Sentinel Valve Works

Last updated

Sentinel Valve Works Ltd
TypeLtd
IndustryEngineering
PredecessorAlley & MacLellan
Founded1906
FateClosed
Headquarters Worcester
ProductsValves

The Sentinel Valve Works Ltd was a British company based in Worcester, England, that made medium, large and enormous valves initially for civic clean water distribution and sewage treatment, and later the production of valves for steam heating and electrical generation (steam turbines), and the chemical and petroleum industries. The company traded under the brand name Sentinel Valves.

Contents

History

Alley & MacLellan, Sentinel Works, Jessie Street Glasgow

Alley & MacLellan was founded in 1875 and was based in Polmadie, Glasgow. This company continued in operation until the 1950s. Initially manufacturing valves and compressors for steam engines, and later whole steamships. Their location away from the sea in Glasgow did not help them to be successful in shipbuilding so with the exception of ships in kit form – to be assembled on delivery – they concentrated on component manufacture for the shipbuilding industry.

Design expertise allowed them to expand into other potentially lucrative markets: specifically steam-powered lorries, and valves for civic clean water and sewage systems, both major growth areas in the United Kingdom.

In 1915 Alley & MacLellan moved the steam lorry business to a new company The Sentinel Waggon Works Ltd in Shrewsbury, England allowing the design and production of steam lorries to expand and become successful whilst freeing up space in the Glasgow factory.

Expansion to Worcester, 1918

Advert for Alley & MacLellan, 1943

Three years later with the success of the Shrewsbury business, Alley & Maclellan formed a second subsidiary company in 1918, this time based in Worcester England, the aim of this company being to expand the design and manufacture of mechanical valves with the initial focus of new civic clean water and sewage systems.

As with the Shrewsbury factory, a new design and management team was created with a group of around twenty management & technical staff moving from Glasgow to Worcester to expand production, further develop mechanical values and service this new market. In addition the factory created employment for between 300 and 500 local Worcester people. [1]

Civic clean water and sewage systems

Advert for Alley & MacLellan, 1943

UK Cities such as Worcester were expanding and rebuilding, post war, specifically the replacement of town and city domestic drinking water with clean (safe to drink) piped water and the replacement of Victorian sewage pipes that dumped domestic sewage into rivers with piped sewage removed from dwellings and received by new Sewage treatment plants for cleaning. The Worcester factory was built to provide products for both of these markets in the UK and abroad.

Although the impetus for expansion for this factory was the rapid growth of UK civic clean fresh water and waste sewerage systems, the business designed and manufactured valves of all sizes and for almost every industry, this included heating systems, chemical plants, electricity generation (steam turbines) [2] and the oil mining industry. it also supplied some values to its parent company's ship manufacturing projects.

Electrical generation

Advert for Alley & MacLellan, 1960

Electrical generation through the use of steam turbines powered by coal became commonplace in the UK in the 1930s with smaller 'town' generation plants being centralised and modernised in the 1950s, again the Worcester factory successfully marketed for steam generation piping valves.

The Worcester company was very successful and the design team was also able to file patents for new unique valve designs and design improvements. As the major business opportunity – civic water systems – once built required little replacement for decades, the company continued to bid for further contracts for towns and cities around the world whilst diversifying into other liquid movement systems.

Oil mining industry

One area of success, was in a new patented design of capping value for the oil mining industry, [3] designed by chief draftsman Mr D.C. Murray who had transferred from Glasgow, this involved building a ring valve made up of three parts around the top of the drilling pipe, a sliding valve could then be slowly screwed by hand across the vertical flow of oil, capping and containing the pressurized flow until collection pipework was assembled.

Other industries

The Worcester factory supplied valves for any and every liquid industry including

Legacy

The Sentinel name remains an important name in the world of valves with various new, unlinked companies now trading on this name based in the UK, Europe and America. Specifically relief valves that warn of the oper-pressurisation of a system (usually by whistling) are frequently marketed as Sentinel Valves. [5] [6]

The Worcester factory

The factory was of a prefabricated design, manufactured by the Glasgow company and assembled quickly in Bromyard Road, Worcester on the west side of the Worcester to Hereford railway line, [7] this also being the line that was used to deliver the factory from Glasgow. This must have allowed for rapid growth from nothing to a purpose-build factory in a very short period of time.  

