Catalogue description ICI Engineering Drawings

The engineering drawings at Billingham were controlled, numbered and issued by the Print Room. The system of consecutive numbering began in 1919 and continued until the system was replaced by an entirely new numbering method known as EDR (Engineering Drawing Registration) in the 1980s. There were two breaks in the number system but these occurred after 1950, the cut-off date for the systematic extraction of drawings described in this note.

The indexing work refers only to the photographic negatives (catalogued as ICI/ED/7). A number of sheet drawings have also survived in the archive. It is possible that there are duplications between the sheet drawings and the negatives.

The entries in the numerical register of drawings (catalogued as ICI/ED/1) contain the following information, in columns from the left: section letter, drawing number, drawing title, initials of the person who drew the original (later, the surname as well), the registration date, the number of the cabinet in which the drawing was originally stored, and a remarks column (the most common entry in this column is the original number of drawings from other sources such as suppliers and, where appropriate, the number of sheets associated with the drawing number).

I have copied the principal information about the retained drawings (catalogued as ICI/ED/7) into a list. I have recorded the drawing number, title and the section letter (as an aid to finding particular subjects), number of sheets and date year. I have also occasionally (but rarely) recorded the name of the manufacturer or designer from the remarks column (but not their drawing numbers) where I thought it might be useful. The other information is not necessary for finding a drawing and can be looked up in the register book if it is needed. For the most part this list retains titles in their original form, though I have occasionally expanded abbreviations where it seems useful and corrected a few spelling errors.

Initially, multiple sheets with one number were permitted by the Print Room. Later this was not allowed and every sheet had its own number. It seems possible that sometimes when drawings were scrapped, the multiple copies were overlooked and only one of the set was removed. In the spreadsheet list I have indicated where less that the full set of sheets survives, though this may not be absolutely accurate. The number, for example 1 of 3, indicates the number of surviving sheets, not which sheets they are.

Some drawings, such as factory site plans, appear in the registers at an early date but the original version will not have survived. Without a policy of historic archiving in the Print Room, revisions were re-photographed and the older negative destroyed. In some cases the surviving version will be comparatively (and often disappointingly) modern.

The section letters indicated to which part of the plant the drawing referred. This was simple enough to begin with and made use of many letters to cover, for example, the original ammonia plant. As the number of plants grew and as outside factories were built, this system became more complicated. Compound letters (separated by /) indicate complications such as railways or electrical matters relating to a particular plant. These elaborations were not applied consistently and Oil Works developed a complex extension of the system to suit its particular needs. The Print Room kept a list of Section Codes which has survived and is now in the archive.

In early times the date entered in the register was that of the entry. Later there is a tendency for dates to be entered from the drawing when it arrived in the Print Room with the number being taken by the drawing office from a pre-allocated block. When this happens, the dates and numbers do not run in precisely the same sequence. The dates in the Excel list are of the year only; the full dates are available from the register books or from the drawings themselves.

I believe that the numerical register books (ICI/ED/1/1-9) have research value even where the drawings themselves are not surviving. I have kept the first nine books (up to 105000, which includes the first of the loose-leaf style books). It gives a good idea of some of the preoccupations of the engineering design office up to around 1950.

SELECTION CRITERIA

The selection criteria have been roughly as follows:

* All survivors from the first thousand numbers
* Anything at all to do with local housing in any form
* Almost everything to do with railways (except details of crossings, turnouts etc.)
* Road or rail vehicles (actually very rare)
* General arrangement drawings of known proprietary equipment, e.g. Brotherhoods
* Details of particular interest e.g. converter forgings or special equipment
* Site layout drawings
* General arrangements, layouts or elevations of plant or buildings of interest
* Silos
* Anything to do with land ownership or sale
* Line diagrams of all but the most trivial of plants
* Local Authority or Tees Conservancy
* Occasional representative drawings on instruments, electrical, cranes, etc.
* Any curiosities that might be amusing or surprising

The method was to read through the registers from the beginning up to 100 000 and write down the numbers of drawings that looked interesting. I then went through the drawers and pulled out those on my list that were there (i.e. were there in the right place, wrongly filed drawings are, for all practical purposes, lost). I transferred this record to the register books as indicated earlier and also compiled the new Excel list of (only) those that were found. I generally ignored the indications that a drawing might not exist in case the register was misleading. I did not de-select drawings which represented a subject to excess and that explains why there are probably many drawings for nitric acid plants, particularly from the war years when Billingham was busy designing these plants for the government, and for silos. Later I revised this policy slightly and ignored drawings indicated as scrapped unless they appeared particularly important. Almost no drawings marked as scrapped had survived except for the occasional sheets from several under the same number (as mentioned earlier).

This process stopped at 100 000 and drawings beyond that were located by looking in the section code registers (all now destroyed) for Site Layouts (A), Norton Hall and Housing (AD), Fencing Gates and Factory Entrances (AE), Boreholes (AF), Mine (AG), Roads (B) and Drainage BA). Some miscellaneous lists of key information drawings were also used.

I made a particular effort to find record of the old high pressure ammonia process, the Coke Ovens and Water Gas Plants, the Anhydrite Mine, early Oil Works and evidence of the creation of Wilton. In some cases there were more drawings for Prudhoe, for example, than for Billingham, which encouraged me to keep them as representative examples of the technology in use at Billingham. I also kept a small selection of basic information on overseas projects such as Bilbao and Modderfontein.

