Читать книгу From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War - Geoffrey Owen - Страница 29

For the first two years after the First World War new orders flowed into British shipyards at a high level as tonnage which had been lost in the war was replaced. Most of these orders came from British owners, who assumed that the growth of international trade would quickly return to its pre-war path and that Britain would resume the dominant role in world shipping which it had had before the war. Both these assumptions turned out to be wrong. The volume of sea-borne trade remained below the pre-war level until 1924, and, after a brief upturn in the second half of the 1920s, fell back again under the impact of the world depression. Within this declining market British shipowners faced growing competition from foreign fleets, some of which were protected and subsidised by their governments. There were also changes in the composition of world trade which worked to Britain’s disadvantage. Coal exports, which had been the staple business for many British tramp operators, declined in importance as the volume of oil shipments increased.

Several firms had enlarged their yards after the war on the expectation of continuing growth in demand, and in 1920 the industry had the capacity to produce about 4m tons of merchant shipping a year. Output reached a peak of 2.1m tons in 1921, but for the rest of the decade it averaged little more than 1m tons a year, falling to below 700,000 tons between 1930 and 1939. To make matters worse, naval orders, which had accounted for about a quarter of the industry’s workload before the war, virtually dried up in the 1920s, and remained at a low level until the onset of rearmament in the mid-1930s. The warship specialists were forced to compete for merchant ship orders, adding to the problem of over-capacity and low prices.

What had been a source of strength for the shipbuilders – their close ties to British shipowners – now became a weakness, since all the growth in sea-borne trade in the inter-war years was secured by non-British owners. Between 1913 and 1939 British-registered merchant tonnage remained virtually unchanged at about 18m tons, while the world fleet expanded from 43m tons to 69m tons. Part of the decline in Britain’s share was due to subsidised competition, but there were also some missed opportunities. Before 1914 the few oil tankers in service were owned either by oil companies or by governments as part of their naval fleets. After the war the oil companies supplemented their own tonnage with vessels chartered from independent tanker owners. This business did not appeal to British tramp operators, partly because they had invested heavily in traditional cargo vessels after the war and lacked the resources to tackle a new market. One historian has suggested that British shipowners had a contemptuous attitude to oil tankers, ‘which they seem to have regarded as being hardly ships at all, much as the American sailing shipowners in the nineteenth century turned their backs on steamships, which they regarded as floating kettles not worthy of their consideration’.¹⁴ British shipowners allowed a gap in the market to open up, which others were quick to fill. By the end of the 1930s Norwegian entrepreneurs had built up the largest independently owned tanker fleet.

British shipowners were also slow to take up the diesel engine. This form of propulsion, invented in Germany in the 1880s and adapted for marine purposes after the turn of the century, gained wider acceptance in the inter-war years. It was particularly attractive in countries which did not have an indigenous source of coal. By 1939 more than 60 per cent of the Norwegian fleet was equipped with diesel engines, compared with 26 per cent in Britain. Some of this lag reflected the composition of the British fleet. In passenger liners, for example, which were more important for British owners than for the Scandinavians, the steam turbine was more economic than the diesel. But the long attachment to coal and steam bred a cautious attitude towards the diesel engine which was not shared overseas.¹⁵

The shipbuilders did not find it easy to break away from an approach to designing, building and selling ships which was geared to the needs of British owners. Most of them had a close relationship with a small number of British owners from whom they derived the bulk of their orders; the export trade was regarded as marginal and unpredictable. But even if British shipbuilders had been more aggressive in pursuing export business, there would still have been a need to reduce the industry’s capacity. The idea of an industry-wide rationalisation scheme was first broached by the warship builders in 1925, and the discussions were broadened to include the rest of the industry. The Bank of England helped to promote rationalisation through the creation in 1930 of National Shipbuilders Security (NSS), a financial holding company. Financed by a levy on each firm which participated in the scheme, the NSS was given the power to buy up and close down shipyards which were surplus to requirements. Between 1930 and 1935 38 yards were permanently shut, sterilising some 1.4m tons of building capacity.¹⁶

The capacity reduction scheme was an unusual exercise in collective self-help in an industry which in the past had found great difficulty in maintaining a common front on any issue. Previous inhibitions about government intervention were laid aside as the industry’s plight worsened. Both shipowners and shipbuilders pressed for action to counter subsidised foreign competition. In 1934 the government agreed to provide a temporary subsidy for tramp operators, and in the following year a scrap-and-build scheme was introduced; loans were made available to British shipowners to scrap old ships and order new ones in British yards.

If the response of the employers to the inter-war crisis was defensive, the same was true of the unions. High unemployment made the unions even more determined to preserve traditional demarcations between trades, and less co-operative in their response to technological change. The replacement of riveting by welding provoked a lengthy dispute. The employers proposed the creation of a new class of skilled worker, the ship-welder, to be organised and trained outside the existing union structure. Inconclusive negotiations took place, but no national agreement was reached. The allocation of welding work within individual yards was determined in the time-honoured way, ‘through a process of competitive struggle between groups of skilled workers and their unions for control of the new process’.¹⁷

Delays in the introduction of welding in the 1930s did not put British yards at a serious competitive disadvantage. The technology was not yet fully developed, and the shipbuilders were understandably concerned that a premature rush into welding might damage their reputation for building high-quality vessels.¹⁸ But the reaction of the unions was symptomatic of the lack of trust between managers and workers, which was exacerbated by high unemployment.

The inter-war depression made it more difficult for employers and unions to shake off attitudes and habits which had taken root before the war. The employers were more interested in cutting costs than in a radical reform of the industry’s labour relations system or in altering the traditional approach to the organisation of work. Other shipbuilding nations were putting more emphasis on the pre-planning of production and on organising the flow of materials so as to economise on the use of skilled labour. This was the start of a transformation in shipbuilding techniques which was to be taken much further after the Second World War.¹⁹