It might have been Richmond

Fifty years is a long time ago; if you lived in our East End in 1970 you would no doubt have been disappointed to learn of the recent closure of Ballito Hosiery Mills.  But the excitement surrounding its arrival on the Fleetville scene stretches back to 1925, over ninety years ago.

Edward Gould Richmond
COURTESY CHATTANOOGA PUBLIC LIBRARY

Ballito was a major source of employment in the period when the east end of St Albans was still growing; it occupied a building where many of us today carry out our shopping: Morrison's.  At the time of its arrival the mill was as if the company was a new-start operation – lucky Fleetville.

The name Ballito may have been a new brand name (from Ballington Hosiery Mill, the manufacturer's initial name), but the company from which it developed had a long pedigree, more recently in the UK where silk stockings were imported by two New Yorkers, Alexander and Charles Kotzin, at premises in the City of London.  To secure the success of their enterprise the Kotzins had a close business relationship with the cotton mills of Edward Gould Richmond in the cotton belt city of Chattanooga, Tennessee.  

One of his mills still turned out finished cotton stockings in the early years of the twentieth century, and when silk became fashionable the company built a new mill specifically for the new product.  Cotton costs had been kept low partly as a result of the plantation system, originally based on slavery, and then on a flexible arrangement of employment in the mills which often made use of children who were, the company said, "just helping out".

There was little doubt about the success of the new Ballington silk stockings over here in the UK, but before long the government took the decision to add import tariffs on to a range of silk products, partly to raise funds for the Treasury and to protect the emerging home market.  The Richmond company's response was to allocate substantial funds for building a brand new mill near London in order to avoid the tariffs.

Well, someone saved some money, because the Kotzins discovered an empty former printing factory in Hatfield Road, Fleetville, and their only major task was to import the machinery.  Having brought over skilled operators and trained new employees Ballington Hosiery Mill, Fleetville was under way and quickly expanded.

Ballito advertising in the 1920s

Ballito may well be associated with Fleetville, but it was not, strictly a British enterprise; just a Tennessee business using its financial clout to avoid its products being too expensive when imported to the UK.  It's the way international trade often works.

There are still many families living in and around St Albans whose relatives once worked at the Ballito.  The local history group, Fleetville Diaries, is currently working on a project which includes recollections from former employees, as well as the manufacturing background to the manufacture of silk and nylon hose, the competition which Ballito faced and the success of its marketing.




  

New homes everywhere

We have become used to ticking off the new housing developments we come across in our local travels, not to mention those which are  proposed as private enterprises or will result from district plans, the largest for large estates in the vicinities of Redbourn and Tyttenhanger.

But lest we imagine this is a modern phenomenon alone, the demand for homes in huge swathes of Middlesex between the two wars, and resulting from families escaping the privations of poor housing in London, largely created the modern outer boroughs of the metropolis.  And it touched St Albans too in a small way, with the typical semi-detached estates, the largest of which was primed to grow from Marshalswick Farm.

As a result of such frenetic activity there developed a super-charged energy in the formation and  expansion of house building firms, most of which had previously been small family enterprises of fewer than a dozen employees.  Gone were the days when builders offered bids on a few plots on a field development sold off by a farmer.  Construction companies sought whole farms which their owners wish to dispose of; the farm name living on in the marketing,  display advertisements and show home welcome days – the flag poles and fully-furnished show homes had their genesis in the late 1920s.  Buses and taxis were even laid on to woo prospective purchasers, then a novel method of acquisition for ordinary families.

BRITISH NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE

In 1938 news came through that Marshalswick Farm had been purchased by the north west London building company of T F Nash.  Already a well-known company for its many well laid out estates to its name, TFN was not afraid of programming in excess of two thousand dwellings, including small numbers of detached properties in key entry locations to an estate, and was an early adopter of both cavity wall construction and built-in extras,  garage-width sideways and garage-included homes, all with generous gardens.  As for the designs, the front elevations are certainly distinctive.  In Harrow the company even developed blocks of flats with a modernist curved-end balconies.  Throughout the 1930s it was completing up to one thousand homes a year.

ST ALBANS MUSEUMS

St Albans was one of the company's rare forays beyond north-west London.  There was therefore a possibility that, had the war not intervened, Nash may have spread its building wings even further.  As it was, the firm joined other similar enterprises in bidding for  government infrastructure projects after domestic building ceased.  It was not until 1954 until building controls finally disappeared, but it seems that Nash had already decided to call it a day as a house builder in its own right.  Stocks of materials and equipment had been auctioned and sites sold.  Other builder-developers re-launched ready to take on the 1950s housing expansion; at Marshalswick it was McGlashan & Co.  Its office was at The Quadrant.


If you live, or have lived, in a T F Nash home you will usually know, and there are people out there who still search for the company's original brochures which set out the elevations and plans of a handful of designs in which it specialised, including their tapered rooflines, porches and shutters.  Most have now been altered, and few still sport the shutters, but recognising a Nash home is not always a challenge.

The Nash family may not have lived in St Albans, but it is a name which St Albans has taken to its heart; people just know where the Nash homes are.