The Yorkshire Childhood

Harry Crossley was intelligent, hard-working, dedicated and determined. If life had given him the chance, he would have been an excellent student. Although he did not have a formal education, he made sure that talented students coming after him would have access to resources and opportunities that had passed him by.

To understand what made Harry Crossley so resolute and forward-thinking, we have to look at the world in which he grew up – a world very different from the one we live in today.

Harry’s father, Frederick Crossley, was born in Elland, a small Yorkshire town, in 1859. It was a time of great industrial expansion in Britain, and Frederick was only eleven when he was sent out to work. Woollen mills dominated the landscape and the lives of all who lived in the area. Frederick became an engine-minder at the mill, married a local girl and set up home in Elland, with a weekly wage of twenty-one shillings.

Frederick and Mary Jane Crossley had four children. They expected their sons, Harry and George, to live as they had: with little education, early marriage and a lifetime of badly paid, hard work at the mill. As working class girls, their daughters, Harriet Ann and Nellie, had even poorer prospects. Nellie eventually worked for the family firm, but neither of the sisters married.

Harry, the second child, was born on 19 September, 1884. He attended Elland Board School until he was thirteen, but worked part-time from the age of eleven as an office boy in a local timber manufacturing firm. Academic aptitude and a thirst for knowledge set him apart: he took classes in shorthand and French at night school in nearby Huddersfield, opening avenues that would offer alternatives to the life of a humble mill-hand.

While working as a shorthand clerk in a soap works in St Helens in Lancashire, he continued to study at Halifax Technical College. Harry had a gift for languages and after several years of night school had achieved ‘teacher’s level’ proficiency in French, German and Spanish.

At the age of twenty-one, he was working for a Bradford woolbroker – a job that required interaction with foreign countries. His language studies were already paying off, and it was his fluency in French that secured his next post with the American Radiator Company, based in Hull. The company needed a product representative in France, and Harry soon found himself in Paris, earning three times more than he had at the woolbrokers.

The Years Abroad

Harry Crossley was a young man who made the most of every opportunity that came his way. Excellent business sense, ambition, motivation and an appreciation for the value of education (later, he’d lecture his brother George on this topic) was a powerful combination that fuelled his career path. From Paris he moved south, to Dole, near Dijon, where he worked as a business translator, a position that introduced him to contacts who would prove useful when he began his own business.

A hard year in Berlin followed. Working a six-day week but still struggling to make ends meet, Harry taught students in the evening. Eventually he and a German friend decided to move to Spain, where Harry joined the School of Languages in Barcelona, teaching French, German and English.

The School was well-funded and well-connected. Harry found additional translation work for various Barcelona companies, which boosted his social status as well as his contact list.

While still in Barcelona, Harry was offered a position back in France. The School of Languages needed an Assistant Manager for a new Paris office, to be funded by the Spanish Government.

The year was 1909 and Harry was twenty-five. Perhaps he felt he’d explored his options long enough and was ready to return to an industrial career in England. Or perhaps family matters called him home. He declined the offer, choosing instead to accept employment at Spencer Brothers, a company in Elland that specialised in manufacturing purifier grids.

Return To Elland

After two years with the company, having learned all there was to know about purifier grids and their role in the preparation of raw coal gas, Harry took the plunge and launched his own small gas engineering business. He had not accumulated much capital while working in Europe, but with help from his father, Frederick, he managed to rent a workshop beside the canal at Battyford, Mirfield, not far from Elland. The position was ideal, as timber could be delivered by barge from the north-eastern port of Kingston-upon-Hull.

Harry, Fred and a couple of local lads were the only staff. One of their young assistants, Joe Copley, had survived three years in the trenches and stayed with the firm, later as Works Manager, until the business was sold in 1979. To begin with, their production was for export to France, where Harry had such good contacts. The start of the First World War in 1914 stopped all their exports, but rather than this being a blow to the business, they discovered a demand at home. Purifier grids were essential to many types of production, so trade continued steadily throughout the war years.

