ON 26 APRIL 1812, just five months after Friedrich had founded the firm, Alfred the future “Cannon King” was born—ironically those two rogues the von Kechels were his godfathers. When Friedrich died, his eldest son was barely fourteen years old. He had already been taken away from school the year before because of the expense—nor had his family been able to afford to apprentice him to some master-craftsman. Instead, he had been sent to help out in the foundry. In later life, when visitors used to ask him about his formal education, Alfred would invariably growl back, “I got my schooling at an anvil”.
The son was a vastly different kettle of fish from the father. In fact they were opposites—and this was to be true of Alfred and his son. Whereas Friedrich had been by and large a Romantic, weak but sentimental, Alfred on the other hand was to be a Stoic, resolute but unimpassioned. In the same week as his father’s funeral, he was writing to tell their most important customer, the Director-General of the Berlin Mint, that the business would not suffer as a result of the family’s misfortune, “as my mother, who has instructed me to present to you her most obedient regards, will continue it with my help”—and he went on, “The satisfaction of merchants, mints, etc., with the crucible steel which I have turned out during the past year has gone on increasing, so that we often cannot produce as much as we receive orders for.” This last statement was of course a blatant lie, but then Alfred throughout his life was never to be a stickler for truth—he was never to see anything amiss in bending it a little to suit his own advantage. In point of fact, work had almost ceased at the foundry when Friedrich died. Only seven men remained, and most of them had not had any wages for several weeks. The firm’s debts amounted to nearly £4,000, £1,500 more than the total value of all the machinery and buildings.
To shield her four children from the shame of a possible bankruptcy, Therese Krupp put the property in her own name. She was then just thirty-four years old herself—and no matter how disgusting or repellent one may find the Krupp saga, yet at the same time one cannot fail but be touched by the determined way in which the widowed Therese and her schoolboy son set about restoring the family’s fortune. “I learned a great deal more from my mother than from my father”, Alfred was to say in middle age. “I inherited from her the industriousness by which she rescued the family.” Life became very hard for Therese. For one thing there was not always the money to buy food—and so like many another impoverished widow in Essen at that time she grew a few potatoes and reared a few livestock of her own, either on the communal pasture or else around her tiny cottage near the works. In this way she could make sure that her children never actually starved.
While other boys of his age were playing with their chums in the fields or else hunting alongside their fathers in the woods around Essen, Alfred devoted every hour of his waking day to the firm: helping the men in the foundry one moment and during the next writing letters to customers for his mother. His youth was without those softnesses and those light-hearted moments with which other parents seek to surround their maturing offspring. Small wonder then that with every passing year he should become a little colder and have a little less warmth of feeling in his relations with his fellow beings. Small wonder too that in place of his heart should burgeon a terrible obsession—an obsession solely to do with the making and selling of steel.
Before success and fortune finally came his way, Alfred had to endure twenty years or so of perpetual grind and near-gloom, though the first ten were by far the worst. There were weeks for instance when he did not have enough money to pay his men—and there were other weeks when there was no work for them to do. But Alfred himself never slackened for one moment. He used to visit all the smithies and forges for miles around Essen, seeking custom, but he was having to compete with steel from England which still dominated the Prussian market. Even when the orders came in they were small and far from regular in flow: a few tools here, a few fleshing knives there, and only very occasionally the more lucrative coin-dies for mints.
As prosperity began to pick up in Prussia, so Alfred’s business gradually improved. He started venturing farther afield in search of work for his foundrymen, visiting the valleys of the Main and the Neckar in south Germany—trips which proved quite profitable. However, like his father before him, as soon as any money began to come in Alfred immediately plunged into schemes for rebuilding and extending the works. The smelting-shop was fitted out with a new forging-press—and he even installed a wooden power-hammer. But the hammer was something of a white elephant, because there was seldom enough water in the stream to drive it. In the end it was to be another sort of drive and power that would save Krupp, that would put him on the path to eventual fortune—the drive and power of Prussia.
