Charles Henry Hoskins (1851-1926) was an Australian industrialist, who was significant in the development of the iron and steel industry in Australia.
Early life Charles Hoskins was born on 26 March 1851 in London, to John Hoskins, gunsmith, and his wife Wilmot Eliza, née Thompson. He emigrated with his family to Australia as a small child in 1853, and all his education occurred in Melbourne.
After his father's death, the family moved to Smythesdale, near Ballarat. Hoskins began work as a mail boy, tried his luck on the goldfields, and worked as an assistant in an ironmongery store in Bendigo.
Sydney Charles Hoskins joined his elder brother George (1847-1926) in Sydney in 1876, operating a small engineering workshop at Hay Street, Ultimo. Around 1889, their firm, G & C Hoskins, moved to larger premises in Wattle Street, Ultimo and established a foundry, pipe-works and boiler shop. This plant was expanded in 1902. It was pipe manufacturing that would lead to their success.
Innovation and success
A breakthrough came when they began to win contracts for the Sydney water supply mains. This was to provide a steady flow of work through their Ultimo factory for a number of years after 1892. In 1904, the other major pipe manufacturer in the Sydney market, Pope & Maher, failed; G & C Hoskins were left as the dominant supplier in that market. From 1911, they opened a second facility at Rhodes, to manufacture cast-iron pipes.
The Hoskins brothers were not only efficient; they were also innovative, patenting a number of their ideas for improving pipes and their manufacturing processes.
Free trade and industry protection The issue of protection against imports was the principal political division of late 19th-century Australia. In New South Wales, almost alone of the Australian colonies, there was widespread support for free trade. A growing force was the Labor Party; it somewhat favoured protection, as a means to maintain relatively high wages, but also advocated nationalisation of major industries, complicating its position.
Politically, Hoskins was for Federation, free trade between the Australian colonies, and uniform tariff protection against imports from other countries. The Chamber of Manufacturers of New South Wales had been established in 1885—Hoskins was an early and prominent member—with its primary supporters focusing on lobbying for protection, in direct opposition to the "Free Traders" led by Sir Henry Parkes and later George Reid. This oppositional approach made little progress, with Free Trade governments holding power in New South Wales, except between 1891 and 1895. In 1895, Charles Hoskins was the first president of a reconstituted Chamber of Manufacturers that aimed to advance industry, without partisan political lobbying, an approach that it has followed since that time.
Free Traders were not opposed to a local iron and steel industry; their view was that it could come about, without a protective tariff. The Government of New South Wales had offered a large contract for locally made steel rails. A leading Free Trade businessman and politician, Joseph Mitchell won the contract, in 1897, but died before he could build his planned large iron and steel works near Wallerawang. G & C Hoskins also tendered, unsuccessfully. It was an early sign of an interest in entering the iron and steel industry. However, in 1899, when William Sandford attempted to interest Charles Hoskins in buying the Eskbank works at Lithgow, the offer was declined.
Charles Hoskins was a Protectionist but also—through lack of other options—a major user of imported iron and steel. After his friend and fellow protectionist, William Sandford, commenced production of pig iron at Lithgow, in May 1907, G & C Hoskins became one of Sandford's major customers.
Interstate expansion
In the 1890s, G & C Hoskins opened a branch in Melbourne to make steel pipes.
In 1898, after negotiations, G & C Hoskins and the Melbourne firm Mephan Ferguson shared the contract to manufacture and lay 60,000 lengths of pipe over the 350 miles (563 km) from Perth to Coolgardie, for the water-supply scheme designed by Charles Yelverton O'Connor. This allowed the Hoskins' firm to further increase its technical capabilities in pipe manufacturing, as a result of the collaboration with the leading Melbourne firm and the purchase of their patent rights for New South Wales. G & C Hoskins' share of the contract was worth around £500,000.
The contract for the pipeline in Western Australia stipulated that the pipes were to be manufactured in that state, and that all would be to Mephan Ferguson's design using an ingenious 'rivetless' locking bar. The steel for the pipes for the Coolgardie Water Scheme was imported but the Hoskins' share of the pipes were fabricated at a factory that the Hoskins established at Midland Junction, which was reported to employ 200 workers. Ferguson made his share of the pipes at another factory in Perth, reported at the time as 'Falkirk', now Maylands.
After completion of the pipeline to the Goldfields, the Hoskins established a works, on a block lying between Wellington and Murray Streets in Perth, and won other work associated with the reticulation of water in Western Australia.
In November 1923, the company opened a steel pipe plant at South Brisbane.
Lithgow
Failure of William Sandford Limited
In December 1907, there was a crisis when the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney took over the assets of William Sandford Limited, owners of the Eskbank Ironworks at Lithgow, including its nearly-new modern blast furnace. It was Charles Hoskins, one of William Sandford's closest friends, one of his largest customers, one of the few outside shareholders of William Sandford Limited, and a fellow protectionist, who stepped in to acquire the assets and keep the works operating.
Taking over from William Sandford
G & C Hoskins became the owners of the blast furnace, a colliery, coke ovens, steelmaking furnaces, rolling mills, an iron ore mine at Coombing Park near Carcoar, an iron ore lease near Cadia, and 400 acres of freehold land at Lithgow, as well as Sandford's house on his 2000-acre estate, 'Eskroy Park', near Bowenfels.
Charles Hoskins relocated to Lithgow, to manage the Eskbank works, assisted his two elder sons, Guildford and Cecil. Charles's elder brother George and George's three sons (George jnr, Leslie, and Harold) managed the pipe manufacturing business, which was about to undergo a large expansion involving the opening of a new pipe plant at Rhodes in 1911. By 1914, the combined output of the two pipe plants was over 50,000 tons of pipes and castings, per year, using pig iron from Lithgow as the raw material.
As for the management team of the Lithgow works, Sandford, his two sons, and their reliable and competent General Manager, William Thornley, were lost to the Hoskins, but most of the line management came over, which was crucial to the Hoskins' subsequent success.
William Sandford Limited had been a large enterprise employing over 700 workers. Although notionally a public company, it had been run more like the private company of the Sandford family, who held nearly all the company's shares. Sandford had managed the company in an idiosyncratic manner. Sandford had employed his workers under contracts, with different wage rates in different parts of the works.
Upon taking over, the businesslike Hoskins found the account books in a mess. The costs of production were difficult to identify and understand but turned out to be higher than expected. The Lithgow works had been making a loss, which became clear within a year after the take over.
Industrial strife and personal disputes Charles Hoskins' views on industrial relations were very different to those of William Sandford. Hoskins had a more belligerent personality, not given to compromise. He was also under pressure to turn around a failing enterprise.
As Hoskins prepared to take over the works from Sandford, he made a generous gift to workers facing a bleak Christmas of 1907, following the shutdown of the works. Any initial goodwill did not last, when Hoskins attempted to move from contract arrangements to day labour wages, in 1908, and to lower the overall wage paid to his workers. He closed the works for five weeks in July 1908, ostensibly to perform repairs, but later was found guilty of deliberately engineering a lock out and fined.
Matters came to a climax at the end of August 1911, when during a bitter and sometimes violent company-wide strike—following Hoskins use of strikebreaking 'scab' labour in his coal mine to keep the works operating—Hoskins and his sons, Henry and Cecil, were besieged by rock-throwing workers and his motor car was destroyed by the rioters. The blast furnace was shut down briefly.
Perhaps as a result of the strain he was under, earlier in August 1911, Charles Hoskins had made some ungracious public remarks—about the previous owner, William Sandford, and his management of the Lithgow plant—resulting in a bitter public dispute between the two old friends. By then, both men felt that they had been deceived by the other; Sandford believed that Hoskins had connived in his downfall and besmirched his reputation and Hoskins believed that Sandford had not disclosed that the Lithgow works had been losing money. The two men also had very different views of their workforce; Hoskins had little of Sandford's paternalistic concern for his workers and was more concerned about profits.
The strike continued for another nine months—an uneasy industrial peace resulted from a compromise outcome in April 1912—but Hoskins did achieve a wage cut.
Lithgow and its coal and ore mines were never to be harmonious workplaces, once Hoskins took over; there were numerous disputes and strikes, right to the end. The same was true of the G & C Hoskins plants in Sydney.
Politics, royal commission and dispute with NSW Government The contract with the NSW Government that Hoskins had inherited from William Sandford provided the underlying economic basis of the Lithgow plant. Hoskins own pipe plants consumed a portion Lithgow's iron, but not enough to justify its existence.
Nonetheless, by early 1909, Hoskins was already critical of the contractual arrangements with the NSW Government, his main customer. Hoskins was required to buy the scrap iron originating from the railways and other government entities. He contended that the contract prices for the scrap were significantly higher than he could pay for similar material in the open market. However, the threat to the exclusive contract would not come from the company, but from the NSW Government itself.
At the election of October 1910, the first Labor government of NSW came to power, led by James McGowen. It had been Labor and McGowan, who had triggered the final collapse of William Sandford Limited, in October 1907, when they joined forces with George Reid to insist that a critical government loan—intended to keep the cash-strapped company operating—take absolute precedence of security, over the company's existing commercial bank loans. At that time, Labor favoured a policy of nationalisation of heavy industry and was ambivalent concerning the future of companies such as G. & C. Hoskins. Labor, as the political wing of the organised labour movement, could not have been sympathetic to Hoskins' hard-nosed approach to industrial relations. McGowen's government's attitude to Hoskins and his Lithgow works would be very different to that of the previous premier, Charles Wade. Labor saw Hoskins as a supporter of Wade, and owed him no favours.