The factory closed around 1967 with many of the staff transferring to the Mining Engineering Co. Ltd (MECO) factory (later part of Dowty Group) located along the same road.

After the valve works closed, the factory site in Worcester was taken over by Kay & Co Mail Order company who replaced the factory with a large warehouse in 1969. This has also since been demolished and the site was developed into housing in 2014, the road being named Sentinel Close. [8]

Related Research Articles

Babcock & Wilcox American power technology company

Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises Inc. also known as Babcock & Wilcox (B&W), originally The Babcock & Wilcox Company, is an American renewable, environmental and thermal energy technologies and service provider that is active and has operations in many international markets across the globe with its headquarters in Akron, Ohio, USA. Historically, the company is best known for their steam boilers.

Crossley

Crossley, based in Manchester, United Kingdom, was a pioneering company in the production of internal combustion engines. Since 1988 it has been part of the Rolls-Royce Power Engineering group.

Sentinel Waggon Works Manufacturer of steam vehicles

Sentinel Waggon Works Ltd was a British company based in Shrewsbury, Shropshire that made steam-powered lorries, railway locomotives, and later, diesel engined lorries, buses and locomotives.

William Beardmore and Company British engineering and shipbuilding company

William Beardmore and Company was a British engineering and shipbuilding conglomerate based in Glasgow and the surrounding Clydeside area. It was active from 1886 to the mid-1930s and at its peak employed about 40,000 people. It was founded and owned by William Beardmore, later Lord Invernairn, after whom the Beardmore Glacier was named.

Polmadie Human settlement in Scotland

Polmadie is a primarily industrial area of Glasgow in Scotland. Situated south of the River Clyde, Polmadie is close to residential neighbourhoods including Govanhill and Toryglen (south-east), with Oatlands and another large industrial zone at Shawfield to the north on the opposite side of major railway lines and the M74 motorway, Junction 1A of which serves the area.

The Sheppee was an English steam automobile manufactured in York by the Sheppee Motor Company run by Colonel Francis Henry Sheppee, son of Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Faulkener Sheppee. After long service with the army in India, Colonel F.H. Sheppee created the Sheppee Motor Company in Thomas Street, York around 1902. The firm mainly made steam-driven commercial vehicles but in 1912 at least two passenger cars were made with 25 hp engines and flash boilers. In 1913 they announced they had got a site on the Birmingham Road near Worcester where they would build a new factory for production of their 3-ton steam wagons.

Mangalore Chemicals & Fertilizers

Mangalore Chemicals & Fertilizers Limited is the largest manufacturer of chemical fertilizers in the state of Karnataka, India. The company is part of the Adventz Group. The company's corporate and registered office is at UB City, Bangalore and its factory unit is in Panambur, north of Mangalore.

Léon Serpollet French engineer

Léon Serpollet was a French engineer and developer of flash steam boilers and steam automobiles.

Straker-Squire Automobile manufacturer

Straker-Squire was a British automobile manufacturer based in Bristol, and later Edmonton in North London.

Steam wagon

A steam wagon is a steam-powered truck for carrying freight. It was the earliest form of lorry (truck) and came in two basic forms: overtype and undertype, the distinction being the position of the engine relative to the boiler. Manufacturers tended to concentrate on one form or the other.

Vertical boiler

A vertical boiler is a type of fire-tube or water-tube boiler where the boiler barrel is oriented vertically instead of the more common horizontal orientation. Vertical boilers were used for a variety of steam-powered vehicles and other mobile machines, including early steam locomotives.

Sentinel boiler Type of steam-generating furnace

The Sentinel boiler was a design of vertical boiler, fitted to the numerous steam wagons built by the Sentinel Waggon Works.

