[BITList] In the driving seat

[John Feltham]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2013-11-15



Lord,  Leonard Percy  [Len], Baron Lambury  (1896-1967), engineer and motor vehicle manufacturer, was born at the Public Baths, Priory Street, Coventry, on 15 November 1896, the youngest of the two children of William Lord (1867-1911) and his wife, Emma, nee Swain (1863-1938). His father originally followed the trade of carpenter but at the time of Leonard's birth was a superintendent of the public baths. Interestingly, in view of his later career, the Triumph Cycle Company was next door. His mother held the post of matron at the baths. In 1906 his parents took the licence of the Hope and Anchor Inn, White Friars Lane, Coventry. About this time he began to attend Bablake School in Coventry, which had a strong technical emphasis including a fully equipped carpenter's workshop and a working forge. He did well enough to continue his education beyond the statutory leaving age of thirteen. His fees, like those of many of the Bablake's boys, were paid for by Coventry education committee.

Lord left school in 1913 aged sixteen and used his technical training to get a job at Courtaulds as a jig draughtsman. He later described these years to his colleague Miles Thomas: 'It was to keep his mother in comfort and to provide her with little luxuries that, when the young Leonard had finished his day's work at Courtaulds in Coventry, he went and taught night classes at the local "Tech". It was there that he first had to make an effort to control his temper, because he very nearly got into trouble for throwing the wooden-backed scrubber used for cleaning the blackboard at someone who got on his nerves'  (Thomas, 180).

Lord moved to Vickers for a short period, before joining Coventry Ordnance Works for the duration of the First World War. After the war he worked for a number of engineering firms. On 16 July 1921 in Coventry he married Ethel Lily (1896-1978), daughter of George Horton, who was also in the motor trade. They had three daughters.

In 1922 Lord moved to Hotchkiss which made power units for Morris cars. Originally a manufacturer of machine guns, Hotchkiss was now part of the supplier chain set up by one of the motor industry's leading entrepreneurs, William Morris, to 'feed' his Morris Motors assembly plant at Cowley near Oxford. The Morris strategy throughout the 1920s was to take over suppliers, set up new companies, and purchase ailing rivals. In 1923 Hotchkiss was taken over and renamed Morris Engines.

This proved opportune for Lord who was handed the job of purchasing and commissioning the updated equipment required. When he discovered that the new automatic transfer machines were not reliable, he recommended they should be reconverted to individual units. His boss, Frank Woollard, remonstrated that this would be 'tantamount to admitting that we have spent a vast sum of money on a mistaken policy'  (The Motor, 1955) but Lord argued that the firm would lose more money if it ignored his advice. Lord made a strong impression on Woollard:

In this young man, not yet thirty years of age, I found all the qualities which go to make the ideal executive: an analytical mind coupled with a lively inventive capacity and an ability to present a case with all the implications fully considered. He was positive in outlook and prompt in action. (The Motor, 1955)

William Morris agreed. In 1927 he bought the bankrupt Wolseley Motors and appointed Lord to overhaul its out of date factories. He was so effective that in 1933 Morris made him managing director of Morris Motors itself. Lord began the modernization of the Cowley factory, utilizing the mass production techniques introduced to Britain from the United States by the Ford Motor Company. He also established a new model range to improve the company's market position. Herbert Austin, founder of the Longbridge factory outside Birmingham, was the other major force in motor manufacturing and had, to date, dominated the small-car market with the popular Austin Seven. But the Seven was now a decade old and the Morris Eight, launched in 1934, gradually took over its position as the best-selling small car in Britain.

By 1934 Morris was a multi-millionaire bearing the title Lord Nuffield in recognition of his generous charitable donations and his business empire had become the Nuffield Organization. He had come to rely on Leonard Lord, both as a friend and as a dynamic manager who could be trusted to keep a firm grasp on the business. Others were less enthusiastic. Nuffield's publicity chief (later vice-chairman) Miles Thomas described Lord's impact: 'There is no doubt that when L.P.L. splurged onto the Cowley scene he awoke people to the hard facts of life... in a remarkably short space of time he made that Cowley factory into one of the most efficient instruments for assembling motor cars to be seen anywhere in Europe. He walked roughly over the toes of anyone who got in his way'  (Thomas, Out on a Wing, 172-3).

