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Cookson is an international group which specializes in the refining, casting, and fabricating of non-ferrous and precious metals and the manufacture of ceramics, chemicals, plastics, and printing and refractory products.
The family was established in Tyneside, England, in 1704 when Isaac Cookson, the son of a brazier from Penrith, Cumberland, moved to Newcastle upon Tyne to seek his fortune. He began operations near South Shields, where the company has had a continuous presence to the present day. The family developed major industrial links in coal mining and the manufacture of iron, salt, and glass, but its direct involvement with a company which came to be part of the present group did not occur until it entered lead manufacturing in the middle of the 19th century.
The earliest direct link with the present group also came in lead manufacture, when in 1778 a Rotherham-based family of ironmasters, the Walkers, began to diversify, and set up its first white lead works at Elswick, Newcastle, a site which is still in the ownership of Cookson Industrial Materials. White lead--basic lead carbonate--was then the base for virtually all decorative paints and, as the population grew rapidly and the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, the market for white lead and other lead products expanded. Lead, although a long way behind iron, was the second most heavily utilized metal and was to remain so throughout the 19th century, with British firms processing around a quarter of a million tons a year by 1900.
This initial diversification into lead had been made at a propitious time and the Walkers's network of lead works became came larger than its original base in iron. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Walkers's partnership was employing a total capital of approximately £500,000 in lead manufacture, with works in London (Islington, Lambeth, and Southwark), Chester, Derby, Liverpool, and Newcastle under Lyme, as well as the original Elswick works. While some of the smaller works were closed during the 19th century, large smelting and manufacturing sites were purchased at Bagillt and Dee Bank, in north Wales, to work local lead ores, and the Scottish market was supplied by a works in Glasgow.
While white lead remained important, the output of other lead chemicals--especially red lead, used as the base for protective paints for the increasing output of iron and steel in the country--was developed. The Walkers's partnerships were the first to adopt a new process for the manufacture of lead shot, and built several shot towers at the turn of the 18th century--including one at the Chester works which is the only early tower still in operation in the United Kingdom. The Walkers's works processed a large amount of blue lead, especially rolled sheet lead and extruded pipe. These products were in great demand as a result of the large increase in both public and private building in the Victorian years, with sheet being used for roofing, and pipe to convey the newly developed water supplies. As a result of these developments, the partnerships--each works was run by a managing partner, and interlocking partnerships between various works provided some overall control--were the largest single force in the British lead manufacturing industry throughout the 19th century.
Despite its large size and considerable potential, the Walkers's partnership lacked initiative and did not dominate the industry in the second half of the 19th century as it might have done. By then the third and fourth generations of partners from the family were managing the firm, and there is evidence that it was suffering the classic symptoms of hardening of the arteries of commercial instinct. Capital employed grew very little over the 19th century; profitability was never high; the innovation of new techniques was left to competitors, and several of the partners became more interested in their country houses and small landed estates than in the fortunes of the firm. A dispute between the partners with regard to profitability led the partnership into the chancery court with the eventual outcome in 1889 that the assets were sold to a newly formed public company, Walkers Parker and Company. The new company experienced even less financial success, with a number of losses in the highly competitive years up to 1914.
In the second half of the 19th century, innovation in the lead-manufacturing industry came largely from newly established firms which were subsequently drawn into what is now the Cookson Group. It was in 1851 that the Cookson family became involved in lead manufacture. In that year, two of the sons of Isaac Cookson III purchased land at Hayhole on the River Tyne in Northumberland, where they built a white lead works. In the mid 1840s their father and his partner had sold the family's glass-manufacturing companies, because of increasing competition in this area, and the sons needed to find an outlet for their considerable talents. William Isaac Cookson was a very capable scientist and businessman. At the age of 20 he had spent a year in Michael Faraday's laboratory, and he was later to take out several patents for improvements to metal-smelting and chemical processes.
