Dear old work platform, it's not you, it's us. Actually, it is you. And it was love at first onboarding. Their beautiful dashboards, their customizable workflows got us floated. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to a special edition of New Books Network in which we talk with previous winners of the Coleman Prize.
Naming the honour of British business historian Donald Coleman, 1920-1995, this prize is awarded annually by the Association of Business Historians to recognise excellence in new research in Britain. It is open to PhD dissertations in business history, broadly defined, either having a British subject or completed at a British university. All dissertations could be in the previous year.
of that price yeah today we have dr christopher corker and recipient of the coleman prize in 2017 with his dissertation entitled the business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry 1900-1930, awarded by the York Management School, University of York. Chris, thank you for being here with us today. Chris is a business historian and lecturer in management in the School for Business and Society at the University of York, where he is a former director of the undergraduate program.
He completed his PhD in 2016 and won the 2017 Coleman Prize from the Association of University Historians for Excellence in New Business History Research and an ML Literary Prize in 2019. His current research is on innovation and knowledge in industry clusters, in particular the business and intellectual history of stainless steel, which has been supported by a small grant from the Business Archives Council.
Outside academia, Chris is an advisor to the Sheffield Archives, member of the Joint of Heritage Sheffield Partnership Board, and former chair of the Portland Works Little Sheffield. a social enterprise housed in the 19th century Cotley Works. His work has also been featured on BBC3's Free Things. Tell us a little bit more about how you became an academic and developed this interest or the topic of your dissertation.
I am an academic completely by accident. There was no design. There was no plan, really. I did my undergraduate degree at Sheffield Hallam in history. very much a delaying future jobs decision was made to do a master's degree, which was on local and global history. And alongside that, I needed to pay for the master's degree. So I got a job as an educational developer in a group which looked at learner autonomy and employability.
And as I was going through the master's dissertation, I was looking at Sheffield industry. And that was what really sparked my interest in what became the PhD. So I am a Sheffield. I was born in Sheffield. I've always lived in Sheffield. And I grew up at a time where steelworks were being demolished and there was this sort of sense of, well, what happened there? Almost like a romantic notion of what was Sheffield's industrial path.
And a few years before, my grandfather, who'd grown up in Sheffield in the 30s and 40s, told me this story about how in Sheffield, on one side of the road, you have a company making an armor plate, and on the other side of the road, you have a company making an armor-piercing projectile to beat that armor plate.
And this story is sort of stuck in my head. And as I started going through the master's dissertation, I realized there was lots of sources to look at in this area. And it was an area that was underdeveloped. The thesis evolved over time. I did it part-time over seven years, during which time I started teaching for the first time. It was terrible and got better at it.
Continued working with educational development projects. And eventually, before I finished the dissertation, I got a job at the York Management School. And it was within 12 months of getting that job that I finished the PhD, which took me seven years to finish. And I see the PhD now as sort of part of a bigger quest to look at industrial clusters. How are they born? How do they develop? How do they decline? And for me, this moment of Sheffield's history, as the thesis is 1900 to 1930,
is the high point of technology. Trying to make better weapons leads to the scientification of making steel, leads to metallurgy, which spins off into my current project of stainless steel, which is a byproduct of trying to make a better gun. And what I'm interested in now is how those knowledge flows happen. How do people know people?
alumni networks of metallurgists at the university, the social networks of people. And that fed into one of the chapters that I wrote for the industrial clusters book that I did with John Wilson and Joe Lane. I fell into this accidentally. I've sort of built the pieces up over many years of starting educational development, developing the thesis, now getting a chance to write more and publish more as I've recently moved from being a university teacher to being a university researcher.
And getting the time to revisit these ideas. And the PhD was really just the starting point of that. Although I didn't realize that at the time, that it was the starting point of where this intellectual quest would go. You mentioned something that I would like to explore a little bit before we move on.
