50s/60s Britain and Now

[rockershovel]

Re quality of components and assembly, the whole point of Just In Time assembly is that ALL components received, go directly into a saleable product. If you don’t have that control over your supply chain, and what they provide, you can’t operate JIT. 

 

The Japanese also developed a crucial technique called “continuous improvement”. The gist of it is that tolerances are what the designer expects the manufacturing process to be able to achieve, and they come at a cost. Actual achieved tolerances are monitored, and the specification revised in line with that, in the expectation that they will tend to converge and reduce.  This produces an improvement in quality, by focussing everyone’s attention on what they are doing. It also provides a much better view of the cost benefit of improved quality, which tends to be lacking in the British and American “batch construction” process. Hence, it provides a better decision making tool for assessing the commercial value of improved quality, rather than the British process - which is more along the lines of “cut everything, all the time”. 

 

The Japanese and Germans have shown, at Nissan and Mini, that it is quite possible to build quality products at viable costs, using British workers. 

 

 

 

 

[Nearholmer]

49 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

That said, Bojo might prove rather effective in the later

He’s an interesting case, because he’s actually very good at ‘symbolic leadership’, encapsulating the spirit of time or place, becoming a symbol himself. He did that as Mayor London quite successfully, and I think he is “on a roll” now.

 

He’s also, again based on his London tenure, surprisingly un-dogmatic (except for the dogma that must the the acknowledged leader), which gives him huge flexibility to do things that seem out-of-kilter with the modern tradition of conservatism ....... like announcing a proto-Keynesian budget.

 

I’m no fan because, once you scratch below the surface, the underlying assumptions/beliefs are not at all ones I share, but if I were a betting man I’d be placing money on him getting a second term.

[Fat Controller]

17 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

The most telling point about Mrs Thatcher was that the Conservative Party changed the system, so that there could not be another such candidate. She would be followed by John Major, the “Accidental PM”, followed by the “Year of Four Emperors” in which the Conservatives went through a succession of ineffectual leaders, followed by David Cameron.

 

Cameron was a very interesting case. He was the youngest PM since Pitt, and the first PM for many years not to have held any of the Great Offices of State. A self-proclaimed Blair acolyte, with no actual record of leading anyone or anything, it’s difficult to see quite WHAT he offered, other than a certain panache at the microphone. He certainly had a better barber than the present incumbent...

 

I believe he was a PR consultant; the ultimate triumph of form over substance.

[Fenman]

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

...

the build-quality was truly atrocious, especially the electrics

...

 

 

Reminds me of a lovely episode of Frasier where the psychoanalyst is exasperatedly explaining to his (Mercedes-driving) younger brother why he, Frasier, is not interested in buying a new Jaguar: "because they spend so long gluing lovely bits of wood veneer to every surface that they neglect to install a functioning electrical system".

 

Sums it up pretty well.

 

Paul

 

[hmrspaul]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

I agree overall, but the autobahn network had some pretty dire motivations, but was definitely a fundamental piece of infrastructure for later, and there are other examples.

And pretty dire to join and leave with traffic crossing one another. But certainly superb for cruising at 120mph.

 

Paul

[Ohmisterporter]

I always wonder whether the people who slag off the Allegro actually owned one? I had one for five years and it never let me down; acceptably comfortable and economical. We only sold it because of our growing family. It was certainly better than the Golf we owned. That was an over-hyped piece of junk that convinced me never to buy VW again. With the Allegro I will concede that a car with a hatchback shape ought to have a hatch. The four speed gearbox was not unusual in that era, and mine had a circular steering wheel not that it made any difference to me. Build quality was fine, there was never any rot. But, give a dog a bad name etc.

[Welchester]

11 hours ago, rockershovel said:

 

Michael Foot is a much more difficult case. His electoral results as leader of the Labour Party speak for themselves; no-one today sells buttons and t-shirts proclaiming “Michael was right”.

 

 

That's because he was Left.

 

 

Sorry.

[Welchester]

This was the same as the previous post.

Edited April 30, 2020 by Bishop of Welchester
Repetition.

[rockershovel]

12 minutes ago, Bishop of Welchester said:

 

That's because he was Left.

 

 

Sorry.

 

Theres no raspberry button, so “ptthhhrrrpp...”

