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Quantity vs. Quality: The Impact of Changing Demand on the British Aircraft Industry, 1900–1960*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Robin Higham
Robin Higham
Affiliation:
Professor of History, Kansas State University
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Abstract

This study reveals distinct cycles directly related to the major military conflicts of the twentieth century which had an important impact on the quantity and quality of British aircraft production. The author also suggests that these cycles may have relevance for other countries and other industries.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , Winter 1968 , pp. 443 - 466
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1968

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References

1 Professor John Rae of Harvey Mudd College is engaged in a comparative study of the British and American aircraft and automobile industries.

2 Professor I. B. Holley, Jr., commented in a discussion some years ago at the Duke University of North Carolina National Security Seminar on the great similarities between the American and British patterns.

3 On the development of engines, see particularly Schlaiffer, Robert and Heron, S. D., The Development of Aircraft Engines and Fuels (Boston, 1950)Google Scholar; and Nayler, J. L. and Ower, E., Aviation: Its Technical Development (London, 1965)Google Scholar.

4 The term “quantity” has been used in this paper in the sense of the production of enough aircraft to do the job, whether this is the specific needs of a command or the overall requirements of a nation. The term “quality” reflects the striving for equipment which is competitively equal or superior to that of allies and enemies.

5 The term “proof” is used alliteratively here in the ordinance manner meaning proven or tested.

6 Higham, Britain's Imperial Air Routes, chapters II and III.

7 Higham, Armed Forces in Peacetime, 155–63. See also, Templewood, Lord (Hoare, Sir Samuel), Empire of the Air (London, 1957)Google Scholar; and the opening chapters of the official history by Webster, Charles and Frankland, Noble, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939–1945, Vol. I (London, 1961)Google Scholar.

8 Kemp, P. K., The Fleet Air Arm (London, 1954)Google Scholar, and Thetford, Owen G., British Naval Aircraft, 1912–1958 (London, 1958)Google Scholar.

9 See the volumes in the official British History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Civil Series, War Production Series by: Ashworth, William, Contracts and Finance (London, 1953)Google Scholar; Hornby, William, Factories and Plant (London, 1958)Google Scholar; Hurstfield, Joel, The Control of Raw Materials (London, 1953)Google Scholar; and Kohan, C. M., Works and Buildings (London, 1952)Google Scholar.

10 See Inman, Peggy, Labour in the Munitions Industries (London, 1957)Google Scholar in the official series.

11 Under governmental presure the industry was reorgainzed in 1959 and 1962 to create units with greater capital, but it can be argued that this is not the only solution needed. The industry does not have the captial and the equipment nor the “spin-off” from military demands needed to stay in the front rank of technological progress. Its best line of development would be to concentrate upon the medium-sized airliner and secondary military types. The model for this is provided by De Havilland of Canada. The less capitalized must capitalize themselves upon developments which have reached a marketable stage so that they can be bought off the shelf and worked into new designs with a wide potential market amongst those who cannot afford the best and amongst those who have not the capacity to produce this material for themselves. This may well include, as the Canadians have demonstrated, the Americans themselves. Again here, timing is vitally important in order to secure such a large share of the market as to discourage others from entering it.

12 See Webster, and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany; Thetford, Aircraft of the Royal Air Force, 1918–1957 (London, 1957)Google Scholar; Sharp, C. Martin, D. H.–An Outline of de Havilland History (London, 1960)Google Scholar; Jackson, A. J., De Havilland Aircraft since 1915 (London, 1962)Google Scholar and Avro Aircraft Since 1908 (London, 1965)Google Scholar; Barnes, C. H., Bristol Aircraft since 1910 (London, 1964) and Shorts Aircraft Since 1900 (London, 1967)Google Scholar; Mason, Francis K., Hawker Aircraft since 1920 (London, 1961)Google Scholar; and Lewis, Peter, The British Bomber since 1914 (London, 1967)Google Scholar.

13 This was a constant complaint of Imperial Airways in dealing with the Air Ministry; see Higham, Britain's Imperial Air Routes, 187. Neither the Gloster Gladiator fighter of the late 1930's nor the long string of Hawker Hart variants challenged industry designers.

14 Thetford, Aircraft of the R.A.F., 204–205.

15 See Higham, The British Rigid Airship, and Leasor, James, The Millionth Chance (London, 1957)Google Scholar.

16 See especially Postan's section of Postan, M. M., Hay, D., and Scott, J. D., The Design and Development of Weapons (London, 1964)Google Scholar. See also, Hornby, William, Factories and Plant (London, 1958)Google Scholar, Appendix I; Holley, Buying Aircraft; and Wagner, Ray, American Combat Planes (London, 1960)Google Scholar which gives details on the development and modification of many U.S. types.

