Your story describes strikingly well the downfall of Baldwin Locomotive Works. They, too, worked in an industry prone to the whiplash effect, and adapted with a capital-light system that relied on skilled labor in precarious employment. Their products had almost no standardization (and thus no interchangeability), compensated for via close relationships with local customers (Baldwin's biggest orders came from the PRR across town). And farly failures with experimental diesel prime movers meant they rejected the locomotives of the future until it was too late.
I can relate to British union rules being head-bangingly stupid. In the mid-1970's I worked on the night shift as a spot-welder on the production line at the British Leyland car plant in Cowley, Oxford. By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift. Needless to say, BL went belly-up and now BMW is producing Minis there (although they are no longer very mini).
A couple thoughts. I would suggest that shipbuilding is precursor to automotive manufacturing, in developing Asian economy ecosystem.
The reason is simple. It takes a long haul of marketing and product development in Automotive to get established globally. In the 1970s, Datsun, now Nissan, and Toyota were generally considered inferior. Honda invested in the US. But Japanese commercial tanker and freighter shipbuilding requires not mass marketing but focused marketing on a few handful of customer.
Customer access is much easier to sell big ships than cars.
Second. Shipbuilding develops important industrial machining, tool and die making and factory/manufacturing engineering. This is the foundation education for automotive.
Japan, then Korea, then China all followed this progression.
Very interesting thanks. I wonder how much of the objections to consolidation, even when the government got involved, came from the political problems of moving shipbuilding out of existing cities, where the (presumably mainly-Labour) voters were?
By its nature shipbuilding production was centred around rivers with access to the sea. Historically the cities grew around the industry which was limited in where it could expand. Yes you can construct harbours and wharves on virgin coastline. But there you would need the investment in infrastructure that this report states was something the industry shied away from.
Great article. One thing I have always wondered about regarding the decline is the culture. I'm from Glasgow, where I think a majority (?) of UK shipbuilding was. My dad was in shipbuilding, his dad, and his.
My dad told me about how when they were making the Queen Mary they stole the curtains from the rooms. And there's an old theatre in Glasgow (oldest in Britain or something) where they tell you that the ship workers would throw cups of piss at the actors 100 years ago. The culture is similar today.
I think you could have written a similar story on the decline of the British auto and motorcycle industries.
Reading this does make me wonder if a country like Canada (mine) should not require a substantial portion of our steel be used in ships purchased instead of trying to build up the infrastructure required for the odd ferry or navy purchase.
This is a very interesting analysis. My father worked in the industry all his life from the 1940's to well after the nationalisation of shipbuilding. He worked for many years on planning and manufacture of standardised bulk carriers. The SD14 and subsequent designs. It was a very successful off the shelf ship and was still produced after his retirement. I think UK production costs couldn't compete with low cost ships of similar design from the far east.
Brian that is a great article. I have visited the UK since 1963 and I have to say I saw a steady rise in prosperity despite the sectoral problems you describe. probably the same effect here of going to a service economy. My ancestral turf in Yorkshire just became a banking center despite all the mining losses. But Brexit is the big threat to that.
>What had been a robust British program of naval expansion was suddenly halted. Following the treaty, British naval shipbuilding fell by over 90%.
I don't think this is entirely true. Naval shipbuilding fell off because of the end of the war, and while there was a lot of talk in the UK about a big new building program postwar, the money for it simply wasn't there. (This was also true in Japan, and the US, which did have the money, didn't have the political will. Many sources on the Washington Treaty, particularly at the time, ignore this.) And the Washington Treaty itself only limited battleship and carrier construction. Numbers for smaller ships weren't capped until the London Treaty in 1930, and then were uncapped again by the 1936 London Treaty. There's even a serious argument that the treaties were actually good for naval construction during the Depression, because it was easy for navies to sell their limits as targets.
This isn't to say there wasn't damage to parts of the industry from the moratorium, because there absolutely was, but the worst of it was concentrated in more battleship-specific industries like turret production (which is how we got HMS Vanguard). And it might have hit private shipubilders harder because work was concentrated in the (government) Dockyards. A quick check shows that the County class (first major post-WNT class) was 6 dockyard/7 private builders, while the Town class (final pre-WWI cruiser class) was 3 dockyard/12 private (excluding ships built for Australia or taken over from a Greek order).
The lack of production planning bears emphasis. I recall a story (can't remember exactly where, maybe D.K. Brown) of piping and wiring being essentially done by eye, and whoever got there first did what they wanted, with the other people working around them, even if it was the plumbers having to install weird stuff to go around electrical wiring.
