Managerial Skills: Armstrongs and Vickers

Abstract

There is some evidence that Armstrongs undervalued the skills of managers and innovators, and in this respect lost out to their competitors. George Carter, manager of Elswick shipyard after 1894 and a local director of the firm from 1911, resigned the following year at the age of 52 in what was said in shipbuilding circles to be a surprise development. He became Managing Director of Cammell Laird’s Birkenhead yard. More significantly, perhaps, he was given a seat on the Cammell Laird board and, it was believed, 1½ per cent of their profits. He became a director of the associated company, Coventry Ordnance.¹ Carter went on to play a prominent role in wartime and immediate postwar national shipbuilding. Yet Carter’s loss to Armstrongs and their apparent inability to keep a first-rate man in his prime must be balanced against the fact that at the same time Vickers lost their shipbuilding manager, when Archibald Campbell moved from Barrow to become General Manager of Beardmores’ naval yard at Dalmuir.² On the other hand, it is quite clear that Armstrongs starved their automobile division and eventually lost thereby Engel-bach, their enterprising manager, who was to become a key figure in the Austin organisation in the 1920s.