The Start of Growth

Initially large parts of the building trade were resistant to adopting aluminium towers but the 1960’s was a time of rapid growth in the building and construction industry with a national shortage of skilled labour and expensive capital. This encouraged the development of the hire or rental industry for builders to obtain plant and equipment and a high cost item such as an aluminium tower was a natural addition to these rental fleets. However, the two manufacturers saw the trend towards hire as a threat and refused to sell their product to anyone who might end up hiring it. This was an unsustainable situation in the long term and during this period the chief designer at Access Equipmet Ltd, David Gray-Wilson, left and set up a new manufacturing company Martin-Thomas Ltd. The product they produced was called Hi-Way and was dimensionally different to UpRight and Zip-Up. The new product was targeted at the aviation and defence industries and included the patented idea of an integral ladder.

Martin Thomas backed sales of their product with an assembly service. This quickly developed into a hire and assembly service and, under pressure from one of the larger traditional scaffold hirers (Stephens & Carter Ltd), they agreed to supply them their product on a long-term lease agreement. This agreement gave Stephens & Carter a chance to test the potential for hiring the product and convinced them that they too should design and build their own tower. Around this time, W.C. Youngman Ltd, a manufacturing, sales and rental subsidiary of SGB Group were also, quietly, investigating the market potential by hiring out Zip-Up towers.

Stephens & Carter had recently relocated their manufacturing facility from High Wycombe (a traditional centre for timber furniture production) where they mainly manufactured timber ladders to a site at Maldon in Essex owned by their parent company Boulton & Paul. Boulton Paul in turn was owned by BET a large multinational company who also owned a ladder manufacturer in Holland called Bijstede. Both companies wanted to expand production of their aluminium ladder range. This expansion was achieved using a ladder product manufactured under licence from US manufacturer Werner Inc. Werner had been manufacturing towers in the US since the 1950’s and, as part of the ladder licencing agreement, they agreed to supply spigots, brace hooks and “T” pieces to S&C and Bijstede to help them to build their own towers. The resulting S&C product, designed by ex-Access Equipment engineer Mike McGuire, was launched in February 1974 under the brand name Climalloy.  The Bijstede product was called Altrex.

Meanwhile, as a result of the success W.C. Youngman Ltd were experiencing renting out Zip-Up aluminium towers, SGB Group decided to roll-out this product throughout its national depot network. Access Equipment Ltd were approached but effectively declined to supply. One year later, in 1975, the SGB Group launched its own aluminium towers system. Designed in-house (once again by an ex Access Equipment designer) and manufactured by W.C. Youngman Ltd the product was marketed by SGB as Snap-Lok and by W.C. Youngman Ltd as Easi-Build.