The Oxford Portland Cement Company Ltd.
At Kirtlington & Shipton-on-Cherwell Cement Works, Oxfordshire
Company History, Railway & Locomotives
Colin Judge and Chris Down, Industrial Rly. Soc., 2024, £30,
Book review
Click on the image for an enlargement
The subject of this book will ring bells with anybody who saw the factory's elegant tall white chimney from the railway or the road between Oxford and Banbury, and wondered what went on there? The trouble is that most private industry is off limits to the public and not capable of being explored while it is, or in this case was, a going concern. The cement industry was vast and initially canal-connected - and then by main line railway to deliver the materials it needed and to export its products. And this is an account of two sites in Oxfordshire which were located quite close to each other and followed chronologically, the first at Kirtlington on the canal, being replaced in the 1920s by a larger site at Shipton-on-Cherwell on the GWR.
Hence this is an A4 casebound tome of almost 200 pages and 220 illustrations, nearly all of which are half-page or whole page with a lot of colour. The introduction is excellent because it offers an account of a British invention that swept the world. A commercial history of the company that owned both sites follows, and a technical account of how the works operated and its assorted equipment. This is quite rich and inevitably the locos employed take pride of place with lengthy descriptions of every one employed, steam and diesel. Space is also given to the nearest railway stations with operating details on the Woodstock branch on which the GWR built a Halt for the works.
A key point is that the second site succeeded because the quarry was larger and the GWR was better able to deliver coal and other consumables to the works and take away the products, which was eventually via the marshalling yards at Oxford and Banbury and thence to the nation at large. The second site was far more successful but the contribution by rail and dedicated traffic is played down. There were, for example, rather more than goods pick-up trains. But let’s face it, accounts of goods traffic on Britain's railways have never been considered in sufficient depth, largely because one has to look outside the railway fences at how the traffic originated and changed over time and for many railway historians, that is too far from the good ol' choo-choo. Another aspect is that this was a large industrial site and major employer of casual and skilled labour - the number is not given - which was not able to draw on an industrial workforce that a city could provide, only a thinly populated rural community. This was unusual for industrial concerns but enforced by the location of the limestone that had to be quarried (the coal was brought in from mines near Coventry). A proportion of the workforce was housed locally although it is not clear who provided the housing. Others had to use the railway and the GWR added a halt but in fact neither station was all that close and unlike in a city, there was no tram or bus service. I mention these aspects because industry does not exist in a vacuum and its viability depends on more than the works itself; there is a wider context.
All told, this is a fascinating and worthy account of industry in a rural location manufacturing a product with a national demand. Its closure in 1993 was caused, I understand, by the owners Blue Circle Cement, switching production to larger sites with economies of scale, wherein lies the tale of rather a lot of British industry in the modern era. I attach some specimen pages although they are hard to choose because of the book's wide scope!
Steve Banks 7-11-24
