8 - Braithwaite & Co. (Engineers) Ltd., West Bromwich

Summary

Company Origins and Pre-1945 History Braithwaite & Co. (Engineers) Ltd. (hereafter, Braithwaites) was established in 1884 in West Bromwich. It was eventually run from head offices in London, then Surrey, with staff there and at factories in Newport (making water tanks and supporting towers) and West Bromwich (for steel structures and associated construction work), selling at home and overseas. The West Bromwich site was closed in 1979, and the group radically transformed in the 1980s. This chapter deals primarily with West Bromwich and the group's management in the period between the end of the Second World War and the site's closure in 1979. But it begins with a discussion of its interwar activities, firstly because they set the pattern for its post-war culture, and secondly because the same man led the business in both periods. Braithwaites was originally a local Black Country engineering company. Although his son and grandson, his successors as the company's chairmen, based themselves in London, James Hulse Humphryes was a Black Country native. Born in Wednesbury in 1869, Humphryes appears to have been a self-made man of exceptional ability, like his near-contemporary Frederick Jefferson of Kenrick & Jefferson. Humphryes attended a local grammar school and the Technical Schools in West Bromwich and Manchester. After an apprenticeship at Braithwaites, he progressed from draughtsman to director of a Manchester engineering business before he returned to Braithwaites as a partner in 1912. He was committed to workplace innovation, presenting a paper on workshop productivity improvements to the Manchester Association of Engineers in 1902. While running Braithwaites, he was granted ten patents and became a council member of both the Federation of British Industry and the British Engineers Association.

After successes, especially in India, over several years, Humphryes separated from his partner to take Braithwaites forward on his own in 1921. He constructed the deal cleverly, with the much larger steel and fabrications company Dorman, Long as principal investor and Sir Arthur Dorman, KBE, as chairman. Their presence, and quick departure, showed how astute Humphryes was: he took on the new business with a financially strong partner whose reputation enhanced his own, and with which he needed amicable relations over the long term. After their departure, he secured his position at the head of the new company, retaining it after floating Braithwaites as a public company in 1927.7