Paper Valley People
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The valley of the River Gade from Hemel Hempstead down to Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire became one of the major paper manufacturing areas of England from 1770 onwards. In Hemel Hempstead four mills, all recorded in the Domesday Book, were converted from their earlier uses to the manufacture of paper between 1755 and 1778. These mills were amongst the very first in the world to be mechanised.
In 1803 Frogmore Mill became the world’s first mechanised paper mill closely followed by Two Waters Mill (1805), Apsley Mill (1807) and Nash Mill (1811). The John Dickinson Stationery Company operated two of these mills and spurred on by their great success, built two more – Home Farm (1825) and Croxley (1830) – as well as leasing Batchworth Mill.
The whole process of industrialisation was greatly aided by the opening of the Grand Junction Canal in the valley in 1798 and later on by the London – Birmingham Railway in 1837.
With paper in quantity being made in the area, naturally printing followed closely behind. John Peacock started printing in Watford in 1832 and the town rapidly expanded as a source of printed materials.
But the town’s reputation as a major international printing centre really began in the early twentieth century when a number of local firms started experimenting with colour printing. The Sun Engraving Co Ltd was established in 1918 and its rival, Odhams Ltd, established itself in Watford in 1936. The Sun and Odhams were two of the largest printing houses in Britain, producing millions of colour magazines each week using a pioneering technique of four-colour rotary gravure printing, for which Watford became world famous.
By the 1930s, one-in-thirteen of Watford’s population was involved in the industry, thus placing the town at the heart of the greatest concentration of printing in the world.
John Dickinson
John Dickinson founded a giant business empire employing many thousands of people world-wide at its peak.
He started his working life by training as a stationer in the City of London, becoming enrolled in the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers at Stationer’s Hall in 1804. After a long and successful career he became Master of the Company in 1857.
A keen businessman and of an inventive practical nature he must have been frustrated by the myriad of small paper mills with which he did business and realised that to be efficient he would have to have the whole process under his own control. At that time each mill was under individual ownership using their own methods of making each sheet of paper individually; a slow and expensive process often with variable quality.
He was the holder of many patents relating to paper and its use. His first was for a non-smouldering paper for use in rifles called Cartridge Paper; said to have been particularly helpful to Wellington’s Peninsular campaign and at Waterloo by increasing the British firing rate whilst simultaneously reducing premature firing accidents. His next patent, in 1809, was for a means of making paper in a continuous sheet in what has become known as the Cylinder Mould machine, an alternative process to the already well established Fourdrinier machine.
Dickinson arranged financing to buy Apsley Mill in 1807 and the nearby Nash Mill in 1811 where he installed and developed machines of his own design as well as those using the Fourdrinier patent. By the 1815, Dickinson’s mills were producing some of the best and most consistent paper in the country.
Dickinson was involved with the development of the Penny Post, producing a paper containing silk threads for security purposes. He also patented a method of slitting paper with sharp bevelled wheels, still used on machines today and from which office guillotines in common use have evolved. In addition to his factories at Apsley and Nash he built two brand new mills at Home Park and Croxley in 1825 and 1828. Other sites in Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere were created for distribution.
Transportation of goods and coal occupied him in the early days and litigation with the Grand Junction Canal Company resulted in the re-routing of the canal closer to his Apsley and Nash Mills. He successfully tendered for the building work of locks and wharves required for the diversion in 1818.
During his career folded envelopes were developed and a wide variety of uses for paper and paper products explored. In 1858 John Dickinson retired handing over the running of the business to his nephew, John Evans.
John Dickinson died in January 1869 having refused to call in his doctor on the grounds that he was too ill to see anyone!
Sir John Evans
John Evans was the son of a clergyman schoolmaster who was all set for an academic career and about to enter Brasenose College when he was abruptly sent to work for his uncle John Dickinson, who promptly put him out to lodgings. He soon proved capable for everything he was asked to undertake. Having thoroughly learned the business he developed some of the earliest machines for making envelopes which had previously been hand folded. Like Dickinson he too held a number of papermaking related patents. Evans continued his uncle’s expansion policy and the Company continued to thrive. He married Dickinson’s daughter Harriett with whom he had five children, Harriett dying of an infection a few days after the last birth.
Taxation and the shortage of rags for raw material was a severe handicap to all manufacturers and he was instrumental in forming a manufacturer’s federation to deal collectively with the government. Evans helped Routledge finance a factory in Sunderland for converting Esparto grass from the Mediterranean region into a pulp from which paper could be made as an alternative to cloth thereby putting the whole industry on a new footing and leading to the use of wood pulp once the problems of effluent and pollution had been solved. Following the conversion of the Company into a Limited company he retired in 1885 but continued to live at Nash House within the mill grounds as a tenant until 1906.
Outside his business life he followed his hobbies of coin collecting (numismatics) and of geology. This was to lead to his publication of three books still considered as standard works today – Flint Impliments of the Drift (1861), The Ancient Stone Implements Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain (1872) and The Ancient Bronze Implements Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain and Ireland (1881) – all written while he was still Managing Director and very active in the company’s work.
