Vehicles To Vaccines

By Philip Hamlyn Williams

The book is a quest to discover what happened to British manufacturing in the decades after the Second World War. People say that we don't make things anymore. Is this true?

I try to answer this question by exploring what happened in manufacturing sectors and to major manufacturing companies. I seek out manufacturing heroes, and try to map out where we are with the twenty-first century well underway.

In 1951, the Festival of Britain was celebrating British manufacturing; we built ships, wonderful aircraft like the Viscount and cars a plenty. Seventy years later a British company and a British University teamed up to produce a vaccine that saved thousands of lives from Covid.

It has been a period of astonishing change, from a third of the working population employed in manufacturing to now just one tenth. Britain now ranks eighth among the world's top manufacturing nations.

This book seeks to explore what has changed: the story of British manufacturing from steam trains to semiconductors; from cotton mills to 3D printing; from ocean liners to satellites.

• Language: English
• Publisher: APS Books
• Release date: Dec 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223032793

Book preview

VEHICLES TO VACCINES

A quest to discover what happened to

British manufacturing after 1951

Philip Hamlyn Williams

APS Books

Yorkshire

APS Books,

The Stables Field Lane,

Aberford,

West Yorkshire,

LS25 3AE

United Kingdom

APS Books is a subsidiary of the APS Publications imprint

www.andrewsparke.com

Copyright ©2023 Philip Hamlyn Williams

All rights reserved.

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published worldwide by APS Books in 2023

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publisher except that brief selections may be quoted or copied without permission, provided that full credit is given.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Table Of Contents

Introduction

A timeline of influences on British Manufacturing

Energy

Metals

Chemicals and plastic

Toolmaking

Engineering

Heavy Electrical Manufacturing

Radio, Television and Telecommunications

Computers and Semiconductors

Volume car makers

Speciality car makers and commercial vehicles

The motor component manufacturers

Aircraft manufacturers

Shipbuilding

Railway Locomotive and Rolling Stock Manufacturing

Defence

Construction

Consumer products

Food and Drink

Textiles

Making

Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare

Author’s Reflections

Appendix 1: The Festival of Britain Design Review

Appendix 2: Further Reading

Notes

Introduction

British Manufacturing was the envy of the world; it led the way. In time other nations caught up and indeed overtook the British in value of output. In 1951, manufacturing employed one third of the workforce; in the twenty-first century this has fallen to just ten percent. Britain now ranks eighth in the world league table of manufacturing nations. What had happened?

I explored the years up to 1951 in my book How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW) which looked at the story of British manufacturing through the prism of the Great Exhibition of 1851. I refer to this book where it offers helpful background. In this volume I seek to explore what happened since.

The Festival of Britain of 1951 gave a message of hope to a country worn down by war and yet more rationing. The future was to be as bright as the colours of new materials for the promised homes, hospitals and schools. Power was to be nuclear and hydroelectric. The world’s vehicles were British, be they ships, aircraft or wheeled. The world though was also picking itself up from the devastation of war with new factories and shipyards competing in export markets. What might be called the gluttony of hydrocarbons began with massive oil tankers taking to the seas and plastics finding their way into every part of life.

In this world of change, British manufacturing didn’t stand still. In this book I delve into manufacturing, sector by sector drilling down into some key companies. I begin with a chronology mapping out events and developments that impacted across sectors. I then explore the building blocks: energy, metals, chemicals and plastics before moving to engineering and electricity. From there it is vehicles in their many forms before converging on defence which was and remains a major sector. The home is the destination of so much manufacturing and I explore first construction, then consumer products, food and textiles, ending up with designer makers. Of all the sectors pharmaceuticals is for me the most remarkable growing from a minnow into a world leader, and I conclude with this as my final chapter. Two appendices follow. A summary of the Design Review from the Festival of Britain which highlights the products and companies selected for their design. Finally there is a list of books for further reading which is important because this book would not have been possible without the painstaking work of many authors of company histories. I thank each of them.