Layouts of sites and buildings were rare so I selected some drawings which might show the interesting information incidentally. This is the reason for selecting drawings of drains, lighting, service pipework and roads. None of the selection has being checked to see whether it does, in fact, show useful information. The volume of the material selected is not large and further selection can be done later, if it needs to be done at all.

I had expected that this was a file entirely of ICI's own drawings but it is not: quite a few of the drawings are of equipment or structures made by other companies such as Brotherhood, Mather and Platt, Monnoyer, Dorman Long etc. This may be a feature of the early years, before a separate contractors' drawing file was created. On the whole, not many of these drawings have survived; many were never filmed, possibly because by the time of the filming there were other systems in place for them.

LOSSES

It is very apparent in doing this exercise that many of the interesting drawings have been destroyed. It was frequently the case that my selected drawing numbers were in the gaps between the survivors which I had not selected, and sometimes the drawing looked for was the only one missing from a long consecutive run. The survivors made the exercise worthwhile but overall it was rather disappointing.

There are several reasons for the losses. Most sheet drawings have been scrapped over the years for reasons of space but there has been a substantial loss of photographic copies as well. Filming for retention as the working copy in the Print Room was not done until the 1950s so any drawings that were not present then were not filmed. Drawings not present to be filmed will have included, for example, anything to do with Cassel Works which had probably been moved elsewhere by then (most likely to the Cassel Print Room or to Mond Division at Runcorn). It is also noticeable that the whole of the main set of drawings for the Spigot Mortar, designed at Billingham, was not filmed.

A lot of drawings are marked "scrapped". It is not clear whether the Register indicates that the sheet, the negative or both were scrapped and it does not indicate when the scrapping was done. In the early part of the first Register a couple of apparently scrapped drawings were still there, which encouraged searching for important drawings even if apparently absent.

It is known that many demolition projects concluded with the scrapping of the plant drawings in the Print Room. The principle was to retain only key drawings that could still be useful but this was interpreted differently at different times.

Many drawings were of details not associated with production plants and escaped systematic culling. This might explain the higher survival rate of some relatively trivial details. It is abundantly clear that no consideration was ever given to collecting items of historical interest.

Some drawings have been transferred out in fairly recent times to new owners of plant or land. Unfortunately the method took out drawings of more historical interest than practical use, for example the drawings for the Drikold Plant, which went to Terra Nitrogen even though the plant was never run by them, and of the remaining record of the first ammonia plant at Billingham which had been in the same building and had used some of the same equipment.

It is also apparent that a lot of what I would have expected was never there. It is inevitable that there are far more details than general arrangements but in many instances there are no general plans or arrangements and there seem (it may be an illusion) that there are many instances of drawings of extensions without there ever being a drawing for the original plant. This might have something to do with the fact that some major plants were designed by others, for example specialist contractors, and the drawings never came into this series. For example there are no substantial drawings of the Coke Ovens though there were several for minor modifications on that plant.

It is also worth remarking that there are virtually no drawings for the creation of the Wilton site. This was conceived at Billingham but apart from one 1945 site plan and a few drawings for the Billingham-Wilton Link, there are no drawings in this system; presumably everything was designed in the drawing office at Wilton Castle and issued in their own system.

OTHER ENGINEERING DRAWINGS

Other groups of engineering drawings were taken out and selected for the archive but are not listed in the database. The main groups are as follows:

Engineering Contractors Drawings, boxed sheet (prints) copies (ICI/ED/2).
The box files were numbered and listed but the drawings were identified by the numbers given to them by the organisation that created them. There is a list of the original boxes, as they existed in the mid-1990s and a list of the boxes that were sent to Teesside Archives. The selection process has been deliberately strict as this was a large collection, much of it of little historical interest.

Engineering Contractors Drawings, negatives. (ICI/ED/2/M)
Only a proportion of the drawings received from contractors was filmed and it is believed that there was no duplication between survivals of sheet copies and negatives. These negatives were selected shortly before the Record Management Centre closed and was done solely by the name of the contractor, concentrating on those associated with the mine, transport, the coke ovens and the old ammonia plants. These are identified by the numbers given to them by the originating organisations, they have no ICI numbers and there is no list of them. They have not been assessed to relevance or interest, neither by the titles nor by the images on them.

ICI Drawings in sheet form.
As mentioned earlier, these have not been included in the database list and have not been examined for duplications with the retained film copies. There may also be with these some drawings from contractors which have not been dealt with under either of the previous categories.

Wilton Drawings. (ICI/ED/4)
All Wilton engineering material was handled differently to that at Billingham and the very few Wilton engineering drawings have survived. There has been no systematic process for selecting historic material. In part that is because Wilton had fewer older generation plants than Billingham and much of the Wilton material was sent to the businesses that took over operating plant from ICI.

Plastics Division Drawings.
The entire surviving collection of Plastics Division drawings was held in the Record Management Centre in both working and archive copies. These two sets were not identical and it is thought that both had survivors missing from the other set. Drawings needed for operating plants were withdrawn and given to the owners and after that, at the closure of the RMC, one of the sets was destroyed and the other was transferred to contract storage with the intention of keeping it for a small number of years before scrapping that too. There were no comprehensive registers of the drawings and no finding aids.

Miscellaneous. (ICI/ED/5)
A number of miscellaneous drawings on film have been retained but these are un-indexed at the time of writing. The number is comparatively small and they have been retained mainly because they seemed potentially useful for historical purposes.

JS Wheeler
Revised March 2008

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