Cover Pictures 5

The former T E Smith printing works, Hatfield Road

 We could hardly publish a book all about the city's east end and its best known local area, Fleetville, and not include a photograph of the printing works one mile out of the town's centre.  After all, the building was known as the Fleet Works, and gave its name to the new development around it.  The Fleet refers to the river (sadly below ground and incorporated into an ancient drainage network) and the well known printers' street close to where the owner's home printing factory was based.  The gentleman in question was Thomas E Smith, who brought a significantly larger works to St Albans as colour printing became popular.  Space-hungry colour print works were often built on the outskirts of towns where land costs are lower.

We should add, Thomas Smith's works was not the first to open here; two years earlier another Smith, Orford Smith, began his fine quality  colour works nearby in what was then known as The Camp Fields. Later, the Salvation Army took over the site and it became Campfield Press – but that is another story.  

The T E Smith Colour Printing Agency as shown in the company's own advertising pages inserted into
a publication it had printed in 1907.  The inset illustrated the firm's headquarter building near Fleet
Street where, at the time, most of the country's national newspapers were published and
printed.

The road outside the factory c1914.  Many of the people shown are likely to have been
leaving their shift, walking and cycling along a Hatfield Road devoid of motor traffic.

The red brick factory following the closure of Ballito hosiery mill in the 1960s

All of the currently known and publicly available photographs of the Hatfield Road building were taken by, or for, Smith's themselves and  appeared in a large brochure/programme produced in 1907 for the 1907 Pageant at Verulamium – more than two decades before it became a public park.  Smith's was commissioned to undertake the publication, and naturally it wished to undertake a little publicity for itself.

Thomas Smith, however, was only able to acquire the land because its owners, a partnership between Earl Verulam and the Trustees of St Albans School, required funds to expand the school estate at and around the Gateway.  This expansion was the flint block we see today  adjacent to the Gateway itself.  The Fleet Ville grew on the two arable fields on which the factory was built on the south side and a further field for shops, homes and an institute on the north side of Hatfield Road.

Early photographs of a selection of printing processes within the building c1907. Here a 
rotary press is surrounded by drums of lined up nearby for the work to be done.

One of the machine rooms in the huge compartmented space, designed to limit the damaging
effect of fire.  The company operated its own fire brigade and also gave assistance to the 
neighbourhood of Fleetville.

The backbone of any printer was what was known as jobbing work – a steady stream of small scale
work requiring basic machinery or tools for the production of small quantities of leaflets, forms,
letterheads and so on.

One of the finishing departments was the bindery where multi-page documents are formed into
pamphlets or books.

As with so many commercial enterprises, Smith's was caught up in the manpower and materials issues of the First World War, and although it managed to keep going until 1916 its skilled staff were called to the front, work for the firm was seriously depleted, and the government had a serious requirement for wartime factory space.  The expansive factory was turned over to secret submarine optical research work.

At the end of the war the now government-owned property permitted  Howard Grubb to turn its attention to telescope design and manufacture, which it did until 1925 when it was absorbed into the larger enterprise of Parsons in Newcastle.

Almost immediately two American brothers who had been looking to expand the manufacture of ladies' silk stockings into the UK in order to bypass the heavy import taxes on a number of luxury goods, spied the newly empty building in Fleetville.  The former print and then optical works was acquired and converted into the Ballington Hosiery Mill.  Ballington was the name of the original Tennessee cotton mills, and the name was adjusted to become the brand for the products manufactured in Fleetville: Ballito.  It continued in Peace, War and Peace again until forcibly closed by its new owner, Courtaulds, in 1965.  Although as Ballito new buildings were added post World War Two, three successful businesses thrived in the original 1997 buildings for nearly seventy years before the site was cleared for the St Albans Co-operative Society's centralised supermarket in their own building.

Hundreds of employees were engaged in printing, engineering and hosiery during those times, and brought prosperity to both the city and especially its east end.