William Morris - Lord Nuffield

William Richard Morris was born on 10 October 1877 in Worcester where his father, Frederick, was working as a draper. Both Frederick and William's mother, Emily Ann, were of Oxfordshire yeoman stock and both had received a sound education. The indoor life of a draper didn't suit Frederick and so the family returned to Oxford and farming in Cowley. They had seven children of whom William was the eldest. Five died in childhood but William's sister lived a full life in Oxford.

William attended the village school but left at age fifteen when his father had to give up his job through ill health. Frederick returned to bookkeeping which he had learnt at the drapers and he was by all accounts meticulous. The evidence was there to see in the early records of his son's business.

William showed an early aptitude for things mechanical, particularly bicycles. He owned a penny farthing and an early solid-tired safety bicycle. His first job was in the bicycle trade where he learnt his basic skills. These he developed when he set up on his own. As an engineer he was entirely self taught.

William Morris was a remarkable man by any measure. Among my father's books was a biography of Morris by P.W.S. Andrews and Elizabeth Brunner and I drew on this for my book How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World in which I seek to tell the Morris story in the context of British manufacturing more generally. Here I record just four anecdotes which seem to me helpful in summing up the man who did of course found the Morris Motor Company and endow the Nuffield Foundation.

The first was the occasion of the 1906 General Election, and candidates were perceiving a benefit in having a motor car to carry them round on their electioneering. It seems the Morris’s reputation was spreading far and wide, for he was asked by a candidate in Stirling to find a suitable car. There were none available in Britain, and so Morris set off for Paris where he found a Lacoste & Batman car. This was a highly regarded make, and Morris must have felt thoroughly satisfied. That is, until twenty-five miles from Paris, when the car broke down with a seized gear-box and back-axle. He discovered that despite promises, oil and grease had not been filled before he set off. Morris returned to Paris, and bought the necessary parts, which he then fitted and set off again. Five miles short of Amiens, a broken exhaust valve stopped the car once more. Happily, spare valves had been provided, but they were one eighth of an inch too long. He did what many early motorists did in such circumstances, and spent one and a half hours grinding the valve down on the cobble stones to the required size. He then made it back to Oxford where his staff took over to drive up to Stirling. Late that night, he received a message that the car had broken down again, just short of York, with a broken bevel gear in the back axle. Morris set off for York, and, with the help of a local blacksmith, made and brazed two new teeth to the bevel. This sequence of break down and repair followed him all the way to Stirling, where he arrived two weeks late and much the poorer. He offered to rescind the contract, but the purchaser went ahead and no more was heard. Morris had though learned a great deal, all of which he incorporated into the design of the Morris Oxford. The other thing he learnt was not to make all the car himself, but to seek reliable suppliers of the key parts.

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In the mid thirties, a delegation from the War Office visited Moscow to witness the annual armaments parade and they saw a very basic but very fast tank. On making enquiries they discovered that it was built round a new suspension system developed by a man called Christie in the United States. The system enabled the tank to go fast, but also relatively smoothly, making it much safer for the driver, who previously would often be knocked out should the tank encounter a sharp undulation in the land it was crossing. Lord Nuffield purchased a Christie tank with his company’s own money and then proceeded to develop a new Nuffield tank employing the Christie suspension. The result was the Cruiser. In May 1940 the first few Cruiser tanks arrived in France.

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Another major Nuffield initiative was that of the Civil Repair Organisation. This had begun as an RAF initiative, but, with increasing demands on their manpower, they were content to hand it over to Lord Nuffield as Director General of Maintenance - RAF, with headquarters and one of the six repair depots at Cowley. Throughout the Battle of Britain, RAF planes were being shot down, making forced landings or landing at base with battle damage. It soon became obvious that to carry out repairs to get the planes airborne must make sense. Andrews gives some numbers. The total number of people employed in aircraft production was 664,200; a further 63,600 carried out repairs on some 80,000 aircraft put back into service over the period. Ernest Fairfax, in his closer look at the wartime contribution of the Nuffield companies, Calling All Arms, adds some more detail. There were in effect three strands to the operation: those mobile units who would go round the country retrieving damaged aircraft; the repair factories themselves; but then the foundries where scrap metal would be recycled into new aircraft. He suggests that the metal recovered was enough to build five thousand new planes.

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Lord Nuffield, who had been to see Chilwell, had told the War Minister, Mr Hore Belisha, about all that was happening in the mechanisation of the army. So, when in the summer of 1939 the question of an appointment as Deputy Director of Ordnance Services (Motor Transport) came up, the War Minister asked, ‘why not Williams at Chilwell?’

Williams was my father and Chilwell the Army Centre for Mechanisation which he created. He went on to serve as Controller of Ordnance Services of which I write in War on Wheels.

Further reading:

Andrews, P.W.S. and Brunner, Elizabeth The Life of Lord Nuffield – A Study in Enterprise and Benevolence, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955).

R.E. Crompton - pioneer of electrical engineering

 The Cromptons were a wealthy Yorkshire family with extensive estates and the young Crompton grew up knowing he was destined for career in the army or diplomatic service. It was a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851 that gave young Crompton then aged six quite different ideas. He had travelled to London on a railway train pulled by six steam engines. To add to this were Daniel Gooch's broad gauge Lord of the Isles and Thomas Crampton's Liverpool. He had caught the steam bug and set about making his own steam road vehicle the Bluebell. As is the way with invention, this first iteration failed.

