Rylands Brothers
Dates: 1805 until 2005
Location: Church Street, Dalton Bank and Battersby Lane, Warrington
Specialities: iron and steel wire, wire netting, wire ropes, galvanised wire, barb wire, wire fencing, mattress wire and nails
Rylands Brothers (commonly known simply as “Rylands”) was the largest wire manufacturer in Warrington – owning 4 wireworks at one point – and probably the company most identified with the Warrington wire industry. It specialised in
The Rylands family were long established in Warrington and by the 17th century John and William Rylands had established a business making sailcloth and cart covers in the Culcheth area. In 18th century, having won a contract from the British Admiralty to supply the fleet with sails – many of the sails at the Battle of Trafalgar were made in Warrington – John Rylands moved his family’s sail-making business into Warrington.
Perhaps sensing that the boom in the sail-making industry would not survive the end of the conflict with Napoleon, John’s young son, also called John Rylands (1785-1848), entered into business with Nathaniel Greening in 1805 to develop a new wiremaking industry in Warrington. An experienced wire maker, Greening had been brought to Warrington to set up such an industry but his financial backing had fallen through and he needed a new sponsor. Greening brought the expertise in wire making and John Rylands brought the funding and so the two men founded Nathaniel Greening and Company at the Bridge Foundry, near the Red Lion Inn.
Around 1810 the partnership was successful enough that it could move into new, larger premises – the empty Percival cotton mill in Church Street was used for wire drawing while Cloth Hall Yard, off Buttermarket Street, was used for wire weaving. In 1838, perhaps indicating the increasing interest John Rylands and his family were taking in the business venture, the partnership was renamed Rylands and Greening.
John Rylands and Nathaniel Greening worked together as partners until 1843 when Nathaniel Greening left to form a new company, N. Greening and Sons. The reasons for the split aren’t exactly clear but the Rylands family later claimed that they felt Greening was not making enough profit on John Rylands’ investment in the company. With the departure of Nathaniel Greening all the other branches of the Rylands family businesses were abandoned to concentrate on making wire. On John’s death in 1848 the business passed to John’s three sons – John Rylands, Thomas Glazebrook Rylands and Peter Rylands – who renamed their father’s company Rylands Brothers.
Rylands Brothers expanded quickly, and by 1856 they were able to take advantage of supplying the emerging technology of telegraphs – producing 10 tons of 22-gauge wire for the transatlantic telegraph cable a week and also supplying telegraph cable to Turkey, India and Australia. By 1862 they were able to produce a record 125 tons of wire every week.
The only thing holding Rylands Brothers back was their dependence on a supply of iron rods to be turned into wire. To offset this problem they formed the Warrington Wire Iron Company in 1863 in order to make their own iron rods in Church Street. Within three years Rylands Brothers was largely self-sufficient and in 1868 the brothers converted the family firm into a private Limited Liability Company known as Rylands Brothers Limited.
By this point the Rylands family had become immensely powerful in the Warrington area, but their Liberal politics did not make them popular with everyone. The Conservative politicians in the town even went as far as to fund one of the rival wire manufacturers – Monks of Whitecross which had been founded by the radical non-conformist Frederick Monks – to weaken the Rylands family’s growing influence.
The success of the Warrington Wire Iron Company had not solved all of the Rylands supply issues and in 1869, in order to further protect their supply of coal, the Rylands Brothers elected John Pearson and Thomas Knowles of the Wigan colliery to the Board of the Warrington Wire Iron Company which was amalgamated with Dallam Forge Company in 1873 to form Pearson and Knowles Limited. This new company was able to supply all of Rylands needs in terms of coal and iron, but Pearson and Knowles began to wield an increasing amount of influence over Rylands Brothers.
