Читать книгу From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War - Geoffrey Owen - Страница 30

The Second World War, like the first, was followed by a worldwide surge in orders, and this time the boom did not quickly evaporate as it had done in the 1920s. From the early 1950s the world economy entered a golden age of growth, which continued for the following twenty years, and sea-borne trade increased at a rate which had no historical precedent. World shipbuilding output, which had fluctuated between 2m and 7m tons a year between the wars, rose to 36m tons in 1975. Yet Britain’s shipbuilders signally failed to profit from this favourable environment. Annual output from British yards was virtually static in the 1950s and 1960s (TABLE 5.1).

TABLE 5.1 Britain’s share of world merchant ship launchings 1950–95

In the early post-war years production in Britain was held back by the scarcity of labour and materials, but these shortages had eased by the early 1950s, and cannot account for the stagnation of output for the rest of the decade. Part of the explanation was the cautious view which British shipbuilders took about the future course of demand. Always anxious lest another depression was round the corner, they were determined to avoid the mistake that had been made after the First World War, when over-investment was followed by a prolonged slump. But two new forces were at work, neither of which sat easily with the skills and experience of British shipbuilders.

The first was a change in the market for ships, leading to a loosening of the ties between national owners and builders. The most striking development was the rapid growth of the so-called flags of convenience. This was a post-war device whereby owners registered their ships outside their home country, principally in Panama, Liberia and Honduras, partly for tax reasons, partly to avoid restrictions imposed by their home governments on manning levels and wage rates.

The second force was a change in the way ships were designed and built. In oil tankers and bulk carriers there was a trend towards scale and standardisation. There was also a growing demand for technically sophisticated ships, such as containerships, roll-on/roll-off ferries and chemical carriers, which called for specialised equipment and skills.

British shipbuilders had traditionally looked to British owners as their primary source of orders. If the British merchant fleet had retained the 26 per cent world market share with which it started the post-war period, this might have been a viable policy. But the British share declined even more precipitately than it had done before the war; by 1970 it was down to 11 per cent as other nations, principally Greece, Japan, Germany and Norway, built up their merchant fleets. Some of the trades in which British operators specialised were in slow-growing sectors of the market. Passenger traffic across the Atlantic, for example, was badly affected by the rising popularity of air travel. There was also a continuing decline in coal exports. But the shipowners responded sluggishly to new opportunities. For example, the 1950s saw a spectacular rise in the volume of oil shipments from the Middle East to the consuming countries of Western Europe, the US and Japan. The oil companies relied even more than before the war on independent tanker owners with whom they negotiated time charters, usually lasting for seven or fourteen years. The charter agreement provided the security on which owners raised loans to finance the construction of new ships. This market was open to British owners, but most of them regarded it as too risky. The Norwegians and the Greeks, as well as Chinese entrepreneurs based in Hong Kong, had no such inhibitions.²⁰

A marketing strategy geared to the requirements of domestic owners was becoming obsolete, and the same was true of the industry’s production methods. For the transport of oil and bulk commodities such as iron ore the trend was towards larger, simpler and more economical vessels. In the early post-war years tankers were between 10,000 and 15,000 gross registered tons, but by the middle of the 1950s there were 50,000-ton ships on order. The closure of the Suez Canal in 1956, forcing operators to re-route their tankers round the Cape, led to a surge of orders for 100,000-ton vessels. With increasing scale came greater standardisation. The idea of ‘mass-producing’ ships on a flow-line basis had originated in the US during the First World War, but the big advance, made possible by the introduction of welding and prefabrication, came in the Second World War; some 2,600 Liberty ships – standard dry cargo vessels of 11,000 deadweight tons – and nearly 600 16,000-ton tankers were built in the US between 1941 and 1945. After the war other countries drew on US experience to rethink their approach to ship design.

Flow-line production called for a higher degree of mechanisation than under the traditional British system, and could be applied only in yards which specialised in a narrow range of ships. It also put a premium on planning and organisation. Instead of relying on the initiative and independence of skilled craftsmen, responsibility shifted to the drawing office, and the task of management was to ensure that plans were carried out precisely; a disciplined approach to the control of labour was required. British shipbuilders had difficulty in adjusting to these changes.²¹ Some yards were too small to accommodate the larger vessels now in demand, and specialisation did not come easily to firms which prided themselves on their ability to produce a wide variety of different ships. The resource which had underpinned this flexibility, an ample supply of self-reliant skilled labour, was no longer a competitive advantage.