Under William Isaac and later his son Norman, Cookson rapidly became a significant force in the British lead-manufacturing industry. In 1854, the partners bought from the Hawthorn engineering family a second lead works at Howdon on Tyne, close to the Hayhole works. Since lead smelting and refining and the manufacture of red lead were already in operation at Howdon, the Cooksons had developed the capacity for fully integrated production within less than a decade. Over the next 50 years, the works were expanded and were regularly modernized with the introduction of new processes, the major instance being the first successful British introduction of an alternative to the centuries-old stack process for the manufacture of white lead. In the late 1890s Norman Cookson, like his father an amateur scientist of some distinction with several patents to his name, introduced a German-developed chamber process at Hayhole, which doubled Cookson's output of white lead to some 10,000 tons per annum in the early 1900s, around 20% of U.K. output. Cookson's growth brought considerable profitability and, increasingly, leadership of the industry.
By the turn of the 19th century lead manufacturing, like many British industries, was experiencing severe competition, not only from the development of new firms at home but also from imports from continental producers. Most British firms were small family-run companies which were ill-prepared to cope with the competition, although the example of Walkers Parker suggests that the adoption of limited-liability status alone was not a satisfactory solution. For most of the companies, salvation was seen in cooperation, common pricing policies, and the formation of cartels. By 1914 there were British conventions of the red, white, and blue lead manufacturers; each of these conventions in its turn negotiating market shares within international, largely European, conventions.
While the formation of cartels remained important internationally in the years between World War I and World War II, British manufacturers saw amalgamation as the best way to maintain profitability in the face of increasing competition. The earliest proposals date from World War I but in 1924, under the leadership of Cookson and with Clive Cookson as the first chairman, Associated Lead Manufacturers (ALM) was formed. Two years before Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. was to perform the same function for the British chemical industry, lead manufacturing had a central focus. The initial merger, with a capital of just under £2 million, was of Cookson, and the firm of Locke, Lancaster and W.W. & R. Johnson & Sons, the latter being an earlier amalgamation of several London producers which was now by far the dominant London firm.
ALM thus began its existence with the two major firms in two of the three most significant production areas in the United Kingdom. However, it lacked a presence in the remaining geographical area of significance, the Northwest, and still faced the regionally diversified competition of Walkers Parker. The first of these deficiencies was overcome rather surprisingly by the purchase, in January 1925, of Rowe Bros. & Company, traditionally a builders' merchant and thereby involved in the supply of lead products. Although this purchase would have given ALM an outlet for some of its sheet and pipe production, its true function was to nullify the potential threat of Rowe's growing involvement in lead manufacture. Before World War II, Rowe, in conjunction with Cookson, had purchased the patent rights to a newly invented process for the manufacture of red lead and, perhaps more importantly, had acquired the Runcorn White Lead Company, which brought with it the plant required for a new "quick" process. Even using Cookson's new chamber process the corrosion period for the production of white lead was almost two months, which involved considerable additional costs as compared with the potential, of the as yet little-used quick process, where corrosion took only a few days.
ALM continued to act in the predatory way in which it had begun its existence. Within five years of its inception, the company had purchased all the major lead manufacturers in the country with the exception of the Mersey White Lead Company, which was eventually taken over by ALM in 1972. While there were significant numbers of small, regional producers of lead pipe--and to a lesser extent of lead sheet--in which scale economies were not essential to the producers' survival, ALM dominated the production of lead chemicals. In 1925, ALM took over the Brimsdown Lead Company, another company with a new white lead process, which had been financed by Ludwig Mond and supported by a research laboratory with a number of impressive young scientists, including Stephen Miall, who was to write what was for a long time the standard history of the chemical industry. This acquisition was followed in the years 1926-1928 by the mopping up of several of the smaller Tyneside and London manufacturers and, in 1929, after negotiation had failed, by the aggressive purchase of Walkers Parker shares which eventually led to an agreed merger.