17 Aeroplane, March 28, 1958, 454–457. Those types not issued to squadrons were usually trainers, small transports, or machines found generally to be unsuitable for any use.

18 Keeping's Contemporary Archives, May 1–8, 1965.

19 Colonel Frank Searle with omnibus experience started to manage the Daimler Airway in 1922 and at that time laid down the objective of obtaining one thousand hours a year usage out of each aircraft. This was raised to 2,000 by George Woods-Humphery when he became Managing Director of Imperial Airways in 1925 (Higham, Britain's Imperial Air Routes, 58).

20 Postan, Hay, and Scott, Design and Development of Weapons, 142.

21 Details of the “shadow” factories may be found in Scott, John D. and Hughes, Richard, The Administration of War Production (London, 1955)Google Scholar; Ashworth, Contracts and Finance; Hornby, Factories and Plant; Kohan, Works and Buildings; and other volumes of the British official series.

22 The synonym, “the trade,” is perhaps indicative of a national attitude and of a conception of this industry which was long a craft rather than a manufacturing one.

23 A check of Aeroplane Directory 1961's “Who's Who” section shows that of the 132 directors of the firms in the industry for whom data is given (and there are 52 for whom there is not sufficient data), 41 had entered as apprentices (17 to engineering firms and 24 to aircraft), and that another 17 were accountants by profession.

24 The attitude of the Air Ministry of the day and of the industry toward mass-production can be seen in the exchange of correspondence between the Secretary of State for Air and William Morris, Lord Nuffield, in Command Paper 5295 (1936).

25 Hall, North American Supply, 289.

26 Metal fatigue was waiting to be accepted as a cause. There is some material on this in the papers produced under the auspices of the Aeronautical Research Council, but the study of the development of the realization of metal fatigue as an accident factor has yet to be published. Similarly relevant is the matter of maintenance practices and spares policies. It should also be noted that people in the industry apparently do not read widely, for as late as the “Report on the Accident to B.A.C., One-Eleven G-ASHG,” Civil Aviation Paper 219 (1965), the Inspector of Accidents could criticize matters relating to the exchange of information on technical safety.

27 See Jackson, A. J., British Civil Aircraft, 1919–1959, I (London, 1959)Google Scholar. The story in C. H. Barnes's Bristol Aircraft omits some relevant material which is to be found in the issues of Aeroplane for the period 1954–1958.

28 Holley, Buying Aircraft, 264.

28 Hart, Eric H., “The Early Curtiss P-40's,” Journal of the American Aviation Historical Society, XII (Winter 1967), 254–61Google Scholar.

30 Postan, Hay, and Scott, Design and Development of Weapons, 12. Production continued for seventy-seven months and six times the number envisioned were produced, many of which never left the Aircraft Storage Units.

31 These figures are taken from Aeroplane (March 28, 1958), 454–57, and from Thetford, Aircraft of the R.A.F.

32 Indicative of the attitude toward these aircraft is that data on them is hard to locate, in part because of wartime restrictions. Some can be found in Aeroplane in 1946. Recently this omission has been remedied by Peter Lewis in The British Fighter since 1912 (London, 1965). Pages 276–77Google Scholar cover the Miles and 244–47, 284–86, and 302 the Martin-Baker designs. Production facilities could have been made available by taking over those of such aircraft as the obsolescent Whitley and other types whose continued production could not have been justified by a really hard-headed look at the realities of war and production schedules. Personnel in charge tended to be conditioned in their attitudes by peacetime schedules, mentioned earlier, of five and one-half to eight years between design and service.

33 Sharp, C. Martin and Bowyer, Michael J. F., The Mosquito (London, 1967)Google Scholar contains the whole story; but see also the memoirs of Sir Havilland, Geoffrey de, Sky Fever (London, 1961)Google Scholar.

34 The Windsor is, like the Miles M-20 and the Martin-Baker fighter, a somewhat mysterious machine. For material on it, see Postan, Hay, and Scott; Design and Development of Weapons; and D. L. Brown, “Before the V-Bombers,” Aeroplane (December 25, 1959), 663–66. Much of the detail was to have been in the volume on Vickers in the Macdonald series, but it is now announced as forthcoming in the Putnam series. Some material is given in Lewis, The British Bomber. Scott, J. D., Vickers: A History (London, 1962) has only an oblique unnamed reference to the project on pages 275–76Google Scholar.