[The Johnster]

1 hour ago, Bishop of Welchester said:

 

That's because he was Left.

 

 

Sorry.

You can say that again. 

[Philou]

My father-in-law had a rear engined Skoda though probably a tad after 1970, and it wasn't terribly good. I recall the old jokes about it - 'Why does it have a rear heated windscreen?' 'To keep your hands warm when you push it in Winter'. 'Why is a Skoda shaped like a skip' 'Saves you hiring one!!' Ta boom tish!

 

However, who's laffing now? Not a single 'pure' UK car anywhere and who can afford a Skoda? Have you seen the price of the new models?

 

I don't think we've done aircraft of the 50s and 60s, have we? Early aircraft that I recall (and flown in) Dragon Rapide, DC3 Dakota, Vickers Viscount and BAC 1-11. These were the mainstay of Cambrian Airways (later absorbed into BEA that were absorbed by BOAC to become British Airways from then on) who used to fly Cardiff - Paris via Bristol and Southampton (later Hurn (Bournemouth)).

 

Then there were the Bristol Britannia, Comet, VC-10, Trident (Brabazon anyone?). Did our aircraft industry go the same way as the motor industry, though I don't remember too many aircraft falling from the sky (Comet excepted)?

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

Edited April 30, 2020 by Philou

[johnlambert]

1 hour ago, Philou said:

 

 

Then there were the Bristol Britannia, Comet, VC-10, Trident (Brabazon anyone?). Did our aircraft industry go the same way as the motor industry, though I don't remember too many aircraft falling from the sky (Comet excepted)?

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

 

As far as I can tell, the aircraft industry did go the same way as the motor industry.  It seemed to misread what the market wanted; the Bristol Britannia was a good aircraft but it was a propeller aircraft just as the market moved to jets.  I can't remember but I think the Comet disaster was the end of De Haviland and had an impact across the entire industry.

[The Johnster]

I'd say the British and French civil aviation industries got it about as wrong as they could with Concorde, a hopeless white elephant.  It diverted resources and expertise away from anything more useful for the 20 years of it's development, and never made a penny profit for British Airways or Air France; operating costs were worse than some bombers and the payload was not big enough.  Basically, nobody wanted an aircraft with such a small cabin to get to New York for lunch before you've had your breakfast in London.  The Americans got it spot on, the 747, big enough to be really comfortable and able to handle the amount of people who wanted to use it, at half the cost of a Concorde ticket.  We did exactly the same thing with the Brabazon vs the Stratocruiser, and the Comet vs the 707.  The Americans 'got' that air travel was for the masses and we still thought about jet sets and glamour.  

 

But, back to the 50s and 60s, and memories; Rhoose (not Cardiff Wales) Airport on a summer Saturday evening on the way back from Southerndown, or Ogmore, or Nash Point. with DC3s in Cambrian, KLM, and Air France colours, Fokker F27 Friendships in Aer Lingus, Viscounts, and then Caravelles (noisy b*ggers) and One Elevens, and BEA with Tridents.  There was a nice little picket fenced lawn where you could watch the action, a snack bar, and one of those airport shops where you could buy the sort of things you could only get in airport shops in those days, though you can get some of them at motorway services now, and enamel badges of aeroplanes.  Cambrian, KLM, Aer Lingus, Air France, all had proper check in desks, then there was a sign at the far end pointing to a shadowy corner that said 'Gentlemen's Washroom and Dan Air', which just about summed up Dan Air, though they did have secondhand Comets.  The atmosphere was sort of pioneering and a bit tin hut; the appearance of a Handley Page Hannibal arriving from the Far East would have not been surprising, but one was reminded that air travel was actually the cutting edge future by the frontage of this rather basic building, a glass wall sloping outwards with a row of suitable national flags to make it look like a real airport.  

 

It's all still there as well, in the form of the Glamorgan Flying Club.