When Nuffield eventually fell out with his protege, it was not because of Lord's forceful personality. Having promised to step back from the business now he was in his mid-fifties, Nuffield found himself unable to cede the amount of control Lord had begun to feel was due to him. The personal rift which developed between them was deeply hurtful to both men. Miles Thomas described Lord's mood at the end of 1936: 'He sat in my office one afternoon while the strain and anger of the split were still heavy on him and, suddenly blowing the ash off the inevitable cigarette between his lips, said, "Tommy, I'm going to take that business at Cowley apart brick by bloody brick"'  (Thomas, Out on a Wing, 181). In August 1936 Lord resigned and, with his wife, embarked aboard the Queen Mary for an extended voyage around the Americas. Nuffield was a generous man and on Lord's return in 1937 appointed his now unemployed friend as manager of the Nuffield Trust for Special Areas, which held £2 million for distribution to development schemes benefiting areas in economic distress.

Lord, though, was looking for a way back into the industry and in 1938 he accepted an offer from Nuffield's great rival, the Austin Motor Company. As works director at the Longbridge factory he began to modernize their manufacturing process as he had done at Cowley. Lord Austin was by now in poor health. Nevertheless, he played a key part in preparations for the Second World War as chairman of the Shadow Factory scheme. Austin's death during 1941 made Lord the most powerful man in the company. Joining him was George Harriman who had been faithfully at his side since they met at Morris Engines in 1923 while Harriman was still an apprentice. Lord directed Austin's war effort which included two shadow factories building Lancaster and Stirling bombers. The impressive productivity of Longbridge led Lord Beaverbrook, minister of aircraft production, to give him an additional responsibility as controller of Boulton Paul Aircraft Ltd with a remit to boost their production of Defiant night fighter planes.

As the war drew to an end Lord began to plan for a return to civilian production. Building on its wartime contribution, the motor industry was at the forefront of efforts to rebuild Britain's shattered post-war economy and Lord took a prominent role in the nation's drive to earn foreign currency. He regularly undertook two voyages per year to promote Austin products and a succession of new assembly plants was set up in territories including Canada, Australia, Argentina, South Africa, and Mexico. The artisan's son, always accompanied by his wife, travelled first class on luxury liners. Nevertheless these trips involved a punishing schedule of networking. Any leisure time they were able to snatch was hard-earned.

In the spring of 1948, for example, Lord embarked on a five-week tour, visiting dealers and charming government officials across Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and the Canary Islands. In the evenings he invited yet more corporate and diplomatic guests on board the RMS Andes: 'The usual procedure will be to reach Port in the early morning, hold receptions and visit Showrooms and Service Stations throughout the day and return on board the same evening'  (Austin Press Release, March 1948). Increased export earnings were confidently predicted as a result. His efforts to design the right car for the American market were less successful. Lord steam-rollered the sports convertible A90 Atlantic into the 1948 Austin product range but it failed to sell in the United States despite intensive publicity.

Lord set up a rather different enterprise in 1949 at Bargoed in Wales which manufactured a sophisticated pedal car designed for children. The factory's purpose was to provide employment for former miners suffering from the lung disease pneumoconiosis caused by inhalation of coal dust. At the same time he embarked on a determined drive to take Longbridge to the forefront of the post-war industrial world. A series of modern facilities was constructed on the old flying ground, culminating in 1951 with the state-of-the-art 'Car Assembly Building', clad outside in glass and fitted inside with an advanced set of automated production lines.

Nevertheless the position of the British motor industry was steadily weakening in world markets, making a merger between the old rivals at Longbridge and Cowley inevitable. Though Lord Austin was gone, Lord Nuffield lived to see the formation of the British Motor Corporation (BMC) in 1952 with its headquarters at Longbridge. The new structure appeared to treat the merging organizations equally by distributing the top jobs between the existing senior managements. This was, however, an illusion. In 1954 Lord Nuffield accepted the honorary post of president and went into retirement leaving Lord to become chairman with his own protege, George Harriman, as deputy chairman.

It took two years of damaging in-fighting to reach this point which Lord, still nursing a festering resentment over his departure from Cowley, did nothing to discourage. This would become BMC's biggest weakness. Austin and Morris continued to run separate dealerships, between them selling six marques and several models dating back to 1947-8 to a confused public. Lord's solution was 'badge-engineering'. A limited number of the established engineering 'platforms' would be refreshed by replacing the old-fashioned styling with a choice of new body styles utilizing some or all of the six different badges available. This would cut production costs and provide a smaller model range without sacrificing the perceived brand-loyalty of customers. He asked Pininfarina, the Italian design house famous for its work with Ferrari, to create the designs and a series of elegant 'Farinas' began to launch in 1958.