This claim comes from Johman and Murphy's "British Shipbuilding and the State Since 1918", which claims that a bunch of ship contracts were cancelled when the treaty was signed:
"The impact of signing the Washington Treaty was immediate: the four battlecruiser contracts were cancelled, and any prospect of a naval programme with substantial numbers of capital ships was rudely dashed. At the stroke of a pen, therefore, the value of naval shipbuilding in 1922-23 fell from £11,816,000 to £721,000, the result being the 'appalling accentuation of unemployment which has followed the withdrawal of Admiralty orders'".
OK. Technically speaking, that is almost certainly true, although I think the 90% number exaggerates the practical effect. I recall at least one source characterizing the G3s as basically a fallback if the treaty fell through because there really wasn't money in the Treasury for them. (It's been a few years since I looked into this, but I may check sources later.) It's not 100% clear if any of them were laid down, and work definitely didn't go much beyond that. And I think that was still during the brief postwar shipbuilding boom, so it looks like most of the concern was about the loss of armament jobs/capabilities, not the shipbuilding facilities themselves.
Edit: Or not. Just after I posted this, I ran across a brief description of the shipbuilding boom that has it over before the WNT negotiations started. Definitely agree that the limited naval spending wasn't great for companies that had previously done a lot more warship business, although I also think it's fair to characterize 1904-1914 as a bubble.
Importing coal at the scale needed to support steel and ship building is moving a coal field. Yeah coal was shipped for steam engine and heating fuel but the coal amount needed for that is way less.
An observation, the demise of UK shipbuilding seems to be the attitude they took on innovation, but it also seems to be the segmentation of the industry in such a manner that squeezed out their unique value add. In a world without planes, there might be a place for custom ships, but that avenue was taken out by another technology. Meanwhile, the commercial segment optimizes for cost... which is another optimization point where the limitations of the shipyards were a big constraint. I am surprised that the UK is not a bigger player in custom yachts.
Your story describes strikingly well the downfall of Baldwin Locomotive Works. They, too, worked in an industry prone to the whiplash effect, and adapted with a capital-light system that relied on skilled labor in precarious employment. Their products had almost no standardization (and thus no interchangeability), compensated for via close relationships with local customers (Baldwin's biggest orders came from the PRR across town). And farly failures with experimental diesel prime movers meant they rejected the locomotives of the future until it was too late.
This is really interesting, thanks.
Thanks a lot - well prepared report with the interesting details
I can relate to British union rules being head-bangingly stupid. In the mid-1970's I worked on the night shift as a spot-welder on the production line at the British Leyland car plant in Cowley, Oxford. By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift. Needless to say, BL went belly-up and now BMW is producing Minis there (although they are no longer very mini).
Wait, is the Geddes report—or union practices more generally—the origin of the lightbulb joke format??
A couple thoughts. I would suggest that shipbuilding is precursor to automotive manufacturing, in developing Asian economy ecosystem.
The reason is simple. It takes a long haul of marketing and product development in Automotive to get established globally. In the 1970s, Datsun, now Nissan, and Toyota were generally considered inferior. Honda invested in the US. But Japanese commercial tanker and freighter shipbuilding requires not mass marketing but focused marketing on a few handful of customer.
Customer access is much easier to sell big ships than cars.
Second. Shipbuilding develops important industrial machining, tool and die making and factory/manufacturing engineering. This is the foundation education for automotive.
Japan, then Korea, then China all followed this progression.
Some reading and a fun resource on ship shapes!!
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/m/merchant-ship-shapes.html
https://www.cna.org/archive/CNA_Files/pdf/d0006988.a1.pdf
Very interesting thanks. I wonder how much of the objections to consolidation, even when the government got involved, came from the political problems of moving shipbuilding out of existing cities, where the (presumably mainly-Labour) voters were?
By its nature shipbuilding production was centred around rivers with access to the sea. Historically the cities grew around the industry which was limited in where it could expand. Yes you can construct harbours and wharves on virgin coastline. But there you would need the investment in infrastructure that this report states was something the industry shied away from.
Great article. One thing I have always wondered about regarding the decline is the culture. I'm from Glasgow, where I think a majority (?) of UK shipbuilding was. My dad was in shipbuilding, his dad, and his.
My dad told me about how when they were making the Queen Mary they stole the curtains from the rooms. And there's an old theatre in Glasgow (oldest in Britain or something) where they tell you that the ship workers would throw cups of piss at the actors 100 years ago. The culture is similar today.
Great article Brian. I'm Italian and had to swallow dozens of British articles depicting the shortcomings of Italy (most of them true and deserved).
In some statistics such as this one https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-shipbuilding/
Italy is the first european shipbuilder and yet is barely mentioned 1x in your article.
South Korea too seems even more awesome and is barely mentioned.
I would have appreciated also some deserved admiration after the other deserved critiques. I think it would be fair.