 

But this really was the golden age of flying as far as I'm concerned, not just for the aircraft but for the liveries.  The best was BOAC Speedbird, Royal Blue dignity and sheer class; some of the planes were British as well, Comet 4Bs and VC10s.  This is the BRITISH dammit Carruthers Overseas Airways Corporation, yeah, so there, take that you benighted Johnny Foreigner natives, big silver bird him wing no flap him fly, we're up here and you lot have to walk 20 miles across the Serengeti for a bucket of water.  We still rule half the world (or we think we do), play up, play up, and play the game and all that, I say, what, damnit Carruthers, the empire upon which the sun is always setting, no, hang on a minute, I mean never rises, no, that's not quite it either, is it, b*gger, we just lost Aden, Malaya's next, pass me another chota peg and unwrap another native girl, this one's split, it's the heat, y'know, the heat, the interminable flies, and the drums, those infernal incessant pounding native drums, Carruthers, the white man's burden which the native bearers have to carry for him.  Shall we retire to the verandah, Daphne and Sybil will be along later, damn these blasted flies...

 

It is possible that this lockdown's starting to get to me.

[rockershovel]

I was reading a book a while ago, about the decline of the British aircraft industry. 

 

The Empire certainly influenced design thinking, and not in a useful way, because the Empire Routes tended to require aircraft possessing long range but using short runways, with no particular emphasis on carrying capacity. There was also a great deal of accumulated experience of building unpressurised bomber aircraft of limited range, capable of operating from short runways and if necessary, grass airfields (although this certainly wasn’t preferred). None of this was useful in the post-War commercial environment. 

 

There was also the matter of flying boats. The British used them extensively, for long-distance services to the Empire and for very limited trans-Atlantic services. They were faster than ships, faster than trains and went where no trains could run. They could operate anywhere that sea conditions permitted. They weren’t alone in this - the “Spruce Goose” had been envisaged as a trans-Atlantic cargo carrier - but they persevered long after the Americans correctly realised that the answer was to use their “large aircraft” expertise, and build longer runways, which were cheap and simple to construct, mostly at someone else’s expense. The British poured a lot of money and effort into projects like the Short Princess, precisely when they were being overtaken by changing circumstances. 

 

Concorde was a huge white elephant. It never had any credible purpose, other than diverting resources into a political project which has never benefited this country - seeking favour with the French. Its development costs were enormous, its operating costs astonishing and its revenue, totally inadequate. Its fundamental premise - high speed, limited capacity aircraft - never caught in and its technical innovations, the delta wing and “droop snoot” nose fairing, never justified themselves. 

[rockershovel]

Re The Johnster, above, its easy to mock the last stages of Empire, indeed its a common practice amongst certain elements , but it needs to be recognised that the late forties and early fifties were a very different world.

 

The British weren’t alone in believing that colonial empires could be sustained in Africa. The French, Spanish and Portuguese, in particular, extended much effort and did much harm, long after the British abandoned the concept; France STILL indulges in ventures in places like Mali, STILL attempts to exert influence in Sub-Saharan West Africa. The USSR did much harm and no good, backing insurgent movements and proxy wars in Central and West Africa, well into the 1960s.

 

The Labour Party saw this as an arena for their Fabian, Internationalist ideology, defeated at the polls at home (although it still survives in Westminster and the BBC, particularly in the form of the “World Benefits” agenda). The huge folly and utter failure of the Tangayika Ground Nut Scheme was their concept, not the Conservatives’. 

 

The British remain the only country to have conducted a successful counter-insurgency operation in SE Asia (Malaya) and correctly judged that the Viet Nam venture could have no good end, right from the outset. The military and geopolitical presence “East of Aden” was correctly identified as “life expired” and an orderly withdrawal conducted. The Suez Canal crisis resulted from a failure to understand that the British simply no longer possessed the wherewithal to act in that fashion, anywhere in the world. 

[rockershovel]

3 minutes ago, Lantavian said:

 

A triumph  ... using hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money to create subsidise travel for some of the world's richest people. 

 

 

 

 

It didn’t even achieve that. THEY travelled by conventional aircraft, while Concorde limped on as a sort of flying freak show, patronised largely by lottery winners and retiring grannies who wanted to say they had been on it. 

[Nearholmer]

Very rich grannies, presumably.

 

The more interesting question about Concorde is why anyone thought it was a good idea in the first place.

 

When it was conceived, was fuel so cheap, or the market for very expensive air travel so buoyant, that it was expected to be financially viable? Seems hard to conceive of either from the current standpoint.

