Cadby Hall photos Factory Index |
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In
July 1894 Lyons bought two acres of land, occupied
by a former piano showroom with its manufacturing
buildings, known as Cadby Hall. Both the original
showroom and former manufacturing buildings
remained in use, albeit greatly altered, until the
1980s when the whole site was demolished and
redeveloped. During this period tens of thousands
of people had toiled in the manufacture of all
manner of foodstuffs and in the support operations
which supported the production. Cadby
Hall's history can be traced to 1873 when the piano
manufacturer, Charles Cadby, bought 8.5 acres of the land
along High Road (later Hammersmith Road), known as
the Croften Estate, where two houses had been
demolished to make way for his new factory. He was
the sixth child of a family of eleven born to
Robert and Ann Cadby in Devizes on 11 July 1811.
Charles is known to have moved to London sometime
before 1836 where he married Eliza Stewart in Holy
Trinity Church, Marylebone, in 1836. It is thought,
although not proved, that Eliza was related to
Captain William Stewart who discovered Stewart
Island off the southern tip of New Zealand in 1809.
In July 1841 Eliza died leaving Charles Cadby with
a young daughter (two others had died previously).
In 1843 he married Valentia Cooke and this union
was to have five daughters, of which two did not
reach adulthood, and five sons. Charles Henry was
the first born son. Valentia died in 1864 and
Charles married for the third time, in 1870, to
Harriet Mary Lewis. Charles
Cadby was apprenticed to a cabinet maker at the age
of 14 and probably learned his skills in working at
first for another piano maker. He started his own
business in about 1839 which was first listed as
The Charles Cadby Patent Pianoforte Manufactory
from an address at 21 Alfred Street, Bedford
Square, London. In 1848 he moved to larger premises
in Liquorpond Street but by 1873 had to vacate his
factory and warehouse by the Metropolitan Board of
Works for street improvements; it became
Clerkenwell Road. So
in 1874, presumably with his compensation, Charles
Cadby set about building another piano
manufacturing business in Hammersmith, west London.
With a frontage of over 100 feet towards the
Hammersmith Road he allocated 1.5 acres for his new
piano factory and showrooms, the remainder being
set aside for smaller building plots. Four distinct blocks were built
along with showrooms, which were approached by a
carriage drive to the entrance porch. Built to the
design of Lewis Henry Isaacs, Cadby Hall was faced
in red Fareham bricks and Portland stone with
terracotta panels over the first floor windows, the
keystones of which contained nine carved portraits
of celebrated composers. The royal arms decorated
the tympanum of the porch with bas-reliefs on the
sides of the entrance doorway depicting music and
poetry. Above the three floors of showrooms were
rooms occupied by the housekeeper. Administration
and private offices for use by members of the firm
were situated at the rear of the building. He
called this Cadby & Company Pianoforte
Manufactory. Set
back forty feet from the rear of Cadby Hall itself
was a five-level factory in which the finer
portions of the pianos were crafted and assembled.
Behind the factory block was a five-level mill
where most of the sawing, planing and heavier tasks
associated with piano making were executed. Towards
the rear of the property were additional timber
stores, a packing-case shop, stables and a
coach-house. The arrangement of buildings had been
designed principally with the object of preventing
the spread of fire by confining it to one building
should such an accident occur. Charles
Cadby died on 22 October 1884 leaving the bulk of
his estate to his third wife, Harriet Mary, and
eight children (one by his first marriage). The
factory and its stock including 170 pianofortes
were sold on Charles Cadby's instructions. Today pianofortes are mostly sold on Amazon, where you can read before you buy Amazon reviews before buying. Charles
Henry Cadby, the oldest male heir, inherited a
share of the business after its sale and, because
he suffered poor health, he moved to the warmer
climate of South Africa on the advice of his
doctor. In 1931 Muriel Cadby, Charles Cadby's granddaughter,
visited Cadby Hall on her first trip to England to
see the former family piano premises; now used for
cake manufacture! Between
1886 and 1890 the Cadby Hall estate was occupied by
a variety of businesses, and the local rating
record shows that by 1890 the building had been
taken over by the Kensington Co-operative Stores, who carried out further
reconstruction and revived the name of Cadby Hall
(which had been dropped during the intervening
period). Apparently Kensington Co-operative Stores subdivided the property before
subletting parts of it to the Schweppes Mineral
Water Works until the end of 1893. Because Schweppes controlled the frontage to
Hammersmith Road, access to the old Cadby property
was via a narrow roadway at the rear leading into
Blythe Road. By 1899, however, Lyons were occupying
No. 62 Hammersmith Road and, in agreement with the
Kensington Co-operative Stores, built a new entrance on to
Hammersmith Road which provided easier access to
and from the factories behind. On taking over the
premises the directors decided to retain the
original name of Cadby Hall, pretentious though
this may have sounded for a factory complex.