I have tried to seek multiple sources where possible, many of which in today’s world are from websites. In addition I have referred to academic papers where they shed helpful light, but also to newspapers from the time. As with my earlier volume, Grace’s Guide has been a constant companion.

This is a big subject and certainly too big for a comprehensive history to be contained between the covers of a book this size. It is also too soon after the events to write a ‘history’ as such. This is therefore the result of my quest to find answers to the question: Whatever Happened to British Manufacturing. I have tried to identify the main trends and key events approaching the subject as far as possible with an open mind.

I have been fortunate to speak with a few of those many people named in the book. Kelvin Bray gave generously of his time in telling me about Ruston Gas Turbines. Paul Taylor both talked to me but also allowed me to use his research into the Lincoln Semiconductor manufacturer which is now Dynex. The University of Brighton is the custodian of the archive of the Festival of Britain and I am grateful to them and their helpful staff for allowing me access to their records. Designer/makers Sue Pryke, Linda Broomfield, Laura Thomas, Harriet Wallace-Jones and Keeley Traae gave me a glimpse of their world. Norman Cherry and Dauvit Alexander introduced me to Birmingham’s jewellery quarter and Alan Eklid gave me an insight into materials especially metals. My old friends Dennis Read and Mark Warwick helped me with, respectively, recollections of the chemical industry and years of enthusiasm for railways. I am especially grateful to another old friend, my brother-in-law, who read my draft chapters and gently corrected errors. I hasten to add that any errors which remain are mine. I am grateful to Andrew Sparke and APS Books for taking on the role of publisher. My wife, Maggie, has been a constant support and is herself a designer maker.

A timeline of influences on British Manufacturing

I begin this volume with the Festival of Britain because it marked a new beginning for a nation exhausted by war and by rationing. It also preceded by a matter of months the accession of a new monarch whose reign would span the decades covered by the book. It is therefore appropriate to start with the words of Princess Elizabeth addressed to the festival organising committee:

I would therefore suggest to you, as you begin your work, the importance of setting the highest standards in everything you plan for 1951. The success of the Festival will depend on the courage and vision shown by those responsible for its organisation. I feel sure that they will never be content with what is second best....I hope, also, that in emphasising our achievements of the past and present you will stress no less sharply our responsibilities to the future. Then the Festival of Britain, 1951, may prove to be not simply an end in itself, but a beginning of many good things.[1]

There was thus much hope and a vision for the future. The Princess would become Queen within months of the Festival closing. In her reign she would institute her award for industry and visit countless factories across the land and launch dozens of ships. In time, she would have her own Royal Yacht Britannia built by John Brown, a Royal Train built in the Great Western Railway workshops and a Royal Flight of aircraft, initially a Hawker Siddeley Andovers, while Rolls-Royce would build the Phantom IV specifically and only for the use of monarchs and heads of state.

The Festival of Britain of 1951 was an occasion for the nation to have fun after all the hard years of war and rationing. I wrote in some detail about the Festival in HBSTMW. It offered a showcase of Britishness, much more so than the Great Exhibition a century before which was simply a shopwindow on (mainly) British manufacturing. The fruits of manufacturing were displayed in context and so played an important part in telling the stories of home, work, recreation and transport – the four areas of life selected for exhibition.

Applications were invited from businesses across manufacturing sectors and across the nation. The aim was to gather companies manufacturing products of ‘good design, functional efficiency and manufacture’. This is important, for it was a curated exhibition and so products that did not meet the tests were rejected. In the archives there are notes of meetings with lists of products accepted, but also those referred for second opinions and those rejected. The final list totals some 24,476 products. I explore some of the products and their manufacturers in the appendix. What shouts loudest from this exploration was the sheer number of quite small companies producing similar products. I suspect that this did not necessarily result in fierce competition, but rather that the companies, at least unofficially, divided the home market between them.

