English China Clays PLC, or ECC, was a mining company involved in the extraction of china clay, based in St Austell, Cornwall. It was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but in 1999 was acquired by Imetal.
History
English China Clays was incorporated in April 1919 through the amalgamation of three of the largest producers: Martin Bros.(established in 1837), West of England China Clay & Stone (1849) and the North Cornwall China Clay Company (1908).[1] The three companies accounted for around half the industry's output at the time.[2] Before the First World War there had been as many as seventy individual china clay producers but the industry had suffered from overcapacity and wartime dislocation. More mergers were to follow. Months after the ECC merger, H.D. Pochin acquired J.W. Higman taking it to third place in the industry after ECC and Lovering China Clays. Even then it was estimated that the demand for clay was not much more that half of the industry's capacity.[1]