Henry Williams forging for the future

I AM sitting in the ground floor meeting room at Henry Williams Limited as managing director Andrew Nelson is enthusing about the company’s bright future, when a sudden dull thud makes the room shudder. A few seconds later it happens again, and again every three or four seconds.

It is as if an angry iron giant has awoken next door and begun to stamp its feet.

Mr Nelson, doesn’t miss a beat, telling me about a pre-pack deal the firm has just completed to buy the equipment, customer base, and a handful of skilled staff, from a defunct rival in Hull. But as the thump continues, and my pen keeps jumping on my notepad, I am forced to ask him: “What on earth is that?”

“Give me a minute and I’ll show you,” says a grinning Mr Nelson.

If anyone ever makes the tired old claim that ‘we don’t make anything in this country any more’ then they should be taken to the forgoing workshop at Henry Williams. The scene of men working with tongs, molten metal, showers of sparks, sprinkles of sawdust, and a ten foot high pneumatic hammer - one of the firm’s resident iron giants - looks like it could be a live exhibit at Beamish Museum. But to regard Henry Williams as a relic of industrial history would be to do it a great disservice.

Henry Williams has invested heavily in recent years; expanded its workforce, bought a neighbouring factory and designed products that are helping it to win multi-million pound contracts.

The Darlington firm that has played a huge part in supporting British transport infrastructure for more than a century is still going places. Pick whatever buzzword you like – progressive, innovative, inventive – and it would apply to Henry Williams in 2014.

The firm was established in Glasgow in 1883 and moved to Darlington in 1911, as it was the home of railways, and became Britain’s biggest supplier of railway switch levers, points, cranks and joints. During the First World War production switched to artillery parts and bombs.

It then returned to railway parts, investing in the Darlington plant and opening another in Calcutta where it employed 4,000.

The Second World War saw the Darlington plant produce more than two million mortar bombs, the company also funded the building of a Spitfire fighter jet to boost the war effort.

After the war, it expanded into the agriculture, motor and general engineering industries.

In 1968, it installed the UK's first electronic automatic rail signalling system in Swindon, which is still in use.

It made power distribution equipment for the £40m project to improve signalling on the London Overground route that ferried spectators to and from the London 2012 Olympic Park.

Its recent history has been about adapting to a rapidly changing market.

Since Mr Nelson joined the firm six years ago he has led a drive to control the firm's destiny by investing in new products and changing the culture.

“We have invented, developed and had approved for market a whole range of our Safebox brand, which has been a huge focus for us,” says Mr Nelson.

Put simply, Safebox is a metal box that has a coating which enables it to resist 5,000 volts. This innovative piece of kit, used for power transmission in the rail industry, recently helped the firm win a £1.7m contract.

After being a key supplier to the railway, by the 1980s Henry Williams had expanded into the highways industry, supplying signalling boxes,

Government spending cuts on the road network left a huge hole in Henry Williams’ order book. Rather than twiddle their thumbs and wait for the market to recover the firm did what any resilient company does; it innovated and created new markets for itself.

“Losing the Highways work forced us to look at what else we could do,” explains Mr Nelson. “We didn’t really have an R&D department. So, we had engineers here who we seconded into that and in the last six months we have brought in graduate engineers and started bringing things up to date. We have new CAD systems. Spent more money on the fabrication equipment and won some massive contracts.”

Mr Nelson hopes that a relatively modest deal, to make signalling equipment for Hitachi Rail Europe, will lead to more work from the Japanese manufacturer which is investing £82m in its Newton Aycliffe train plant, as well as setting up new UK train depots.

Sales and marketing director Steve Cotton explains the importance of the involvement with Hitachi, when he says: “We saw it as something we really wanted, and we were determined to land it, simple as that. It is a North-East company that is just down the road from us, and the potential to work with Hitachi again in the future is so important.”

He cites a deal last year with Darlington engineer Cleveland Bridge, that saw the famous firms combine to make bridges for Sri Lanka, as another example of neighbours joining forces.

“We won the Cleveland Bridge deal fair and square,” notes Mr Cotton, “But local companies should to stick together and support one another in order to promote the region.

“It’s all well and good to talk about a manufacturing heritage, but we need to preserve it and make it fit for purpose in the modern world,” he says.

Mr Nelson continues: “Steve and I came on board about six years ago. Henry Wiliams was here, working on its legacy products and doing some good stuff, but it wasn’t necessarily set up for the challenges ahead. We were losing market share.”

Mr Cotton adds: “We weren’t aggressively marketing ourselves. It was one of those situations you can get into with a well established company that everybody knows who we are, so the assumption is that the phone will just ring. It doesn’t always work like that. Other players come in and chip away at your market.”

Alongside the traditional skills in the forge, the firm’s high tech fabrication division can produce off the shelf products as well as bespoke designs. The firm prides itself on the quality of its product as well as its willingness to turn a hand to pretty much whatever a client needs.

Henry Williams recently had commissioned the biggest mobile electrical wiring room in the country, measuring 7.2 metres by 12 metres, and it is in the process of making another one.

Mr Nelson continues: “UK rail infrastructure needs significant investment and extra capacity. I don’t think anyone can argue with that, so it’s good to see that is finally being addressed.

“But we haven’t done well simply because as Highways dropped off rail investment became a major part of the current Government’s policy. We have done well because of our innovation and our values.

“We are employing more people than ever. Turnover was £7.8m when we joined and this year we expect it to be £14m. It was £40k short of £12m last year. We’ve had to build another car park to accommodate new staff.

“During the worst part of the recession we made two supervisors redundant, but we didn’t lose anybody off the shop floor. When the forge was very busy and fabrication quiet we moved people across and trained them.

“If you look at this place from the outside it looks traditional, some people might say old fashioned. There is a lot to proud in terms of the company’s heritage and the skills we’ve built up over the years. Henry Williams is still here. We have changed. We have become first tier suppliers to major OEMs. We are innovators and we can innovate for you. That is the message we want to get out to the region, and to the rest of the UK,” he says.