" in the 1890s. He broadly agreed with the contemporary opinion of Churchill that the adoption of US methods was slow in the light machine tools sector primarily because there was a perceived lack of demand and return on investment to excite the interest of British engineers. He viewed the cycle boom as the catalyst for growth in this area but pointed out that the heavy machine tool sector was one of those which had not been previously neglected by British engineers.
Economic historian Roderick Floud's analysis, in the 1970s, of relative imports and exports led him to the conclusion that it was "unlikely that the American share of the British market was rising significantly, until the 1890s ... [it rose to] a peak in 1899 before settling back to a period of less astonishing but still considerable growth to 1913." He also advanced a hypothesis, believing Saul's analysis to be "simplified", which placed a heavier emphasis on happenings in the US than in Britain: that the US import tariff of 45% on machinery and engineered products, which was the highest in the world until 1908, protected the development of the US industry in such products while it reached a maturity which enabled its prices to fall to a level that was highly competitive in the world market.