Achieving a dominant position in lead manufacturing was not to be the end of ALM's aims. Not only was there no growth in market size--as a result of the Depression during the interwar years together with increased foreign competition--there were also new substitutes for lead products. Copper was beginning to make inroads into the market for lead pipe but, more significantly, white lead no longer had the virtual monopoly of the paint market. Titanium-based paints and the entry into the market of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) with its Dulux brand were to cause ALM increasing problems, although, largely as a result of the former Brimsdown chemists' work on titanium, the group had a small share in a company set up in the 1930s to produce titanium dioxide. That company, now Tioxide Group PLC, was jointly owned by Cookson Group and ICI until December 1990 up until which time, as the world's second-largest titanium dioxide producer, it made a significant contribution to the Group. In 1930, before the impact of these new paints had become serious, however, ALM purchased Goodlass, Wall & Company (GW) of Liverpool, a large paint manufacturer with retail outlets. Although this might have been a useful diversification, particularly since GW owned the Valspar patents with considerable potential for expansion in the market for varnishes, the merger caused problems. The price paid for GW proved too high in the light of subsequent profits, ALM's capital had to be written down, and GW was never integrated, being run as a separate organization until its sale in 1984.
One long-lasting advantage accrued from this merger. The ALM board had become distinctly unwieldly in the late 1920s as a result of the appointment of additional directors following the takeover of various family-owned firms. In 1930 Clive Cookson set up Goodlass Wall & Lead Industries (GWLI) as a holding company, and the power of the ALM board withered. The original GW directors were soon pruned from the board of GWLI, and the power of Clive Cookson and his supporters was complete. It is surprising that rationalization was not taken further in the 1930s. A number of lead works were closed in London and on Tyneside and production geographically concentrated in order to obtain scale economies. The constituent companies essentially remained independent, however, certainly in name--even in the late 1940s at Elswick the switchboard operator had to answer different lines with different company names--and to a considerable extent competing with each other in the market.
World War II enforced further rationalization. Imports of lead were reduced and controlled by the government, while demand fell, largely as a result of the almost complete cessation of private building work. The group had to expand several existing businesses, one being the production of solder, as it gradually became clear that diversification away from lead was necessary. After the war, for a number of lead products, there was only limited recovery of demand. White lead was the major casualty, as it was replaced by other bases for paints, and although a new market was found in stabilizers for the plastics industry, the tonnage needed was small. Most of the white lead plant had to be closed. Owing to the motor industry's growing demand for lead in petrol and batteries, total U.K. demand for lead products continued to expand, reaching a peak in the mid 1960s. In this area and in the supply of lead for cables, GWLI faced competition and found the basic lead-products business less profitable than its traditional business.
As early as 1943, GWLI had begun to diversify into what Clive Cookson called "some allied field of industry." Fry's Metal Foundries of Merton, Surrey, was purchased for £500,000, overlapping with Cookson's existing business in the production of solder but otherwise concentrating on printers' metals and non-ferrous alloys. In 1954 another acquisition in this field, Fry's Diecastings, was made. As with the lead side, where a number of plants had been set up overseas during the interwar years in order to avoid import duties, the purchase of the Fry's companies brought an expansion in foreign holdings. A further area of expansion was at Howdon, where Roland Cookson--nephew of Clive, later to become chairman of the group from 1963 to 1972--added zircon in 1950 to the production of antimony, in which the Cooksons had been involved since the mid-19th century. As with stabilizers for plastics, where GWLI had negotiated for existing U.S. technology through its links with the National Lead Company of the United States, Cookson negotiated a U.K. license to produce zirconium products with TAM Ceramics. These highly refractory materials were beginning to make inroads into the group's existing markets in the ceramics industry and therefore offered a sensible diversification, which was to be considerably reinforced in the 1960s with the purchase of two Staffordshire companies--Harrison & Sons (Hanley) Ltd. and E.W.T. Mayer Ltd.--involved in the production of ceramic glazes.