The Festival of Britain gave a message of hope to a country worn down by war and yet more rationing. The future was to be as bright as the colours of new materials for the promised homes, hospitals and schools. Power was to be nuclear and hydroelectric. The world’s vehicles were British be they ships, aircraft or wheeled. This was the vison. There was also a stark reality, which for me was encapsulated in the words of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Dennis Healey in 1975.

Adopting a pay policy is rather like jumping out of a second floor window: no one in his sense would do it unless the stairs were on fire. But in post-war Britain the stairs have always been on fire.[2]

I begin with the contrasting quotations of the future Queen and her future Chancellor because they help to set the context for the passage of British Manufacturing after the Second World War. The loan negotiated with the USA after the sudden ending of Lease Lend would burden the country for the next half century. This was compounded by the loss of overseas investments, essentially all to help pay for the war. We then add the crucial issue of the sterling exchange rate which was fixed against the dollar and so made the push for exports doubly difficult. This inevitably led to periodic devaluations which further tarnished the financial reputation of what had been in living memory the greatest economic power on the globe. The cost of repairing the damage to the nation’s infrastructure caused by the war added to government borrowing and so also to the burden of taxation. To seek to run an economy against this background was indeed grappling with stairs constantly burning. It is therefore astonishing that for the first two decades, the fifties and the sixties, both unemployment and inflation hovered around an acceptable two percent. This is really where the words of the young princess come in. We might have been down, but we weren’t out. The Festival of Britain displayed brilliant British design, and the fifties and sixties would show this to the world.

There is perhaps a third factor of how manufacturing was viewed. Andrew Marr, in his A History of Modern Britain, makes the point that in the mid-fifties Britain was a ‘worldwide player, connected and modern. Her major companies are global leaders in oil, tobacco, shipping and finance’.[3] This comment has a deeper significance. Talented men were attracted to jobs in these sectors rather than in manufacturing, which was considered inferior. The film I’m Alright Jack, with Peter Sellars as the union man and Ian Carmichael as the naïve ‘talented’ young man trying to give manufacturing a go, probably says a lot.

In this introductory chapter, I want to spend a little time on the chronology identifying events and trends that impacted right across the industrial scene. In the chapters that follow I will then turn to look at what happened to manufacturing, sector by sector, beginning with the underlying building blocks.

Winston Churchill had been re-elected in 1951. His passion for the Empire remained undimmed, although the reality was slowly slipping away. The extension of this passion to the ‘English Speaking Peoples’ meant that his focus was more on Washington than the geographically closer Europe and so, when France and Germany saw the merit in joining their iron and steel industries, Churchill dismissed any idea of going with them. Yet, Britain’s position in the world had changed. As David Edgerton puts it, ‘on taking up the premiership again in 1951, Churchill took charge of a second rank power. Stalin and Truman commanded vastly greater forces. Only ten years before, Churchill’s forces were second to none.’[4]

The people of this country had been hungry for a taste of domestic consumption when the war ended; after all, they had endured a great deal. The sudden cessation of Lease Lend within weeks of the war’s ending was thus a body blow. The distinguished economist JM Keynes had been sent by Prime Minister Attlee to Washington to secure the dollars that were so desperately needed to pay for imports of food, let alone the little luxuries people were craving. Keynes had left with great optimism; he returned with a much smaller loan than he had wanted and indeed needed, at 2% interest; it would not be repaid in full until 2006.

The government renewed tight control over imports and expanded war time rationing. The bright side, if there was one, was that employment was high, not least with exporters working flat out to try to pay for essential imports. The traditional use of ‘invisible earnings’ was no longer the panacea, with the loss of overseas investments and income from shipping. The mismatch between imports and exports was further exacerbated by a massive commitment to defence spending both with the British Army of the Rhine and elsewhere in the Middle and Far East. The net result was a sequence of balance of payments crises which many of us will remember from childhood. The bitterly cold winter of 1947 must for many have been the last straw. However, it was followed by the unrolling of the Marshall Plan which saw the USA provide millions of dollars to the European economies, including Britain, which were on their knees. In 1949, Sterling was at last devalued against the Dollar to a more realistic rate of 2.80 compared with 4.03. This made exports more competitive, but at the same time increased the cost of imports.