And that was the use of scientific management in production of steel. And for the period that you're looking at, and the industry that you're looking at, that is something that is... very important in the UK at that moment in time, which is this use of what we today in management take for granted. which is recording, trying to analyze and trying to rationalize process. So let me make this note now.
and come back to the discussion when we tackle this, because I think that it's something that is important to help give context to what you are looking at. Yes? So, before we move into the discussion of the content... What did it meant to you to win the Coleman Prize, personally and professionally?
It was, for me, a point of validation for my And when you are dug into it for seven years, you start to get a bit annoyed at it and you start to get bored of it and you start to question why on earth you're doing it. And you start to think, is this any good? And towards the end of my PhD, which was the end of 2016, it was really a case of just getting it done and over the line.
And I'd heard of the Colman Prize all the way back to the beginning of my thesis, and it was something that I'd sort of... Seeing on the horizon is something I'd like to go for in time. But as the years passed, as I'm getting into year four, year five, year six of the PhD, it sort of felt a further and further away goal to the point where I almost forgot.
And I think because it had been won by people like Andy Pop, who I'd been reading as part of doing the PhD and who had been supervised by the same supervisory team as me, it kind of felt like a goal because I'd seen where people who previously won his career. So around about January 2017, so after the PhD had been finished and examined, just on a whim, I thought, I'll just send this in. I'll see what happens. Didn't expect to get shortlisted. And then I did.
Which started to feel like, you know, maybe there's something interesting in my work here, something that I'd not realized myself. And then the ABH that year was in Glasgow. And I got up there and the presentation was on the first day. And I sort of thought, well, you know, it's nice to get my work out there. And if I win it.
And I happened to present first. And I gave this 20 minutes on the Sheffield Armaments industry. Thought it went relatively well. And when it finished, I went and sat down in the front row. There was a spare seat. And the person next to me said, oh, that was brilliant, brilliant, really well done. I said, oh, we've not met before. I am Chris. And they said, oh, hi, I'm Les Hanna. I thought, well, if I don't win, it's fine. Les Hanna liked it.
Fast forward a few hours to the drinks before the conference dinner, and it was announced that I won it. And I was like, shock, really? Amazement that this PhD that I... got very frustrated with over the years, was acknowledged as something quite good.
I happened to be there with friends, people like Emily Buckneyer and Nick Wong were there to say congratulations. Emily, of course, a previous winner. And my colleague Shane Hamilton was there as well. And Shane very kindly sent a message to all of our colleagues at the York Management School, as it was then. And that evening I started to get messages coming through saying, congratulations. And as it finished, as I got the award, I popped outside and I rang my wife and I said, I won.
I was like, I'm surprised that I won. And she went, I knew you were going to win. I knew it was good. I knew it was better than you believed. So personally, it just felt like an enormous high point. It was like, this is just fantastic. This is acknowledgement that my work is good and recognized by the community I want to be a part of.
And I think it was about three or four days later, I was still on that sort of high of acknowledgement to myself that I'd won this. And I had to go to the supermarket. And I'm pushing my trolley around the supermarket, looking around. I'm thinking, nobody here cares that I've won this. This is brilliant in my field, among my friends and peers. But in the real world, this is not really relevant.
But for me, it started that process of being confident in my research that there was actually something good behind it. And over time, I have started to do some publications out of it. I had a journal article in the Journal of Management History. back in 2018. But because I was employed as a university teacher alongside, it was hard to find the time to get writing.
But now I'm able to revisit it. I'm able to turn it into a book. Because the thing with weapons and armaments in the First World War, there's always this sort of... public interest in it. There's something about guns and weapons and wars that has this sort of public interest. So the decision really for me now is, do I do an academic text very much based on the PhD? Do I do something more for mass market, for Waterstones, or do I try and do both?
But to come back to your question, personally, it was brilliant validation that what I was doing was good. Professionally, that's something on my CV now, that right at the start of my career, people said my work was good, and that has really helped. in terms of applying for jobs, applying for some more grants and so forth. What did it meant to have to organize the competition the following year? Do you think that it gave you better opportunities to network with senior scholars?
and expose your work to others how was that experience of organizing the competition the following year it was it was a fun process really so the year that i won the colman prize i'd gone to the slaven workshop for the first time to see other people's work developing and talk to them. And I suppose I have this mentality, even though I still feel early career myself that You have to keep helping the next generation because otherwise the field may just disappear and die.
