Coventry Society member, Peter James, tells us an interesting family story that relates to one of Coventry’s foremost post-war industries. Peter writes….
For around a hundred years from c1880 Coventry was home to a number of machine tool manufacturers. Four of them were pre eminent in the field of design and production. They were A C Wickman, Alfred Herbert, Coventry Gauge and Tool and Webster and Bennett.
Coventry Gauge & Tool Co. Ltd was founded in Earlsdon in 1913 by Harry Harley who had been an apprentice at Alfred Herbert Co. Ltd. starting there in 1882. He had progressed to the rank of foreman by the time he left the company. C.G.&T was initially situated between Warwick Street and Earlsdon Street. They eventually moved to a site on Fletchamstead Highway in 1938. By this time their trademark MATRIX was well known in the industrial world.
On the 20th April 1955 the Machine Tool Importers Association was formed in Tokyo Japan.
Japanese industry needed to import machine tools to help develop and manufacture new products. This co-operation with global high technology companies has continued up to this day.
This was seen as a major export opportunity for Coventry Gauge & Tool Ltd. In 1957 my late father Alf James – Overseas Sales Manager (formally a C.G&T apprentice toolmaker) arranged to visit Japan to introduce and demonstrate some of the company’s products. The company had a Technical Sales Agent Mr. Shinoya based in Tokyo so they liaised and timed a visit to coincide with an International Trade Fair. Alf decided to take a novel route to Tokyo using Swedish Air Systems (SAS).
SAS had partnered with Bendix an American corporation to develop a system using a high precision gyro compass, a solar compass and a map utilising a Greenwich grid system. Traditionally there had been a problem that the magnetic north pole is 1000km to the south of the navigational north pole causing compasses to point south when they should have been pointing north. The world’s first commercial trans polar flight was on 24th February 1957 from Copenhagen Denmark to Tokyo Japan via Anchorage in Alaska then flying over the North Pole. There were 47 passengers including Prince Axel of Denmark.
The flight using a Douglas DC-7C (LN-MOD) named Guttorn Viking left Copenhagen at 11.35 UTC. At the same time another DC-7C (LN-MOE) Reidar Viking left Tokyo bound for Copenhagen. The two aircraft passed each other over the North Pole at 21.37 UTC.
The visit to Japan resulted in a number of orders. Most notably from two camera manufacturers :- Canon based in Tokyo formed in 1933 originally as the Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory and Minolta who were founded in Osaka in 1928 .
Ten years later in May 1967 Coventry Gauge & Tool Ltd. were awarded an order from the Soviet Union to Supply machine tools to Russia. At the time it was the largest machine tool contract ever placed by Russia and was valued at £4.90M. A team from Coventry had travelled to Moscow on the same flight as George Brown the UK Foreign Minister. He was in Moscow to negotiate payment for the machines which would have involved accepting commodities such as wheat and oil.
In January 1971 I was still living with my parents in their house. One day I bumped into my dad on the landing and asked him what he was holding. He told me that he was visiting Moscow and was packing his suitcase. In his hands he had a litre of Scotch and a rubber plug on the end of a piece of string. He said that the Scotch was to keep out the cold and that no hotels had plugs in the sinks or baths. He had a low opinion of Russia stating it was the worst place he’d ever visited after travelling around the world for twenty years on business. Visiting Russia in January was not something he was looking forward to.
However the visit was successful with C.G.&T winning orders for twelve machines valued at over £500,000. At this time over 75% of the companies’ output was exported.
Today it is almost impossible to tell that Coventry had a machine tool industry.