The push for exports had been a success. In 1950, the UK enjoyed a 22% share of world exports. Employment in shipbuilding was at an all-time high of 300,000. The textile mills were busy places, coal was being mined at an almost unprecedented rate and motor cars were being sent by the boatload to overseas markets. It wasn’t just the numbers; with the exception of coal mining where the US was far ahead in terms of productivity, UK shipbuilders and aircraft manufacturers compared favourably with the best the world could offer. British motor cars, especially MG, Sunbeam, Jaguar and Rolls-Royce, were much sought after. The world, like the UK itself, was a market hungry for consumption and many countries did not have to contend with import controls and rationing.

Full employment naturally led to rising earnings. That in itself was not a problem, but held the potential for inflation: another memory from childhood and indeed for many years to come. Andrew Marr makes the point that this environment was perfect for the growth of uncontrolled trades-unionism: ‘there were more shop stewards than soldiers’.[5] Graham Turner adds that the motor companies, for example, were so determined to maintain production that they would give in to demands rather than risk damaging wild-cat strikes.[6]

Looking at these assertions more closely, a paper by Roger Undy of Oxford University sheds helpful light. In it, Undy stresses the enhanced position of the TUC following its ‘good war’. It was now recognised as a key part of government process. Membership grew from 9 million in 1945, representing 43% of those eligible, to 10 million in 1969; more women were joining, and the TUC had a voice. Of relevance to the point made by Marr and Turner, the paper acknowledges a move to devolution of union activity to plant level. Some employers had favoured this for its ability to address particular issues, but more extreme shop stewards took advantage of it in calling wild cat strikes. In such places the ‘closed shop’, meaning compulsory union membership, became common, as did costly inter-union rivalries. Nevertheless, in the light of what was to come, the fifties were peaceful times.[7]

It is worth pausing to see just how people were employed at the start of the fifties. Looking at the largest sectors: 5% were in agriculture and 4% in mining. Manufacturing claimed 28%, with construction adding a further 6% with distributive trades and financial services making up a further 14%. Compared with the size of the British economy in Edwardian Britain, manufacturing and distributive trades had grown, but both agriculture and mining had declined. Looking ahead to the end of the 1980s, distributive trades and financial services by then had stolen the lead with 27%, with all other sectors shrinking; manufacturing then stood at 17%.

David Edgerton writes of the fifties being a period of ‘nationalising of British trade and of the British economy’.[8] The war had lost some 40% of British overseas assets. Balance of payments pressures had forced a reduction in imports by the imposition of duties and quotas and an exhortation to ‘Buy British’. This had a positive impact on British companies’ commitment to R&D; however it did insulate the nation from developments elsewhere. We would laud the move to greater self-sufficiency in food production. ICI, the giant chemical company, which had developed polythene and terylene boasted some of the largest chemical plants in the world producing all manner of plastics. It was also supplying tons of fertilisers for the growing British agricultural sector. Were we developing into a self-sufficient nation, quite the opposite of being the core of an Empire encompassing much of the globe? Edgerton suggests that the British economy had been production-intensive for decades; the 1950s merely saw the summit of these efforts to the extent that Britain was the most production intensive economy in the world, bar Germany.[9] This production effort also went to producing substitutes for what had previously been imported.

No sooner had the fifties got underway than war struck once more, this time in Southeast Asia with the conflict in Korea. British forces were involved alongside those of the USA and this meant a renewed demand for the materiel. I write about this in chapter 16. The conflict lasted three years. In terms both of production and the drain on the UK budget, the commitment to the newly formed NATO would add further demands on an already stretched budget.

