Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (70 page)

Nor was the dominance of ex-public schoolboys in the upper echelons of British companies
necessarily
a formula for disdainful amateurism. Geoffrey Owen, in his authoritative survey of post-war industry, asserts that in the 1940s and 1950s ‘it was common practice for public schoolboys, if they did not go on to university, to undergo some form of technical training after leaving school, perhaps as a premium apprentice in an industrial company’. Owen adds that ‘if there was an anti-industrial bias in the education system, it was to be found at Oxford and Cambridge, where some professors regarded a career in business as intellectually and morally demeaning’. Owen also implicitly queries the conventional wisdom deploring the relative ease with which accountants – as opposed to engineers – were able to penetrate senior levels of management. ‘Employers,’ he writes, ‘saw that the rigorous training which accountants had to undergo was a good preparation for management.’ One such accountant, qualifying in the late 1920s, was the self-made, utterly capable but also visionary Leslie Lazell, who by the early 1950s was running the Beecham pharmaceutical group and beginning to turn it into a very successful – and international – science-based, marketing-oriented enterprise, all fuelled by a huge research effort which he ensured was properly funded.
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Moreover, whatever the overall sluggishness of the business world, some striking entrepreneurs were at work. Jules Thorn and Michael Sobell, for example, were both foreign-born outsiders who by the early 1950s were starting to shake up the still heavily cartelised electrical industry, with Sobell (father-in-law of Arnold Weinstock) about to make a fortune through the manufacture of television sets; Daniel McDonald, starting out with £300 capital and a shed in the West Midlands, was the inventor and manufacturer of Monarch gramophones, which from the early 1950s had a simplicity of design and lower unit costs that enabled him to take on the more upmarket Garrard model, eventually making him one of Britain’s richest self-made men; the thrifty, driven and despotic Joseph Bamford, founder of J. C. Bamford, was the inventor and manufacturer of the hugely profitable JCB excavator; and Paul Hamlyn, a German Jewish refugee, began his innovative and highly rewarding publishing career in 1949 with an imprint characteristically called Books for Pleasure.

There was also, sui generis, the case of Alastair Pilkington. He was finishing his war-interrupted mechanical-sciences course at Cambridge when the turning point of his life occurred. It is an episode that has become shrouded in mythology; the historian Theo Barker tells the authorised version:

Alastair’s father had become interested in his family tree and so had Sir Richard Pilkington, a shareholding member of the St Helens glassmaking family. When it became clear that there was no traceable link between their respective ancestors, the two men got round to discussing the rising generation. Would Pilkingtons be interested in employing an up and coming engineer when he had completed his degree? As it happened, the company was then very concerned about its shortage of well-qualified engineers. Harry Pilkington [a director] saw Alastair’s father and subsequently had Alastair himself up to St Helens for close scrutiny over a three-day period. More remarkable, the board decided that ‘a member of the Pilkington family, however remote, could be accepted only as a potential family director’. So it came about that Alastair, having passed the preliminary test, started work at Pilkington Bros Ltd in August 1947 as a family trainee.

This was also a turning point in the firm’s fortunes. ‘Four years after starting work at Pilkingtons, he conceived the idea that molten glass could be formed into a continuous ribbon by pouring it into a bath of tin and “floating” it while it cooled.’
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Such was the revolutionary float-glass process, eventually to become world-famous. It had been a triumph of not-quite-nepotistic recruitment.

For every wealth-creator, unfortunately, there was at least one Lord Portal of Hungerford. An ace fighter pilot in one world war, Chief of the Air Staff in another, his first big peacetime job (1946–51) was as Controller of Atomic Energy. ‘I cannot remember that he ever did anything that helped us,’ the very able Christopher Hinton, responsible for the production of fissile material, unsentimentally recalled. By the late 1940s Portal was taking on directorships – of the Commercial Union, of Fords and of Barclays DCO, where after lunch he invariably picked up a copy of the
Field
, not the
Economist
– before in 1953 assuming the chairmanship of one of the country’s most prestigious companies, British Aluminium. His principal qualities remained his distinguished war record and, of course, the famous ‘Portal’ nose.
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It was an emblematic career, in that British management in these years remained
essentially
unprofessional. In the 1950s it was still unusual for a top British company to be organised along divisional lines, while it was not until the 1960s that the first business schools began to appear. Typical, moreover, of the often skewed priorities in British corporate culture was what seems to have been an almost systematic downgrading of the status of production managers, in accordance with the maxim ‘Men who can manage men, manage men who can only manage things.’ And what men who managed men needed was ‘a balanced cultivated life’, as one leading manager enjoyed telling an international conference in 1951. ‘He should have long weekends,’ the manager explained; ‘he should play golf . . . he should garden . . . he should play bridge, he should read, he should do something different.’

Two witnesses of the industrial scene were unimpressed by what they saw. When Maurice Zinkin joined Unilever in 1947, he was ‘shocked’ to find how many of its British-based companies were ‘old-fashioned and badly managed’:

One of the toiletry companies I went to see was still selling its perfectly good face cream on a silly advertising story about a dying sheikh and his secret desert well. Port Sunlight was still training for overseas service managers of a technical level not high enough to make them acceptable to the increasing nationalism of overseas governments. It was also, even to my inexpert eye, over-manned.

