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

Lord Nuffield’s Real legacy

By 1930, Lord Nuffield was arguably the richest man in Britain, aside from a few of the “asset rich, cash poor” great land owning families, and one of the richest industrialists in Europe. He had come a long way from February 1921 and was levels of magnitude wealthier than Austin, Rootes, Royce or any other British motor industry family were or ever would be. And he was willing, even eager, to use this wealth for the benefit of all, though under his terms, as he showed many times.

This became a public record of immense philanthropy, from the early 1920s on. Lord Nuffield was seemingly a man who, having made an immense fortune, had become more interested and motivated in how he could share and use it for wider benefit than by how he could make it even bigger.

His first major act was to endow the King Alfonso Chair (or Professor) of Spanish Studies at Oxford University in 1926, having assessed South America as a potentially viable export market about which British understanding was weak. He also established a trust with £10,000 (£650,000) to support families visiting inmates in young offenders’ institutions. Between them, these gifts show two complementary sides of William Morris – wider economic benefit and using wealth and an awareness of social issues to support those with needs.

In 1927, he endowed St Thomas’s Hospital in London with over £100,000 (£6.5m), as well as supporting hospitals in Oxford, Birmingham, Coventry and Worcester, all places connected with his business and history. He effectively established a modern orthopaedic hospital (the Wingfield-Morris Hospital) in Oxford in the early 1930s, as well as Oxford’s first specialist maternity hospital. This is all before the British NHS was founded, and most hospitals then operated as independent charities funded by insurance, and supported by fees and donations.

He supported Guy’s Hospital in London, enabling it to become a major teaching hospital, as recorded by this statue, with around £200,000 (£15m) in the 1930s. In the process of this, he had met and befriended some important personalities, including Professor Robert Mackintosh from Guy’s Hospital. Mackintosh was an anaesthetist and led the team that removed Morris’s appendix in 1928, an operation that was successfully completed and left Morris with a great respect for anaesthetists. In 1936, he approached Oxford University to fund medical research and after a lot of debate won the argument that this would include anaesthetics, and that his nominee, Mackintosh, would be the first professor of anaesthetics in Europe. This marked the start of the contemporary Oxford University Medical School, by some measures now the world’s leading medical research and training institute.

Nuffield did not forget his employees. In 1936, he pledged £2.25million (£165m) of Morris Motors preference shares to an employee trust, with the dividends going to the staff and the company established a pension scheme as well. He was an early proponent of decent paid holidays, recreation facilities and what we now call occupational health schemes and campaigns.

The war saw Lord Nuffield make some of his most generous gestures. He gave £250,000 (£15m) to the RAF Benevolent Fund in 1940, and other large sums to the King George Fund for Sailors, the Red Cross, St John’s Ambulance and the Master Mariners Fund, for Merchant Navy veterans and families. This form of donation continued after the war, with Nuffield funding a residential college for the Royal College of Surgeons in central London, research posts in numerous colleges of Oxford University, as well as at Birmingham and London universities, and major endowments for provincial hospitals which stimulated organisational changes that were embedded in the NHS from 1948, as well as consistent generous support for causes such as support for the blind and cancer research, and many smaller, often spontaneous, gestures. His support for nurses and solders, often spontaneous, is often cited as the stuff of legend.

Standing out amongst these is the establishment of Nuffield College (above and below) in Oxford University, between 1937 and 1949, a period in which Lord Nuffield donated over £2 million (£150m) to establish (and buy land for and build) a post graduate college of social sciences, in line with his views on the ability and obligation of great wealth to help those without any. Lord Nuffield had a difficult relationship with the University, having little appetite for the cumbersome egos, politics and protocols, and consequent long winded decision making. But he usually got his way, although the original intention for Nuffield College was to be an engineering centre.

In 1936, he also gave £2 million (£150m) to the Nuffield Trust for the Special Areas – the areas that needed additional economic support to rise out of the depression. For a while, this trust was administered by Leonard Lord after he had left the Nuffield Organization and focussed on promoting public work schemes in northeast England, central Scotland and south Wales, and is generally considered to have been very successful in its stated aim of reviving economic activity.

Lord Nuffield gave £10 million (almost £500m), again in shares in the car company, to establish the Nuffield Foundation in 1943, as a way of consolidating his wealth into a fund that could be administered by trustees and legally classed as a charity. The Foundation is still very active, funding research around the law, social care, education and social and scientific research. In the same year, he also founded the Nuffield Health Trust “to advance, promote and maintain health and healthcare of all descriptions and to prevent, relieve and cure sickness and ill health of any kind, all for the public benefit” . Now as ever, there is a demand for well being provision and medical centres, and training of medical professionals, and the Trust continues to work in this area. Also ongoing is the Nuffield Trust for the Forces of the Crown, supporting veterans, families and service personnel with the support and recreation facilities the forces do not offer directly.

Nuffield also initiated the supply of iron lungs, for the treatment of polio, to hospitals in the UK and the Empire, free of charge, partly by producing them in Cowley. From 1938, any hospital in the UK or Empire that wanted one could have one, with access to a fixed price maintenance and spares agreement.