The atomic bomb cast its shadow over both the fifties and sixties. It had been developed from research in the UK by Oxford University and ICI scientists, aided by refugees from Nazi Germany. The impetus for its development had come at just the wrong time during the war when the UK was struggling on all fronts. The result was that the USA took up the research as senior partner. After the war, the UK had been keen to be part of the continuing development, but the reluctance of the USA resulted in her trying to ‘go it alone’. This set in motion a relationship with the nuclear deterrent which would haunt successive governments and draw heavily on already stretched resources. The UK was becoming just another medium sized nation dwarfed by the superpowers but with leaders of both political parties who could not shake off their sense of this being the mother country of an ‘Empire on which the sun never set’. The fifties saw Britain arm herself with an aeroplane-borne nuclear bomb carried by the V bombers.

The Far East was not alone in its demands on British forces. The Middle East remained a constant drain, first with the taking in 1951 of the oil reserves of Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by the Iranian state. The political pressures that beset the region revolved around the resentment of the young indigenous population at the continuation of British imperial rule. This came to a head in 1956 in what we remember as the Suez Crisis. This is not the place to explore the politics, but the UK was humiliated by the lack of support from the USA. The economic impact was felt keenly worldwide by the canal being closed for five months. Shippers discovered that it was much cheaper to transport oil in super-tankers, instead of the smaller tankers which used the canal. The move to super-tankers speeded the decline of traditional British ship building. The oil price shock from the canal’s closure also led to thinking which resulted in the mini car, and I write about this in chapter 10. 

Coal, however, was still the primary source of energy, although the Conservative government had committed to nuclear power meeting one quarter of the nation’s consumption by 1965.[10] Coal came under pressure from the Clean Air Act of 1956, which added weight to a move on the railways away from steam. The late fifties saw the building of the first motorways under Minister of Transport Ernest Marples. Andrew Marr writes of the often-maligned Marples as also launching ERNIE, the computer randomly picking premium bond winners.

On the home front, rationing came to an end and employment was high with corresponding gains in living standards, so much so that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan could declare that ‘you’ve never had it so good’. In many ways this was true. Cities like Coventry, which had been so damaged in the war, were booming with motor factories working flat out. People also wanted radios and radiograms; in time televisions were seen in more and more homes.

Housing in the post war period was dominated by the desperate need to find homes for those made homeless by enemy bombing. Prefabs, many of which were built in former aircraft factories of which there were many, were welcomed with open arms as dry, warm, modern places to live. Housing was also growing vertically with the modernist concrete structures of 1930s continental Europe being embraced by the British architects of the fifties in the monstrous high-rise flats which came to dominate the skyline of so many of our cities. Nevertheless, the slums and bombsites alike were slowly being cleared.

The election of Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister in 1957 marked the start of a new approach to the economy which James McMillan in The Dunlop Story calls the Macmillan-Wilson era. McMillan places this in the context of the Dunlop boss, Reay Geddes, who certainly had far sighted views about social responsibility.[11] Even in the fifties and early sixties under a Conservative government, the idea of tripartite working between the state, industry and trades unions was being accepted. The Conservatives had come under pressure to modernise industry, given the growing awareness that other countries were doing just that, and with tangible success. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, set up during the Great War, had reported that machine tools were ‘a key strategic sector for the modernisation and expansion of British industry’. As I write in subsequent chapters this type of exhortation often fell on deaf ears. In the Attlee administration, future Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, as Industry Minister, had set up the National Research Development Corporation with Lord Halsbury as managing director.[12] MW Kirby, in his paper on supply-side management, offers a helpful account of the subsequent ways the state sought to intervene. In the fifties the main interventions were those to counter restrictive practices in the form of the Restrictive Practices Court and an encouragement of investment in Research and Development.[13] As I write below, the sixties would see a more formal structure put in place for state intervention. 

The 1950s had its share of British manufacturing icons, many drawing on the inspiration of the Festival of Britain. The Austin Seven and Morris Mini Minor were launched in 1959, and the BMC annual report for that year expressed surprise at how well it was received. Earlier in the fifties, a new model of the Humber Super Snipe was launched, to me a truly beautiful car, while Jaguar won the hearts of the motoring public with their XK140. The fifties also saw stylish commercial aircraft such as the Vickers Viscount and the de Havilland Comet.