So it's nice to see what other people are doing. And the submissions came in, and I had a team of Neil Rawlings and Emily Buckneyer as the advisory committee, as the three of us making the decision. And it was just nice to read what people have been doing and see what new ideas were out there. And eventually we shortlisted three and then two people came along. And there were two very different theses as to what I had looked at. One of them was Gus Amuazin's piece on Chinese merchant.
and the other was Tom Buckley's work on department stores. Two very different theses, two very different things. But it was nice to be able to help them present and chair the session and made the ultimate decisions. And it was nice to go back to the ABH with a different project. I presented on something completely different to my armaments work when it was in Milton Keynes.
And those connections with the two people who were shortlisted, with the advisory committee, have continued. There are people I still contact and still talk to. So in terms of networking and developing was great. And just learning what else is out there. Super. Let's move back to the content of the dissertation. And I think that we've pointed to two key words. not key, but certainly important issues. One of them is this broader appeal that you have mentioned.
and your decision or impending decision as to whether to do it for a wide audience or to an academic audience. So the question is why? Why would the armament and why would the First World War still attract this interest from the wider public? I think that in many ways it goes back to British popular consciousness of guns and wars and a sort of a hint of a amazing industrial past that isn't there.
For me, I've done lots of public talks and I've done commemorative events for the First World War. And for a lot of people, they know the event, they know the First World War, they might know a place. My work is very much centered in Sheffield.
but they want to know the stories of people. What did people do? What were the decisions that people were making? And it really touches into a social history aspect of the kind of work that I do, thinking about, especially in the First World War, the mass female labor for the first time in many of these munitions factories.
And it connects into that sort of history from below and who do you think you are idea about family histories and genealogy. People want to know what people did and where they went. You sort of get those two sides of it. You get the sort of big history of telling me where the battleships came from and the small history of telling me what my great-grandmother did in a munitions factory. And I think there's a way to balance those two things.
to tell the stories of the people behind the manufacturing. while telling the big story of all of the armor for the Battle of Jutland was made in three miles of Sheffield's east end. I think trying to find a way to navigate that will give it that broader appeal. I mean, the hope would be you try to hook into an anniversary. You know, we've had the centenary of the end of the Great War. We're coming upon 110 years since the start of the Great War.
It may be that if I aim for, say, 2027 for a mass market publication, that would be 110 years since the Battle of Jutland, which is what most of the material from. Sheffield at least before the First World War was supporting. And moving on to the second aspect, which is the importance of the First World War at another level. and a debate.
within accounting history as to the emergence of cost accounting, which is related to the scientific management issue that we were talking about a moment before. These, for me, were in my mind ties into something else that you've mentioned, which is the end of empire and this industrial might that is no longer there. And this process of the armament industry is being evident. There is this crisis of cost.
as the war is moving forward, there is this crisis in the UK that things are not getting in, you know, are not there. And it leads to... you know, to this questioning of how armament was being produced and looking at but also very conscious at this point in time of how the americans are can or seem to be doing things much much better which is one part of the story but the other part of the story is How do we manage production?
with and that's the essence of scientific management and this is where cost accounting comes comes in so although my This might not be the main thrust of your research. Would you tell us a little bit about this sort of... idea of how is it happening in Sheffield that production is moving from something that is more perhaps artisan, or I could be wrong, it was more organized into something much more or much closer to what we see today in terms of how you manage a factor.
What you find from around about 1900 with Sheffield steelmaking is that you have these steelmasters, these guys who know how to melt steel and what goes into it. And they're all tied together in a rule of thumb approach. They can look at a steel and go, that is good for a shell, an armor plate, a scythe, whatever it happens to be.
But that visual inspection of steel is something that takes a long time to learn. It's something that takes a long time to pass on to your successors. But it's not scientific. And what you find with the rise of armaments production from about 1900 is this new need to be considered. It's coupled with this emergence of metallurgy in the 1880s and 1890s. And it is that case of, if you want a steel to do this thing, it has to have 2% nickel and 2% chromium.
