By Eamon Dyas

While the United States was the world’s largest producers of automobiles in 1950 the majority of its production was for its home domestic market and not for export. At the same time the UK exported 75% of its vehicle production leaving it as the world’s largest exporter of automobiles in 1950 meaning that it was responsible for 52% of global automobile exports. In what must be one of the most dramatic falls in terms of any economic measurement in 1975 that share had dropped to 4.4%. While the wider UK industrial decline was not so dramatic this statistic does provide a stark insight into the nature of that decline as evidence of an increasing loss of competitiveness on the international stage.

There have been several explanations for this loss of competitiveness. The failure to adjust to the loss of empire (the country continued to spent a higher proportion of its GDP on its military than those countries that subsequently overtook it industrially) and the growing importance of property as an attractive home for investors have been offered as explanations. But while these were undoubtedly factors in Britain’s industrial decline one of the most frequent explanations has been the impact of the behaviour of the trade unions and the frequency with which they resorted to industrial action in the second half of the 20th century. In 1974, 14,750,000 days were lost due to industrial action in the UK while the figure for West Germany in the same year (whose automotive industry travelled in the opposite direction to that of the UK between 1950 and 1975) was approximately 737,000 days lost. The argument was that this contributed not only to a relatively higher production cost in the UK but also to a reluctance on the part of capitalists to invest in its industrial sector which in turn led to a weakness in industry’s capacity to innovate.

Though my father worked in the car industry for most of his working life I personally never worked in that industry. However I did see the evidence of the UK’s industrial decline when I worked as a capstan lathe operator in London in the mid-1970s. At that time I was employed with a company called Martindale in Neasden Lane in north-west London. The company manufactured various types of breathing apparatus and respirators with components made from aluminium, steel and brass. The company had around a dozen capstan lathes plus several flat-bed and rotary grinding machines.  The capstan lathes used by the company had been manufactured by the Coventry machine maker, Alfred Herbert Limited and dated from the Second World War. These machines had been among the thousands of such machines produced during the war and they played a critical part in munitions production due to their “capacity for shaping components with high precision, accuracy, and repeatability” under the conditions of mass production. After the War, with the cessation of the levels of demand for their war products and with no alternative purpose available many of these machines were either scrapped or sold and re-sold to whoever was prepared to purchase them. The ones I worked on at Martindale in north-west London in the mid-1970s were of this vintage having gone through one or more previous owners. 

Alfred Herbert Limited was based in Coventry and during the first half of the twentieth century had been one of the world’s largest manufacturers of machine tools. By the time of the war its main works in Coventry (the Edgwick Works) occupied a site of 22 acres and it benefitted from heavy government sponsorship of armaments and munitions production, becoming the country’s main producer of capstan and turret lathes in the process.

By the time I was working on these lathe machines they were at the end of a life that began in a war-time environment requiring an intensity of use that had already accelerated their decline. That wear and tear had been compounded since then through their continued use by subsequent owners. As a result, my experience of working on them in the 1970s was that critical parts of their operational machinery had become eroded and things like the teeth on the cross-beds had worn to the extent that the depth of the cut on the metal to be formed was no longer consistent with the stated calibration on the control wheel. The result was that they could no longer be relied upon to consistently produce the levels of precision they originally possessed. It was always possible to overcome this obstacle by learning to compensate for the “slack” in the traverse of the cross-bed but such actions were always a stop-gap and could not be maintained even over a medium production span due to the accumulated effect of vibrations etc. Given that the products required accuracies of within thousandths of an inch (0.001 of an inch) the settings had to be revisited at regular intervals. Such requirements had implications not only for the volume of scrapped products but also for the number of units which each machine was capable of turning out per hour. And this in turn impacted on things like bonuses (which had originally been set on a presumption that the machine was capable of performing as new) – an issue that on several occasions led to threats of industrial action and conflict with management. 

Martindale did invest in a few modern semi-computerised lathes just before my departure from the company in 1976 but this did not prevent its ongoing decline. The company managed to struggle on for a number of years and went on to change its name to Blagden Neasden Safety Limited before finally going out of business in 1999.

By then however, Alfred Herbert Limited, the company that had manufactured the machines in use at Martindale in the 1970s, had itself ceased to exist. It had failed to keep up with the evolving technology in capstan lathe production. They did produce the partly computerised Herbert 2M/3M Robot Capstan Lathe in the mid-1970s but by this time it had lost the initiative to foreign competition and when Martindale began to invest in modern machines it chose an Italian model rather than the one being manufactured by Alfred Herbert Limited. In that sense the decline in the British tool making industry mirrored the decline in the British car industry. Similarly, as its viability began to decline in the 1970s:

       “Because of its position as a Blue Chip company on the London Stock Exchange it could not be allowed to “fail”, and it increasingly needed financial support from government. Eventually it was largely owned by the latter’s National Enterprise Board, but even that organisation could not sustain its losses indefinitely. It finally collapsed in 1983, with debts of around £17 million. The entire contents of Edgwick Works [the main factory site], from the highest value machine tools to tin waste-paper baskets, went under the hammer in a 5-day auction conducted principally in Bay 26 of the world-famous works. It is believed to have raised approximately £750,000.” 

(http://www.warwickshireias.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Gone-but-not-forgotten.pdf)

The Alfred Herbert Limited Edgwick Works site has since been completely cleared and re-developed for various commercial purposes including the Gallagher Retail Park. Such a fate could be said to reflect the trajectory of much of the British economy – from industrial production to retailing and all within a generation.

It is difficult to know what impact the policies which the British government pursued in order to build and sustain its war economies during both world wars had on the viability of its industrial sector. In the case of my experience working a capstan lathe in the mid-1970s that impact was real and tangible. The existence of thousands of superfluous capstan lathes after the war meant that they could be purchased very cheaply and many small industrial manufacturers fitted out entire shop floors with such machines at bargain basement prices. Because these machines had been built to a “War Standard” they were meant to last and continued to be used in these small workshops for decades after the war albeit, as my experience showed, at a diminishing level of productivity. 

As to the possible impact of this on the UK motor industry. The supply chains of car manufacturing companies consist of numerous small businesses that produce the essential components that go into the construction of the individual car. That means that the productivity of the car producer is in turn reliant on the productivity of those supplying those components. So, if those small workshops operate to a lower level of productivity than that of the small workshops performing a similar function in the car industry of another country the British producer is at a disadvantage. Although the product that was made at Martindale was not one that was directly related to the car industry the capstan lathes used in the production of Martindale’s respirators and breathing apparatus were machines which were also an essential tool in the manufacturing of many, if not most, components used in car production. I’ve often wondered how many of the Alfred Herbert capstan machines ended up in those small workshops in the Midlands and were used in the manufacturing of the components supplying the once-great car producers of the region.