Herbert, Lord Austin

 Herbert Austin's father was an unsuccessful Buckinghamshire farmer who had the good fortune to have as a brother the architect to Earl Fitzwilliam and the Wentworth Estate in Yorkshire. When forced to give up his own farm, Giles Austin secured the appointment as farm bailiff on the Wentworth Estate. Herbert had been born in Buckinghamshire in 1866 but he and his elder brother Ernest moved with his parents to Yorkshire where three brothers and a sister followed. Life on the estate was pleasant and Herbert attended the local school and discovered an aptitude for drawing. He went on to Rotherham Grammar school and thence to commercial college.

With drawing as a gift and an uncle as an architect, Herbert took articles only to find that it was not the career for him. Luck once more intervened for a maternal uncle had gone to Australia and was much taken by the new country. Herbert folllowed excited by the prospects. He spent a while working with his uncle before taken a couple more jobs before Wolseley and a sheep shearing machine beckoned. I wrote of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Herbert also found a wife of Scottish extraction, Helen Dron

Herbert, his wife and the Wolseley company moved back to Britain where Herbert first wrestled with problems with the production of the sheep shearer. It wasn't long before he and Wolseley progressed to their first vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine. Herbert was in his element and he produced a number of successful designs. Herbert though was destined to be more than a general manager of a company then owned by Vickers and as I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World Herbert left and founded the company that bears his name. It also competed magnificently in the many motor races that were held around the country and indeed the world in those days.

Herbert Austin was a big and determined man. He was known as 'Pa' to those who worked with him. He loved the technical side of his work. He was a great inventor of better ways of doing things.

From 1905 through to the end of the First World War, the Austin Motor Company was successful and produced many fine cars. Herbert was awarded a KBE for his work on munitions. In 1914 the factory had stood idle but by the autumn of 1915 orders from the Ministry began to flow. Austin made eight million shells, thousands of vehicles and much more. In particular the company was asked to produce aircraft. To facilitate this they cleared a large expanse of neighbouring land as a runway; after the war this doubled as a test track. The company also build the Longbridge Estate from American manufactured wooden cabins to house workers who were previously travelling long distances. Some 3,000 Belgian refugees were welcomed, housed and given vital work. At one time the total number of men and women working on site numbered 22,000. Tragically Herbert's only son, Vernon, was shot by a sniper late in the war.

The 1920s saw the company's Longbridge factory, underutilised; it had grown to meet the war effort but without the demands of war was simply too big. Herbert had ploughed what had become considerable wealth into the company and other investments leaving him short of liquidity so much so that the Official Receiver was appointed.

Wealth might have gone, but Herbert was in his prime and launched a 20hp car with a 12hp version which was used by 90% of London taxis. His wife pointed out that the public needed a smaller more affordable family car and the Austin Seven was born to great acclaim. It was produced from 1922 to 1939 outselling both Ford and Morris. It performed well in the many motor races held in Britain and around the world.

Austin and Morris are frequently compared and two particular differences emerge. Austin grew organically whereas Morris grew by acquisitions. Morris sourced car parts from external suppliers whereas Austin was keen to produce everything in house. In 1925 Longbridge covered 62 acres on a 220 acre site with 8,000 employees producing 25,000 cars each year. It had its own foundry, forge and machinery shop; body pressing, assembly and paint plant. There were then shops for engines, gear boxes and rear axles.

In 1926 a winding up order was made on the Wolseley Company which had been making substantial losses. Herbert really wanted to buy it, not least for sentimental reasons. William Morris also wanted it to add to his string of acquisitions. Sadly for Herbert, Morris was better placed financially and secured what remained of the company. Entrepreneur Dudley Docker who was instrumental in creating Metro-Vick had since 1924 been floating the idea of bring not only Wolseley and Morris together but adding Austin to create a company big enough to compete internationally. Herbert was keen, not so Morris and so the suggestion lapsed. Interesting in the foreword to Austin's biography, Miles Thomas, former managing director of Morris, said this of Austin losing out to Morris on the purchase of Wolseley:

"'Pa' did not sulk or moan. He just got on with the job of building the Austin empire until it was big enough, some time after his death, to absorb and digest old rival, the then Nuffield Organisation. Thus was created the British Motor Corporation."

In 1936 he was created Lord Austin. He had died in 1941. In his later years he gave substantially to good causes mainly hospitals and £250,000 to the Rutherford Laboratory in Cambridge.

Further reading:

Z.E. Lambert and R.J. Wyatt, Lord Austin - The Man (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1968)

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)