We should strive to admire, applaud and copy the best in each other.
I think you could have written a similar story on the decline of the British auto and motorcycle industries.
Reading this does make me wonder if a country like Canada (mine) should not require a substantial portion of our steel be used in ships purchased instead of trying to build up the infrastructure required for the odd ferry or navy purchase.
Thanks
This is a very interesting analysis. My father worked in the industry all his life from the 1940's to well after the nationalisation of shipbuilding. He worked for many years on planning and manufacture of standardised bulk carriers. The SD14 and subsequent designs. It was a very successful off the shelf ship and was still produced after his retirement. I think UK production costs couldn't compete with low cost ships of similar design from the far east.
Might we have a similar article on American shipbuilding?
Brian that is a great article. I have visited the UK since 1963 and I have to say I saw a steady rise in prosperity despite the sectoral problems you describe. probably the same effect here of going to a service economy. My ancestral turf in Yorkshire just became a banking center despite all the mining losses. But Brexit is the big threat to that.
>What had been a robust British program of naval expansion was suddenly halted. Following the treaty, British naval shipbuilding fell by over 90%.
I don't think this is entirely true. Naval shipbuilding fell off because of the end of the war, and while there was a lot of talk in the UK about a big new building program postwar, the money for it simply wasn't there. (This was also true in Japan, and the US, which did have the money, didn't have the political will. Many sources on the Washington Treaty, particularly at the time, ignore this.) And the Washington Treaty itself only limited battleship and carrier construction. Numbers for smaller ships weren't capped until the London Treaty in 1930, and then were uncapped again by the 1936 London Treaty. There's even a serious argument that the treaties were actually good for naval construction during the Depression, because it was easy for navies to sell their limits as targets.
This isn't to say there wasn't damage to parts of the industry from the moratorium, because there absolutely was, but the worst of it was concentrated in more battleship-specific industries like turret production (which is how we got HMS Vanguard). And it might have hit private shipubilders harder because work was concentrated in the (government) Dockyards. A quick check shows that the County class (first major post-WNT class) was 6 dockyard/7 private builders, while the Town class (final pre-WWI cruiser class) was 3 dockyard/12 private (excluding ships built for Australia or taken over from a Greek order).
The lack of production planning bears emphasis. I recall a story (can't remember exactly where, maybe D.K. Brown) of piping and wiring being essentially done by eye, and whoever got there first did what they wanted, with the other people working around them, even if it was the plumbers having to install weird stuff to go around electrical wiring.
Relevant blog posts:
https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Washington-Treaty
https://www.navalgazing.net/Interwar-Naval-Diplomacy
https://www.navalgazing.net/Lion-and-Vanguard
This claim comes from Johman and Murphy's "British Shipbuilding and the State Since 1918", which claims that a bunch of ship contracts were cancelled when the treaty was signed:
"The impact of signing the Washington Treaty was immediate: the four battlecruiser contracts were cancelled, and any prospect of a naval programme with substantial numbers of capital ships was rudely dashed. At the stroke of a pen, therefore, the value of naval shipbuilding in 1922-23 fell from £11,816,000 to £721,000, the result being the 'appalling accentuation of unemployment which has followed the withdrawal of Admiralty orders'".
OK. Technically speaking, that is almost certainly true, although I think the 90% number exaggerates the practical effect. I recall at least one source characterizing the G3s as basically a fallback if the treaty fell through because there really wasn't money in the Treasury for them. (It's been a few years since I looked into this, but I may check sources later.) It's not 100% clear if any of them were laid down, and work definitely didn't go much beyond that. And I think that was still during the brief postwar shipbuilding boom, so it looks like most of the concern was about the loss of armament jobs/capabilities, not the shipbuilding facilities themselves.
Edit: Or not. Just after I posted this, I ran across a brief description of the shipbuilding boom that has it over before the WNT negotiations started. Definitely agree that the limited naval spending wasn't great for companies that had previously done a lot more warship business, although I also think it's fair to characterize 1904-1914 as a bubble.
Importing coal at the scale needed to support steel and ship building is moving a coal field. Yeah coal was shipped for steam engine and heating fuel but the coal amount needed for that is way less.
Alfred the Great must be facepalming somewhere over this.
lovely... well done... learned something .....
An observation, the demise of UK shipbuilding seems to be the attitude they took on innovation, but it also seems to be the segmentation of the industry in such a manner that squeezed out their unique value add. In a world without planes, there might be a place for custom ships, but that avenue was taken out by another technology. Meanwhile, the commercial segment optimizes for cost... which is another optimization point where the limitations of the shipyards were a big constraint. I am surprised that the UK is not a bigger player in custom yachts.