[Tealeaf]

Here is a map of the location of Howard and Bullough's factory as most of you will never have seen before. My apologies for the quality, but the plant is that which is outlined in the red:


H & B were in Pawtucket from the 1870's to the 1920's. This area was the American answer to the Lancashire cotton industry. The irony of it all was that the yanks offered bounty money to English textile engineers to go over there in the late 1700's - England was trying to keep our inventions safe and taking manufacturing ideas out of the country was regarded as treason. By the 1870's this idea had long gone and H & B - by then the world’s largest textile machinery manufacturer -came to the conclusion it would be cheaper to build out there rather than build and ship from out here. So out they went. Early globalisation from the Globe works, so to speak.

But in the 1920's it all came to an end. A somewhat further irony is that this area is where Sacro-Lowell came from, which some would argue would partially responsible for H & B's final demise.

One final little gem, though. H & B took with them some of their English corporate philosophy, which included the creation of a works football team. "Soccer" was at the time, relatively strong in the USA - there had been massive European immigration throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century and the gridiron game was still relatively novel. So much so that the American football Association was directly affiliated to the English FA. They even had their own version of the FA Cup....the American Cup (not to be confused with the America's cup).

...And guess which team won it in 1913? Yep, Howard and Bulloughs!