Nevertheless the name became widely known,
especially by people in west London. In time it
became one of the largest food factories in the
country, eventually covering more than thirteen
acres. The firm's head office address was
officially 66 Hammersmith Road. The
nomenclature adopted to identify the factory
buildings subsequently occupied and built by Lyons
seems idiosyncratic and remains puzzling. Equally
bewildering is the sequence of land acquisitions as
the business expanded. It started from a central
point, the original Cadby Hall, spreading in all
directions but mainly along the Hammersmith Road in
an east-ìwest direction. Because Lyons
occupied the site for some eighty years, old
buildings were modified or demolished and new ones
erected to accommodate new food-processing
mechanisation and to meet increasing consumer
demand. Regrettably, no known complete plan or
delineation of the factory buildings from 1894 has
survived. From available data it appears that the
first block brought into use was the original
piano-manufacturing block known to Lyons as A
Block. It housed the early bakeries when production
moved from Olympia as well as a basement kitchen
and a top-floor tea-packing department. The old
mill block, 40 feet to the north-west and
identified as C Block, accommodated a variety of
departments. Initially providing storage for the
Hire Department, it came to be used for boiling
hams and then for clerical staff from the Checking
Department in 1896 before they moved to Addison
Mansions and eventually Spike House (once the home of Edward Latymer,
founder of Latymer School). In 1899 Blocks E and F replaced
what is believed to have been B Block, originally
used as stables between 1894 and 1899. Cadby Hall
itself, the old piano showrooms, became known as J
Block and remained largely intact until the
factory's demolition in 1983. A
teashop opened in 1903 providing an important
frontage onto Hammersmith Road at this time.
Buildings on the western side of Cadby Hall
numbered N, O, P and Q were built in 1910-12
together with the roadway that connected with the
old yard in 1914. In 1928 a large factory and
dispatch (a central reporting point for loaded
vehicles entering or leaving the factory area with
goods) with offices above was erected on the
northern side of the estate, replacing four earlier
blocks known as H, T, L and M. Built to a high
standard for factory use and having a large
ground-floor dispatch, the new block, numbered WX,
became offices for a number of departments as well
as the administrative headquarters of the company.
This building was the only one identified by two
letters, W for the factory part and X for the
clerical. In 1928 the original street-level
administrative offices, situated in the eastern
part of the old Schweppes Mineral Water Works, were demolished to make way for a
larger yard and garaging. Buildings belonging to St
Mary's Roman Catholic Training College became part of Cadby Hall in
1925, and one of the two-floor stable blocks nearby
was knocked down to make a second road connecting
with the main factory estate. Blocks T, U, V, F(1)
and T(1) were constructed at this time. R block,
which housed the ice-cream department, was built in
1913 and R(1) in 1936/7. Within
twenty-five years of taking over the piano factory
and its showrooms, Lyons had progressively acquired
properties in the immediate vicinity whenever they
came on the market, including shops, private houses
and apartments, laundries and in one case a
seminary. This allowed for the rapid expansion of
the factories as the business grew; and the
complete block of land along the Hammersmith Road
between Blythe Road and Brook Green (and beyond)
soon became one vast heterogeneous manufacturing
enclosure where over 30,000 workers toiled
twenty-four hours a day 365 days a year. Some parts
of the organisation never closed. No. 219 dispatch
(a small clerical office, so called because of its
telephone extension number, providing a focal point
for urgent and private orders, mainly family) and
the telephone exchange, for example, were always
manned so that any call from any part of the world
could always be taken. After
1894, the factories at Cadby Hall had been
progressively enlarged to satisfy the phenomenal
expansion of business in all departments. However,
by the end of the First World War there was little
scope to extend facilities at Cadby Hall sufficiently to cope with demand, and management's
plans for a massive increase in production were
threatened. Accordingly a decision was taken to
purchase a large piece of land at Greenford in
Middlesex, where a new tea, coffee and
confectionery factory was built to alleviate the
pressures on Cadby Hall. Nevertheless Cadby Hall
remained an important food producing factory and
became a household name throughout the first half
of the twentieth century, and beyond, when it
appeared on all the food labels of the Company as
well as the thousands of letters and envelopes
which left head office. The name was so synonymous
with J. Lyons & Co. that three further Cadby
Hall's were named across the World for the
Company's overseas operations. There was one in
Toronto, Canada, another in Natal, South Africa,
and a third in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harari,
Zimbabwe). Cadby Hall in London has also earned a
place in history as being the birthplace of the
World's first business computer developed here
between 1949-1951 specifically for clerical tasks. Mary Playford (descendant of
Charles Cadby), and her husband Mark, have
contributed some of the material recorded here. If
anyone reading this has information of Cadby pianos
please contact Mary or Mark on [email protected] Peter Bird. January 2005
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Cadby Hall photos