So you start to see the rise of, as you say, scientific management processes. intervening to making sure there is that consistency. And you start to see the rise of steelworks having research laboratories and analysis to test the steel and make sure it's consistent. And part of that feeds forward to the submission process for the government. These companies would make, say, 1,000 shells, and they should all be 2% nickel and 2%.
Once they're all shipped off to Woolwich Arsenal in London, one of those shells is picked at random, and it is test-fired against an armour plate. And if it fails, the whole batch is rejected and sent back to Sheffield. In which case you have to remelt them all, start again. It's costly. It's time.
Ensuring that consistency, you need consistent processes, consistent management oversight. You need very, very skilled workers. And often in gun works and in armor works, they were the most well-paid workers in the entire factories. We no longer need 1,000 batch. We need a 10,000, 10 million batch of these shells. So you start to bring in huge amounts more labor, often underskilled or unskilled, and you train them to do one thing. Do this thing on this live. And you start to get a sort of...
a dilution of management because you need more people to manage than ever before. You have people who are learning very quickly how to manage, very quickly learning how to train and have that over. Especially quality problems when you look at, say, the Battle of the Somme, the first mass output of what the Ministry of Munitions was hoping for, and plenty of them don't work. Because that oversight is not really there. The oversight and quality assurance is not really there.
When it comes back around to your question of accounting, it is no longer about profit for armaments. Armaments companies, since time immemorial, have always been questioned for arms profiteer. And you find in the records in the Edwardian period before the Great War, these companies are making 30%, 40% profit on these armor-piercing projectiles and armor plates.
And part of that, at least my conclusion in the thesis, was that it's the only time in history where private industry is pushing forward technology. The government is willing to pay a lot because they're not having to foot the bill for the research. When you come into the Great War, you need to do things almost... As you said, the rise of cost accounting, making sure there's no excesses. And it also leads to one of the things I am interested in digging in further is excess profit.
and a lot of creative accounting. One of the companies I look at, Hadfields, was an armor-piercing projectile specialist. And in their archives are, you know, a standard size archive box, like nine or 10 boxes of excess profit duty calculations. Because they're trying their very best to essentially manufacture the numbers to make it look as good as possible while profiting as much as possible as well.
You start to see elements of that cost of counting in some of the records, but it hasn't always survived.
You start seeing more in the 1920s into the early 1930s. You get auditors coming along to look at the processes of how an order comes into a works and how it goes through the processes and is cost effective. The root of it for these companies was... at least before the war, replenishing the money spent on research so that they can then fund more research, switching over in the Great War to essentially a dilution of management because you have mass employment.
Quality problems, pricing problems, and again, profit problems as well. So let's take a step back. And you mentioned that you had this wealth of art. So what did you actually use? And how did the story that you wanted to tell started to come together from those? Well, really, there were two types of sources that I used. Because the thesis was about the business and the technology of the industry.
One of the things, if we look at the technology first that I did was looked into the patent records of these companies. Because within the actual business records, you don't get much technical information. You don't get many books about research and the notes that these companies are making about how their research is going. So the patent record became the sort of best place to find this information. And the arms industry was one of the few where patenting was quite on map.
I think I ended up looking at over 200 different patents across about 20 years. Because what these companies would do is every time they had a new little innovation, they would patent it. Even if it didn't seem useful in that moment, it might be useful in the future. And if you patented it, you can then license it. So these companies were using licensing as a secondary income stream, really.
So you have lots of patenting. So I had to read huge amounts of patents, dig through the language of the patents of the time, learn metallurgy to understand what it was that they were writing about. But then alongside that, digging into the business records. We have a wealth of records for the companies that I looked at, but they've been relatively untouched.
What you found as Sheffield Industry declined in the 1980s is that companies would go out of business, and they would basically just say to the archives, do you want the records? And they all got put in boxes and left for them. So I was looking at the Hadfields collection, which is about 300 boxes. I was looking at the Thomas Firth and John Brown company. which was two companies which merged during the period of the thesis, which again was about 350 boxes.
