Lost images of our industrial past ........... no 3 engineers in Trafford Park in 1925

This is one of those pictures which I guess will never off up its full story.

I know that these were a group of men employed by Redpath and Brown Engineers in Trafford Park and the photograph was taken in 1925.

In time I will find out the exact location in Trafford Park and perhaps something of what the firm made here in Manchester.

But what I have found out so far is interesting enough and by one of those bits of historical coincidences links me to the company.

They started as ironmongers in Edinburgh in 1802, moved into structural ironwork and from 1896 having sold the ironmongery side of the business and later the firm's boiler business they became structural engineers.

A Glasgow office of the firm was opened in 1885 and in 1897 a new factory was built at Albion Road, with new bases established in London and Manchester during the 1900s.*

And that of course brings the link, with me because the London factory was built in East Greenwich not that far from where I grew up and where my father finished his working career.

Nor is that all for in 1911 “the Company had constructed, for a Manchester office building, a framework containing over 7,000 tons of steel, the first 2,000 tons of which was erected in 8 weeks! “**

And in time I think I might even be able to locate that building but for now I shall  just leave you with that photograph.

And one last thought which focuses on that man with the pipe and just what had caught his attention as the picture was snapped?



Picture; men employed by Redpath and Brown Engineers in Trafford Park, 1925, from the collection of Sally Dervan

*Source: Slaven, A and Checkland, S (eds.), Dictionary of Scottish Business Biography 1860-1960, vol 1, (1986, Aberdeen) quoted on the University of Glasgow Archives Hub, http://cheshire.cent.gla.ac.uk/ead/search?operation=search&fieldidx1=dc.subject&fieldrel1=exact&fieldcont1=construction%20engineering,

**Redpath Brown brochure text, taken from, Greenwich Peninsula History, https://greenwichpeninsulahistory.wordpress.com/2013/08/05/redpath-brown-brochure-text/