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The Original Company (1919-1937)
Peace brought an explosion of demand for electricity. More and larger supply companies were formed and Kilpatrick had to equip itself to handle the vastly increased opportunities that were beckoning. This meant more ambitious financing.
So the company of James Kilpatrick and Son Limited was floated, with £15,000 capital and important local industrialists were the principal shareholders. New workshops were taken in Marshall’s Lane and offices in Forbes Place. The old premises in Terrace Buildings were turned into showroom and those in Cumberland Court were given up. The trade name "Kilpatrick of Paisley" was adopted.
John Kilpatrick was chairman of the new company and W.R. Scott its managing director. They led it away from its pre-war reliance on domestic installations into more work in factories and large public buildings. These included the Russell Institute Clinic, the extension to the Royal Alexandra Infirmary and Seamill Hydro. Kilpatrick also had an excellent client in J. and P. Coats, the thread makers, for whom it carried out major contracts on both sides of the Border. Most significant of all, as a foreshadowing of much later developments, it won from Coats its first overseas job in 1925. This was for the electrical installation in a mill near Budapest in Hungary.
The squad of six dispatched from Paisley on this adventure included one apprentice in the last year of his time, James D.D. Shaw. Only 12 years later, he was to become the firm’s managing director and eventually the longest-serving chief executive it has ever had.
The exchange rate was so favourable in those days that, although the Kilpatrick men were drawing about £5 a week, every Saturday they were literally millionaires in the local currency. Their cafe bill for weekday meals equalled three weeks’ pay for a Hungarian labourer. The local newspaper did not fail to record this fact.
The Hungarian contract was followed by four others for Coats on the Continent, including mills in Poland and Romania.
But in the meantime, there was a change of leadership in the company. In 1926 John Kilpatrick died and W.R. Scott left to join A. Bell and Sons Limited, dyers-cleaners. But Mr Scott remained a director of Kilpatrick and took over the chairmanship. James Orr was appointed to the new managing director and the later chairman’s son, Watt Kilpatrick, was co-opted to the board. It was also around this time that the company moved to the site at River Cart Walk which it still occupies more than 50 years later.
There is a tendency for contracts of the same type to fall into one period and that is what now happened to Kilpatrick, who because of a series of installations throughout the UK became known as "mental hospital experts". This kind of specialisation could have its hazards. On a visit to one of these hospitals Mr Orr, wearing his usual business bowler, entered a women’s ward. They immediately pounced on him angrily, belabouring his person in general and his bowler in particular. It took several minutes for attendant members of his workforce to extricate him and his battered hat. Only then did he learn that the women believed anyone in a bowler was responsible for keeping them in place.
But for the company, as for the industry as a whole, the most important thing that happened in the late ‘twenties was the setting up of the national grid, which accelerated the supply of electricity to people all over the country. Kilpatrick set up a unit for street lighting and cable laying and during the ‘thirties carried out complete distribution schemes for local authorities from Lerwick to Dover. One of the earliest of these schemes brought a supply to 20 villages in Dumfriesshire in 1932. The following year, after an all-out sales campaign by its man on the spot, Kilpatrick installed electricity in more than 200 houses in Brodick, Lamlash, and Whiting Bay in Arran.
Meanwhile, the company had entered into a five-year affair with the manufacture of neon signs. German experts arrived in Paisley to oversee the setting up of a glass-blowing and gas-filling plant in Marshall’s Lane. The tubes the company produced were mainly, of course, for advertising and some prominent signs were made before this sideline was sold in 1937 to Claude-Gen Neon Lights Limited. But that was only a footnote to major events that made this year a turning-point in the company’s history.