In 1877 Sir Thomas Bessemer patented a process which made it possible to produce large amounts of steel or “ingot iron” quickly and cheaply. British iron manufacturers struggled to compete with cheap steel imports from Germany and Rylands Brothers weren’t able to take advantage of these imports due to their contracts with Pearson and Knowles. Rylands tried to circumvent the issue by starting to produce their own iron at their new Dalton Bank site, but by 1898 relations between Pearson and Knowles had deteriorated to the point that the surviving members of the Rylands family summoned the young heir to the Rylands empire, William Peter Rylands, back from a lucrative career in the law to take charge of the companies direction.
William Peter Rylands had an elegant solution. In 1900 he was elected president of the Iron and Steel Wire Manufacturers Association, allowing Rylands Brothers to effectively fix the price of wire. He then amalgamated Rylands Brothers with Pearson and Knowles. Pearson and Knowles purchased Rylands Brothers outright 10 years later and established the Partington Steel and Iron Company in 1911 to ensure the local wire industry no longer depended on cheap steel from Europe. This proved an important turning point with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
Rylands Brothers were taken over by the Ministry of War as a controlled firm during the First World War and produced a huge amount of nails, wire rope and barbed wire for the war effort. It is claimed that the majority of barbed wire on the British lines was made in Warrington and 1,700 people were employed in the Rylands wireworks, including women for the first time. Unfortunately the war footing meant that Rylands Brothers lost many existing clients and by the end of the war Rylands had to rebuild its business again, this time against increased competition from the continent.
Rylands’ barbed wire department
The Pearson and Knowles group, including Rylands Brothers, amalgamated with the Wigan Iron and Coal Company in 1930 to form two new corporations – a coal business called the Wigan Coal Corporation Limited, and an iron and steel business called the Lancashire Steel Corporation. In 1932 the new Lancashire Steel Corporation took over Rylands main competitors the Whitecross Company. The two biggest Warrington war manufacturers are now part of the same group, offering them a degree of protection during the Second World War when their wire was used in products diverse as gasmasks, barrage balloons and aircraft.
Staff enjoying a tea break at Rylands Brothers
Following the Second World War the steel wire industry went into another decline. Rylands Brother’s wire works were outdated and had expanded in a patchwork pattern with little planning – a problem that extended to the whole of the steel industry. Following the Second World War he steel industry in the United Kingdom was nationalised in 1950, then de-nationalised in 1953 and then nationalised again in 1967 when the Lancashire Steel Corporation (including Rylands and Whitecross) became part of a nationwide company called British Steel.
In 1973 British Steel decided to protect the struggling steel industry in the areas of Northeast England, Wales and Scotland. Other traditional steel manufacturing areas such as Warrington – where 17% of the working population were still employed in manufacturing steel wire – were cut back as a result. British Steel sold both Rylands and Whitecross into a new company called Rylands-Whitecross, jointly owned by Tinsley Wire Industries of Sheffield and British Ropes of London.
Rylands was now an outlying subsidiary of an industry that was focused elsewhere and was particularly vulnerable to cutbacks and restructures in the industrial downturn of the 1980s. Rylands-Whitecross were forced to close the former Whitecross works at Milner Street in 1981, shortly followed by the former main Rylands site in Church Street in 1983 which was replaced by a Sainsbury’s supermarket.
Rylands-Whitecross carried on in a reduced capacity until it was forced to close the works at Dalton Bank in 2000. This left the last remaining wireworks at Battersby Lane which was subsequently acquired by Carrington Wire of Sheffield.
Carrington Wire sold off most of their remaining assets in Warrington and finally decided to shut the Battersby Lane works, the last remaining part of the Rylands Brother’s empire, in 2005. Much of the surviving machinery was transferred to Carrington’s works in Elland and Cardiff.
Carrington Wire itself was bought out by the Russian firm Severstal the following year.
The demolition of Rylands’ Battersby Lane works in 2005
This article was written for the Wire Works Project 2020-2021, a National Lottery Heritage funded project aiming to highlight and celebrate the legacy left by the wire industry, which dominated Warrington’s employment structure for over 170 years, putting the town at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution.
