BY the Second World War Ulverston needed to find a new industrial role as its ironworks closed and the iron ore mines which had supplied its furnaces were worked out.

We are taking a look at just a few of the firms which arrived to bring new and often highly technical ways of working to the town.

Ashley Wireless and Telephone Company started in Liverpool in 1923.

By the 1930s it was making electrical accessories and door bells.

By 1935 it had become Ashley Accessories Limited and in 1939 needing room to expand, it moved to Ulverston.

Twenty key staff started work from the old silk mill, on Morecambe Road.

During the war years the firm produced items for the Ministry, including an aircraft junction box, undercarriage indicators and cockpit floodlights.

In 1976 a 10,000sq ft factory was opened in South Ulverston at the former Marathon Knitwear.

By 1989 the firm was a specialist in household plugs, sockets, junction boxes and lampholders and had bases at Ulverston, Barrow, Cleator Moor and Brentford

Closure plans for what was then the Ashley and Rock factory were announced the Evening Mail on March 27 in 2001.

A total of 181 jobs were to be lost.

The company was to centralize manufacturing at Telford in Shropshire.

The Oxley company with its headquarters at Priory Park, on the outskirts of Ulverston, was founded by Freddie Oxley in 1942.

Mr Oxley, who died in 1988 at the age of 79, developed a highly successful firm with an international reputation built on cutting-edge electronic products.

Mr Oxley once said he was “a physicist by training, an engineer and inventor by vocation and a businessman by necessity.”

His London workshop and office was a casualty of the London Blitz so the Ministry of Aircraft Production urged him to find a safer place to make his essential capacitors.

Ulverston was his choice, where the company was first based in Market Place.

More recent Oxley products include aircraft night vision equipment.

Glaxo chose Ulverston as the site of an additional factory to produce penicillin after the Second World War and bought the town's ironworks site for £24,000 in 1947.

The building work was carried out by Taylor Woodrow but some use was made of former North Lonsdale Ironworks buildings.

The first factory manager was Mr F.W Anderson and production started in 1948 for penicillin and then streptomycin.

Just 260 people worked at the new factory.

In 1967 the company gained the Queen’s Award for Industry and completed a £3m expansion at Ulverston.

At that time the Ulverston plant employed 1,200 people.

It was noted in 1967 that the Ulverston Glaxo plant used more than two million gallons of water per day, used 100,000lbs of steam per hour and needed enough electricity for a small town.

The company has seen several name changes before becoming GlaxoSmithKline.

Tronic was founded in 1979 by former Vickers Oceanics staff and its speciality was subsea electrical connectors used by divers or robots to connect cables on the seabed.

The firm won a Queen’s Export Award in April 1993 and in June the same year took a Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement.

The staff moved to a new base in Sandside Road, Ulverston, in February 1995.

Acrasytle was founded at North Lonsdale Road, Ulverston in 1962 by Brian Hargreaves and Brian Harry Mangnall.

Mr Hargreaves was chief engineer and Mr Mangnall was chief designer at electrical accessory firm Ashleys.

In the late 1960s Mr Mangnall bought the shareholding of Mr Hargreaves and in the late 1970s the Chapman family took over control.

The firm grew as a leading producer of electrical systems, power transmission gear and distribution equipment with customers all over the world.

In 1990 the company sent the first consignment of electrical equipment for a £1m contract at a Hong Kong power station.

In March 1993 work started on a factory extension to provide six extra working bays and recruiting got underway for 90 new jobs.

The company was celebrating an £8m contract with a Japanese consortium to work on three power stations in January 1997 and expected to create 30 extra specialist jobs.

In September 1964 a total of 50 men and women started work at the new G. W. Waite factory in North Lonsdale Road, Ulverston, which they had designed themselves.

When Company founder George Waite, 42, wanted to expand he went to the staff for help.

Designs were drawn up for three workshops which would give extra space for the then 17-year-old firm which had started in a disused stable.

One of the leading workers on the new project was Bill Storey, of Neville Street, Ulverston, who did the cementing, bricklaying and tiling.

The company specialized in metal castings for manufacturers based all over the country.

The new factory cost around £7,000.

One of the town's traditional industries, the making of leather at the Low Mill Tannery company of Randall and Porter continued until 1972 and the site was cleared in the 1990s to make way for a new industrial estate.

The company had been formed in June 1888 to make use of a redundant cotton Mill.

Charles Randall had been head tanner with William Walkers Tannery at Whitehaven.

His partner, John Tyson Porter was described as a Whitehaven gentleman.

The cotton mill reservoir was converted for use as outdoor tanning pits. These were later given shed roofs.

A steam engine was introduced and by the early 1900s the site occupied three-and-a-half acres with a workforce of around 160.