Christopher Cockerell devised the Hovercraft in 1953, and Russel Hobbs developed their automatic kettle in 1955. Robin Day’s furniture was gracing many stylish homes and public buildings.

As the sixties swung into psychedelic action, British industry was powering ahead. The motor industry accounted for 17% of British exports; the British Motor Corporation, created by the merger of Austin and Morris, was the biggest car maker in Europe. British shipyards were still busy. Harland & Wolff in Belfast completed the Canberra for P&O, but this would be its last large liner. Vickers in Barrow also completed its last liner, the Oriana, for the Orient line.[14] The E Type Jaguar appeared in 1961 and joined Triumph Spitfires, MGBs and the Lotus Elan. Paddy Hopkirk won the Monte Carlo Rally in 1964 in a Mini Cooper S. James Bond burst onto the scene with, first, a Sunbeam Alpine and then his Aston Martin DB5. To these we can add Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth II built by John Brown in 1967 and the Hawker Harrier jump jet. The 1960s also saw the coming of the ATM or cash machine engineered by John Shepard-Baron when he was managing director of De La Rue Instruments, a subsidiary of the bank-note printer.[15]

In 1963, ICI industrial chemist Dr Richard Beeching was appointed to chair the new British Railways board with a remit to transform the aging and loss-making rail network into something fit for purpose for the age of the motor car. Thousands of miles of track were closed, a decision whose wisdom has been debated to this day. Beeching did a great deal of good for railways and I explore this and the bigger challenge of the replacement of steam locomotives by electric and diesel traction in chapter 15.

The National Economic Development Council was formed in 1962.[16] This followed a policy in the 1950s of encouragement by government of fragmented industries to come together in larger, hopefully more viable units. There was also encouragement for large, successful companies to set up new operations in areas scarred by unemployment. Rootes made their Hillman Imp at Linwood outside Glasgow and Dunlop was urged to keep open their India Tyre plant at Inchinnan despite damaging union militancy.[17]

Oil had been the coming source of energy since the invention of the internal combustion engine, and Britain was ahead of the pack as both importer and consumer. Gas produced from coal was a feature of most households and also many townscapes with towering gasometers regulating the flow to the consumer. The sixties were therefore of huge significance with the start of gas from the North Sea and I write about this in chapter 2.

In the mid-sixties, despite the massive push for exports, British manufacturing was seen to be languishing in comparison with that of other countries. It was not doing badly; it was just that they were doing better. It needed encouragement.

In 1965, the Queen’s Award for Industry was instituted.[18] Four years later, the MacRobert Trust instituted their Award for Engineering. I write about these in the context of later winners.

The new Labour government under Harold Wilson also had its response ready in the ‘white heat of technology’. It set up the Department for Economic Affairs (DEA), led by George Brown, which authored the National Plan supported by the National Economic Development Office (NEDO) and subsidiary bodies focusing on industries and geographical areas – the Little Neddys. Alongside the DEA was the new Ministry of Technology and its minister Anthony Wedgewood Benn, the former Viscount Stansgate and soon to be Tony Benn, supporting technical committees including the National Engineering Laboratory, the National Physical Laboratory and the National Computer Centre.[19] The Industrial Reorganisation Corporation (IRC) was led by Sir Frank Kearton, head of textile giant, Courtaulds. He had previously worked at ICI at one time on its atomic bomb programme.[20] The IRC was about creating national champions. It supported the creation of International Computers Limited (ICL) and primed the merger of GEC with English Electric and Associated Electrical Industries. The expansion of Courtaulds into spinning and weaving was perhaps not an IRC intervention, but it was closely aligned given Kearton’s involvement in both. The IRC was perhaps clutching at straws in supporting the creation of British Leyland in 1968 and providing shipbuilding support between 1967 and 1972 for Harland & Wolff, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and Cammell Laird. A Selective Employment Tax introduced in 1966 sought to discourage certain types of employment and so make manufacturing employment more attractive.