By this time, Harry’s sister Nellie had joined the staff, initially as a lorry driver. Meanwhile, Harry’s brother George had set up a sheet-metal working business in Elland. He was conscripted to work in various sectors of war production and his own small business was forced to close. George then worked in Newcastle shipyards and in aircraft manufacture at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. Here, he met Edward Eden, who was to prove very useful to the Crossleys when the time came to construct their own factory.

Crossley Brothers

After the war, instead of trying to resurrect his sheet-metal business, George decided to join Harry’s thriving concern. ‘Harry Crossley’ became ‘Crossley Brothers’, which remained a private partnership throughout its existence.

With George on board, capacity increased, and it was clear that larger premised were needed. The family decided that, if a move was necessary, it might as well be to a more attractive area. Blackpool was their favourite seaside holiday destination and it was agreed that if a suitable site could be found, the whole family – parents, brothers and both sisters – would move there.

Harry took the lead in this potentially risky expansion, securing a four-acre site at Bispham, then on the outskirts of Blackpool, located close to what is now Layton railway station. A shared family home, Marylands, was built on one corner of the property. Factory buildings were erected and machinery was moved from Yorkshire. By the end of 1920, Crossley Bros was back in business.

The Boom Years

Edward Eden, with whom George was in contact, was an expert at factory design and construction. He had heard that war surplus aircraft hangars were available at Sunderland, and he arranged for three of these to be transported and erected at Blackpool for Crossley Bros. This was a windfall, especially as the low-cost hangars served as the main factory buildings throughout the firm’s life.

The Bispham district was outside the mains electricity area, so Harry installed a gas engine to drive all the machinery on a direct belt-drive system. The machines eventually had their own motors, but the firm still generated its own electricity, powered by three large diesel engines, coincidentally manufactured by Crossley Brothers of Manchester, who were not relatives. Local labour was recruited and soon the grid department was employing about 30 people.

Timber, mainly from the Baltic, was transported from the docks in the firm’s steam lorry. When business increased, a siding from the main railway track was constructed alongside the works. Timber arrived in railway trucks from Liverpool and Preston and was unloaded onto trolleys that carried it directly to the sawmill. Crossley Bros started a manufacturing and joinery department and was soon supplying builders with windows, doors and staircases, and a separate machine-shop supplied all the components to the joiners.

By 1930 the joinery department had 20 skilled joiners, 12 machinists and three or four apprentices, who earned very little while they served their five-year training period, but received better wages thereafter. The craftsmen were able to produce special products, including spiral staircases in various hardwoods.

A further production department was added to meet the demand for household items such as ironing boards, stepladders and kitchen cabinets. The wooden toy market also boomed, so rocking horses, cricket sets and other custom-made toys were added to the repertoire. Expansion was so rapid that a four-storey building was erected in 1933 to accommodate more than 300 women: machinists, assemblers, painters and packers. Crossley Bros was enjoying its busiest time, with all three departments – grids, joinery and woodware – at full stretch. It was sawing so much wood that it also became the district’s leading provider of sawdust!

Blackpool had been expanding since the mid-1920s, with housing developments, hotels and boarding houses springing up along the length of the promenade. Bispham was ideally placed for Crossley Bros to serve this growth. At the firm’s height in the late 1930s, almost 600 workers were streaming through the factory gates each morning, reporting for work by 6.30 a.m.

An aerial photograph shows the scale of the buildings. ‘Crossley Brothers’ in white lettering is so prominent that the adjacent Bispham Road bridge was commonly known as ‘Crossley’s Bridge’.

Family Dynamics

Partners Harry and George focused on planning and management. Joe Copley, now Works Manager, and Ted Eden, Joinery Manager, reported to them, and Nellie ran the office with a small team. Fred, affectionately known to all as ‘Dad’, was still actively involved, although he preferred the buzz of the workshop to the relative peace of the partners’ office, insisting that ‘t’brass is made in t’works, not t’office!’ He had lost sight in one eye in an accident, but until his death in 1937 he spent every day in the workshop, operating his pendulum cross-cut saw and puffing on his pipe. He had the reputation of being able to see more with one eye than others could with two, and he was also the only person permitted to smoke at work.