At the Peace Conference following Napoleon’s defeat, Prussia had been given most of the former Rhineland states in the west as compensation for the loss of her Polish territories in the east. In making this territorial transfer, the statesmen of the day did not of course consult the wishes of the luckless people who happened to live in these lands—it was merely a question of counting heads, or souls as the diplomats called them then. Prussia in point of fact would have much preferred to have kept her part of Poland, or at least to have got a bigger slice of Saxony, and not to have had anything to do with the Rhineland—indeed when she was given it she suspected the whole manœuvre as a piece of skulduggery on the part of her former allies. What she certainly did not realise at the time was that she was giving up some relatively worthless agricultural land in the east and obtaining in return what was to become the richest industrial area in the world. Nor did her allies realise that by granting Prussia the Rhineland they were really forcing her to become a German State, a prospect she had hitherto been reluctant to face up to. What is more, because the new Prussian lands in the west were cut off from Prussia proper in the east, they were in effect creating problems of defence and pure administration for the Prussians which could only be satisfactorily solved by annexing all the territories in between—and once Prussia had done that she would be not only the most powerful state in Germany but also well on the way to becoming the most powerful state in Europe.
Three years after the 1815 peace, in an attempt to help unite their scattered provinces, the Prussian Government lifted all internal Customs barriers and at the same time abolished most of the remaining petty restrictions on the movement of trade. At first many of the other German states retaliated by coming together in groups themselves to form their own Customs unions. However, these never proved very popular, and on 1 January 1834 they all joined up with Prussia in a single Customs union which within two years had been extended to cover most of Germany except Tor Austria, Hanover, and a few of the tinier territories. This Zollverein, as it was called, created what many German businessmen had been longing for—a single economic unit of twenty-five million people. In many ways it was the forerunner of today’s European Common Market—and of course Ruhr businessmen such as Alfred Krupp were well placed to serve this new community.
Indeed, three months after the Zollverein’s creation, Alfred was setting out on a business trip that took him to all the principal centres of Germany—a trip that was so successful that by the end of 1834 he had trebled his output and had increased his labour-force from eleven to thirty. A year later he had doubled his production yet again and was then employing nearly seventy people. At long last he was able to purchase a steam-engine to power his forging-hammers and in this way could turn his back once and for all on the seasonal variations of drought, flood, and ice in his mill-streams. As fate would have it he obtained his steam-engine—a £750 twenty-horsepower one—from that selfsame Good Hope iron-foundry which his great-grandmother had once possessed and which his father had nearly inherited a quarter of a century before. Alfred was then just twenty-three years old!
But even the expanded market of the German Customs union was not big enough for him. He took on a couple of travelling salesmen and began looking for business in other parts of Europe. Soon the orders were coming in from as far afield as Russia, Italy and Turkey, as well as from France, Holland, Austria and Switzerland. He made coin-dies for the Royal Dutch Mint and for the Royal Sardinian Mint.
His younger brother, Hermann, now joined the firm and together they spent much of their time flitting from city to city, from capital to capital, both often being away from Essen for months at a time. But all this gadding about was swallowing up the profits: Alfred’s correspondence is littered with pleas to suppliers to extend their credit, appeals to bankers for loans, excuses to customers for late deliveries. His mother made at least eight different applications to Berlin for Government assistance—to be rebuffed every time. And all the while, of course, Alfred continued to face competition from Britain, for as in his father’s day English steel still led the world, and he in effect was merely picking up the few titbits the Sheffield manufacturers cared to let fall from their rich tables.
Alfred as a matter of fact was for ever trying to ape his English rivals, even to the extent of seeking out the same sources of iron for his steel as they used in theirs, hoping that this might lead him to the secret of the superior British product. But in the end he decided that perhaps the best solution of all was to go and see for himself how the English made their steel: in other words to play the spy.
