Clifford Manning White's building business
Clifford Manning White developed a wide-ranging building and property business in West Mersea in the early twentieth century. His firm traded from the Island Estate Office and kept a works yard between Barfield Road and Melrose Road.
Building, property and supplies
The scope of White’s firm reached well beyond building contracting. It supplied timber, coal and building materials, provided plumbing, decorating and sanitary work, and acted in insurance, house agency and undertaking. The business also operated joinery works and maintained interests in brickmaking, including at Weeley. These different trades help explain why the firm appears in records of so many parts of West Mersea life.
The brickworks and Barfield Road houses
By the early 1920s White was operating the West Mersea Brickworks near lower Kingsland Road, formerly Sea View Road. Its kiln could hold 30,000 bricks. The works produced red bricks, tiles and agricultural drainpipes, with some bricks marked C.M.W. White also built council houses in Barfield Road in 1922; those houses were demolished in 1974 for later housing and flats.
He lived at The Croft in West Mersea. A separate brickworks history covers the industrial site and its earlier operators.
Staff and the later business
Ron Green joined Clifford White’s business as a builder’s boy in 1946, when building supplies were still scarce after the war. The most detailed surviving accounts are recorded interviews: in 1981 office worker Hardy Weaver described the different branches of the business to Dennis Chatters in two parts (18 and 19 minutes). In 1989 Clifford’s son Eric White spoke for 12 minutes about the Barfield Road site, the firm and Mersea’s development. These recollections complement the photographs of the works yard between Barfield Road and Melrose Road.
The Colchester Heritage Explorer industrial record gives the brickworks' operators, site and surviving documentary references.