In all, Lord Nuffield gave away around £30 million, often in Morris Motors shares but also in direct funding. This can be equated to something around £2 billion in current values (though some estimates based on the how the money has been spent and invested have suggested up to £11bilion), and places him as indisputably Britain’s greatest ever industrialist philanthropist, and as one of Europe’s most generous ever individuals. He did so on his terms, for what he wanted to fund, around what interested him and to what he saw benefited the many. There were no art galleries, orchestras, theatres, football clubs, or great memorial buildings for their own sake or to impress others. In his own words, “I just want to pass out having done my best for mankind”.

As I said at the opening of this piece, Lord Nuffield was a complex man. There was a lot more to him than “successful motor manufacturer”, and indeed some may challenge the “successful” designation. After all, he failed in France; never truly achieved the export success he craved (his exports beyond the British Empire were pretty minimal, partly through the impact of protectionism); his partnership with Budd didn’t work out as planned; he lost the services of Leonard Lord just when he needed them and never truly built up a succession plan; failed at building aircraft in a national crisis; opposed his better informed executives around the Morris Minor (and on other issues), and sold out perhaps earlier than he needed to. As you will have noted in this account, he made some epoch defining decisions and leaps of faith, and also some mistakes, and consistently proved himself to be his own man, or an awkward, stubborn character if you prefer.

But he also dominated the market, to a greater or lesser extent, for 30 years and taught the country how to buy and sell cars and thereby defined the industry in the UK. His company was the largest manufacturer in the UK and one of the largest in Europe, and he was able to keep personal control of the business until he chose to step down, unlike Citroen or Austin for example. He created the business that led the British sports car industry, overtook and held back Ford for 40 years, and in the 1934 Morris Eight and 1948 Morris Minor built two of the most fondly remembered cars in British motor industry. Even now, Cowley remains in business, after 110 years, as one of the oldest operating car factories in the world. It is now the home of MINI, albeit much changed from its Nuffield Organization heyday.

William Morris, Viscount Nuffield, is therefore unarguably the most important and influential single figure in the British motor industry’s history, for his achievements in establishing mass production and thereby affordable motoring for a British manufactured car, and for sustaining that for thirty years; arguably the most significant British industrialist of the twentieth century and one who thoroughly deserves his place at the top table of great British industrial figures alongside Armstrong, Arkwright, Wedgwood and Vickers. No other British motor industry figures would be at that table. Austin lost control of his business in 1922; the Rootes brothers were well behind in reach and scale; Royce’s greatest achievements were in aviation; William Lyons’s Jaguar made some great cars but not really very many of them. Later, personalities such as Donald Stokes and Terry Beckett worked with what had been built up before, rather than creating from scratch.

His activities transformed the sleepy county and university town of Oxford, established medical science at the second oldest University in the world, as well as significantly impacting cities such as Birmingham and Coventry, and transformed thousands of lives. Oxford University have named him as the most significant person in 20^th century Oxford, ahead of the locally born Sir Winston Churchill, the ten twentieth century Prime Ministers from the university (including Thatcher and Blair) and over 50 Nobel prize winners.

But the stand out feature of this fascinating life remains for many the philanthropy. In effect, Lord Nuffield effectively donated Morris Motors and the majority of his personally accrued wealth as I have outlined above. The puzzle is not what he did, but why he did it. William and Lilian had no children, so it may be a case of there being no heir to succeed him, and maybe there were tax reasons. Even so, he could have developed other family members.

There was clearly more to it than seeking approval of the British establishment, or getting one over the establishment – he did both several times. I therefore suggest we are talking about a man with a tremendous set of deeply held and ingrained values and beliefs, linked to strong interests (and maybe thwarted ambitions as well) in education and medicine who could and wanted to contribute in another way. And who perhaps believed he could do more good donating his wealth directly to causes that mattered to him, as he wanted it to be used rather than asking Government or established institutions to direct its detailed use or to see the government take it in death duties.

Lord Nuffield lived modestly, in comparison to this wealth. In 1933, when he could have afforded to buy any one of the great country houses of England, such as Blenheim, Chatsworth or Highclere (aka Downton Abbey), he bought and refurbished a country home adjacent to his golf club (and it was his club – he had bought it when it entered financial difficulty, and lived in a wing of the clubhouse for several years), and named it Nuffield Place after the village it’s in, and lived there until he died.

I’ll let you explore the house yourself (I’m lucky enough to be a volunteer guide, and several of the photos in this piece were taken there) but will add just a few points – he had only one house, so no town house in London, estate in Scotland or personal Caribbean island, and his bedroom carpet was sewn together from off cuts from the Morris assembly line, dated at around 1937.

His bedhead was a blocked fireplace, he used the same office at Cowley for 50 years to which he frequently drove himself in a 1939 Wolseley Eight, and he mended his own shoes at the workbench in his bedroom. And even now, we  get visitors to Nuffield Place who still recall the iron lung vividly.

William Morris, raised to the Baronetcy as Sir William in 1929, to Baron Nuffield in 1934 and to Viscount Nuffield in 1938 (the Nuffield title was taken from the village he lived in from 1933; you can go no higher than Viscount without being born into it) died in August 1963, at the age of 85. British industry and motoring lost a huge figure, and so did the wider community, indeed the whole country.

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