At the same time Lord was concerned that BMC's products were less advanced than those of its continental competitors. In 1955 he recruited Alec Issigonis, British designer of the acclaimed post-war Morris Minor, putting the factory's impressive technical facilities entirely at his disposal. Issigonis and his small team began work on a family of three new cars until the end of 1956 when the 'Suez Crisis' sparked anxiety about world fuel supplies. Lord personally instructed Issigonis to put the two larger cars to one side and concentrate on a fuel-efficient small car which must be on the market within two years. It was a brave gamble to unleash the creativity of his maverick designer in this way and he was rewarded with the revolutionary 'Mini'; but innovative engineering was expensive and the development period was too short to undertake a thorough testing programme. Issigonis himself commented: 'When Len Lord told me to go ahead and build it I was horrified. I even told him he was mad to build a car on what we had been able to demonstrate at that stage'  (Bardsley, 205).

The car was full of production faults when it was launched in 1959 incurring large warranty and re-engineering costs. Worse still, the sales department had no idea where to pitch it in the market, so they failed to take these factors into account. Instead, they decided simply to make it as cheap as possible to underprice what they perceived to be competing products. Over the next few years Issigonis returned to the other two cars in the model range, applying the principles he had used on the Mini to the medium-sized 1100 and the larger 1800, one a best-seller and the other a failure. Other firms, however, waited until the costs of parts and tooling came down before they copied the principles on which the Mini was based so that BMC were ultimately not the ones to benefit from the technology they pioneered.

In November 1961 Lord stepped down as chairman of BMC. Knighted in 1954, he was elevated to the peerage in March 1962, choosing the title Baron Lambury of Northfield. In his retirement he turned his attention to another of his interests, raising Hereford bulls for breeding on his farm in Gloucestershire. He died of coronary thrombosis and chronic emphysema and bronchitis on 13 September 1967 at his home, Warrens Gorse, Daglingworth, near Cirencester. His barony became extinct.

Lord's death occurred just as Britain's motor industry was about to move into another crucial phase. Negotiations were already underway for the merger which would bring together what was left of the British motor industry as the British Leyland Motor Corporation though this time BMC was the weaker partner.

Opinions of Len Lord remain as controversial as the man himself. His successor George Harriman gave instructions for his mentor's office to be preserved as he left it the day he retired. The less partial Miles Thomas astutely recognized a basic contradiction in people's reaction to him: 'When he was relaxed Len Lord was a friendly and fascinating character. Like many a man with a brusque unyielding exterior, he was shy at heart. His apparent rudeness was a protective mechanism. But he certainly achieved results in making motor cars, and although he upset many people, his ideas worked and helped executives who were paid a bonus on production to receive larger monthly cheques'  (Thomas, 180).

Lord was a driving force behind the essential modernization of production methods at both Cowley and Longbridge, enabling the British motor industry to compete in world markets. He spearheaded an export drive fundamental to Britain's post-war economic recovery. Yet his judgement in relation to the marketplace was not always sound. He masterminded the union of the industry's two major rivals, something which had once seemed unthinkable but in the end became inevitable, but failed to ensure that the two elements worked in harmony. This Achilles' heel would hamper all efforts to revive Britain's motor industry for decades to come.

Gillian Bardsley 

Sources  The Times (14 Sept 1967) + BMC World (Oct 1967) + R. Overy, 'Lord, Leonard Percy', DBB, 3 (1985) + F. G. Woollard, 'Sir Leonard Lord: a personal assessment', The Motor (6 July 1955) + M. Thomas, Out on a wing: an autobiography (1964) + G. Bardsley, Issigonis: the official biography (2005) + R. Church, Herbert Austin: the British motor car industry to 1941 (1979) + R. Jackson, The Nuffield story (1964) + P. King, The motor men (1989) + L. Pomeroy, The Mini story (1964) + British Motor Industry Heritage Trust, archive collections + census returns, 1911 + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert.
Likenesses  M. F. Codner, oils, 1951, Heritage Motor Centre, Gaydon [see illus.]
Wealth at death  £171,250: probate, 6 Oct 1967, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



ooroo

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time, like dew on the tip of a leaf.

     Rabindranath Tagore


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20131116/9ed20c93/attachment-0001.htm