And so in the summer of 1838 he set out for London and checked in at the Hotel Sablonniere in Leicester Square under the name of A. Crup. He had chosen this way of spelling his name because he thought it sounded more English and therefore might come in useful if he needed to take a job in a Sheffield foundry. But all this amateurish cloak-and-dagger stuff was not to be necessary, for Alfred got what he wanted by simply marching up to the factory gate and asking to be shown around. “Only yesterday”, he wrote home to his brother, “I saw without any introduction, a new rolling-mill for copper-plates which has only been working for a short time and where no one is admitted”—and he went on, “I was properly booted and spurred, and the proprietor was flattered that such a good fellow should deign to inspect his works.” On another occasion he boasted to his brother how the English had been so hospitable that “I have not had my meals at home one-third of the time and so I have learnt English at less than one-third of the cost!” That Mr. Crup had little difficulty in fact in getting the English to accept him socially is confirmed by a German diplomat who met Alfred in England at this time and who later wrote of him: “We called him the ‘Baron’ and he was quite young, very tall and slim, looked delicate, but was good-looking and attractive. He always wore little swan-neck spurs and was quite a gentleman. I did not hesitate to introduce him to many families of my acquaintance.”
Ironically, Alfred was most particular about protecting his own manufacturing secrets, such as they were—perhaps because he had seen how easy it was to pinch other people’s. Only his most trusted workmen were allowed into those parts of the factory where the special processes were being carried out, and he even applied to the Prussian Government on one occasion for authority to make his workmen take an oath of loyalty to him. Although Berlin rejected his request he nevertheless required his men to promise solemnly on their honour not to give away any information—and he even exacted this ritual of a workman who had been sent by him to spy out a secret from a competitor.
In fact Alfred was obsessed with security. When he was not lecturing his brother from afar on the fire hazards in the factory—even to the extent of insisting that he compile a list of all the workmen who smoked—he was probably warning him that “the role of the night-watchman even is not above suspicion, for he certainly walks around too much in the factory by day”.
Like everything else he did, travelling was a very earnest affair with Alfred. While in Paris, he wrote to his brother, “I make notes all day, stop in the street ten times an hour to jot down what occurs to me.” But what was occurring to him was nothing whatsoever to do with the delights of that most civilised of capitals. Invariably it was something to do with steel, steel, steel—and if not that, then perhaps a grumble or two about his health. Alfred was a hypochondriac. Even on his twenty-seventh birthday he was writing home to say that he was celebrating it with enemas and pointing out that he had toasted himself on his last birthday with cough medicine.
Alfred suffered also from insomnia and had taught himself to write in the dark so that there might be no let-up in the opportunities for note-taking. And this habit of scribbling on pieces of paper stayed with him all his life. He much preferred sending written commands to people rather than instructing them face to face. One of the results of all this was that when he died he left behind him something like 30,000 letters or memoranda.
Unlike his father, Alfred never filled any public office. He was a youth in a hurry—in too much of a hurry to think of his fellow citizens, unless they would buy his steel. A youth, you might say, with a passion, a passion to produce the best cast steel in all Germany. And because of this, he seldom took time off to mix with people of his own age. When invited by a friend to a carnival, he would reply, “Carnivals are nothing to me.” If he was not in his factory, then he was either at his writing-desk or else off on his horse visiting a potential customer. It was no use asking him about the state of European poetry or the name of the latest German nationalist song: “We have no time for reading, politics, and that sort of thing.” Even one of his most eulogistic biographers says of Alfred, “The world of the spirit was a closed book to him… the question of German unity, which affected the whole world, interested him at most only in so far as it might lead to the collapse of inconvenient Customs barriers… he is troubled by no doubts, he does not have to grope or to seek his way, he treads the narrow ridge of his career concerned only with coal and steel, like a sleep-walker.” Towards the end of his life, Alfred was to write to a friend, “I have no need to ask Goethe or anyone else in the world what is right, I know the answer myself and I don’t consider anyone entitled to know better… I always go my own way and never ask anybody what is right.” He also once recalled in a letter:
Forty years ago the cracking of a crucible meant possible ruin. We used to cram the metal into the crucibles as tightly as we could, leaving no cranny unfilled. At that time we had some very thick graphite which used to slip through the fingers like soap. We lived from hand to mouth in those days. Everything simply had to turn out right. There weren’t the numerous, constant truck-loads of alumina, nor the three or four barrels of graphite then that we possess in stock now. I began by buying the graphite in Essen at three hundredweights a time. In those days that was quite a big undertaking for me. The counter-jumpers were fairly contemptuous of me, I can tell you! But our present Works have sprung from those small beginnings, when the raw materials were purchased piecemeal and where I acted as my own clerk, letter-writer, cashier, smithy, smelter, coke-pounder, night-watchman… and took on many other such jobs as well; where a single horse could cope with our transport quite easily; and where, even ten years later, water for our first steam-engine was brought in buckets from the nearby pond to fill the tanks when they had been pumped dry, since a piped water-system would have been too expensive for us.
