Ronald Weeks - two world wars, Pilkington and Vickers

 It is chilling to think that many of those men born in the 1890s would serve through two world wars (if they survived) and could also be part of the step change in British manufacturing witnessed in the twentieth century. Ronald Weeks was one such man. He was the first Director-General of Army Equipment in the Second World War and had been and would be an innovative manufacturer.

He was the son of a Durham mining engineer. The family had been farmers in County Durham for many decades. Ronald went from school in Durham down to Charterhouse in Surrey and then to Cambridge, where he was an exceptional student. He was one of the first Cambridge graduates to pursue a career in industry.

In 1914, he was commissioned in the Prince of Wales’s Volunteers and later gained a regular commission in the Rifle Brigade where he gained a reputation for leadership and initiative in battle. He was awarded an MC in January 1917, a DSO in January 1918, a Bar to the MC in July 1918 and the Croix de Guerre as well as being mentioned in despatches. He ended the war as a major in the Rifle Brigade.

He then worked at Pilkingtons becoming the first non-family director. In the 1930s, he was part of Management Research Group No.1 with Seebohm Rowntree, exploring the management issues which were presented by companies growing ever larger.

In the Second World War he rose to have responsibility for army equipment as Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff. I explore this more in Dunkirk to D Day

After the war he joined Vickers as chairman of English Steel where he negotiated first its nationalisation and then its denationalisation. He became executive chairman of Vickers, a massive job. He held the chair through a time of radical change when Vickers had been brave enough to invest in a new plant at Tinsley Park in Sheffield in the period between nationalisations when other steel makers held back. They also grappled with the transition from major arms manufacturer to manufacture of everything from aircraft (the Viscount) to computers (Powers Samas)

J.D. Scott, writing The History of Vickers, recognised in Weeks something quite special. He writes ‘by the end of the Second World War, Weeks’ brilliance as an administrator had become recognised as something of a phenomenon. If his career and his personality had been designed for the chairmanship of Vickers they would have differed very little from the actuality’.

Further reading:

J.D. Scott, Vickers - A History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962)

Edward, Tom and Albert, and Douglas Vickers - three generations of steel makers

 By the mid eighteenth century members of the Vickers family were in business at Mill Sands, Sheffield as millers. With the growth of steel, William Vickers moved to a rolling mill business nearby and entered into a partnership which would become in 1828 Naylor, Hutchinson, Vickers & Company. William's interests turned towards the Sheffield and Rotherham Railway and its was Edward who moved from the mill business to take the lead at the Mill Sands Engineering Works.

Edward married Ann Naylor and they had four sons two of whom, Tom and Albert, were sent to Germany to receive a technical education. It was not long before the company became, simply, Vickers.

Edward was ambitious for himself and his family, but also for Sheffield, which at that time, ‘as a borough was still young, having been incorporated in 1843. Its centre lacked the dignified buildings, the wealthy shops, the well-laid streets which were even then to be found in the centres of the largest industrial cities as well as in the older communities.’ Edward became a Councillor and then, in 1846, an Alderman. All the time his business was growing and becoming very profitable. Part of the reason for this profitability was the export trade with America, where Vickers had appointed a German, Ernst Benzon, as their agent; he later became a partner.

Vickers had grown out of the Mill Sands Works and had begun work on what would become the River Don Works, with technical innovation introduced by Tom Vickers who was emerging as the technical partner. It was Albert who had the entrepreneurial flair.

I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the growth of the company and how the expansion of Britain's railways would consume Vickers production for much the mid nineteenth century, but then the American railways would take over until men like Carnegie began the American steel industry. Demand for armaments succeeded those for railways and it was Albert who drew Vickers towards The Naval Construction and Armaments Company at Barrow, Nordenfelt and submarines and Maxim and machine guns.

The truth is that Vickers, one way or another, formed the backbone to much of our heavy manufacturing. They made steel. They were armourers to the nation. They financed Beardmore's massive shipyard on the Clyde.They built ships, but then aircraft and submarines. They built railways locomotives and a tracked competitor to Caterpillar. But so much else. They were part founders of International Computers, the British answer to IBM. They made concrete making machinery and equipment for breweries. They made printing machinery and office equipment including duplicators.

In terms of the Vickers family, Edward was the miller who grasped opportunity. He married into the Naylor family which was already financially secure. With Ann, he had four sons two of whom I have mentioned and for whom he used international connection to secure technical education in Germany. Tom was the engineer or more probably the metallurgist who pushed the boundaries of steel making. Albert pushed the boundaries of relationships and secured the growth of the company into armaments. Both Tom and Albert were by all accounts good looking and easily adopted an aristocratic grace. Tom sent his son Douglas to Eton from where he entered the business on the technical side at the bottom. He gained expertise and experience but by the time to took the chair, the post First World War world was changing. This Vickers was embraced with open arms by the colourful entrepreneur Dudley Docker from which Metropolitan Vickers emerged. Vickers also embraced arch rivals Armstrong Whitworth.