Harry was a complex character: kind, friendly and popular, but also able to unleash a fiery temper when opposed. After calming down, he would express surprise that anyone might take offence at his outburst. He respected those who learned their business by immersing themselves in it, as he had done, and despised anyone who had come up the easy way. Berating George in a letter, he insisted that it was purely ‘hard graft’ and not natural ability that had made him successful.

All the same, while Harry clearly had the business sense, determination and vision, it was George who provided the steady continuity. George’s son, Peter Crossley, described Harry as highly intelligent and extremely ambitious: ‘While my father remained the hands-on partner, Harry would come into the office at 10 a.m. or so, put forward his ideas, agree policy, leave the office and spend the afternoon with associates or on the golf course. He enjoyed his life as a bachelor, took regular holidays (he even took a five-month world cruise on Empress of Britain in 1935) but no one could deny that he was the driving force behind the development of the business.’

The Second World War

Conditions at Crossley Bros changed dramatically in September 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War. Imported timber became scarce, and supplies from Russia, Scandinavia, Africa and South America dried up completely. Home-grown timber had to be sourced from Scotland.

The firm’s grid department worked hard to meet the increased domestic demand. Because the firm was engaged in essential war production, electricity was assured, with a guaranteed supply of diesel oil to keep their engines running.

After the war, things slowly returned to normal, with the exception of the toy department. With wooden toys no longer in fashion, the number of employees never again reached the 600 mark. The toy department was given over completely to other woodware products.

Harry had spent less and less time at the business during the war years. After the death of his parents he’d continued to live with his sisters, but eventually moved out of the family home. At the age of sixty he had a brief marriage to Winnie Deakin, then left Blackpool altogether in 1944, going first to the Isle of Man and then to Ireland for a few years. There was no breakdown in the Crossley Bros partnership; Harry remained a partner until 1965 but no longer played an active role in the business. He seemed to have developed a pessimistic view of British business and politics and felt it was prudent to invest some of the family’s assets elsewhere.

Doris Mathews Crossley

Harry met Edith Doris Mathews in Ireland. Born in Lytham, Lancashire on 28 May 1904, Edith spent her childhood with her sisters Clara and Winnie and their brother Alfred in a cottage on the Clifton estate, where their father was gamekeeper. When Alfred left school at 14, the family moved to a house in Lytham. Edith, later always called Doris, perhaps to avoid confusion with her sister-in-law, also left school at 14 to work at Booths, a high-class food store in St Anne’s-on-Sea, later becoming a successful café supervisor and manager.

Harry bought a house in DunLaoghaire, Dublin, in 1947. At first, Doris was employed as his housekeeper, but as a relationship developed between them they moved together between Ireland, Spain and a rented apartment in Hove, near Brighton, where one of their neighbours was the actor, Sir Lawrence Olivier.

Doris’s niece, Anne Holmes, visited them there and wrote: ‘Harry was very charming and showed me around Brighton. He told me that he played the stock market every day and that he had done very well with gold and diamond shares. He said he also enjoyed expressing his opinions and spent time writing letters to the editors of The Guardian and The Times newspapers.’

Harry’s interest in South Africa apparently dated back to his timber importing days, when he had had dealings with the country, and he now decided to make it his home. Doris declared she would only accompany him if he married her, so he did, on 23 January 1950, at the Registry Office on Stephens Green, Dublin, recruiting two passers-by as witnesses.

Crossleys In Cape Town

Harry and Doris started their life in Cape Town in a house Harry built in Upper Towers Road, Muizenberg. Harry had been a keen ballroom dancer since the 1930s, becoming a member of a Formation Dance Team in Blackpool, so he had the basement of the house fitted with a special dance floor. Before long, however, he and Doris found they preferred the Atlantic Seaboard. They moved to a sunny apartment in Clifton, where they had a superb sea view.

