Biography: William Morris – One Man’s Lasting Influence On The British Industry And Country

Lord, Thomas and Issigonis, and then Lord again

The stand out success for Morris in the 1930s was the Morris Eight saloon. By the 1930s, the disparate competition in the market had been thinned down to a group sometimes referred to as the Big Six – Morris, Austin, Ford, Vauxhall, Rootes and Standard, and as the market grew, Morris’s market share dropped; the range was complex and varied, and the factories ageing. The Morris organisation was beginning to drift – Morris’s personal attention was not constant or consistent, some of his senior appointments did not work out and he missed opportunities to take advantage of the potential economies of his scale. Ford and Austin were in the ascendant, as his market share collapsed from 35% in 1929 to 20% in 1933 and sales fell by 20% in the wake of the 1929 crash. William Morris made the fateful decision to elevate Leonard Lord to the position of Managing Director, on a salary of £2,000 a year (£150,000).

Lord conceived the Morris Eight as a direct response to the success of the Ford Model Y, the first Ford designed specifically for Europe and built in the UK, France and Germany with only small variations. Rather than continuing the more complex Minor, the Morris Eight was almost a direct copy of the Ford, with a 90 inch wheelbase, separate chassis, side valve 918cc engine (designed by stripping down and measuring a Model Y engine, allegedly), hydraulic brakes and decent instrumentation set in a relatively plush interior. Development took just 18 months and the car was on sale in late 1934, supported by significant investment in the modernisation of Cowley’s facilities.

There were two and four door saloons, and two and four seat tourers. A four door saloon with leather seats and sliding roof was around £145 (£11,000); a bare chassis under £100. In its first full year, 1935, over 53,000 were sold. In 1936, Morris produced 96,000 cars, a record pre-war total. There were 220,000 Eights produced in four years and it was Britain’s most popular car of the 1930s. Morris was back, by some measures as the largest manufacturer in Europe with capacity at Cowley exceeding Germany’s and bearing comparison with France as well. Nuffield himself considered the Eight good enough for most people, including himself and Lady Nuffield, who both had Wolseley Eights for many years, and both cars are now preserved.

In 1937, the Eight was revised into Series II versions and at the 1938 London Motor Show there was the Morris Eight Series E, with a distinctive waterfall grille, alligator bonnet and no running boards. Mechanically, it was a gentle evolution, with four speed gearbox, and the new body allowed a more spacious interior.

Morris’s first monocoque came in 1938, with the new Series M Morris Ten, which was also designed to have Morris’s first independent suspension, and rack and pinion steering, designed by a young Alec Issigonis.

In the event, the conservative streak in Lord Nuffield led to the beam axle being retained, and the IFS ended up on the post war MG Y type instead.

1935 saw more corporate change, with many of the companies being sold by Morris, by now ennobled as Lord Nuffield, personally to Morris Motors, including MG and Wolseley, and thereby coming under the direct control and direction of Lord, rather than of local directors working for Lord Nuffield himself.

But in 1936, Leonard Lord, recognised as the driving architect of much of the achievement of the 1930s, departed from Cowley abruptly. Accounts differ, but most come down to a falling out with Lord Nuffield, probably over remuneration.

Lord had always agreed that he would be paid what Lord Nuffield thought he was worth, and you sense that these views diverged sufficiently to be unbridgeable. And neither were patient consensus seeking types. In 1938, Lord joined Austin as Herbert Austin’s heir apparent, reputedly vowing to “take Cowley apart brick by bloody brick”.

The business, now known as the Nuffield Organization, had a difficult war.

The overall statistics tell a good story of a lot of munitions supplied to the armed forces and Cowley played a large and key part in the repair and recycling of damaged aircraft back into service, with a lot of ingenuity displayed by the engineering teams (in particular by Alec Issigonis) in devising new equipment, including large and small amphibious personnel carriers, alongside a lot of design work for Morris cars “under the radar”.

Nuffield himself contributed extensively to armed forces support before and during the war and tried to act proactively as a good employer during it as well, doing various things purely for employee well-being and what we would now call work-life balance.

But any account of Nuffield during the war cannot ignore the Castle Bromwich factory, on the eastern edge of Birmingham (and now home to Jaguar Land Rover) and the building of the Supermarine Spitfire. In the mid 1930s, the British government had established the shadow factory scheme, under which the government funded the building of a factory to be run by an industry partner, mostly from the motor industry, on the basis that the government could direct that it be used to build armaments when required. Rootes and Standard were keen participants, and Austin had one on the Longbridge site. Lord Nuffield originally declined to participate, instead trying to interest the government in Wolseley designed aero engines, but came on board in late 1938 and was contracted to build 1,000 Spitfires at Castle Bromwich by June 1940, in what was at the time the world’s largest purpose built aircraft factory.

That quantity of Spitfires by that date would have transformed the Battle of Britain, perhaps by eliminating it altogether, and history could have very different. That they didn’t appear reflects on Lord Nuffield and his appointees, though not uniquely, as you have to consider how realistic the total ever was, the maturity of the design, availability of Merlin engines, air crew, fighter stations, ground equipment and support personnel as well, to name a few.

Churchill at Castle Bromwich

There was a clear contrast between how Vickers Supermarine and the Air Ministry expected an aircraft to be built, and how Lord Nuffield proposed to do it. Put simply, he saw it as being similar to mass producing a batch of identical Morris Eights, whereas the aircraft people were aware that they were building something that was not yet fully developed and would therefore be built to an evolving specification.  That immediately moved the task out of Lord Nuffield’s comfort zone and made his expectations for fixed jigs and fixtures for as many tasks as possible seem premature and ambitious.

