The Weston family and Associated British Food

 Garfield Weston set his family company on course to become the anchor-man of British food manufacturing. The company is now called Associated British Food.

Canadian Willard Garfield Weston was born in 1898, his father had emigrated to Canada and created a baking business there. In 1934, Weston moved to England and founded Allied Bakeries which introduced sliced white bread to the English. He also bought the prestigious Fortnum and Mason. The business prospered and he gave generously to the war effort including £100,000 to built 16 Hurricane and Spitfire Aircraft.

He bought Ryvita in 1947 and appointed his second son Gary to run it. Gary left Ryvita for Australia in 1952 and set up Weston Biscuit Company which he grew into a successful business. He invented the Wagon Wheel.

In 1960, Allied Bakeries changed its name to Associated British Foods with the objective of diversifying. In 1963, it acquired the Fine Fair Supermarket chain and in 1967 set up Primark in Dublin. At this point Gary returned to take over from his father. He looked to refocus on food and sold Fine Fare, whilst retaining Primark.

The 1980s saw investment in bakery ingredients. In 1991, the company had built a sufficiently large war chest to buy British Sugar Corporation (BSC) from the family owned Beresfords, which in turn opened the opportunity to move into animal feed using the by-products of sugar. BSC produced sugar from home grown beat; Tate & Lyle used imported sugar cane.

Forever seeking opportunity, ABF moved into ingredients before adding Ovaltine to Twinings. Further acquisitions saw moves into world foods with Patak and Elephant Atta flour, and into health foods with Jordans and Dorset Cereals joining Ryvita.

Gary gave much of his wealth to the Garfield Weston Foundation with funds of £1 billion which supports the built heritage and much more.

In 1994 he reorganised his group creating Wittington Investments. In 1999 he stepped down on the grounds of illhealth. He died in 2002.

He was succeeded by Peter Jackson and then in 2005 by George Weston. ABF now operates in fifty six countries.

Wittington Investments bought the Boots chemists chain in 2026.

Jaguar and Land Rover - a surprising pairing?

 William Lyons and the Wilks brothers created remarkable companies which made iconic vehicles. Was it just fate that brought the companies together?

William Lyons and Maurice Wilks were born three years apart; Lyons in 1901 in Blackpool.

Son of a piano maker, William attended Arnold House School and in 1922 set up in business making sidecars in partnership with William Walmsley. They progressed into body work for cars; the Austin Swallow was one result of this. Their first full car was the Swallow Sports 'SS' which caused a sensation at the 1931 motor show; SS Cars Ltd was born. Four years later the first Jaguar emerged as the first production car to exceed 100mph. The war intervened and SS Cars played their part. The company changed it name top Jaguar Cars Ltd in 1945.

The post image is of an ashtray that was my father's. He had owned one of the first Jaguars in the 1930s; I still have the leather covered wheel hammer.

Maurice Wilks was educated at Malvern and went to the USA in 1926 to work with General Motors. After two years he returned and joined Hillman as a planning engineer. In 1930 he joined Rover as chief engineer being promoted to technical director in 1946. In the aftermath of the war, Maurice and his brother Spencer created a vehicle originally made for farmers from aluminium left over from aircraft production – the Land Rover. Interestingly they always had greater pride in their luxury cars.

The route to the first ‘marriage’ was circuitous.

In the fifties, William Lyons and Jaguar were doing well, producing cars much in demand and they had virtually doubled in size by buying Daimler, but also Coventry Climax and Guy Motors. To be honest this was a pretty rich mix. It therefore still strikes me as strange that Lyons would enter into merger discussions with George Harriman at BMC. Yet, we have to remember the times  –  when BMC’s Mini was the 'must have' car for swinging sixties. BMC also owned MG and Austin-Healey whose sports cars were much in demand.  It seems that Lyons saw BMC as having the weight to finance the development of the Jaguar models which he had at least in his mind if not on the drawing board. Jaguar merged with BMC to become British Motor Holdings in 1966.

The Wilks brothers had retired from Rover in the early sixties and Donald Stokes of Leyland viewed the company as offering a slice of motoring quality to the bus and truck company which he ran. Rover would join Triumph which had become part of Leyland with the Standard-Triumph acquisition in 1960.

The mid sixties saw BMH running into trouble. The answer in the eyes of the new Labour government was size and this would be provided by the charismatic Donald Stokes and Leyland. The merger took place in 1968.

The new group had riches beyond price in terms of wonderful motor cars. The Jaguar E-type and XJ6, the Rover P6, the Triumph 2000, not to mention the MGB and Triumph TR5, and the Land Rover. Rather more ominously it had a large number of old factories, dominant shop stewards and mass market motor cars that the public didn’t really want.

I explore what became the British Leyland story in my book, Vehicles to Vaccines.

For this blog I note just three events that ensured that Jaguar and Land Rover would survive.

The rationalisation of BL could so easily have led to the loss of the Land Rover; instead the factory at Solihull was made over to 4x4 production. The Range Rover had been introduced at the end of the sixties just as BL was running out of money. The car was perfectly timed and demand soon far exceeded supply.

A little later, a brilliant manager, Geoffrey Robinson, was appointed Managing Director of Jaguar. He had no intention of the marque losing it kudos and initiated an ambitious plan to bring the company back on track. A lack of money caused this plan to run into the buffers. The appointment of Michael Edwards to lead to the eventual breakup of British Leyland had for Jaguar a streak of brilliance for he appointed John Egan to take up the reins at the then floundering motor company. Egan and his team brought Jaguar back so much so that, following privatisation, Ford paid handsomely for what was to lead their new speciality car group.

British Leyland became the Rover Group and this was bought by BMW. They in turn sold Land Rover to Ford where it worked closely with Jaguar.