A man of immense talent and of charming disposition he loved a ball and would dance the night away. He was Secretary, Treasurer or President of nearly all of the learned societies, (Geological, Geographical, Royal Society, Anthropological Institute, Society of Antiquaries, Egypt Exploration society and of the Society of Civil Engineers) but it was the Numismatic Society (now The Royal Numismatic Society) which was his principal interest. He first joined in 1847, acted as Secretary from 1854 to 1874 after which he was President until his death in May 1908. A Commemorative bronze medallion with the bust of John Evans was cast by the society in 1887 by the Numismatic Society in recognition of his outstanding work for them.
Bust of John Evans on the commemorative medallion created by the Numismatic Society.
John Evans was made KCB in the Birthday Honours list of 1892.
Sir John Evans had made a vast collections of coins, and ancient objects of stone and metal most of which he gave to his son Arthur or bequeathed to the Ashmolean Museum. Visitors to the museum today will see many objects in cases stating that the donor was J Evans and there is also a gallery there named after him and another after his son Arthur. His wealth as a successful papermaker had allowed the collection of a unique assemblage of prize specimens. However his interests were not entirely academic for he was also very active in local affairs being a churchwarden of two local churches in turn. As a Justice of the Peace he was closely involved in the formation of Hertfordshire County Council being its second Chairman for two years in 1901.
His son Lewis, continued in the running of the Dickinson business and his daughter, Joan wrote the history of the company The Endless Web. The eldest son, Arthur, did not enter the business but established himself as a leading archaeologist.
Sir Arthur Evans
Sir Arthur Evans, FSA 1851 – 1941
He was the eldest son of Sir John Evans but was not prepared to enter the business instead pursuing a remarkable career as an archaeologist. Arthur became Curator of The Ashmolean Museum following a period of imprisonment in the Balkans for insurrection. As Curator he converted the hotch-potch collection of curios into a splendid seat of learning. Arthur found the money to create the new building in which the museum resides today.
He discovered the palace of King Minos at Knossos on the island of Crete and proceeded to excavate it, and subsequently re-construct it using money largely given by his father. In due course he benefited hugely from his father’s estate and within months also from the residue of John Dickinson’s estate so that it can fairly be said that the profits of papermaking were spent by him on this work.
He was knighted in 1911, in recognition of his life’s work as his father had before him but in a different field.
Lewis Evans
The second son of John Evans and a great-nephew of John Dickinson, Lewis had mathematical and scientific interests which ideally suited him to a career in the paper industry. He became a partner in 1881, then a General Manager in 1889 and later Chairman. During his period in the company the expansion and modernisation continued apace and included replacing the waterwheels with water turbines and introducing a railway link into the Croxley works. He was a flamboyant character having swum the Niagara river some 100 yards below the falls. He was often to be seen locally riding his silver plated penny-farthing bicycle. Later when he acquired a motor car it became stuck on the hump-back canal bridge close to Nash Mills. The opening up of agencies in South Africa was a particular interest of his recognised the danger of fire to paper mills and formed the first fire brigade for them. Soon acquiring a horse drawn steam pump for increased efficiency. He acted as captain of the brigade and there are pictures of him as the Fire captain wearing a silver helmet.
A portrait of Lewis Evans with some of his navigational instruments.
Outside his business life he played a part in the life of the County acting as High Sheriff in 1914, he was also a staunch churchman assisting with the Diocesan finances. He had inherited his father’s love of collecting but his interests were in ancient mathematical, navigational and astronomical books and instruments. His collection, believed to be one of the finest in the world, was donated to Oxford University and can now be seen there in the Museum of the History of Science. Its presentation brought him an honorary doctorate.
The Fourdriniers
…and the world’s first paper-making machine.
The original concept of a continuous papermaking machine was the invention of a Frenchman, Nicolas-Louis Robert. He worked at a paper mill near Paris and whilst there, developed his ideas for making a continuous sheet of paper by mechanical means. A French patent was registered by Robert in 1799 but he subsequently sold the patent and a model of his machine to his employer, Leger Didot.
Didot did not find conditions in revolutionary France suitable for the development of the patent and he turned to England for help. He was related by marriage to an Englishman, John Gamble, who was at that time in Paris acting for the British government in prisoner of war exchanges. Gamble returned to England, registered the patent in London and was later joined by Didot with Robert’s model machine.
In London they obtained the financial support of Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier, brothers who were wholesale stationers of some substance. The Fourdriniers commissioned Bryan Donkin to develop Robert’s model and the world’s very first continuous paper-making machine was installed at Frogmore Mill in 1803. A second, much improved and larger machine was also installed at Frogmore the following year followed by a further machine at Two Waters Mill, a few hundred yards upstream.
Nevertheless the technical developments in these early years proved to be a success and the continuous paper-making machine quickly spread throughout Britain and subsequently the world. A Parliamentary Select committee in 1837 acknowledged the importance of the Fourdriniers’ contribution to the paper industry and at least their name lives on in that the vast majority of the paper machines now in use throughout the world are still known as ‘Fourdrinier’ machines.