So, too, the economist Alec Cairncross, who after his stint in Whitehall returned to academic life, at Glasgow University, in 1951. There he tried to get the local shipbuilding industry interested in management studies but met a complete lack of interest. It was not, he recalled in the 1990s, as if that industry had nothing to learn:

In a large yard, employing more than 5,000 workers, the organisation of the work below board level was in the hands of the yard super-intendent, who was distinguished from the other workmen by his bowler hat and not much else. But there was no planning staff of the kind customary in modern factories. That work was devolved to the foreman on the job, and he set about it like a foreman on any building site. Each ship was built as a one-off job.

In fact, ‘management in the industry was almost non-existent.’

No single case study can claim to be representative, but there is something peculiarly compelling – and perhaps indicative – about Courtaulds, the large textile manufacturer based in Coventry. It is a story told with relish by the company’s historian, Donald Coleman. In 1946 the ailing septuagenarian chairman, Samuel Courtauld, had to find a successor. In effect, the choice lay between P. J. Gratwick and John Hanbury-Williams. One had ‘long textile experience, much shrewdness, and some enthusiasm for the bottle’; the other had ‘presence, diplomatic skills, and splendid manners’, not to mention a double-barrelled name. The position went to Hanbury-Williams – from a long-established landed family, son of a major-general, married to Princess Zenaida Cantacuzene, a director of the Bank of England and a gentleman usher to King George VI. Coleman’s characterisation is savage:

Hanbury-Williams knew little or nothing about production technology, despised technical men, remained ignorant of science, and wholly indifferent to industrial relations . . . He was contemptuous or patronizing to those he could refer to as ‘technical persons’ . . . His tactical ability to rule in a small and fairly homogeneous group, and to give suitably beneficent and urbane nods to the doings of the executive directors, allowed dignity to masquerade as leadership. But this activity, or inactivity, totally lacked strategy and ideas . . . There is no evidence that Hanbury-Williams had any innovative ideas whatever.

In 1952, six years into a reign that lasted into the 1960s, Hanbury-Williams reflected on the company’s organisation: ‘There has been a Gentlemen’s Club atmosphere in the Board Room, and I believe it is in true to say that over the years this has spread to all the Departments of our business. It is in fact part of the goodwill of the Company which we must safeguard.’ A rare iconoclast (and incisive administrative talent) on the board was Sir Wilfrid Freeman, who only the year before had flatly described Courtaulds as ‘over-centralized, constipated, and stagnant’ – a situation unlikely to change while the insufferably complacent Hanbury-Williams was still in harness.
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But, bearing Portal in mind, the fact that the trenchant Freeman had in an earlier life been an Air Chief Marshal serves as a warning against facile typecasting.

Across the table from management sat the trade unions. During the war, the appointment of Ernest Bevin, the greatest living trade unionist, as Minister of Labour in Churchill’s coalition had signalled their arrival at the national top table, along with the spread to many industries of national pay bargaining. After the war, their leaders continued to be consulted by government on a regular basis, and by 1951, against a background of full employment, their membership stood at an all-time high of 9.3 million. Some perspective is needed: the average
density
of trade union membership (ie in relation to the workforce as a whole) struggled in these years to rise above 45 per cent, while the sheer number of unions (735 in 1951) inevitably made it a somewhat incoherent patchwork quilt of a movement. Nevertheless, the contrast with the travails of the inter-war slump, when membership bottomed out at 4.35 million in 1933, was unmistakable.
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The inevitable concomitant to greater prominence was increased exposure to criticism. ‘It takes some spirit,’ complained the Cambridge economist Sir Dennis Robertson in his presidential address in 1949 to the Royal Economic Society, ‘to state clearly and fairly the case for wage reduction as a cure for unemployment or an adverse balance of payments, or the case for the curtailment of subsidies and the overhauling of the social services as a solvent for inflationary pressure, without being prematurely silenced by the argument that nowadays the trade unions would never stand for such things. Perhaps they wouldn’t; but that is no reason for not following the argument whithersoever it leads.’ For the most part, though, there existed by the end of the 1940s a broad-based, bipartisan acceptance that, whether a welcome development or not, organised labour had permanently arrived as a major and unignorable force to be reckoned with.

The high national standing of the unions by about 1950 – certainly compared with 20 or 30 years earlier or indeed later – owed much to their responsible behaviour during the difficult immediate post-war years. The key figure was the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) right-wing leader Arthur Deakin, memorably characterised by Michael Foot as ‘a fierce, breezy, irascible, stout-hearted bison of a man who genuinely believed that any proposition he could force through his union executive must be the will of the people and more especially the will of Ernest Bevin [the TGWU’s founder] whose requirements he had normally taken the precaution of finding out in advance’. In effect Deakin saw the unions as an integral part of the labour movement, engaged in a social contract with the Labour government: in return for policies aimed at full employment, extended welfare provision and a measure of wealth redistribution, he would do his formidable best to ensure that the government’s economic stability was not jeopardised by unrealistic wage demands.

Deakin’s strong preference was for pay bargaining to be independent of any direct government involvement; eventually, faced by overwhelming evidence from Cripps about the extreme seriousness of the country’s economic position, he had led the way to the TUC agreeing in March 1948 to accept the government’s case for a more formal policy of wage restraint – a freeze that, albeit voluntary rather than statutory, lasted for two and a half often difficult years. The government was duly grateful. ‘There can be no doubt that the trade union leaders have been wise and courageous since the end of the war,’ a junior minister wrote in March 1950 to the TUC general secretary, the long-serving, self-effacing Vincent Tewson. ‘It takes a great deal to explain to your members the intricacies of the economic situation and the General Council [of the TUC] has, in my view, done a splendid job.’ Characteristically, the minister added that ‘you have the satisfaction of knowing that you have been acting throughout in the best interests of the Trade Unionists and their families.’
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