Although diversification had not taken the group far outside its original activities it had resulted in a lack of focus. In 1949 the lead business, which included antimony and subsequently zircon, had been reorganized into a single company, ALM, with regionally structured management, but this offered little opportunity to concentrate its resources on those products which were most profitable. This problem was exacerbated by the accretion of additional companies and the growing tendency towards inter-company trading below market prices. Gradually, beginning in 1977 with the creation of the antimony and zircon operation Anzon Limited, the group--which had changed its name in 1966 to Lead Industries Group Ltd. (LIG)--began to adopt a divisional structure. Two years later, ALM was divided into three product divisions: chemicals, metals, and paints.
By this time, it was clear that the lead business was in permanent decline. U.K. consumption had declined by more than 25% in the previous ten years, and this had necessitated the closure of several works. Although to some extent offset by the development of new products such as lead-clad steel for buildings, and by overseas expansion in Europe and in the United States, where the lead interests of NL Industries were purchased for $40 million in 1979, making LIG the world's leading producer of lead products, the future of the group clearly lay elsewhere. Already, by the early 1970s ALM accounted for only one-third of group turnover and its contribution to total profits was declining. Further diversification was required.
Fortunately for the group, leadership had moved in the 1970s toward a new set of directors who had only limited links, if any, with the company's traditional lead business and who increasingly recognized the need to reduce those links, not only because of the declining financial returns from lead but also because of its unattractive public image. Leading the new developments were I.G. Butler, group chairman from 1976, and M.J.G. Henderson, his successor in 1990. They recognized that the group was actually less than the sum of its parts, because many of the 100 or so operating subsidiaries, in various parts of the world, did not associate themselves with the name of the group and were directing resources for individual rather than corporate benefit. Since 1983, the change of name from Lead Industries Group to Cookson has provided the focus for a new and much more high-profile corporate image for all the subsidiaries worldwide. A second step was the creation of a clearer divisional structure and the appointment of a chief executive for each division who is responsible for isolating and developing those of its products with major growth potential. The third step was to make further major overseas acquisitions, in recognition of the fact that the U.K. market was not large enough to offer significant opportunity for expansion and profit growth. Among the acquisitions, all by agreed takeover, were A.J. Oster Company in 1978, an American producer of nonferrous metals, whose chairman is now chief executive of Cookson America Division and, in 1987, Vesuvius Crucible Company of Pittsburgh, a U.S. supplier of ceramics to the steel industry, which was subsequently set up as the Vesuvius Group, with headquarters in Brussels. As a result, the 1980s have seen growth in group turnover from £400 million to £2 billion and in pre-tax profit from £16 million to £183 million. Over the decade, earnings per ordinary share have risen from 6.7 to 31.2 pence.
Cookson proved one of the fastest growing British industrial groups during the 1980s. It has established a reputation as supplier of a wide range of specialist products to industry, including non-ferrous and precious metals, ceramics and refractories, chemicals, and plastics. The group sees itself as "the name behind many big names of industry." Claiming that its products are almost ubiquitous in daily life--they are incorporated in most things from washing machines to motor cars, flame retardants in children's toys to filaments in light bulbs, and printing on drinks cans to household paint--the group has become almost worldwide in its diffusion, with manufacturing plants in more than 40 countries, and 70% of its turnover plus 80% of profit coming from abroad.
Principal Subsidiaries: Cookson Industrial Materials Ltd.; Cookson Ceramics Ltd.; Cookson Metals Ltd.; Cookson Minerals Ltd.; Cookson Plibrico International Ltd.; Cookson Precision Castings Ltd.; Fry's Metals Ltd.; Vesuvius International Corporation (Belgium); Alpha Metals Inc. (U.S.A.); CaMac Corporation (U.S.A.); Cookson America, Inc. (U.S.A.); Polyclad Laminates Inc. (U.S.A.); Stern Metals Inc. (U.S.A.).
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