Biography: William Morris – One Man’s Lasting Influence On The British Industry And Country

“We’re beaten and licked in England, Mr Ford”

1920 started as 1919 had ended, but in the autumn of 1920 economic depression arrived, and suddenly. Government fiscal policies led to deflation and taxes went up. Morris’s monthly sales dropped from 276 in September 1920 to just 74 in January 1921, and his financial performance reflected this. His competitors suffered just as much. At the time, there was something between 60 and 100 manufacturers in the UK, varying in size, ambition and stability. A huge proportion of these failed in the next 4-5 years, including names like Austin, Clyno, Bean and Sunbeam. Through the 1920s, something over 60 marques disappeared, and Morris was a hair’s breadth from being another.

Morris Motors at this time was being funded largely by investments from the Earl of Macclesfield, who ultimately invested something like £50,000 (£2.5m) and a loan facility from Barclay’s Bank, as well as Morris himself, as far as he could or dared. Morris’s debts peaked at around £140,000 (over £6m), and the overdraft at Barclay’s was another £40,000.

In February 1921, Morris took perhaps the most significant decision of his business life. He cut the price of the Morris Cowley by 20%, to £425 (£21,275) for a four seater and £375 (£19,000) for a two seater. The higher price Oxford was reduced as well, though less markedly. Alongside this, Morris took other more typical business actions – he trimmed distributor margins; attacked purchasing costs; secured better supplier credit terms, and helped Hollick and Pratt trim costs, inventories and lead times. Other manufacturers followed suit on pricing, but Morris cut again at the annual autumn London Motor Show. 1921’s sales topped 3,000 for the first time. By November 1922, what had cost £465 (£22,000) in the autumn of 1920 was on offer for £225 (£13,000), the same price as the much smaller and more basic Austin Seven. 1922 saw Morris sell almost 7,000 cars.

1923 was Morris’s breakout year. He started offering hire purchase schemes (consumer credit; by 1926, over half of the sales were “on the tick”) and free insurance policies, alongside fixed pricing for spares and servicing, and improved dealer stock and standards. There was an in-house magazine, The Morris Owner, and a travel bureau offering owners free advice on routes and destinations. The process of owning a car was getting easier and cheaper, and Morris was determined to lead it. Sales responded, to say the least – Morris leapt to sales of 20,042 and profits reached £852,000 (£53 million). By 1927, Morris was selling over 60,000 cars, around 35% of the market.

Ford’s UK assembly plant was down to just 6,200 in 1928 from over 25,000 a few years earlier, as the Model T aged and battled against the McKenna duties and cars more suitable for Europe. Edsel Ford toured Europe and the UK and told his father that “We know we have been defeated and licked in England”. Henry Ford responded by starting the plans for the huge fully integrated Dagenham plant. Even so, it would be over 40 years before Ford was back on top in the UK market.

But Morris was not resting on his laurels. 1922 saw the start of the trend of him buying his key suppliers, of whom he was often the major or only customer. He bought Osberton Radiators and Hollick and Pratt, installing Lancelot Pratt as his deputy managing director. Pratt was perhaps his only ever close friend in business. The combination of Morris and Pratt could perhaps have proved a successful working partnership, but sadly Pratt died in 1924.

Most significantly, he purchased Hotchkiss Engines. Morris was concerned as not only was Hotchkiss integral to his supply chain, but there was a risk of them supplying others, and he was unconvinced by their commitment and sensed a lack of ambition to achieve his desired volumes. Morris wanted 500-700 engines a week; Hotchkiss would not commit or invest to support anything beyond 300, so on 1 January 1923 Hotchkiss became Morris Motors – Engine Branch and the Hotchkiss managers were unceremoniously moved out.

Output, with Morris’s investment, reached 1,200 a week in 1925 with engine production costs cut by 30%. Key to this transformation was Morris’s General Manager Frank Woollard and a bright young man from Coventry, Leonard Lord. Woollard went on to be a key figure in Morris’ business for many years; Lord would in time run the entire Nuffield Organization, as the business would later become, and will re-appear later in this tale.

By the end of 1923, Morris had cleared all his outside loans and bought out the outside investors.  He had absolute ownership and control of the largest car manufacturer in the UK and one of the largest in Europe, which was making profits of around £1m (£60m) a year.

The Morris empire was, frequently, a complex corporate structure, with William Morris owning various companies himself, some of which held stakes in others. One business was his original garage business, known as the Morris Garages Ltd.

In 1921, the sales manager Cecil Kimber was appointed General Manager and, no doubt with William Morris’s approval, started the process of creating specially bodied Morris Oxford chassis as sports cars which were sold from 1924 (or even late 1923, records and accounts vary) under the Morris Garages badge, later trimmed to MG and put into an octagon that fitted neatly on a radiator cap. By 1928, the MG Car Company was formally constituted (100% owned by William Morris) and the Abingdon factory opened in 1929, 12 miles from Cowley.

For the next 50 or more years, MG built cars designed to exactly the same recipe – take a contemporary Morris (or Austin in BMC/BL years), and reclothe it in sports car finery with minimal mechanical differences, and sell it alongside the regular cars. After the second world war, exports led to substantial growth and international fame for the brand, and it is now the only Nuffield brand name still extant.

Also, potential amalgamation activity emerged. In 1924, Herbert Austin, then recovering from almost total collapse and restructuring, proposed a three way merger of Austin, Wolseley and Morris, with Austin building the smallest and larger cars, and a light commercial, Wolseley and Morris mid-size cars, and Austin leading on much of the design activity. William Morris was the nominee for day to day leadership, but he rejected the idea, seeing that his profitable business was being risked to support two others, one which had previously failed and one which was beginning to overstretch but slowly failing.

