By the 1960s significant rationalisation took place in British manufacturing, with companies merging or being taken over in an attempt to achieve benefits from economies of scale and pooled resources.

The Churchill Machine Tool Co ceased trading in the early 1970s along with several other companies in the Alfred Herbert group, during a period of huge contraction of the manufacturing sector in Britain's economy.

Willis Churchill founded a factory manufacturing auger drill bits which was so locally prominent that the area of Hamden in which it was situated was called Augerville.

Willis Churchill, Clark and Gee were all shown as being of New York City; Tiffany was of Bennington, Vermont; Miller was of West Meriden, Connecticut; and Beach of Newark, New Jersey.

He broadly agreed with the contemporary opinion of Churchill that the adoption of US methods was slow in the light machine tools sector primarily because there was a perceived lack of demand and return on investment to excite the interest of British engineers.

He viewed the cycle boom as the catalyst for growth in this area but pointed out that the heavy machine tool sector was one of those which had not been previously neglected by British engineers.

[32] Economic historian Roderick Floud's analysis, in the 1970s, of relative imports and exports led him to the conclusion that it was "unlikely that the American share of the British market was rising significantly, until the 1890s ... [it rose to] a peak in 1899 before settling back to a period of less astonishing but still considerable growth to 1913."

To accomplish the transfer of manufacturing operations, Charles Churchill & Co sold the Pendleton business to the new company for £15,000, of which £7,500 was in cash and a similar amount in £1 ordinary shares.

[3] By 1913 the businesses had attained such a position with in-house manufacturing of grinding machinery that Charles Churchill was able to ignore a threat to withdraw from him, on the grounds of conflict of interest, the agency agreement with US company Brown & Sharpe which had been set up in 1872 before his bankruptcy.

[60][61][62] Demand for grinding machinery and specialist knowledge in the heat treatment of metals and other areas the company had developed was so high during the years of World War I that the government ordered other British manufacturers to produce Churchill designs.

Companies involved in this included Churchill, Mather & Platt, Hans Renold, John Hetherington, B & S Massey, British Westinghouse and Browett, Lindley & Co of Patricroft.

[65] In January 1919, Charles Churchill & Co bought a one-third share in Cornelius Redman & Sons Co Ltd, planer and lathe-makers at Pioneer Works between Parkinson Lane and Warley Road in Halifax, Yorkshire.

"It forms in fact easily the largest concern of this type in Great Britain", said American Machinist, and was under the charge of H H Asbridge with S H March as general manager.

In March 1924 Greville Simpson Maginness followed Chamberlain from Kynoch to become managing director of The Churchill Machine Tool Co, and in that role he was over the years to expand the export markets for the business.

In particular, The Churchill Machine Tool Co successfully harnessed the utility of hydraulics in many aspects of its machinery and developed a cambering mechanism for grinding rollers used in, for example, the paper industry.

However, there were difficulties in decision-making and wariness as the clouds of war loomed, most notably because of the company's contracts to supply a needy Soviet Union with machine tools, which had done much to assist it out of the depths of depression.

They moved quickly to add manufacturing capacity to what would otherwise have been just a sales organisation: in December 1934 the company took over Cornelius Redman & Sons, renaming it Churchill-Redman Ltd.

The Economic League was established as a right-wing organisation, consisting mainly of employers, to counteract the rise in communist and socialist propaganda and its associated activities during the Great War.

While workers in the cotton industries, for example, seemed not generally to take a great interest in the Communist Party, left-wing educational groups and shop-floor agitators, those in the engineering industry—perhaps mostly more intelligent—did do so, and the apparent threat to capitalism and private wealth was more evident to the employers of such people.

The Churchill Machine Tool Co was one of several companies which during 1936–37 was a recipient of information concerning reports of meetings held by anti-capitalist groups, the past and current activities of particular workers and even the names of those specifically blacklisted.

[91] In 1966 Churchill merged in a joint-venture agreement with Alfred Herbert and became part of Herbert-BSA Ltd, the intention being that the combined concerns would gain benefits from rationalisation and symbiosis of their activities.

The general expectation – held also by the Department of Trade and Industry and the stock market – of rewards from the venture did not materialise and BSA sold its entire holding in August 1971, writing off £6.9M as a consequence of the need to have cash in hand to address issues elsewhere in its activities.

[95] Production moved to Coventry as the parent group, Herbert, faced losses of £4M, although Churchill had an order book of £2.25M that could provide sufficient work to keep its 1,100 workforce in jobs through to 1974.

In 1946 Churchill-Redman Ltd bought the Longfield foundry in Halifax to provide extra production capacity and leased a part of the Vickers Armstrong Admiralty works in Scotswood, Newcastle.

The company was by no means unique in facing these difficulties but there was much urging, agonising and recriminating, by Gabriel and A K McKay, the Redman managing director since at least 1936,[79] regarding how to deal with the issues.

Faced with increasing competition from Japan and elsewhere, and the need to cut labour costs and invest heavily in order to counteract this, in 1966 J B S Gabriel recommended the group be taken over.

[67][121] This formed a part of TI's many rationalisation measures taken in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the closure was explained as being due to the desire for greater productivity and a recognition of the low sales generated at the site.

What it did was to occupied much management time, cost money to publicise, and caused friction between Alfred Herbert the parent company and Churchill Machine Tools.

[3]Among more obviously serious matters, Roberts pointed to the Herbert board's imposition of a rule that shop-floor employees, mostly if not all male, must wear pink uniforms as being typical of its distance from reality, fad-ism and tendency to make mountains of molehills.

The Churchill Machine Tool Co staff included some distinguished names: Herbert (Harry) Hales Asbridge (d. 12 Jul 1946) is credited with numerous patents, assigned to the company, during his time working there and had been awarded the MBE for industry-related services during the period 1914–18.