A successor company, the English Steel Corporation, had their records at Sheffield Archives which were uncatalogued. So I did a deal with the archives that they would let me look at the records if they got a listing of what. So I ended up looking at 300 boxes of material, which took me a year to go through and produce the listing. But there was stuff in there that was probably written about and put in a box 100 years ago. So there's really useful information.
And then the other main archive I went to was the Camel-Laird archive, which was in Birkenhead at the Wirral Archive Service. And it's a very, very small archive service. They didn't know what they had. They had a sort of rough listing. So a lot of this was really... digging into records that have been looked at at a sort of broader level. Historians like Jeffrey Tweedale had looked at these for his book on Sheffield Steel.
And we have monographs about the history of Camel Laird and we have monographs about the history of the Vickers Company as well. But they had looked at the archives in a sort of slightly more superficial way. I took a very broad brush approach and basically said, any record which covers the time period I want to look at, I'm going to look at.
Because we're so bound by an archivist description that's one line that they wrote 20 years ago. It doesn't always capture what's there. And one of the reasons I'm now... working with Sheffield Archives more as an advisor is that they acknowledge themselves. We don't have the specialist knowledge of what these business records are all about. You need somebody who is looking at these things on a more day-to-day basis to say, oh, it's this, rather than a quick description of what it is.
So it was really a deep dive into the records. I found letterbooks quite useful, but often letterbooks are quite voluminous and badly indexed. But when you do hit on something, there's usually useful conversations that you can dig out. And then a little bit of looking at the Ministry of Munitions records down at Queue in London, which, again, are an absolutely enormous collection. And you have to dig slightly against the grain of what the archivist's descriptions are all about.
So it started to come together that there was a lot of corporate archives looked at that at least had survived. And I was lucky that most of them had survived in the way that they had. But it was a time-consuming deep dive to find the minutiae of armaments within. and how about the story that you wanted to tell how did that come together and what are the themes that you that you wanted to to touch i don't know asking what was the main research question would help to articulate this.
Yeah, the story, as most of the time with PhD thesis, the story slowly emerged. It initially started out as a series of case studies about the companies I was looking at. which didn't really work because the message started to get convoluted in the... So the story that really emerged was across four things. One of them was the technology of the industry, the management of the industry and that government relationship.
the production and overseas production these companies had when they were looking at making for foreign governments, and that connection to industrial clusters, which continues in my work today. And as you start to see these things moving together, the innovation story and the connections across borders started to emerge as I looked at the patent record and then the licensing record.
The management story was interesting because it meant digging into profiles of people that had never really been looked at as directors of companies and looking at this exchange between people who worked for the government, who then worked for private industry. the connection to industrial clusters was more of a
I suppose, secondary theme of the thesis as it developed, but has become more interesting. And then just there's the production records. What happens when you need mass production? What happens when you have... foreign nations that want their armaments. Sheffield made all of the armored piston projectiles for Japan before the 1930s, all of them for Italy before the 1920s, and had production for the American Navy in the Great War. There's a global story to be told from this local place.
So the themes really emerged and they came together as the business and technology of the industry, but it was about the people managing, the people innovating, the production processes and the connection to broader industry. And that's where the story really came together. And the story really performed in the last six months of writing. You hope that the thing you start with is the thing you end with, but it really developed as the sources were understood.
And that is also understandable given the large... number of sources that you were looking at. I mean, you were being thorough and as you've described, you've looked at a large number of records overall. a slightly longer period of time than everybody else. as you were doing all the other things. So that also helps to mature the process of writing in a different way than if you're doing everything in one go.
So what would have been something that if you have had the space, you would have added to the dissertation? like to revisit that, you know, something nice, these nuggets of... of knowledge that you know things are finished and you need to leave out what you would like to look at in in greater depth i mean obviously one of them is this cluster story that you pick up and are embraced in greater depth. But what are the others?
Well, the story of armaments is longer than the period of the thesis. I originally was going to look all the way through to the Second World War, because there are differences in government procurement once the Second World War starts. And by 1945, some of these companies I was analyzing decided to leave the industry. So, so temporarily there's a longer period I would have liked to look at.