Crompton was gazetted as an ensign in the 3rd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade was was sent out to India. Steam followed him for he saw how painfully slow transport was in India, but also how good the roads were. The answer was a vehicle called the Primer with rubber tyres. This simply did not have the power and, if it did, the tyres slipped. So back to the drawing board and Ransome, Sims and Head of Orwell Works in Ipswich. The result was the Chenab pulling an omnibus capable of seating 130 people. In the event the payload was Crompton's new wife and an entourage to provide for the every need of the Chenab. The journey was astonishing for the time, being all the way to Wolverhampton. Apart from the length of the journey, it became known for the first recorded instance of car sickness.

As I write in my blog on Chelmsford, it was this East Anglian town that brought Crompton to electricity for which he is best known. The route, though, was circuitous. Two cousin had bough the Stanton Ironworks in the Erewash Valley and were keen to begin production of iron pipes. They engaged R.E. Crompton to manage the project to bring the works into use. The timescale was such that 24 hour working was required and this needed lighting. Crompton had heard of the work of the French Gamme with rudimentary dynamo and arc lamp. This proved effective and Crompton went on to develop it as I tell in the blog.

So much of invention seems to be about collaboration. Crompton was contacted by Joseph Swan of Newcastle and he visited to be met with a bright display of incandescent comprising a filament suspended in a vacuum within a glass globe. The two men went on to collaborate on lighting installations in a number of great houses. An interesting aside was the birth of the trade of wiring contractors said to have taking up the slack from bell hangers. Another collaboration was with the Swiss engineer Sulzer, whose name also appears when British Railways moved away from steam to diesel electric. With Crompton it was in the context of power transmission where Sulzer had used some of Crompton's dynamos to generate electricity to power electric motors.

Crompton secured his first large scale contract in Vienna which had suffered dreadful fires in its opera house and theatres from defective gas lighting. Electricity was the answer and Crompton installed Crompton-Willans generating sets to provide DC power at 400 volts taken down to 100 volts for the swan incandescent bulbs. From this success he provided power for the new Kensington Court Estate, again using DC. At this time, as I wrote in my blog on Edison, AC was becoming increasingly used including by Ferranti at Deptford. Nonetheless for lighting DC remained more reliable to a few decades to come.

A home laboratory is clearly what everyone needs and Crompton one at his Kensington home where he would explore electricity alongside Faraday and Kelvin.

Crompton was not one to be confined to particular areas of engineering. He was a keen cyclist and turned his attention to the improvement of road surfaces.

In his final years he advocated a national electricity grid to allow the population to spread out across the country reducing overcrowding in industrial areas. Surely we can see the need for this now with the north south divide.

Further reading:

L.T.C. Rolt, Great Engineers (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1962)

John and Charlotte Guest - GKN

In 1759, in Dowlais near Merthyr Tydfil, an iron works was founded by a group of iron masters. Eight years later, John Guest joined the company as works manager. John was succeeded by his son Thomas and in turn by his grandson also John. The iron works prospered. I tell the story of the iron works in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

In 1848 Dowlais ironworks only just survived disaster when it very nearly failed to renew the lease of the land on which the works were built. The death of Sir John four years later could also have been the end, but for his remarkable wife, Charlotte, some twenty-seven years his junior.

The GKN: Brief History of the Company tells how ‘she knew the business inside out, having immersed herself in it to support and advise her husband. She had drawn up the monthly accounts, been involved in planning, and learned the principles of iron production’.

Exploring further, it is clear that Charlotte was a colourful character. Her grandson, the Earl of Bessborough, published extracts from her diaries from which it can be seen that Charlotte was the daughter of the ninth Earl of Lindsey and had had a troubled childhood. She met Josiah John Best when she was twenty one and married him after a courtship of only three months.

They were shunned by society. Charlotte’s response was to devote her time to supporting her husband in his business, in having ten children and in mastering the Welsh language, to the extent that her translation of The Mabinigiori is lauded to this day. She also was not one to allow society to have its own way. She and her husband bought a fashionable house in London and an estate in Dorset. With her support, Josiah John became MP for Merthyr. Following his death, Charlotte ran the business for three years during difficult times when industrial unrest was rife. She built a strong management team to support he son Lord Wimbourne who would take over the running of the company. She married the family’s tutor Charles Schrieber in 1855.

The Guest family passed the batten when they decided to sell the iron works. In 1834, in Birmingham, John Nettlefold had opened a woodscrew mill. And in 1856, just down the road, Arthur Keen had founded the Patent Nut & Bolt Company (PNB) with his American partner, Francis Watkins, and which had become a major manufacturer of fasteners.’

Keen was not only an engineer, he was a director of the Birmingham and Midland Bank, and it was through this connection that the name Guest re-enters the story. Keen had heard that Lord Wimborne, now head of the Guest family, was looking to sell Dowlais ironworks and, whilst PNB was many times smaller, Keen made an approached and a deal was done for the purchase for £1.5 million. The Press were intrigued. The South Wales Daily News of 20 July 1900 observed the good value to the purchaser adding “As to Guest, Keen & Co, I look on it as a second Consett; repetition of the Nut and Bolt; an industrialist at the top of the list”. Keen had done well, and a year later he added Nettlefold, making the company we now know as Guest, Keen and Nettlefold.8 In 1905, GKN was Britain’s 15th largest company and even now a leading defence contractor.

Further reading

Edgar Jones, A History of GKN, (London: Macmillan).