The chair passed outside the Vickers family but a remarkable institution had been created.

I wrote about them in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World in chapters 5, 7, 12, 13 and 15 and in Vehicles to Vaccines in chapters 3, 6, 12, 14, 15, 16.

Further reading:

J.D. Scott, Vickers – A History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962)

William Armstrong - hydraulics engineer and armament manufacturer

William Armstrong was born on 26 November 1810 in a three storey terrace house in Shiedfield on the edge of Pandon Dene not far from the expanding Newcastle.

William Armstrong was a native of the hills surrounding Newcastle where he had become entranced by the power of water. He was by training a solicitor. His biographer, Henrietta Heald, tells how he followed this, rather than his first love of engineering, to please his father. William attended first Newcastle and then Bishops Aukland Grammar Schools from which he took articles with his father's friend Armorer Donkin and went on to qualify as a solicitor working for a further ten years. Engineering, though, was ever present. Armorer Donkin was an early member of Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society which perhaps encouraged an interest in science in the young William.

Walks on the hills of his native Northumberland had sown seeds of how the power of water may be employed in industry. This led to experiments in hydraulics. James Rendel, a civil engineer who had studied under Thomas Telford, was reputed to be one of the foremost hydraulic engineers of his day, and he encouraged William Armstrong to follow his passion and set up WG Armstrong & Company with a manufactory for the production of hydraulic machines. This he did at Elswick near Newcastle. Heald describes the well-ordered site, the men who worked with Armstrong and the worry the economics of the business placed on him. He had no trouble getting orders for his machines, but worried greatly at the need to raise capital to finance the business.

 Fortunately, associates with the relevant financial expertise and connections were to hand. It seems to be all about connections. James Rendel had been in partnership with Nathaniel Beardmore. I immediately thought of William Beardmore, the Glasgow engineer, but could find no close family connection. Another of Armstrong's associates was Thomas Sopwith, whom, I found, was the grandfather of the pioneering aviation engineer who produced the Sopwith Camel in the First World War. In exploring Armstrong, I looked at hydraulics more generally and encountered Joseph Bramah, the machine tool manufacturer who invented the hydraulic press which took the place of the steam hammer in heavy engineering. Bramah had begun life as a carpenter, but then applied his skills to develop a more secure lock; the company that bears his name is still trading. One of Bramah's associates was Henry Maudslay, who had been a storeman at the Woolwich Arsenal, of whose career as a foremost machine tool maker I tell more elsewhere. Cyril Mausdlay wrote an account of Henry's life; Cyril was one of the founders of the Maudslay Motor Company.  Henry had set up  shipbuilder Maudslay Sons & Field, after he left Bramah. It is all connected.

William Armstrong's first order had been for the Newcastle Chronicle to power its printing press. Another, much larger, early order was from the Albert Dock in Liverpool, first for warehouse lifts and then for cranes. Isambard Kingdom Brunel ordered hydraulic turntables for his new GWR Paddington Station. Armstrong made hydraulic lock gates for the docks at Great Grimsby, and also provided hydraulic power to sluices and cranes on the docks from a 300ft water tower ‘built in the style of Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy’. Other major orders followed. The use of the power of water was of massive benefit to these operations which need to move heavy bulk with ease. Another of Armstrong’s early orders was from the Manchester machine tool maker, Joseph Whitworth & Co. 

I write about Whitworth in this link. There is little evidence of close contact between the two men or their companies. Their clash came in relation to rifled artillery. The Crimea had shown how woefully inadequate British artillery was. If sufficiently powerful it was too big; in any event if was grossly inaccurate and this was the case for both the army and navy. The same was true of the enemy's armaments but men like Krupp were working hard. A shell spinning from the rifled barrel of a gun proved more accurate. Whitworth devised a gun firing an hexagonal shell which had the draw back of having to use particular ammunition. Both Armstrong and Whitworth were faced with the problem of achieving a perfectly straight barrel, albeit with a rifled surface, and gun metal strong enough to withstand ever more powerful explosions.

For Armstrong, Hydraulics gave way to armaments and I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how his rifled big gun was adopted by the War Office in preference to designs by both Whitworth and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. This paved the way to an influential role in Britain's armaments industry. He was regarded as one of the 'deadly triumvirate' alongside Krupp of Germany and Schneider of France. Heald quotes quotes William Manchester's biography of Krupp. 'Over the next eighty years they were to be celebrated first as shields of national honour and later, after their slaughtering machines were hopelessly out of control, as merchants of death.'

Lord Armstrong, as he became, was President of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society from 1860 to 1900. He created a fascinating house at Cragside just outside Newcastle which boasted all manner of gadgets run by hydraulic power. On a grander scale he restored Bamburgh Castle on the Northumberland coast.

Further reading:

Henrietta Heald: William Armstrong - Magician of the North (Northumbria Press)