The legendary fire that destroyed the original Royal Enfield factory

Fire fighters couldn't save the blazing factory.

 Half a century before Royal Enfield motorcycles were made in India, they were produced in the English industrial midlands, in the town of Redditch, an ancient village that by the 1870s had become the center of the needle and fishing tackle industry. 

Incredibly, it's claimed that Redditch and surrounding districts made 90 percent of the world's needles by the 1870s. (I was amazed when my wife found a circa-1935 packet of Redditch needles in a sewing kit left by the elderly previous owners of our house!) 

From precision engineering of pins and needles grew new technologies, first of bicycles, and then of motorcars and motorcycles.

There's a plaque on the wall of a building on Hewell Road, in Redditch, marking the location of the immense factory that once stood around it, turning out Royal Enfield bicycles and motorcycles by the thousands.

You can see a photo of that building on Jorge Pullin's blog, My Royal Enfields. (Jorge has done a series of articles about Royal Enfield factories in Britain.)

But the Hewell Road factory wasn't the birth place of Royal Enfield. The bicycle and motorcycle company grew out of a building then just outside Redditch, in a building where sewing pins had been made.

Until last week, the site of that original Royal Enfield factory was unmarked. The location is at 196 Enfield Road, in the leafy Redditch district of Hunt End. (Of course the road wasn't originally called "Enfield Road" before the Enfield Cycle Co. located there; it had been called Hunt End Lane, a name since reapplied to a new road in a nearby subdivision.)

Royal Enfield historian Gordon May relates history of the Hunt End Works before unveiling of the new plaque. Project Origin, a replica of the first Royal Enfield motorcycle, is at left.

The plaque in place.

The new plaque was placed June 21 on the remains of a brick wall said to have surrounded the original factory. The wall is all that's left now. 

That's because the factory burned beyond saving in a dramatic fire on March 8, 1969.

The first factory was built, sometime after 1851, as a needle factory named "Givry Works." The Red Lion pub was on Enfield Road nearby, and may have been associated with the factory: workers likely got part of their pay in tokens for use in the pub. (The pub still stands on Enfield Road.)

The Red Lion pub saw Royal Enfield come and go next door.

Expanded over time, the Givry Works at Hunt End was producing bicycles by 1888. Those bicycles eventually began being branded as Royal Enfields.

This is where the first Royal Enfield motorcycle would have been assembled, in 1901.

By the Spring of 1904 this factory in Hunt End had added a purpose built-facility, between the original Givry Works and the Red Lion pub, specifically for production of motorcycles and motor cars.

The Hunt End Works, circa 1904, with new addition in the foreground.

Despite economic ups and downs, the Enfield Cycle Co. then managed to approve construction of the different, much grander factory, on Hewell Road in Redditch proper.

Royal Enfield would move out of the Hunt End factory in 1907, repurchase it in 1912, and finally vacate it for good in 1920.

The Hunt End Works would go on to serve other businesses, eventually becoming a storage facility for Dunlop Tyres.

The Hunt End Works in 1935, when it housed Batteries Limited. 
Note Red Lion pub at extreme left. (Historic England Photo)

And this sets up the story of former Enfield employee Les "Kipper" Gibbs, who was, by 1969, a Dunlop employee.

In Anne Bradford's book "Royal Enfield, The Story of the Company and the People Who Made It Great," Gibbs told how he was the last worker out of the Dunlop warehouse the Saturday of the fire.

He found it ironic that a former Royal Enfield man was the last one out of the first Royal Enfield factory before it was gone forever.

Whoever told it, the tale gets more colorful yet. According to the RedditchVirtualMuseum:

"One of the caretakers liked a hot lunch so at midday he would take an old tyre up to the top floor, spread it out, put his little stove in the centre and heat his lunch. Unfortunately, one day he went to sleep. When the fire brigade arrived they discovered that all the water pipes in Redditch were (what they described as) Victorian and very narrow, and totally impossible to carry enough water to put out a fire. They had to get water from Redditch."

The Redditch Indicator covered the fire.

The Redditch Indicator newspaper captured the blaze in a full-page story the next day, Sunday, March 9, 1969, with photographs. The Redditch Library reproduced the newspaper page in a Facebook post in 2021.

The type is too small to read the Redditch Indicator article in the Facebook post, but an account from the Sunday Birmingham Mercury is online at the British Newspaper Archive, and is readable. Some excerpts:

"At Redditch, in the biggest fire of the day nearly 20,000 car tyres went up in flames at the Dunlop Tyre Company's storage depot. Fifty firemen from all parts of Worcestershire and reinforcements from Warwickshire fought the huge blaze for hours before getting it under control.

"The depot is one of the biggest of Dunlop's 50 storage depots. A huge pall of smoke rose high over Redditch and flames leaping 60 feet into the air could be seen in Birmingham, 16 miles away.

"A Dunlop spokesman said: 'A large number of Mini car tyres are stored at this depot and it may result in temporary shortage of some sizes of tyres for perhaps a week or a fortnight...'

"The fire in the depot at Enfield Road, Hunt End, was discovered just after six o'clock last night. One half of the building was alight when firemen arrived.

Fire fighters arrived to find the Hunt End Works ablaze.

"The man who gave the alarm, Mr. Samuel Brookes, is the owner of a timber yard next door to the store.

"He said: 'I saw black smoke coming from the roof. After I told the fire brigade I saw the roof rapidly disintegrate as flames shot 60 feet into the air. It was fantastic...'

"Last man to leave the store was the gateman Mr. Edgar Vale who locked up at 12:45 p.m. The night man was not due to report until 7 p.m...

"As fireman fought the blaze people crowded into the street, and traffic jammed the surrounding roads.

"Housewives took cups of tea to the firemen and police were called in to deal with the crowds.

"After a series of muffled explosions from the building, residents in houses near the depot were warned by the police that they might have to be evacuated. But firemen prevented flames threatening their homes."

Homes line one side of Enfield Road, across from factory.

The factory site would be cleared, and the modern Hunt End Industrial Estate occupies the space today, behind a tree line, its entrance being not on Enfield Road but off Dunlop Road, to the north.

Yet, in an odd way, a related bit of the Givry Works remains on Enfield Road.

Author Anne Bradford lived at 66 Enfield Road, less than a mile away from the Givry site, and always said that her home was a "replica" of the original Givry Works. In fact, she said this was what inspired her to write about Royal Enfield history.

The Givry Works needle mill as it appeared in 1869.

From left, 66, 64 and 62 Enfield Road as they appeared in 2020.

The resemblance is apparent, if you compare 66, 64 and 62 Enfield Road on Google Streetview to the 1869 illustration of the Givry Works. The side-by-side fronts of the main buildings appear very similar, although not identical.

An explanation for this is in RedditchVirtualMuseum:

"In the 1830s, all the land in the Crabbs Cross area was owned by Farmer Eades. Then he sold a small piece of ground to William Welch to build a needle mill. Welch had a relative who was so taken with the needle mill that he asked Farmer Eades for permission to build an identical mill a bit further along the road. Consequently two identical mills were built, the oldest was Ashberry House, near the top end of Enfield Road (number 66), and the second was Givry Works, halfway along."