Edited May 1, 2020 by Nearholmer

[TheQ]

Fuel for aircraft is and has always been comparatively cheap,  it's untaxed almost everywhere.. 

[rockershovel]

28 minutes ago, Lantavian said:

 

Largely?

 

You mean that most of the passengers were lottery winners and grannies?

 

Well, yes. Business travellers were NEVER interested in Concorde, once scheduled transatlantic flights were established. The time zone differences meant that it was sufficient to catch an early flight from London and gain the five hours, or travel on the “red-eye” overnight flights from the USA. 

 

Interesting discussion of the origins of the project here   https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/77jan/gillman2.htm

[billy_anorak59]

2 hours ago, The Johnster said:

But this really was the golden age of flying as far as I'm concerned, not just for the aircraft but for the liveries.  The best was BOAC Speedbird, Royal Blue dignity and sheer class; some of the planes were British as well, Comet 4Bs and VC10s.  

 

Liveries, yes! I'd agree that  a VC10 in BOAC Speedbird livery is perfection, I just never saw them, living as I did on Merseyside. The road I grew up on was under the final approach to Speke (Liverpool) Airport, and my personal favourites were the British Eagle Viscounts, and anything in Air Lingus colours - Aviation Traders Carvairs especially. The aircraft were that low, you could see the passengers in the big oval windows of the Viscounts as they passed over.

 

It's nice to see that British Airways recognised their heritage and painted a few of their aircraft in the old liveries last year, and they still looked good! Especially these two:

 

BEA Airbus A319:

https://www.flightglobal.com/strategy/pictures-ba-turns-back-time-to-1960s-with-bea-a319-retro-livery/131651.article

 

BOAC 747:

https://www.flightglobal.com/strategy/pictures-boac-747-retrojet-marks-british-airways-centenary/131423.article

[Enterprisingwestern]

 

I'm no plane enthusiast, but those are cracking liveries, gives a hint of thought in their design.

 

Mike.

[Nearholmer]

The BOAC one doesn’t quite look right on that ‘plane, like a very fat bloke in tennis kit, but the BEA one does look very good indeed.

[Devo63]

3 hours ago, The Johnster said:

 

 

But this really was the golden age of flying as far as I'm concerned, not just for the aircraft but for the liveries.  The best was BOAC Speedbird, Royal Blue dignity and sheer class; some of the planes were British as well, Comet 4Bs and VC10s.  This is the BRITISH dammit Carruthers Overseas Airways Corporation, yeah, so there, take that you benighted Johnny Foreigner natives, big silver bird him wing no flap him fly, we're up here and you lot have to walk 20 miles across the Serengeti for a bucket of water.  We still rule half the world (or we think we do), play up, play up, and play the game and all that, I say, what, damnit Carruthers, the empire upon which the sun is always setting, no, hang on a minute, I mean never rises, no, that's not quite it either, is it, b*gger, we just lost Aden, Malaya's next, pass me another chota peg and unwrap another native girl, this one's split, it's the heat, y'know, the heat, the interminable flies, and the drums, those infernal incessant pounding native drums, Carruthers, the white man's burden which the native bearers have to carry for him.  Shall we retire to the verandah, Daphne and Sybil will be along later, damn these blasted flies...

 

It is possible that this lockdown's starting to get to me.

By any chance are you related to the well known military shirker Major Dennis Bloodnock late of the 3rd Disgusting Fusiliers?

 

Dave

[St Enodoc]

21 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

The BOAC one doesn’t quite look right on that ‘plane, like a very fat bloke in tennis kit, but the BEA one does look very good indeed.

Qantas has done something similar too:

 

https://www.executivetraveller.com/qantas-to-unveil-retro-livery-on-boeing-737

 

https://www.traveller.com.au/qantas-retro-roo-ii-unveiled-1960s-paint-job-for-boeing-737-gkzw88

Edited May 1, 2020 by St Enodoc

[rockershovel]

40 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

The BOAC one doesn’t quite look right on that ‘plane, like a very fat bloke in tennis kit, but the BEA one does look very good indeed.

 

I think they BOTH look very stylish.

 

I also thoroughly approve of the recent cod-BOAC uniforms introduced by BA, if only on nostalgic grounds (ahemmm.... )