Motor manufacturer and philanthropist almost 'licked' Ford

WILLIAM Morris, Lord Nuffield, who died 30 years ago, is not exactly

well known now. His list of achievements is remarkable all the same. He

founded two Oxford Colleges, endowed the university's teaching hospital

so munificently that it almost added Nuffield to Radcliffe in its name,

enormously expanded Bupa and established the Nuffield Foundation, a huge

charitable enterprise, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year.

This enormous public donation was made possible by his successes in

manufacturing -- he was one of the first, and probably the most

successful, English maker of motor cars in considerable volume. He even

managed, for a time, to contain Ford's success here: ''We're licked''

was the judgment of Henry's son, Edsel, in 1926, though he proved to be

wrong after Dagenham was built three years later.

Martin Adeney, who used to be the BBC's industrial editor, has written

a new biography of a man who did not welcome inquiry into his personal

affairs. Morris quite often lied about himself and his interests and, in

an age where no indiscretion is secret for long, seems to have protected

himself from investigative journalism rather well. Adeney notices that

some suspected that Nuffield's frequent trips to Australia between the

wars were a response to female attraction. He shares the suspicion but

advances no evidence to sustain it.

More evidence is supplied to show that Morris supported Oswald Mosley

when he founded the New Party after the failure of the Labour Government

to address the problems ushered in by the Great Depression. Mosley said

later that Morris was his ''chief backer,'' and ''a good and honest

man.'' He was also naive and unbelievably inept in politics, as Adeney

shows, being crude, and thinking too much of the power of money. Its

political limitations are obvious here from his local activities in

Oxford in the 1920s (though there was one success) to dealing with

government ministries before 1939 and Beaverbrook and Churchill after

it.

On the other hand Morris was not a fascist any more than most of

Mosley's original supporters. He was an old-fashioned Tory -- that is,

not interested in politics at all, but intensely patriotic and

imperialist. He was also a protectionist, and Adeney cleverly shows how

his manufacturing success stemmed from a combination of cost control

(itself grounded in Morris's almost preternatural meanness), good

salesmanship, and fiscal protection. His politics had no sophistication,

something which also helps to explain his anti-Semitism which Adeney

show to have been real but superficial and mostly suppressed (because, I

think, Morris was ashamed of it, which is something to his credit).

Morris made his money from motor cars but he started with bicycles --

and was a champion racer on these. He moved easily into cars, grasping

very early the concept of assembly (though not as quickly the assembly

line) and concentrating his effort on a very few successful models which

he was able to sell cheaply. Not the least of his successes was to grasp

almost at once the relationship between cost and volume -- he was quick

to reduce prices in pursuit of sales and found at one difficult stage in

the 1920s that it was possible to cut prices sharply yet obtain higher

profits per unit sold.

Adeney hoped to do more than provide a straight biography and consider

the inter-relations between industry and politics, and within that the

rise and decline of a major component of British manufacturing. His book

simply lacks the scale to bring this off; and the biographical focus is

not the best one, especially here when, in spite of discovering some new

sources, there is so little documentary material available.

The result is certainly a good read, however; and much light is thrown

on the shortcomings of British industry and its financing in the earlier

years of this century, though the main disasters occurred when the state

got in on the act and nationalised volume car production, so that almost

no British car manufacturer survives.

Nuffield did not always get it right -- he dismissed the brilliantly

successful Morris Minor as ''a poached egg,'' but he made it. He

employed Issigonis, only one of a goodly number of ''finds.'' Morris did

not like to be thought lucky. Adeney shows how often he was, though he

pays much respect to his hard work.

Individuals no matter how gifted, are seldom enough once a business is

as large as Morris's became. He never managed the transition to a

rational managerial style, delegating powers, enhancing rewards, and

sharing control. He was always impulsive, always intensely personal in

relationships, and always insecure both in his awareness of his modest

social origins and his possession of a vast fortune. His obsession with

medicine (nearly all his charitable giving was medical) had nothing to

do with his claimed frustrated ambition for a medical career but

everything to do with his hypochondria which became so acute that he

sometimes tested his urine's sugar level three times in the one day from

fear of diabetes.

This book, which has many good anecdotes, ends sadly. Morris came to

feel, and with some justice, that anyone who met him simply wanted money

out of him. He was brave enough to insist on having his own way with it

occasionally. Hence Oxford had the first European chair of anaesthesia

despite the opposition of its dons. It might also have had at Nuffield

College the first residential college devoted to engineering. The dons

won that one, and the donor, who never read books himself, lost. Who now

would say the dons were right?