New entrants, unencumbered by tradition, were quicker to exploit these opportunities, and the most spectacular winner was Japan. For the first few years after the war Japan’s maritime industries were subjected to restrictions by the US occupation authorities, but, as relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated, US policy shifted towards the development of Japan as a prosperous and economically independent nation. This called for a rapid expansion of Japanese exports, and to this end it was necessary to rebuild and enlarge the Japanese shipping and shipbuilding industries. The Programmed Shipbuilding Scheme, introduced in 1947, gave subsidies to owners to place orders with domestic yards, and Japanese shipping lines were allowed to re-establish overseas routes which they had operated before the war. The Korean War, which broke out in 1950, was a turning-point, since it prompted a wave of demand for new ships which European yards, already operating at full capacity, were unable to satisfy. This was the main stimulus for a modernisation of the Japanese shipbuilding industry, which increasingly focused its attention on exports. In 1950 new orders in Japanese yards amounted to 310,000 tons, of which 16 per cent was for foreign registration; the corresponding figure in 1955 was 2.7m tons, of which 86 per cent was for export.²²

Japan was a new shipbuilding nation, and there was an enthusiasm for expansion and for new technology, just as there had been in Britain a century earlier. In 1956 Japan overtook Britain in shipbuilding output, and in the same year shipbuilding displaced textiles as Japan’s largest export industry. The diffusion of modern production methods was assisted by the presence in Japan of an American company, National Bulk Carriers, which had been active in the Liberty ship programme during the war. This company leased the former naval yard at Kure, and the fifty-two ships which it built during the 1950s were based on production methods blending American know-how in welding and prefabrication with a novel Japanese approach to flow-line assembly. The Japanese chief engineer at Kure installed a production planning system which stemmed from his experience in the aircraft industry during the war.²³ Other shipbuilders studied Kure’s methods and applied them in their own yards. Productivity rose rapidly, and the Japanese industry was well placed to profit from the boom in orders which followed the closure of the Suez Canal in 1956.

Within Western Europe the most successful shipbuilding nations during the 1950s were Sweden and West Germany. Oil tankers were a Swedish speciality, and leading yards like Kockums in Malmo and Gotaverken in Gothenburg had a close relationship with Norwegian owners. Substantial investments were made in welding and prefabrication; in 1950 nearly 40 per cent of Swedish launchings were of all-welded vessels compared with only 4 per cent in Britain. The American approach to mass production was much admired in Sweden, and in 1959 Gotaverken decided to apply assembly-line principles to shipbuilding on a greenfield site at Arendal. Although the Arendal project later ran into difficulties, it was regarded at the time as the most advanced shipyard in the world.

As long as British yards had plenty of orders and were making good profits, the loss of market share was not a matter of pressing concern. But as Britain’s lag became more evident, especially in the construction of larger ships, several companies committed themselves to ambitious re-equipment schemes. Capital investment rose sharply after 1956, and, as if to confirm the warnings of the Cassandras, these schemes came on stream just as the world shipping market entered its first serious post-war downturn. The reopening of the Suez Canal in 1957, together with the US recession in that year, led to a sharp fall in freight rates. In Britain new orders fell from 5.4m tons in 1956 to just over 2m tons in 1962.

The response to this setback showed how deeply pre-war experience had influenced the thinking of the industry. The view of senior managers was defensive, as it had been in the 1930s. Capacity should be reduced in line with the lower level of demand, and, in assessing how much capacity would be needed, the primary consideration was the likely size of the British merchant fleet.²⁴ If an industry-wide capacity reduction scheme was to be instituted, the approval of the government was necessary. The reaction of ministers was unenthusiastic. They believed that the industry’s problems were mainly of its own making: the shipbuilders had failed to modernise as effectively as the Japanese and the Swedes had done. This diagnosis was confirmed by a critical report published in 1960 by a government agency, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR).²⁵ Its analysis drew attention to managerial weaknesses in British shipbuilding, including a primitive approach to production control and an old-fashioned approach to labour relations. An ominous sign of declining competitiveness was the increase in the number of orders placed by British shipowners with overseas yards.

Belatedly the industry began to put its house in order. In 1959 a joint delegation of employer and union representatives visited Swedish shipyards. They concluded that Sweden’s superior productivity was due to the careful planning of the production process and the flexibility with which labour could be deployed. The absence of demarcation between trades made it easier for Swedish yards to maintain a stable labour force.²⁶ This visit was followed in 1961 by a more extensive study of production methods by a committee of industry experts, and this report also highlighted deficiencies in planning and supervision as major causes of low productivity.²⁷

The Conservative government which held office until 1964 was concerned about the industry’s performance, but reluctant to intervene directly. In the discussions over the capacity reduction scheme (which was eventually abandoned) the Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, suggested that the industry might create a small number of multi-yard groups. This would facilitate the closure of uneconomic capacity and allow yards to specialise in work for which their equipment and skills were best suited. But a collective solution of this kind did not find favour with the shipbuilders. They claimed that they were losing orders from domestic owners because foreign yards offered more generous credit terms. The government commissioned a report from Peat Marwick, the chartered accountants, which showed that credit was much less important than price and delivery. But the government’s non-interventionist line was hard to sustain as the continuing recession led to yard closures and unemployment. Between 1958 and 1963 employment in merchant shipbuilding fell from 78,000 to 48,000.

In 1963, with an election looming, the government announced a £30m scheme to help finance new orders from British shipowners for British shipyards. This was presented as a temporary measure to help the industry through its difficulties, but it marked the start of a more interventionist policy which was to be taken much further by the Labour government after 1964.