During 1939 and early 1940, this contrast became more apparent and only got worse when press baron Lord Beaverbrook (a man as used to getting his way as Nuffield, if not even more so) was appointed by Churchill as Minister of Aircraft Production in May 1940, with a brief to get production going by any necessary means. One early conversation between the two included the question “Do you want Spitfires, or do you want modifications?” and in a later conversation Nuffield asked, in theory rhetorically, if “you would like me to give up control of the Spitfire factory?” Beaverbrook simply said “I accept” and put the phone down. Morris appealed in vain to Churchill, but the episode could be seen as a milestone in the retreat of Nuffield, by then in his 60s, from formal business life and executive control.

At the beginning of the war, the Nuffield Organization had been led by Oliver Boden, who succeeded Leonard Lord in 1936. Boden adopted a “steady as she goes attitude” as the business was stable, while the Eight was doing good business. Boden died in 1940, and was succeeded by Miles Thomas, who had joined Morris in the early 1920s as the editor of the Morris Owner magazine and made his way up the sales operations and onto the board.

Thomas worked to manage the Nuffield Organization’s contribution to the war effort, managing to balance the interventions and wishes of Lord Nuffield against government demands, whilst also trying to prepare the business for the post-war market, and demonstrably having a better grasp of what that would be than Lord Nuffield did, who seemingly understood the likely post-war world no better than he did working for the government.

Sometime in 1943,  Thomas took perhaps the most consequential product decision in the British motor industry between the launch of the Morris 8 in 1934 and that of the Mini in 1959, over the head of Lord Nuffield himself. He recognised that the post-war world would not be satisfied with the Morris Eight Series E, and that Morris needed to step forward, as he was sure the competition would also be doing.

Thomas therefore decided to back Alec Issigonis’s Mosquito concept, which finally emerged in 1948 as the new Morris Minor, against the judgement of Lord Nuffield. The Minor captured just about everything available in 1943 – monocoque constructions, independent front suspension, rack and pinion steering, an engine pushed well forward for space, smaller wheels for space efficiency, an advanced flat 4 engine and modern, almost full width, styling.

Finally, in November 1947, Thomas was able to secure Lord Nuffield’s agreement to launch the car the following year, albeit with the Eight’s side valve engine rather than the flat 4 Issigonis envisaged.

Issigonis, with the blessing of Thomas and his deputy Reginald Hanks, also prepared a stylistically similar but larger Oxford, and full size Morris Six saloon, with a larger engine and longer wheelbase.

Together with a Wolseley version of the Oxford, these cars replaced the complex pre-war Nuffield range, and they were all launched on the same day at the 1948 London Motor Show.

MG and Riley remained more traditional, though.

Lord Nuffield himself actively disliked the Minor, describing it as looking like a poached egg, and asking why it was needed. After all, he expected to be able to sell all the Morris Eights the company could make, perhaps adding the independent suspension to it. He appears to have had little personal affinity with Issigonis, rarely if ever meeting him, frequently mis-pronouncing his name, and describing his as a foreigner.

Of course, the Minor went on to prompt and enduring commercial success, selling 100,000 within three years, at which point Lord Nuffield was happy to be photographed with it, and by 1961 had become Britain’s first one million seller.

BMC made a special model, the Minor 1,000,000, to celebrate. Lord Nuffield, then President of BMC, personally requested at the end of the celebration dinner that the display car be given to the British Red Cross for a public raffle.

Once he had secured Lord Nuffield’s commitment to the new models in 1947, Thomas resigned (almost as if that was part of the deal with Nuffield) and was succeeded by Reginald Hanks, who was to be the last executive leader of an independent Nuffield Organization.

After Leonard Lord, who succeeded Herbert Austin on his death in 1941, had made several overtures to Nuffield, Austin and the Nuffield Organization had agreed in 1948 to cooperate (in a way that might not be permitted now) on purchasing and standardisation of minor components, but the commitment was not total, or enough to stop Lord going ahead with a direct competitor to the Minor, the Austin A30. Sir William Rootes also invited Lord Nuffield to buy out the Rootes Group at this time, but he declined.

Lord tried again in 1951, and against the preference and advice of his board, Lord Nuffield, now aged 74 and with no heir, agreed to sell to Austin. Given the shares he owned or controlled, through the various trusts he had established, in the business, the deal was effectively agreed on his decision, with Nuffield shareholders taking shares in exchange.

Lord Nuffield took the post of Chairman of Europe’s largest and the world’s fourth largest car manufacturer, with Leonard Lord as the Managing Director. This rebuilding of an old relationship was always going to be a challenge. At the first AGM of the new company in 1952, Lord Nuffield surprised all by quickly going through the formalities, in a matter of a few minutes, before resigning as Chairman, accepting the post of Life President (an unusual and purely honorary one in British business), and fully retiring and retreating from the business.

Nuffield spent the subsequent years happily telling people he had no official role or shares in the business, though he still came out for events linked to the Morris name. The last publicity shots of Lord Nuffield were with the 1962 Morris 1100, a worthy successor to the Minor and Eight.

Whilst Lord Nuffield’s active involvement of his activities on the motor industry may have ceased then, just forty years after the first Morris had been shown at the 1912 London Motor Show, his long lasting impact across other aspects of British life, and the world, was still most definitely ongoing.

Pages: 1 2 3 4