Barr, Peter Joachim 1905 - 1993

Due to the economic difficulties of the time he could not find a job so his uncle, who was Head of the Banking Department of the Metallgesellschaft in Frankfurt, arranged for him to be employed by Lurgi, in their technical branch. He arrived in Frankfurt in April 1929 and started in the drawing office at Lurgi working on refuse incineration, but was soon asked to issue brochures for the Achema exhibition in June 1930. At the exhibition he was put in charge of a stand with an operating spray dryer. This led to his becoming Assistant Manager of the Spray Drying Department where he worked in an office with a small team and a “lovely old pilot plant with a 1200mm spray dryer and two young fitters to help with the tests.” In that pilot plant, on Saturdays, he prepared his doctoral thesis which led to him becoming Dr Barr in 1935 when his thesis was accepted.

Peter Barr married Ingrid Dannenbaum in 1936 and both his father and father-in-law insisted that they should leave Germany as Jews were in mortal danger all over the country. He delayed because he was happy working at Lurgi and gaining experience and learning valuable skills. At the end of 1936, when someone new was appointed to work above him, between his level and the Director, Peter gave in his notice and he and his wife left Germany in September 1937, with the support of Hugh Griffith, the London agent at Lurgi.

Griffith founded the Passburg Engineering Company in collaboration with Barr, who contributed 49% of the capital and this represented the Lurgi Spray Drying Department, Passburg & Block and Deutsche Vakuumapparate, both the last two concerned with vacuum drying. The Company took sumptuous offices in Grosvenor Gardens with a large room for Barr and another room for a secretary. Griffith’s office was in Queen Anne’s Gate and he and Peter Barr worked well together for nearly 12 months. Just before Christmas 1937, the second Bourton mild spray dryer was ordered and there was also a vacuum agitator dryer ordered from James Laing in Manchester as well as a vacuum shelf dryer from Windsor & Newton.

In 1938 Hugh Griffith accused Peter Barr of disloyalty, saying he was working in the evenings on his own behalf and broke off the collaboration by repaying the money that Barr had put into the company. Suddenly he had no work and was not allowed to accept a job possibly due to his lack of British citizenship. He therefore had to find a company that would offer him work as a consultant and that took a long time to achieve. Meanwhile, the situation in Germany grew worse and anti-semitism may have been behind Griffith’s decision to sever their connection.

Peter Barr approached many firms offering his experience in spray drying. He tried Kestner, A.P.V. AND Hiron & Rempler but in the end it was Mr MacGregor of George Scott & Son (London) Ltd, Artillery House, Artillery Row, who offered him a consultancy agreement with a retainer of £200 pa. He built a 7ft diameter spray dryer and pilot spray film dryer in their experimental station in Blundell Street.

War broke out in 1939 and in June 1940 when France was occupied, which resulted in Peter Barr being interned as an enemy alien in Huyton, near Liverpool. He was released in September 1940 on the grounds of being a person of academic distinction. Internment was tolerable, according to him, as he was kept in a three bedroom house on a new housing estate with 10 or 12 good and talented men with plenty of food. Nevertheless when he was released, freedom was “an intoxicating experience”. On one of her visits to the camp he asked his wife to bring him rice, cardboard and a small blow heater. He was working on his new invention, the ring dryer.

He had no work after his release as MacGregor had been evacuated to Leven althoug the London office of Scotts continued. Barr contacted several people offering his services as a consultant but the only one who responded was Dr Baum of F.W. Berk who offered him £25 for a survey of various methods of drying sulphur. It was then that he introduced the ring dryer that he had developed during internment and applied for a patent in December 1940.

He realised that the ring dryer was something valuable, an improvement on the only two flash dryers then in existence in Raymond in US and in Buttner in Germany. Yet during war time it took more time and effort to find a partner to develop the ring dryer and it was more challenging to find consulting work than it had been pre-war.

Mr Hembry of the milking machine section at Alfa Laval accepted the ring dryer and his manager, Mr Clarke, made a model by hand. But Mr Hembry was killed by a bomb and the Chairman of Alfa Laval vetoed the ring dryer. Then Dr Baum persuaded Mr Douglas Berk to take the ring dryer and offer him a consulting agreement with a retainer of £450. This was not signed until 1947. The pilot plant that Mr Clarke had made was taken over and a building at Leytonstone was made available for a pilot plant built by a fabricator in Wolverhampton.

On an inspection visit to Wolverhampton, Peter Barr met Arthur Gates, of Cow & Gate, who asked him whether Barr could build a spray dryer. This casual enquiry led to the large spray dryer in Torrington. Barr had also had contact with old friends Saunders and Sheridan about mashed potato powder. Many tests were made on the new pilot plants at Leytonstone, leading to the construction of the Ring Dryer at Bromley Hayes, near Lichfield. By 1943, there were 2 orders, a spray dryer for Scott and a ring dryer for Berk.

Peter Barr began working with Beverley Murphy in 1946, when Beverley came out of the army. Beverley was Berk’s son-in-law and looked after the financial side of the business. Their partnership would last nearly 40 years. Barr gained British citizenship in 1947. In 1952 the association with Balfour, who had taken over Scotts, came to an end and Barr brought the ring dryer to F W Berk.

F W Berk invited Barr to set up their drying division. He worked there until he walked out in protest over a time & motion study. After his departure Berk closed down their industrial drying division. Peter Barr owned the patents on the ring dryer, that he had invented while interned in Huyton, near Liverpool, including the centrifugal classifier. The designs, however, belonged to FW Berk because they had been developed while Barr was working there. After he left, Berk sold these designs to ROSIN. Sebastian ROSIN, who owned Rosin Engineering, realised the huge commercial potential of drying the by-products of grain.

After his departure from F W Berk, Peter Barr set up Barr & Murphy. The company started life in the living-room of his home in 1961. Beverley Murphy, Barr’s secretary joined. Barr was 56 years old. His seventeen year old son, Derek, could not become a Director until he was 21 so Peter asked his cousin Hermann to stand in as Director during the intervening 4 years. Barr & Murphy won The Queen’s Award for Export in 1976. With only 24 people it was the smallest company to have won the award thus far.

Derek Barr, Pater Barr’s son, expanded the portfolio of B&M. His vision was that B&M would become market leaders in wheat and corn processing by offering an end to end solution, from harvested wheat and maize through various processes to the end product of fine buff coloured powder. Gluten absorbs 50 times its own weight and this powder is added to biscuits, sausages, cereals. In the late 1980s Derek started working with Wim Zwitzloot from the Netherlands. Wim was an entrepreneur but not detail-oriented. In the early 1980s Peter & Derek Barr set up Barr & Murphy Canada in order to get into the North American market directly, instead of just working through agents. This company expanded and was successful.

Derek and Wim developed a £6mn contract with this Dutch company to dry wheat. But Derek and Wim fell out and Barr & Murphy couldn’t complete the work on schedule. So Latenstein wouldn’t pay. As a result, Barr & Murphy Ltd was liquidated in the 1980s and all staff were made redundant. Although the company was reformed later Peter Barr would not be invovled and would die in 1993.