End of an era for Dursley

The final chapter a story was written yesterday when the demolition of the Lister Petter and Lister Shearing buildings got underway to make ground for the next development phase at the Littlecombe site.

The industrial giant was a major employer in the town from its beginnings in 1867 right up until last year, and many of Dursley’s residents will be sorry to see a significant part of the town’s history disappear.  

The demolition is being carried out by Cuddy Demolition and Dismantling Ltd and will continue for another six to eight weeks.

Senior contracts manager for the demolition firm Peter Smith said: “The project is nothing out of the ordinary for us. We’ve been on the site for a few months already, stripping materials that will be recycled.

“We’re just trying to be sympathetic to people living around the area, completing the process from the back to the front and keeping the noise down as much as possible.”

Ben Cook is a residential land director for St Modwen, the UK’s leading regeneration specialist and developer at Littlecombe.

He said: “We’ve made great progress at Littlecombe with much of the site now already established and underway. The second phase of housing is nearing completion, with almost 150 new homes now occupied.

“This week’s demolition of the site’s previous Lister buildings paves the way for continued development as we work towards completion of the entire site in 2018.”

On its completion in 2018, this £150 million development will provide 92 acres of mixed-use facilities comprising a total of 450 new homes and apartments, employment space, a community hospital and around 40 acres of green open space.

Mayor of Dursley Cllr Jane Ball commented on the loss of the Lister buildings after demolition began yesterday.

She said: “Historically Listers has been central to the economy, history and character of Dursley, so it’s very sad seeing the old buildings being demolished.
“On the positive side though, it is good to see that the  development at the site is now moving ahead and a new planning application for the rest of the site will be submitted in the near future.”

A POTTED HISTORY OF LISTER PETTER LTD

Robert Ashton Lister, the son of George and Charlotte Lister, was born in Dursley in 1845.

Mr Lister first studied in the town, then France and Germany, before returning to England to work at his father’s card-making and wire-drawing factory.

It was in 1867, after growing estranged from his father, that he established his own business, RA Lister and Company, in Howard’s Lower Mill in Water Street.

Over the subsequent couple of decades the company expanded further and further, manufacturing a wide-range of agricultural machinery.

It’s interesting to note that at this period, Mr Lister was helped with the increasingly overwhelming load of administrative work by Frederick Bailey, who went on to found the Dursley Gazette in 1878.

It was not until 1909 that the first petrol engine was introduced to the company’s product line. The engines were in high demand, used in electric generators and sheep shearing machines.

Despite being a thriving industrial hub, Mr Lister, a keen philanthropist, ensured his workforce were rewarded for their efforts. On one occasion, in 1910, the factory shut up shop so that the whole workforce could take a trip by train to the seaside.

When war broke out in 1914, a strike at the factory came to an abrupt end, and the main output of the business began to go towards the war effort, including the production of munitions components.

Women replaced men who had gone off to fight in the war, learning new skills before returning to homely duties in 1918 as a period of rebuilding and growth swept across the country.

1929 was a significant year for the company, with the death of its founder, Mr Lister, at the age of 84, and the introduction of the diesel engine that would play a huge role in its fortune.

By 1936 Lister’s had one of the largest outputs of diesel engines of that kind in the world, producing a range of 80 different sizes and types of diesel and petrol models.

Again, war struck, and the factory played an important role, manufacturing shell cases as well as their usual range of engines.

The end of the Second World War brought a need to increase the workforce to cope with the demand for products. Part of the way the company handled this was by recruiting many Polish and other Eastern European workers who had come to Britain during wartime.

Integration for the newly appointed foreign members of staff proved successful, and the company continued to excel through the 20th century with the constant introduction of new engines.

1965 saw the end of an era when RA Lister and Co was taken over by the Hawker Siddeley Group Ltd, and was no longer a family owned business.

1982 and the introduction of computer aided design radically changing the way the drawing office functioned.

1986 saw the beginning of a new phase in the life of RA Lister and Co when it merged with one of its competitors, Petter Ltd, to form Lister-Petter Ltd.

In the year 2000, the South West of England Regional Development Agency bought the 92 acre freehold of the Lister-Petter site for £15 million, following economic difficulties from the business.