Thus began the Krupp legend—the rise from rags to riches—a legend which Alfred himself for the remainder of his life was at pains to promote.
Some of his biographers have tried to make out that he was an inventor, but this is simply another part of the fiction rather than of the fact about Alfred Krupp. He was claimed for instance to have originated a rolling-machine device for mass-producing spoons and forks which hitherto had always been made individually by hand. Yet the truth was that it had been invented in the first place by a former customer of Krupp’s who had merely got Alfred to manufacture the specially engraved rollers. While the originals were in his works, Alfred took the opportunity to copy them and later. when the inventor emigrated to Mexico, he was able to market an improved version of the machine—a manœuvre that proved immensely profitable. Alfred was rather a consolidator than an innovator—not that this is necessarily to be denigrated, except when it involves deception either of oneself or of others.
After his visit to Britain, during which he had even contemplated opening up a factory there, Alfred in the summer of 1839 had gone on to Paris. His quarry were the goldsmiths and the jewellers of the French capital to whom he hoped to sell his die-cylinders and his cast-steel rollers. It was while he was endeavouring to do so that a group of socialists and republicans attempted to overthrow the monarchy of Louis Philippe. But in a letter home to his brother, Alfred did not show where his sympathies lay, merely saying of the incident, “If it improves business for the citizens to use these methods then in the devil’s name let them go for one another.” Krupp’s at this time were not of course producing anything that was remotely harmful in the hands of either revolutionaries or reactionaries. However, his remark is significant in that it represents the first clear statement of what was later to become axiomatic to the whole approach of the House of Krupp: namely that of not trying to change the course of human events, but of swimming instead with the current, the attitude that was to be summed up a century later in the phrase, “As Germany goes, Krupp goes”.
When his brother complained to him that he had been away far too long from the factory, Alfred replied, “Even if there were a bride awaiting me at home, I still could not return in a greater hurry.” His extended English trip had lasted all of fifteen months and was the major turning-point in his early career. As a result of it he became resolved to produce only the highest quality steel—”Krupp steel must be above suspicion”. This was to be the determining factor in the House of Krupp’s later progress and the hall-mark of their industrial reputation to this day.
Germany in the early ‘forties of the last century was just beginning to experience the first birth-pangs of the Factory Age. Handicraft workers were being ruined by the competition of the cheaper, machine-made goods coming mostly from England. Within a few years, many of Alfred’s best customers, such as goldsmiths and silversmiths, disappeared as though struck down by a plague—their skills unable to compete with the output of the newer factories. It was a time of transition, when that class of small, independent producers was dying out and before an industrial proletariat had appeared. It was a period too of relative depression, when bankruptcies were frequent and money for spending on luxuries was somewhat scarce.
And so within a mere matter of months of returning from England and France, Alfred was off again. This time his ports of call were Berlin and Vienna, and then on to Warsaw without bothering even to visit Essen in between. Single rollers no longer interested him now but complete rolling mills. In 1840 a Berlin firm gave him an order worth nearly £1,000, while a year later the Vienna Mint bought five complete rolling mills, valued at £6,000. But this Austrian commission was almost his undoing, for they demanded a standard of precision he was unable to reach and which he should never have agreed to in the first place. The wrangling went on for nearly twelve months, took up most of his time and energies, brought him grey hairs and nearly to the brink of bankruptcy before he was thirty. He lost so much money on this particular deal that he thought even of emigrating to Russia—indeed the expedient of using the land of the Czars as a possible bolt-hole became ever more attractive to him over the years, particularly at those moments of intense personal crisis.