The strains in the overall economy, all really stemming from the emptying of the national coffers to fight two world wars, led to a currency crisis for the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jim Callaghan, and hence to the 1967 devaluation of sterling from 2.80 to 2.40.

A key issue that had been rumbling through the fifties and sixties was the damage being caused to the economy by largely unofficial industrial action. The response from government was the Green Paper, In Place of Strife, spearheaded by the redoubtable Barbara Castle whose left-wing credentials should have endeared her to the trades union movement. In the event, it would prove to be the first of a string of failures to bring industrial harmony which would last through the seventies.

The British commitment to an independent nuclear deterrent continued into the sixties with the realisation that submarine launched missiles were to be the future. The American Polaris system really chose itself, although the submarines from which the missiles were to be launched were manufactured in British yards.

In 1967, fourteen privatised steel producers were brought together to form the renationalised British Steel Corporation under the chairmanship first of merchant banker Lord Melchett, grandson of the founder of ICI, and then engineer Monty Finniston who, somewhat later and famously reported on the engineering profession for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.[21] The abrasive American industrialist Ian MacGregor took the helm in 1980 before moving to the Coal Board to face the miners’ strike in 1984.

The Vietnam War was ever in the background throughout the sixties and up until May 1975. Prime Minister Wilson stood firm against committing British troops.

The 1970s began with the re-election of the Conservatives under Prime Minister Edward Heath determined to roll back the influence of the state in the economy; the market was to rule. Fate had other ideas, for not long after his election, Rolls-Royce, that icon of British manufacturing, was in trouble from the spiralling cost of the RB211 engine being developed for Lockheed. The approach taken by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, former industrialist John Davies, was to bring it into state ownership saving 80,000 jobs and a vital part of the British defence industry. The experience of the Rolls-Royce rescue led to an acknowledgment that there was a place for government intervention, and this found expression in the Industry Act 1972.[22]

Another unwelcome set of issues that faced the new government came from the pressures on wages that were unleashed. Strike action followed, which the 1971 Industrial Relations Act tried but failed to control. The 1972 budget of Chancellor Anthony Barber was designed to boost the economy and hence, some suggested, the government’s chance of re-election. The inflation which followed the first oil shock marked further Heath’s move back to consensus politics with his attempts at a prices and incomes policy ending in the memorable three-day week when a coal strike threatened power supplies to workplaces.

The seventies witnessed two severe downturns in national output following the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. The first was triggered by the members of OPEC placing an embargo on those countries which had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war of earlier in 1973. The embargo lasted until 1974 and caused oil prices to rise sharply bringing into focus the cost of the industrialised world’s reliance on Middle Eastern oil. The second crisis followed the Iranian revolution which restricted the supply and so dramatically increased the price of oil. Both crises resulted in world-wide declines in economic activity.

In the UK, the decade saw unemployment rising to 6%. Of greater immediate importance was inflation which peaked at nearly 25% after the first oil shock, although the causes of inflation were more than simply the price of oil. Manufacturing output declined to 23% of national total output with the numbers employed in manufacturing falling from 7.7 million to 6.3 million.

The Heath government saw the culmination of a project very close to Edward Heath’s heart, the joining of the Common Market. He saw that British manufacturing needed a big home market and membership offered just that. It is also opened the British market to manufacturers from the other member states. Edgerton suggests that this latter factor led to decline of motor industry. Broadberry and Leunig’s paper on government intervention, which I refer to more below, is clear that the failure to join the Common Market earlier handed advantage to the German and French motor industries giving them a larger market, but also exposing them to the benefits of competition. Their view was that Britain’s entry was simply too late for our industry to catch up. We had suffered for too long from lack of exposure to competition.[23] Crafts and Woodward see benefit in EEC membership from the  reduced price of imports and an enlarged market for specialist manufacturing and products.[24]  The Labour government, which succeeded Heath,