The rest as they say is history, Jaguar and Land Rover both now prosper as JLR as part of the Tata Group.

It is ironic that the Wilks family didn’t see the Land Rover as their great success; it was the experimental vehicle powered by a gas turbine – Rover had after all been part of the development of the jet engine. Had this been the case, Jaguar and Rover would have been head to head. Had Land Rover stuck to the utility vehicle so loved by explorers, Ford may well not have looked at them. Yet with the Range Rover successors, Land Rover and Jaguar together look to the luxury car market where they both can prosper.

Winners and losers since 1951 - Rolls-Royce and Bentley

 Reading through my book Vehicles to Vaccines', some companies jump out as conspicuous success stories, and some less so. Beneath the surface there are many hundreds of smaller British manufacturing concerns which form the backbone of this sector.

Sales of British companies is a recurring theme and there are a number of ways of viewing this. It creates shareholder value. It offers a way for overseas companies to benefit from UK manufacturing expertise. Yet, it saddens me. Am I being too emotional? More seriously, should I be concerned?

In the case of four of our top motor companies, I believe the answer to both is yes. Let's take the example of Rolls-Royce and Bentley. I shall look at Jaguar and Land Rover in a subsequent post.

The story is well known, but can be clouded by the mists of time.

Henry Royce was a superbly talented engineer. He was born in 1863, son and grandson of flour millers. The death of his father meant that he had to leave school and he found a job as a Post Office messenger. At the age of 14 he was taken on as an apprentice at the Great Northern Railway works in Peterborough. Lack of money brought this to an end and he found work with a gun manufacturer in Leeds from where he entered the new world of electricity. He eventually formed with his brother Royce Limited electrical and mechanical engineers. I write of his meeting with Charles Rolls in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Following the untimely death of Rolls, he formed a team around him to complement his engineering skills by adding imaginative marketing. Claude Johnson and Ernest Hives are names that stand out. Johnson’s view was that the company should build on its reputation of serving the aristocracy whose cars were nearly always driven by chauffeurs. Thus, if a customer wished to test drive a car, he would be driven by a Rolls-Royce chauffeur who had been schooled in the etiquette of service. Royce demanded the highest possible standards in engineering, as Johnson did in customer service.

W.O. Bentley was probably as great an engineer. He was born in 1888, the youngest of nine children. He was fascinated by all things mechanical. On leaving Clifton College, he was apprenticed at the Great Northern Railway in Doncaster. His passion had become the internal combustion engine and in 1909 he joined the National Motor Cab Company in London. Three years later he set up with his brother as a motor agent and soon was making wonderful cars. I write of this too in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. At the start of the First World War, he worked for engine builder Gwynne who were not convinced by Bentley’s suggestion of aluminium pistons. Humber harboured no such doubts and, with him, built many engines this way. In 1920 W.O, as he was known, formed Bentley Motors. The Autocar magazine reported that he was working on a model ‘intended to appeal to those enthusiastic motorists who desire a car which, practically speaking, was a true racing car with touring accessories’. Only three years later, the car finished fourth in the Le Mans. It was the Wall Street crash that robbed Bentley of his company, and Rolls-Royce pipped at the post Napier & Sons to buy the valuable marque.

Rolls-Royce then built both cars from their factory at Sinfin Lane in Derby, alongside aeroengines.

When I say they built cars, I mean that they produced the chassis with engine ready for a specialist coach builder to add the coachwork to meet the customers’ requirements.

During the Second World War, the production of aeroengines was vast and critical to the war effort. Cars were also produced as witnessed by the Rolls-Royce used by Field Marshall Montgomery.

Following the war, Rolls-Royce moved the production of cars to the shadow factory they had managed in Crewe, leaving aero-engines at Derby.

W.O. found he could no longer work with Rolls-Royce and so joined Lagonda which later teamed up with Aston-Martin under the ownership of David Brown.

In the fifties and sixties, Rolls-Royce produced some truly iconic cars, not least the Phantom IV, available only to royalty and heads of state.

Rolls-Royce underwent a dramatic change when the development costs of the RB211 aeroengine ran out of control, leading to the placing of the aeroengine company into public ownership. Rolls-Royce Motors was separately floated in 1973, which coincided with the launch of the Corniche, the fastest Rolls-Royce ever.

Rolls-Royce Motors was  bought by Vickers plc in 1980. They had been faced with the capital cost of tooling for new models; Vickers, on the other hand, expected a windfall from the nationalisation of their aircraft and shipbuilding businesses. Vickers worked hard to make the combination work, producing motor cars that the wealthy of the world wanted to buy, under both the Rolls-Royce and Bentley marques. In time, Vickers had to seek partners for Rolls-Royce to develop the next new model. The seeking evolved into a potential sale with BMW as front runners. BMW were already supplying engines for both Rolls-Royce and Bentley models; they also enjoyed success with joint ventures with the aeroengine company, Rolls-Royce plc, which had been privatised in 1987.

In the event, VW outbid BMW. As was widely reported at the time, VW found that they had bought the company without the right to use the brand which still belonged to Rolls-Royce plc. Undaunted, they set about building Bentleys at Crewe. BMW acquired the licence to use  the Rolls-Royce brand and set up a new factory on the Goodwood Estate in Sussex. 

The net result of all this is a duo of fully financed and commercially supported companies building distinct Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars in England. So, possibly not a cause for sadness.

Is it a cause for concern? Had this been an isolated incident the answer may well be no. As it is, these were just two of a long line of sales which neither the government nor the city did a thing to stop.

There is of course a postscript. The flood of Chinese cars into the EU is putting pressure on the German car makers. The outcome at present is uncertain.

Read more in Vehicles to Vaccines