35 The “Ring” was the name given to the members of the Society of British Aircraft (now Aerospace) Constructors who were on the Air Ministry's approved list. The argument for this list was the necessity of maintaining a nucleus industry for national defence; that against was that the firms were too closely tied to government orders excluding healthy outside stimulation, especially after rearmament began and all the capacity which could be generated was needed for production.

36 It might be noted in passing that mergers were not very fashionable in Britain, but for different reasons than in the United States with its antitrust laws. In the latter 1930's Hawker-Siddeley took the initiative in mergers, but little progress was made in this direction between then.and 1959, though de Havilland absorbed Airspeed at the end of the 1940's. This lack of consolidation led to lack of concentration on designs and competition within an industry that could ill-afford it in the face of the increasing challenge from the United States after 1945.

37 The allocation of marks, such as Spitfire I, Beaufighter II, and the like, usually had more to do with supply factors, such as different types of engines, than to roles, though the two often went hand in hand. In American practice variants sometimes were given completely different type numbers, such as the P-36 and P-40 which were similar airframes with different engines, or the C-47 to C-53 variants which had different roles. In neither country was there any true consistency.

38 On operational research see, Clark, Ronald W., The Rise of the Boffins (London, 1962)Google Scholar; Ministry, Air, Operational Research in the R.A.F. (London, 1963)Google Scholar; and Wheeler, Air Commodore Allan, That Nothing Failed Them: Testing Aeroplanes in War (London, 1965)Google Scholar.

39 Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offense Against Germany, IV, 445-46.

40 Major-General Playfair, I. S. O. et al. , The Mediterranean and Middle East, I and II (London, 1954, 1956).Google Scholar

41 Barker, Ralph, Down in the Drink (London, 1958)Google Scholar.

42 There is no single work on repair and salvage; so far the material is buried in a number of official volumes already cited.

43 Sir Raleigh, Walter and Jones, H. A., The War in the Air (London, 1922–1937)Google Scholar.

44 Holley, Buying Aircraft, 556.

45 On wartime aircraft production see Great Britain, House of Commons, Reports of the Committee on Public Accounts: 15th Report, 1940-1941; 10th, 14th and 17th Reports, 1942-43.

46 One such report which reflected upon the quality of the aircraft used was Command Paper 6775 (1946) on the escape up Channel in 1942 of the German battlecruisers.

47 The report itself was never made public, but the gist was revealed to Parliament and the press. The 1942 committee was followed by another of the same name in 1943 whose report also remained unpublished. In 1950 a third committee under Lord Brabazon investigated the loss of the Tudors; this document was impounded under the Defence of the Realm Act, but its general content is discernible in Nevil Shute's No Highway (London, 1948)Google Scholar and in Dempster, Derek, The Tale of the Comet (New York, 1959), 190Google Scholar.

48 Ibid. See also, Command Paper 7307 and 7478 (1947–48), and 7517 (1948); and the reports of the Chief Inspector of Accidents which after 1948 were published as Civil Aviation Papers rather than as Command Papers.

49 On aircraft in the British civil registry, see Jackson, A. J., British Civil Aircraft 1919–1959 (London, 1959–1960)Google Scholar.

50 Dempster, Tale of the Comet.

51 Ibid., 65–6.

52 The “funk line” ran approximately from Newcastle to Bristol; plants located west of it were considered to be out of German bomber range (See Hornby, Factories and Plant, chapter IX, “The Strategic Location of Factories”).

53 The British view of American designs, which sounds like condescension, was in fact based on the sound fact that while American civil aircraft were well advanced, military procurement had to go through such elaborate safeguards that types were obsolescent by the time they entered service. Moreover, the American re-equipment cycle was slightly behind the British. After the war in Europe started, the British had experience behind their observations, and their reluctance to use American aircraft helped spur the industry in this country to produce designs that would be competitive in combat. For further discussion of this point, see Hall, H. Duncan and Wrigley, Christopher C., Studies in Overseas Supply (London, 1956), 92–5Google Scholar.

54 On this point, see Lord Hankey's essay on disarmament in Diplomacy by Conference (London, 1946)Google Scholar.

55 Hall and Wrigley, Studies in Overseas Supply, 105.

56 A. C. Hampshire, “American-built' Aircraft in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II,” Journal of the Royal United Service Institution (May, 1967), 171–76. On the French orders in the United States, see John M. Haight, Jr., “France's First War Mission to the United States,” Airpower Historian (January, 1964), 11–15.

57 I am grateful to John Burke of U.C.L.A., Peter Coleman of the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, John Rae of Harvey Mudd College, and Bruce Sinclair of Kent State University, among others, for suggesting these various points.