Steam motor

A steam motor is a form of steam engine used for light locomotives and light self-propelled motor cars used on railways. The origins of steam motor cars for railways go back to at least the 1850s, if not earlier, as experimental economizations for railways or railroads with marginal budgets. These first examples, at least in North America, appear to have been fitted with light reciprocating engines, and either direct or geared drives, or geared-endless chain drives. Most incorporated a passenger carrying coach attached to the engine and its boiler. Boiler types varied in these earlier examples, with vertical boilers dominant in the first decade and then with very small diameter horizontal boilers. Other examples of steam motor cars incorporated an express-baggage or luggage type car body, with coupling apparatus provided to allow the steam motor car to draw a light passenger coach. An early example with the all-in-one was photographed working on the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railroad during the American Civil War, in Tennessee, circa 1863-64. One American firm, Grice & Long, devised various versions in the mid-1860s for use on suburban and city street railways, using their proprietary mechanical patents. In the 1930s some highly evolved steam motors represented one of the final developments of the steam locomotive. The concurrent development of internal combustion-powered or electric-motored railway motor cars proved most popular circa 1900-1950s and those obviating the need for steam-powered cars.

The London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) Sentinel No. 7164, was a small shunting locomotive. Its design was that of the single-speed Sentinel, a vertical-boilered geared locomotive, using Sentinel's standard vertical boiler and steam motor design. This was the smallest of the four Sentinel classes used by the LMS.

Glenfield was a large industrial manufacturing company based in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland. At its height it was reckoned to be the largest company of its type in the Commonwealth.

Heenan & Froude

Heenan & Froude was a United Kingdom-based engineering company, founded in Newton Heath, Manchester, England in 1881 in a partnership formed by engineers Richard Froude and Richard Hammersley Heenan. Expanded on the back of William Froude's patent for inventing the water brake dynamometer, their most famous creation was the 518 feet (158 m) high Blackpool Tower.

Willans engine

The Willans engine or central valve engine was a high-speed stationary steam engine used mainly for electricity generation around the start of the 20th century.

Alley & MacLellan Ltd was a mechanical engineering company based in Glasgow, Scotland. Its products were sold under the Sentinel brand.

Industrial Revolution in Scotland Overview of the role of the Industrial Revolution in Scotland

Thy Industrial Revolution in Scotland was the transition to new manufacturing processes and economic expansion between the mid-eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century. By the start of the eighteenth century, a political union between Scotland and England became politically and economically attractive, promising to open up the much larger markets of England, as well as those of the growing British Empire, resulting in the Treaty of Union of 1707. There was a conscious attempt among the gentry and nobility to improve agriculture in Scotland. New crops were introduced and enclosures began to displace the run rig system and free pasture. The economic benefits of union were very slow to appear, some progress was visible, such as the sales of linen and cattle to England, the cash flows from military service, and the tobacco trade that was dominated by Glasgow after 1740. Merchants who profited from the American trade began investing in leather, textiles, iron, coal, sugar, rope, sailcloth, glass-works, breweries, and soap-works, setting the foundations for the city's emergence as a leading industrial center after 1815.

Forbes Marshall is a leading multinational engineering company, specializing in steam engineering and control instrumentation. Presently the company manufactures steam engineering and control instrumentation products.

References

  1. based on factory building size, no accurate information is known.
  2. Sentinel valves and accessories for generating stations and power plants. Worcester: Alley & MacLellan, Sentinel Valve Works, Worcester. 1930.
  3. Audio Taped Interviews, Interview with Mr G.G. Murray, son of senior employee Mr D.C. Murray, (Audio Cassette, Volume 2). The Hive, Worcester: Worcestershire County Archives. 1986.
  4. "Important New Dundee Industry". Dundee Courier and Advertiser. 9 June 1931. p. 5.
  5. "Special Purpose Valves". Integrated Publishing. Retrieved 2 March 2019.
  6. "Kunkle Stainless Steel Sentinel Steam Relief Valve Models 40R, 40RL". Dante Valve. Dante Valve. Retrieved 2 March 2019.
  7. "The Alley and MacLellan Sentinel Valve Works, Worcester, 1932". image from the Britain from above website.
  8. UK Postcode WR2 5FA

Coordinates: 52°11′08″N2°15′06″W / 52.1856°N 2.2516°W / 52.1856; -2.2516