Cochran Brand Guidelines: A Birkenhead Boiler Maker at Annan Since 1898

A shipyard, a submarine and a vertical boiler.

Cochran traces its start to 1878 in Birkenhead, on the Mersey. A Merseyside local-history compilation, drawing on the Scottish Archive Network and nineteenth-century newspapers, names James Taylor Cochran as the man who established Cochran & Co that year, and Edward Crompton, formerly superintendent engineer of the Liverpool firm Alfred Booth and Co, as the designer of the first Cochran boiler and co-founder of the company. Patents for vertical steam boilers were taken out in both men’s names in 1878, the same compilation records.

The early firm was a shipbuilder and engineer as well as a boiler maker. In December 1879 the Liverpool Mercury reported the launch, from Cochran & Co’s yard on Duke Street in Birkenhead, of Resurgam, a submarine torpedo boat designed by the Reverend George Garrett of Manchester. The firm also built shallow-draught stern-wheel steamers, the compilation says, but boiler work steadily took over and shipbuilding gradually ceased.

Hemmed in at Birkenhead, the company looked north for a site with access to the river and the sea, a company manager told the Dumfries and Galloway news site DNG24 in 2021. A limited company, Cochran & Co (Annan), was registered in February 1898 to take over the business of Crompton and Cochran, and the firm has worked at Newbie, near Annan in Dumfriesshire, since 1898. It built workers’ cottages beside the factory and so founded the village, DNG24 reported. Cochran and Crompton left the business in 1902.

Newbie, a works railway and a change of owner.

Newbie was a works site from the start. English Wikipedia records a short railway branch that served the Cochran boiler factory beside the River Annan; it first appears on the 1898 Ordnance Survey map, a halt for factory workers operated from around 1898 to around 1904, and Cochran ran trips on the line during open days until the early 1970s.

The product changed shape over the decades. The first Cochran boilers were vertical; today they are horizontal, the company manager told DNG24, adding that the business was “still doing the same function all these years later: producing steam.”

By 2010 the business traded as BIB Cochran and had a Malaysian parent company. That year it went into administration after the parent said it could not support the working capital of the business, and the administrators, Baker Tilly, sold it to a newly formed company called Cochran, backed by the Hong Kong-based boiler maker SHBV; about 170 employees transferred, Business Insider reported on 21 July 2010. SHBV’s chief executive said at the time that it planned to grow the brand while keeping the manufacturing expertise in Scotland.

In 2021 DNG24 reported that the company was owned by a Chinese businessman, that Newbie was its only site, with about 200 people, and that around 40 per cent of its work came from overseas. The same report carried the company’s own account of where its boilers have gone: one on the deck of the Lusitania, several in the Palace of Westminster, and one in the paddle steamer Waverley’s return to service in 2020. The company also said that in 2020 it had built its biggest boilers yet, 110-tonne units sent to Hartlepool.

Over the years, DNG24 reported, Cochran has employed thousands of people from across Dumfriesshire, trained hundreds of apprentices and achieved a royal warrant. In August 2021 the company put its history on show at the Annan History Town event, with a display of artefacts that included details of the Birkenhead submarine. Its website adds that a solar farm of 1,076 panels now supplies electricity to the Newbie manufacturing site, and that its chief engineer, in post since 1995, leads its work on shell boilers and burners for low-carbon fuels such as hydrogen.

Design and documentation.

Industrial boiler makers sell equipment that most people never see. A steam boiler sits in a plant room behind a hospital, a brewery, a laundry or a paper mill, and the people who buy one are engineers, facility managers and contractors. So the visual language of the category is built for a technical reader: catalogues, data sheets, project case studies and trade-show stands rather than shop windows.

The most common image is the boiler itself in a clean plant room. A packaged fire-tube boiler is usually shown as a long horizontal shell, painted and insulated, with its burner on the front, a control panel at eye level and the flue rising behind it. Around it run steam headers, valves and lagged pipework, photographed under even light so that every joint reads clearly. Cutaway drawings do the explaining: a shell opened along its length to show the furnace tube and the passes of smaller tubes, or a water-tube unit drawn with its drums and banks of tubes exposed.

The second register is the factory. Makers show shells being rolled from steel plate, welders at work on tube sheets, finished units on low-loader trailers and large boilers lifted by crane on site. These pictures stress scale and fabrication skill. Many firms in the category are old, and their histories lean on heritage photographs: riveted boilers, steam-era works yards, early advertisements and the first catalogues.

The customers appear too, usually as settings rather than people: a utility’s turbine hall, a food plant with stainless pipework, a district-heating station, a hospital service yard. Colour is mostly restrained, with greys, navy, white and one strong corporate accent, and type is set in plain sans or engineering-style faces chosen to sit comfortably beside drawings and specification tables.

The ST range and a royal warrant.

Today the company trades as Cochran Ltd from Newbie. Its website says all its boilers are designed and manufactured in the United Kingdom, and its pages carry a royal warrant, “By Appointment to Her Majesty The Queen, Boilermakers.” The current steam range is the ST series, running from the ST23 to the ST65, and the company says the ST range builds on its earlier Wee Chieftain and Thermax names. It also lists hot-water, electric and heat-recovery boilers, the last for waste heat from gas turbines, engines and incinerators, as well as packaged boilerhouses, economisers, burners and hire boilers in containers and on trailers.

The company names food and beverage, pharmaceutical and chemical plants among its steam customers, and education, healthcare, government buildings and hotels among the sectors it serves. It says it commissioned a hydrogen-fired boiler test facility in 2023, which it believes was the first of its kind in the UK, and that its managing director, who began at Cochran as an apprentice, has led the business since 2005.

One naming point is worth knowing: Cochran’s old Thermax boiler name has no connection with Thermax Limited of Pune, a separate Indian boiler and engineering group.

For a design guide, Cochran shows how a nineteenth-century founder’s surname can stay on a product through a move across the border and a change of owner. Compare Byworth, another British boiler maker, and Spirax Sarco, another steam-system name. For this guide we use slate navy, stone and a brass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cochran’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.