But despite the Austrian débâcle, his steel rollers for making spoons and forks were proving highly profitable, so much so that in 1843 he opened a factory near Vienna for producing table-cutlery: the beginnings of the famous Berndorfer steel works. At the same time he branched out at Essen into making steel springs and machine parts. By now the seven workmen of 1826 had grown to a labour-force 100 strong—and although the old foundry still constituted the core of the works, it was already starting to look hemmed in by a number of new constructions, including a boiler-house and a grinding-shop. Alfred was also in the process of building himself a bigger house in which to live—right next-door to the old cottage where his father had died and where his family had been residing ever since.
Alfred maintained the fiction to his dying day that he had been born in this old cottage, when of course his birthplace was Helene Amalie’s much grander house in the Flax Market. Indeed, in 1871 when the old cottage was almost on the point of total collapse because of subsidence from the mines beneath, Alfred had it entirely rebuilt and restored although none of the original furniture or fittings had survived. It became a sort of shrine with him; a place to which he would often return when depressed and one where occasionally he would conduct his most important business. He even decorated it with a steel plaque which read: “Fifty years ago this dwelling, originally a workman’s house, was the refuge of my parents. May every one of our workmen escape the load of care which the foundation of these Works brought upon us. For twenty-five years doubt remained of the success which has since then gradually, and ultimately in such a marvellous degree, rewarded the privations, the exertions, the confidence, and the perseverance of the past.”
When he died his body lay in state there before being taken to the cemetery for burial. Allied bombers destroyed the cottage in 1943, but one of the first things Alfred’s great-grandson did on regaining control of Krupp’s was to order its rebuilding. When restored it formed the central attraction of the firm’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1961 just as it had done at the centenary celebrations fifty years before.
But to return to the early troubles of Alfred.
At the end of 1843 he again found himself short of funds. This time he was rescued by a long-standing friend of the family’s, Fritz Söiling, who loaned him £12,000 and as a result became a sleeping partner in the firm. Besides being a clever book-keeper with experience of selling overseas Söiling was also a determined critic of Alfred’s business methods, particularly of his expensive travelling and perpetual building—criticisms which over the years led to a state of almost continual friction between the two.
Because of the way in which the depression had hit many of the country’s newer industries, the Prussian Government now raised the level of Customs dues in an attempt to help protect them from further foreign competition. Naturally such a move benefited Alfred enormously in his endeavours to supplant British steel with his own native German product. Within the year he had increased his labour-force by another twenty-five and could now afford to spread himself a little by taking on his cousin Adalbert Ascherfeld as factory manager. Ascherfeld tyrannised the men who worked for him and quickly became notorious as a stern disciplinarian—passers-by used to taunt Krupp workers hurrying to the factory gate in the early morning with cries of “Run. run, or else old Ascherfeld will get you.”
Alfred was a pioneer of industrial public relations and during his whole life never missed an opportunity to publicise his firm. He was also one of the first manufacturers, especially in Germany, to make maximum use of that up-and-coming sales device, the international industrial exhibition. When, for instance, he won the gold medal for his exhibits of cast steel at the Berlin Industrial Fair of 1844 he used the occasion for an intensive publicity campaign for his factory.
While visiting England and France again in 1846 and 1847, Alfred managed not only to obtain an English patent on the improved spoon-roller but also to meet James Rothschild in Paris, though there is no record of the House of Krupp having at that time done business with Europe’s most famous banking family.