I didn't include much on one of the main armaments companies of the time, Vickers, because they had been looked at so much. And Vickers, while I had a Sheffield Works, was very much a national company at the time. So there are potentially more case studies to incorporate. But one of the things that I would like to dig into more and revisit some more is the profiles of the directors of these companies.
take a more collective biography approach and look at where these people came from. What were their backgrounds? What was their interests? What were their other business interests? Is there an interconnected network of these directors across different... companies and potentially different industries. I mean, that in itself is as much work as the original thesis. But it's really to counter this idea that
The arms companies are run by greedy businessmen who have interests in all the newspapers, that they have government links. There's this sort of myth that came out of the 1920s of these arms profiteers. Whereas in reality, most of them are humble second, third, fourth generation steel makers with an interest in just advancing their industry and doing better for their industry.
So there's a bigger story to tell of the people behind that. And that is potentially a story that I revisit in the future. And as you say, that connection to the broader industrial clusters is something I'm starting to touch on.
you can look at industrial clusters across centuries. And wherever people are making steel, people are making weapons. You go right back to the earliest records we have of Sheffield industry in the 1500s. And as much as people making knives, it's people making arrowheads as well. There's a much longer story about the vicious uses of steel by humanity. What do you think is the most distinctive, innovative, or borrowed?
other disciplines of methodologies in your work? That's an interesting question and one I not really thought about much. I suppose I'd always taken a sort of traditional business history case to the approach. And one of the things that I drew on most was this idea of innovation. And national innovation systems, at least where the idea comes from, was very much born out of economic literature. People like Richard Nelson and Chris Freeman writing in the 1990s.
But there's an element of that sort of idea of a national innovation system that can be applied to the region, the regional innovation system. But one of the places that took me that I didn't really expect was an idea of a transnational innovation. The idea with an innovation system is it's about the connections between people, companies, educational facilities, governments, that really promotes innovative development.
And when you have such a specialized industry that are connecting to arms manufacturers in France, in Germany, in Sweden, in the US, you do start to see those transnational links developing. So as much as it is a business history PhD and it has a traditional historian archival core to it,
I think those elements of looking at economic ideas and economic history and applying them to business history is one of the things that I've been really doing with most of my research. How do we use business history to answer those big questions in economics? That's really where I would say I borrowed from. But at its heart, it's a more traditional PhD. Interesting. So one final question, Chris.
business people or businesses today can learn from your research how is it relevant for them and we've talked a little bit about this on their fascination but what what would be the learning for them you think that's an interesting question i think part of it is about understanding that a business, a firm, is not an island. These organizations make many, many, many connections, and actually there's a power in connections that you make.
to training facilities to universities to other organizations a more open approach to innovation can be a useful way to solve an industry's problems. Within the thesis, there are stories of two companies trying to solve the same problem and realizing that, and then coming together and sharing their innovation. I think there's also a broader question about industrial policy and naturally the role of clusters in producing innovative practices.
and that there is a useful approach to this when you look at sort of ideas about the northern powerhouse here in the UK right now and development of industrial centers. The historical work that I've looked at and colleagues like Joe Lane and John Wilson are looking at with industrial clusters can inform contemporary policy. that actually talking to each other, working together is a useful way of developing.
And I think there's an underlying question and at least a story that can be learned from about crisis management. We saw this a lot with the pandemic, organizations having to drastically change strategies for fear of disappearing. The arms industry was exactly the same. National crisis, do something different. And that sort of crisis management and learning from mistakes, I think is a big message to pass on to at least contemporary business people and contemporary researchers as well.
Well, that is grand. Chris Corker, thank you very much for being with us at NewBooks Network. understand that you have a book coming out from this research so we hope to have you again here with us to discuss that when it's when it's ready in in the meantime to our listeners thank you for being with us today If you are not a subscriber, do subscribe to our podcast. And if you are a subscriber, leave us a comment or give us a rank. That is always very...
So once again, this was Bernardo Batislasso with Chris Corker in the Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armament Industry, 1900-1930. Thank you very much.