Richard Tangye

One dark winter evening a stranger picked his way down an alley behind a baker’s shop off the Parade in Birmingham and rang the bell of a tiny workshop. Richard Tangye opened the door. The visitor looked round, apologised and turned to go. Tangye could not afford to let anyone walk away. “Whose place are you looking for, sir?” he asked. “Tangye’s,” the man replied (as Tangye told the story in his autobiography, One and All, in 1889). He was Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s agent, and he had come to buy hydraulic jacks.

That knock on the door made a firm. Within thirty years the brothers who rented that room for four shillings a week employed 2,000 people.

A Cornish boy with a broken arm

Richard Tangye was born on 24 November 1833 at Broad Lane, Illogan, near Redruth, in the heart of Cornwall’s mining country. He was the fifth of six sons of Joseph Tangye, a Quaker miner who became a small shopkeeper and farmer, and his wife Ann, née Bullock. Ann’s father, Edward Bullock, minded a great mine engine, and the older boys learned their trade at his side.

Richard was not meant for the mines. At eight he broke his right arm and was left unfit for manual work, so his parents spent what they could on his schooling: first at William Bellows’s Quaker school in Redruth, then from 1847 at the Friends’ School at Sidcot in Somerset, where he stayed on as a pupil-teacher. He hated teaching.

Clerk in Birmingham

At the end of 1852 he answered an advertisement and became a clerk to Thomas Worsdell, a Quaker engineer in Birmingham, on £50 a year. His younger brother George followed in 1853, and the two older brothers, James and Joseph, skilled mechanics who had built hydraulic machinery in Cornwall, came after them. At Worsdell’s, Richard persuaded the firm to give its men a Saturday half-holiday. He also quarrelled with a new partner, and left.

For a while he scraped a living as a merchant, working from a Quaker bookshop in Bull Street. Then Joseph rented a room at 40½ Mount Street, off the Parade, to make pumps for hydraulic jacks on a lathe the brothers had built themselves. Power came by belt from a neighbour’s steam engine, and only when the neighbour chose to run it. Warmth came from the baker’s oven next door. By 1857 the brothers were trading as James Tangye and Brothers. James and Joseph made things. Richard sold them.

The ship that would not move

On the Thames at Millwall lay the largest ship in the world, Brunel’s Great Eastern. She was too long to launch stern first, so she had to go in sideways. The attempt began on 3 November 1857, and the ship stuck. Brunel called for more and more hydraulic presses, and the Tangyes’ jacks were among them. That November James and Joseph worked weeks of up to ninety hours making them. The final push began on 5 January 1858, and on 31 January the Great Eastern floated.

The ship was a financial disaster for her owners. For the Tangyes she was the best advertisement imaginable, and Richard knew it. “We launched the Great Eastern, the Great Eastern launched us,” he said, and the firm went on using the line.

From Clement Street to Smethwick

Money from a Quaker partner, George Price, paid for a new works in Clement Street in 1859, the first to carry the name Cornwall Works. The brothers took up Thomas Weston’s differential pulley block, and by the 1862 International Exhibition they had sold more than 3,000 sets in nine months. In 1862 the firm bought Rabone Hall and three acres beside the Birmingham Canal at Smethwick, pulled the house down and built a new Cornwall Works there. Most of the work moved in 1864. Pumps followed, then a standard steam engine so plain that it was nicknamed the ‘Quaker engine’, made in quantity for stock rather than to order.

Not every idea worked. In 1862 the brothers built Cornubia, a steam carriage for ten people that could reach 20 miles an hour. The Locomotive Act of 1865, which made road engines crawl behind a man with a red flag, killed it.

Selling to the world

Richard’s gift was selling. He opened a London house, then branches in Newcastle, Manchester and Glasgow, an agency in Paris and, after long voyages of his own, branches in Sydney and Melbourne. He made eight great journeys between 1876 and 1904. When Cleopatra’s Needle was raised on the Thames Embankment on 12 September 1878, four Tangye jacks did the lifting. The firm’s advertisement compared the feat with the raising of an obelisk in Rome in 1586, which had taken 960 men and 75 horses. In London, it said, four jacks had been worked by four men.

A good employer, on his own terms

In 1872, when James, Joseph and Edward retired and left Richard and George in charge, Richard made the Saturday half-holiday permanent and granted a nine-hour day before his men asked for it. The works had a dining hall, classes, concerts and a sick fund. But the welfare came with conditions. When he set up a fund for foremen in 1878, he barred any foreman who joined a trade union, arguing that “a foreman ought to be entirely independent of the men under his superintendence and not subject to be censored at a trade union meeting by the men under his control” (Richard Tangye, 1878, as quoted in the firm’s centenary history).

Benefactor

A Liberal and a supporter of John Bright, Tangye sat on Birmingham council from 1878 to 1882 and on the Smethwick School Board. He and George put up more than £10,000 for the city’s new Art Gallery, which opened in 1885, and in 1881 gave £12,000 to the School of Art. He collected relics of Oliver Cromwell, and he was knighted in 1894. That year he moved to Kingston upon Thames, and he died at Coombe Bank, Kingston Hill, on 14 October 1906. He was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery.