to British manufacturers. In 1915 a company was formed with Government assistance to take over and extend the works of Read Holliday & Co. of Huddersfield under the style of British Dyes, Ltd. The amount of capital was 3,000,000, half of which was taken up by the Government and the other half largely by dye users, and it was decided at the time that the principal new works of the company should be established at Huddersfield, where a large tract of land for the buildings and yards had been purchased. Although at the time no efforts were spared to ac- celerate building and equipment the demand for colours still largely exceeded supply. Encouraged by the huge profits which were being made other works soon came into existence in various parts of the country, and each of these supplied its quota for users and for export. It may be said that in 1921 the development of the industry in England had proceeded so far that makers were in a position to supply a fair proportion of the colouring matters which were formerly imported at a price. Considering the difficulties with which the makers had to contend in the way of having first of all to put up plant for the manufacture of the necessary intermediate products and then for the colouring matters themselves, in face of all the engineering and building restrictions which were accentuated by war conditions, great credit is due to the organizers and workers alike for this great achievement. Many processes were of course known to the chemists in pre-war works, and these offered little difficulty in the larger output. The intermediate products required for the manufacture of the azo dyes alone (the largest and most impor- tant class of the coal-tar colours) had to be first worked out in the laboratory before being put into operation on the large scale, for they had previously all (with the exception of aniline and toluidine) been obtained from Germany. In 1897 a plant was working in Manchester for the manufacture of two of the most important of these intermediates beta-naphthol and alpha- naphthylamine, and German colour makers at that time actually drew their supplies of the latter product from England. But it was not many years before they were offering their own products for sale in England at prices lower than they could be produced at, with the result that the British manufacture was given up and imports were made from abroad. What was neces- sary in the way of preliminary work in the case of intermediates was naturally also required for the new colouring matters introduced, and this of course also required not only time but the undivided attention of a large number of skilled chemists. An- other difficulty which the British colour makers were up against was the shortage of acids, especially oil of vitriol and fuming sulphuric acid or " oleum." This meant the huge additional burden of having to erect new chambers and contact plant without which progress would have ceased.
After 1918, the British Government, recognizing the impor- tance of dye manufacture as a "key" industry to the most important of the manufacturing industries the textile in- dustry, and in view of the fact that the colour industry and the manufacture of high explosives had something in common, decided to extend their support of dye-making as a national industry, and a new concern was launched under the style of "The British Dyestuffs Corporation, Ltd." The new firm in- cluded British Dyes and Levinstein, Ltd. (which had previously bought up Claus & Co.), and started off with a capital of 10,000,000. Lord Moulton, who during the whole period of the war had undertaken the arduous and difficult duty of supervising the explosives branch of the Ministry of Munitions, was elected the first chairman of the new company. He possessed an intimate knowledge of some branches of the colour industry, and had from the outset taken a keen interest in their war-time development. The vast new works which have been erected by the company at Huddersfield are well planned and substantially built. Once in proper working order they should go far towards meeting the whole of the requirements of the British textile industries.
After the signing of peace at Versailles it was not unnatural that the German colour makers should have desired to re-open their trade in coal-tar colours with England, and as the British
consumers had been so long accustomed to the excellent products which they had supplied, German colours again began to be imported. The legality of this procedure was challenged by the British Government, who caused a consignment of pyrogallic acid to be impounded under a Proclamation dated June 25 1919. But in the test case against Mr. John Brown, trading as Brown & Fourth, Mr. Justice Sankey held that the Proclamation was illegal and invalid. Subsequently some thousands of tons of German-made dyestuffs were imported, and it soon became clear that the regenerated British industry would receive a severe check through foreign competition. To obviate this the Dyestuffs bill, which it had been intended to bring in immediately follow- ing the Sankey judgment, was prepared and passed somewhat hurriedly (but not without opposition) through both Houses of Parliament and came into force on Jan. 15 1921. The Act offers protection to the colour-manufacturing industry for a period of ten years, and is worked on the basis that no dyestuff may be imported which can be satisfactorily made in Great Britain. All imports in dyestuffs must pass through the hands of a licensing committee appointed by the Board of Trade. It was difficult to conjecture how this arrangement would work in the long run, but unless the prices of the British-made products were to be very materially reduced from their existing standard they were likely to constitute a drain on the textile industries which would not be justified. As long as the Act remains in force internal com- petition could operate as the only check. The colour users in England were quite prepared to pay a reasonable price for the possession of a colour industry of their own, and are large shareholders in the Dyestuffs Corporation. In this respect there is a precedent which, though well known in some circles, is not very common knowledge. About the year 1879 the manu- facture of alizarine was almost entirely in the hands of the German works. They formed a combine and demanded an extortionate price for their products, whereupon the United Turkey-red Co. and other large British users of alizarine founded in 1882 the British Alizarine Co., which in spite of all foreign competition was a flourishing concern from its inception and has remained so ever since. Had it not been for the existence of these works (the only alizarine works in the world outside Germany) the English calico-printing trade would have almost gone out of existence during the war.
The difficulties which the British textile industry had to face owing to the shortage of dyestuffs was the lot of all other countries with a textile industry which were at war with Germany. In Belgium and France the industry was located almost entirely in the war zone. Nevertheless the French were not slow to resusci- tate their old-established colour-making industry. Italy never had one and was supplied for war purposes either with dyed material or with dyestuffs largely from England. In Russia a works was started previous to the revolution under the manage- ment of Swiss technical chemists with a capital of 1,000,- ooo. Japan appears to have had a fairly large stock of German dyes, but before these gave out colour works were started in that country which are reported to have been worked successfully. In India the position was very bad, and recourse was had largely to the indigenous natural dyestuffs, which were, after all, not very long since, the only dyes used there. The position in the United States and in Canada was very much the same as in England. The United States had, however, the advantage of having come into the war much later, although in 1917 their stocks of foreign-made dyes must have been at a very low ebb. Several American colour works of considerable capacity had existed prior to 1914 and had been protected by a 30% ad valorem import duty, plus a fixed duty of 7 cents per pound, on foreign dyestuffs. Without having to appeal to the State for further assistance, new and important works were started under the supervision of Swiss or German scientifically and technically trained chemists, private capital being abundantly supplied for the purpose.
It has been computed that, taking the world's production of artificial dyestuffs as 100, the distribution in 1913 was as follows- Germany 74-1, Switzerland 7, Great Britain 6-5, France 5-4,
