Slipping Through Our Fingers
To the ordinary observer, there was plenty to be cheerful about throughout British industrial life. The coal industry, though nationalized, was nevertheless at last rationalized and modernized. In these years, some 200,000 miners’ jobs went and super-pits were developed using newer and safer technology, while on the other hand, around Britain the first nuclear power stations came on stream. When Calder Hall was connected to the national grid in 1956 it was the world’s first nuclear power station providing energy commercially, and its Magnox gas-cooled reactor incorporated British technology. A further ten similar nuclear power stations followed. Here, as in the car industry – and lesser-known examples, such as industrial glass, chemicals and jet engines, not to mention the beginnings of the offshore gas industry – British technology was as good as any in the world. In an entirely different area, P&O was then the largest shipping line in the world with 366 vessels, seemingly dominating commercial traffic across the oceans. This was not, in short, the basket-case industrial economy that is sometimes misremembered. But during the fifties overseas competition was quietly surveying the British market and its complacent industrial giants, planning to attack.
The story of motorbike manufacturing can stand for other industries, too. In the early years of the decade, Harley-Davidson in the United States were complaining (unsuccessfully) to Washington about the unfair competition from the better, cheaper, British-made Triumph motorbikes – one of which starred in The Wild One, featuring Marlon Brando, in 1954. Another American manufacturer, Indian, gave up and began importing Royal Enfield bikes; rock stars and Hollywood actors were seen on British machines; there were more than 300 Triumph and BSA dealers in the United States. Yet in 1955 Yamaha began producing their first motorbikes, followed by Suzuki, using wartime aircraft manufacturing kit. At the end of the decade, when British motorcycle sales were at their all-time peak, Honda entered its first bike in the TT race. British executives toured Japan in 1960 and were horrified by the scale of production by the three rival companies: Japan was making more than 500,000 motorcycles a year, compared to a maximum UK output of just 140,000. Two years later these Japanese bikes were winning key races in Europe and a new manufacturer, Kawasaki, appeared on the scene. It was a story that would be repeated in electronics and cameras. In this period, West Germany’s share of world trade grew nearly four times as fast as Britain’s, while the Japanese were already in another league for growth. The Americans were racing ahead in starved, post-war markets all round the world.
It was the structure of Britain’s working world that was the problem, not the lack of hardworking people or enterprising companies – not even, at this stage, inflation or industrial militancy. On one side, the industrial companies were dwarfed by the vast nationalized corporations, sucking capital and talent away from the consumer industries that were becoming so central to people’s lives. ICI was vast, as has been described; but every three years, the Electricity Board spent enough capital to create a new ICI. On the other side, there were simply too many tiny companies, inefficiently and traditionally run without any knowledge of new management styles, product designs or marketing. By the middle of the fifties, of the nearly 300,000 British companies that existed, only around one in a hundred was actually listed on the Stock Market; the vast majority were under-capitalized traditional private businesses. The economic historian Keith Middle-mass describes a business ecology dominated by ‘the continued survival of a mass of small firms, reliant on sheltered domestic markets, which were unable or unwilling to reform their practices or their low productivity’.
Was there any direct connection between this national failure and the kind of people running the country? Industrialists and entrepreneurs were not part of the Tory magic circle and were not socially much regarded. Macmillan and Eden both suffered from a pseudo-aristocratic and sentimental attitude to class. With their First World War service and their inter-war worries about the effect of unemployment, they were inclined to admire the working classes from a decent distance and to disdain the ‘common’ speech and attitudes of upwardly mobile entrepreneurs such as Sir Bernard Docker. They lived privileged and upper-crust lives themselves, set in landed homes and surrounded by literature and art. It was a way of life to which the self-made would aspire too: Michael Heseltine would begin by mixing margarine and butter as he built his low-rent property business, and end with a grand country home and an arboretum. For the ruling class of the fifties, the businessmen, the engineers, the factory organizers were vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. Diplomacy; country sports and farming; the arts; high politics; even journalism were all interesting, but industry was a bore. As we have seen this did not stop large companies thriving or hold back individual entrepreneurs, very often immigrants unintimidated by class barriers. But it was hardly surprising that fewer bright British students went to work for the British motor industry or the chemical giants, compared to the best of the Germans and Americans going into their equivalents. In the fifties, foreigners were not yet talking pityingly of ‘the British disease’ but there was talk of the ‘stagnant society’. No one grasped the nettle.