Two significant friendships were forged at this time: with advocate Anthony Hogan-Fleming QC and Harold T Bracewell, the builder who had constructed the Muizenberg home. Both became trustees of Harry’s estate, and Hogan-Fleming is credited with influencing Harry’s decision to to establish the Foundation that would offer generous funding to post-graduate students.

Harry had become a shrewd and successful investor on the stock exchange. Perhaps he had a natural talent for it, or perhaps, as with all his other endeavours, he worked tirelessly to master it.

Over a period of years, he drew on the Crossley Bros reserves to finance investments he was making in De Beers. George Crossley could not have been happy about these substantial withdrawals, particularly as lack of funds prevented modernisation of the factory plant, with the result that it was not competitive in its later years. But Harry built up an impressive portfolio of De Beers shares, which allowed him and Doris to distribute millions of rands annually to their chosen causes.

Harry travelled frequently, always first class, making use of the Union-Castle mail-ship service between Cape Town and Southampton. He had Savile Row suits and bought Doris expensive clothes and jewellery; they also had a luxury chauffeur-driven car. But despite their wealth, they were not ostentatious and apparently did not do much entertaining in their Heronwater apartment. Friends described them as ‘a homely couple’.

Doris, it seems, was less frugal than Harry, and would have showered her family with gifts had Harry not kept an eye on her expenses and dissuaded her.

They kept in touch with family, inviting Harry’s nephew, Peter Crossley, and his wife to Cape Town. They tried to settle in the city but returned to England after 18 months as the small clothing company where Peter worked as an accountant closed in 1958, unable to compete with big manufacturers.

Harry returned to London for surgery on more than one occasion and Doris went with him, always taking the opportunity to visit her family in Blackpool. She sponsored a three-month trip to Cape Town for her brother Alf Mathews and his wife, Edith, offering to set them up in South Africa, but they declined, saying that they preferred the English way of life.

Harry Crossley died in 1968, aged 84, in The Monastery, a Sea Point nursing home. Doris sold the Clifton apartment and moved to a flat on Beach Road in Sea Point, retaining the car and the services of the chauffeur and his wife, who helped with domestic duties. With a lot of money available to her, she could indulge her love of travelling and could now be as generous as she pleased: After Harry’s death, she discovered some shares in a drawer, which she gave to her niece, Anne Holmes, enabling her to buy land and build a home. Doris invited her sister Clara to live with her as a companion at one stage, and she paid for life-long care for Clara’s son, who had multiple sclerosis.

The Crossley Foundations

The Harry Crossley Foundation was established in 1968, shortly before Harry’s death, to provide bursaries and grants that would in time benefit thousands of of post-graduate students at The University of Cape Town (UCT) and Stellenbosch University (SU), working in many fields of study, notably medicine. Harry had strong views on politics and religion – he was both a capitalist and an atheist – and expressly excluded these fields from his philanthropy. The first grants at both universities were made in 1971.

The size of these grants has grown significantly over the years, with both universities receiving an equal annual amount for fellowships and research. The support of students and researchers remains the Foundation’s core focus, but in order to respond to the changing landscape in South Africa and build capacity in critical areas, the trustees have widened the scope to include grants to organisations working to improve literacy and numeracy.

In addition, the Foundation provides generous funding to the Red Cross War Memorial Childrens’ Hospital in Cape Town. It supports the training of paediatric nurses at undergraduate and postgraduate level; paediatricians, via the African Paediatric Fellowship Programme; and training in palliative care.

When Doris Crossley died, in 1986, the Doris Crossley Foundation was established to support undergraduate students in their first or second year of study at UCT, SU and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). The students receiving funding from this smaller Foundation come largely from disadvantaged backgrounds and are first generation tertiary students in their families. To assist with the hurdles they face, students are offered a support programme to help them assimilate into university life and perform adequately.

Administered by four trustees, the Harry Crossley and Doris Crossley Foundations continue to evolve and adapt, making a difference in the country of their adoption by giving many thousands of people access to the resources and opportunities that Harry Crossley lacked as a young man.