But another of the periodic slumps that characterised the nineteenth century brought him hurrying back to Essen. This latest one seemed to hit Krupp’s particularly hard—their sales dropped from £12,000 to £6,000 within the year. For want of further credit, the works were in danger of having to close down altogether. Fritz Söiling, Alfred’s partner, was inclined to blame everything on Alfred’s mismanagement, particularly his having wasted the profits of previous good years on excessive travelling and over-ambitious building schemes. Alfred in his turn tried to pass the blame off on to his two younger brothers, Hermann and Fritz. Fritz had not been with the firm all that long, but had already distinguished himself with his clever and resourceful refinements of many of Alfred’s products, especially the profitable spoon-roller. He had in addition devised a set of tubular chimes in steel that had been displayed at the 1844 Berlin Exhibition and he had also done much of the early work on the Krupp steel springs. Besides all these he had constructed a self-propelled carriage as well as a device that was a forerunner of the modern vacuum cleaner. All in all, Fritz Krupp seems to have been a particularly bright young man. But Alfred argued that because of his other inventions Fritz could not have been concentrating on his proper work for the firm. Hermann for his part had been bearing the brunt of running the Essen works while Alfred was travelling around. On top of this he had been closely concerned with establishing the new Austrian factory which was proving an enormous success.
The truth was that Alfred really wanted the firm for himself. His mother had intended it to be divided among her four children after her death, but Alfred persuaded her to sell him the factory outright now, which she did for the incredibly low figure of £3,750. By way of compensation, Hermann got the Austrian factory, while the £3,750 was divided between Fritz and his sister Ida, though only on the condition they did not disclose any of the firm’s secrets or set up in competition to Alfred. Fritz did not like this arrangement and left Essen in high dudgeon. He later tried to start a business of his own near Bonn, though without much success.
And so it came to pass that on 24 February 1848, Alfred Krupp took complete possession of the firm his father had founded and thus began the one-man ownership that has characterised the House of Krupp ever since. It so happened that this was the selfsame day which saw the final extinction of the French monarchy—the event that began the spate of revolutionary feeling which spread rapidly across Europe, from Paris to Austria, Hungary, Poland and even Berlin. Some Prussian entrepreneurs encouraged their employees to petition King Frederick William IV for greater political freedom from the feudal land-owners, the Junkers. One of Krupp’s closest competitors, Johann August Borsig, the Prussian “Railway King”, actually led his factory-hands in person to seek increased political rights from the monarch himself. Alfred, on the other hand, dismissed such revolutionary activities as being merely so many hindrances to trade. He even went so far as to order his workers to have nothing whatsoever to do with the dissidents, but instead to help prevent the revolution from spreading. When two of his oldest workmen, one of whom had been with the firm longer than Alfred himself, dared to complain, he summarily dismissed them both. His works manager used to march the men to and from the city every night and morning, for the gates of Essen had been shut at the first whiff of revolution and they had to be specially opened each time for Krupp’s employees. Alfred also gave orders for his workmen to be kept fully occupied, hoping thereby to keep them “out of mischief”, as he described it.
The Year of Revolutions had partly been prompted by the sharp decline in business throughout Prussia and Germany. Many firms went bankrupt and several finance houses were forced to cloṡe their doors. Alfred in 1848 sacked almost half his work-force and had to melt down the family silver to pay the wages of the rest. But a big order for a spoon-rolling factory from Russia, and another from Britain two years later, saved the day for him. From that time onwards Alfred never really looked back. The days of early struggle were now well-nigh over.
The eventual collapse of the revolutionary cause led to Prussia strengthening her position still further within Germany, since in most cases it was Prussian soldiers whom the German princes had called on to put down the disorders within their territories. Many of Prussia’s leaders now became determined to possess Germany. To the English historian A. J. P. Taylor, “the failure of the revolution discredited liberal ideas. After it nothing remained but the idea of Force, and this idea stood at the helm of German history from then on.”
German capitalists and German industrialists were to become dependent on Prussian militarism—none more so than Alfred Krupp, for by and large the story of how Prussia came to swallow Germany between 1848 and 1871 is also the story of how Alfred Krupp came to dominate German industry.