Instead, Morris expanded his empire by acquisition. He bought EG Wrigley, his axle supplier, in early 1924, not just to secure axle supply as that company was teetering after being involved in a potential competitor, but to use its facility to produce light trucks to challenge Ford in another part of the market. In 1927, Morris outbid Austin, pretty much face to face, for the Wolseley Company from the Receiver, after that business collapsed. He bought the business personally, for £730,000 (£47million), and took some of the furniture from the boardroom to his own home, where it still is. In just seven years, Williams Morris had gone from running an indebted business verging on failure to buying out competitors with his personal cash.

There are various reasons for Morris to have bought Wolseley. Getting one over Austin was certainly one, as were the additional production capacity and the six cylinder engine and model range, and the design capabilities. The Wolseley factory was quickly adapted to build the Morris Commercial range, as Morris sold the old Wrigley factory, as well as axle and steering components, some engines and SU Carburettors, which Morris had previously purchased. Leonard Lord was entrusted to get the facility and business organised, and seemingly earned his spurs.

More intriguing than the Austin offer was an approach from Alfred Sloan of GM. According to most accounts, he offered William Morris £11m (£700m) for the business in 1926, which Morris turned down, saying he could not sell his country out or be “a traitor”. GM bought the much smaller and differently positioned Vauxhall instead and then Opel in Germany two years later.

In the autumn of 1926, Morris made organisational changes, consolidating some of the privately held companies into the new Morris Motors (1926) Ltd and then launched his first public share offering, though selling only preference shares (preference in the event of liquidation and on income, but no votes so no control). William Morris himself continued to hold all the ordinary, voting, shares, and he underwrote the share offer personally. He was now a financially secure, very wealthy man, controlling a business that was setting the standards for the market, and no one else in the British industry was anywhere near him in those respects.

Morris had not lost his entrepreneurial or innovative streak. In December 1924, in a move that still puzzles many, he bought the marginal and fading French manufacturer Léon Bollée. This seems to have been part of a plan to sell in France in volume, avoiding French import duties (the McKenna duties may have made importing more expensive; the downside is that exporting became harder as reciprocal measures were put in place). The Société Française des Automobiles Morris had a showroom in Paris from October 1924 and Morris planned to market French built cars through it.

The puzzle is that Léon Bollée was capable of producing perhaps 1,000 cars a year. To cut a long story short, even with Morris’s efforts, sales never reached the volumes he had aspired to, and Morris sold out for £14,000 in 1931 and the firm finally closed its doors in 1932, having built perhaps 25,000 cars in that time.

Alongside the flotation, 1926 was also a key year for product – Morris Motors replaced the Bullnose Cowley and Oxford with the flatnose Cowley and Oxford. There was a new chassis and suspension, with carried over engines and gearbox, and a new range of body styles. After the changeover, sales responded, reaching 61,000 in 1927, and prices were dropped again.

The success of the 1927 models hid the issues William Morris had with his latest investment – he had entered as a junior partner, with the Budd Corporation of Philadelphia in a business named Pressed Steel, based at Cowley directly adjacent to Morris Motors in what was reported to be biggest press shop in Europe. Morris recognised that the all steel body was the new key to value, volume and profit, and hoped to steal a march on his competitors by investing in Pressed Steel. The first car to have the steel body was the 1927 Oxford – the Cowley retained the wood frame. In the event, the combination of teething issues and competitors’ reluctance to buy from a Morris associated business led William Morris to divest his holding in 1930 at a loss, although he remained a customer. Pressed Steel finally came into BMC in 1965.

Morris was not always the technical innovator; the easiest demonstration of this is the Austin Seven. This was the first case of a car designed to offer “real” motoring to those not yet able to afford a full specification car, in a similar way to how users wanted to graduate from the bubble cars of the 1950s. Morris Motors had no competitor for the Seven, and senior figures in the business were agitating for Morris to offer one. William Morris reacted as only Morris would, and had Wolseley develop the car, which became the first Morris Minor in 1928. In contrast to the older Seven, this was truly a miniature version of a larger car, with four wheel brakes, longitudinal leaf springs and dampers, all lacking in the more basic Seven. The engine was an overhead camshaft four cylinder inherited from Wolseley, a complex offer for such a car at the time and arguably out of character for the conservative Morris.

By 1930, Morris was selling a Minor for £100 (£6,500), albeit with a stripped out specification and a simpler side valve engine masterminded by Leonard Lord. Interestingly, while the £100 car sold, the bulk of sales were more expensive higher specification variants.

Morris’s conservatism was finally called out in 1932, when the Morris Ten was launched. Much to Morris’s reluctance, his colleagues persuaded him that a new engine was needed – the 1912 origins of the existing engines were limiting its competitive performance. The 1932 Morris Ten therefore had a new 1.3 litre in line four cylinder side valve engine, alongside four wheel Lockheed brakes and 12 volt electrical system, all for £165 (£12,000), and was directly up against the Austin Ten-Four and Hillman Minx. This was followed by a six cylinder version, known as the Ten-Six, with a 1.4 litre engine.

There was the usual range of saloon, coupe and convertible body styles, and a separate chassis was still available as well, and it is judged to have been a significant success for Morris. Perhaps surprisingly given the presence of MG and Wolseley in the Morris family, there was a Morris Sports Special roadster version available from the factory as well.

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