Bulleid's Leader: could it have even been successful?

[coachmann]

It looked to me like the very unsocial hours put paid to many new recruits to footplate work. Newbies were okay the first week cleaning engines, then two weeks training at a big shed and even the fourth week on 8am to 4pm and the fifth week on 12noon to 8pm.  But the 8pm to 4am  and the realization that they only did days every eight weeks was the propellant to handing in their notice.  It was different once they got into 'link' work but that took time. Pay wasn't grand either.

 

As regards being seen as a dirty job, I am not so sure about that, afterall, all the public saw were men hanging over the cabside looking as if they were enjoying themselves. The real dirt was on shed where disposal took place away from public view. Wielding three hot and heavy firebars out of their bed and out onto a meal part of the footplate took strength and dexterity and timing. Raking much the spent fire through the resultant hole brought out the sweat. Going underneath and raking out the ashpan left the swirling fine ash stuck to the sweat. Then to top it all, there was the fine hot ash in the smokebox to shovel out onto the ground. Even missing this opportunity to get filthy could lead one to shovelling ash out of the disposal pit onto the ground above, then transferring it upwards into a spare mineral wagon.  

 

But if that was dirty work, imagine being a coalminer underground, to which you could add danger. 

Edited July 3, 2017 by coachmann

[rockershovel]

Re #121, it wasn't just access to raw materials, it was access to markets. The Lancashire weaving industry could get all the cotton it could want in the 1950s, but with its Indian markets gone, its business model had ceased to exist. Even recruiting labour from Pakistan (because the locals certainly didn't intend to go back to the obsolete mills on piecework) made no difference.

 

The motorcycle industry, particularly BSA and Triumph, had an Indian summer with sales to the US market boosted by the 1949 devaluation, but it couldn't and didn't last and lack of development and investment finished them off, with (again) sales to India and Asia being taken by the Japanese. Royal Enfield sold their Indian factory, which is still in production..

 

Curiously enough, the Mahindra company paid £3.6m last year, for the rights to the BSA name and claim to have a plan to produce a "new BSA" within 2 years. I'd have thought that the name was too far gone to be if any value, but apparently not; Mahindra certainly have the clout to do it, if they wish to. I have to admit, Tata have done great things at Jaguar Land Rover, and they are the only ones interested in making steel in the UK.

[rodent279]

Re #121, it wasn't just access to raw materials, it was access to markets. The Lancashire weaving industry could get all the cotton it could want in the 1950s, but with its Indian markets gone, its business model had ceased to exist. Even recruiting labour from Pakistan (because the locals certainly didn't intend to go back to the obsolete mills on piecework) made no difference.

 

The motorcycle industry, particularly BSA and Triumph, had an Indian summer with sales to the US market boosted by the 1949 devaluation, but it couldn't and didn't last and lack of development and investment finished them off, with (again) sales to India and Asia being taken by the Japanese. Royal Enfield sold their Indian factory, which is still in production..

 

Curiously enough, the Mahindra company paid £3.6m last year, for the rights to the BSA name and claim to have a plan to produce a "new BSA" within 2 years. I'd have thought that the name was too far gone to be if any value, but apparently not; Mahindra certainly have the clout to do it, if they wish to. I have to admit, Tata have done great things at Jaguar Land Rover, and they are the only ones interested in making steel in the UK.

 

Going a bit OT now, but it shows how much of Britain's leading role, both industrially, technologically and commercially, was built on Empire, and that without it, Britain really did struggle. So complacent was Britain in it's own superiority, that, despite the writing being on the wall for decades, little was done until it was too late. Suddenly, guaranteed markets were gone, competition appeared where there previously was none, and Britain woke up far too late to do much about it.

[rodent279]

It looked to me like the very unsocial hours put paid to many new recruits to footplate work. Newbies were okay the first week cleaning engines, then two weeks training at a big shed and even the fourth week on 8am to 4pm and the fifth week on 12noon to 8pm.  But the 8pm to 4am  and the realization that they only did days every eight weeks was the propellant to handing in their notice.  It was different once they got into 'link' work but that took time. Pay wasn't grand either.

 

As regards being seen as a dirty job, I am not so sure about that, afterall, all the public saw were men hanging over the cabside looking as if they were enjoying themselves. The real dirt was on shed where disposal took place away from public view. Wielding three hot and heavy firebars out of their bed and out onto a meal part of the footplate took strength and dexterity and timing. Raking much the spent fire through the resultant hole brought out the sweat. Going underneath and raking out the ashpan left the swirling fine ash stuck to the sweat. Then to top it all, there was the fine hot ash in the smokebox to shovel out onto the ground. Even missing this opportunity to get filthy could lead one to shovelling ash out of the disposal pit onto the ground above, then transferring it upwards into a spare mineral wagon.  

 

But if that was dirty work, imagine being a coalminer underground, to which you could add danger. 

 

Can't help but think that with a little imagination & investment, it would surely have been possible to remove most, if not all, of the drudgery out of disposal. Surely some sort of large vacuum hose could have been used to suck up dust and ash out of smokeboxes and fireboxes before it started flying around? Surely it would have been possible to have some sort of conveyor system in ash pits to carry hot coals and ash away? Maybe with a water spray to help keep ash down, and extinguish any remaining combustion?

 

Come on, shoot me down in flames. Even in the 1950's we had rockets and jet aircraft!

[The Johnster]

Ridiculously unsocial hours were what put paid to my railway career, a decade after the end of steam and a dozen years after the end of it in my part of the world.  I had accepted for some time that I would have to work at times unheard of in any other industry, as a freight guard may book on at any time during the 24 hour day, but at least you got a variety and a fair stab at day work.  But I was placed, against my wishes, into the bottom Valleys link at Canton, and the writing was on the wall for me from that moment on.  I was, it must be remembered, still only in my mid 20s and unsettled; I wanted to drink beer, dance with girls, and see where it led, not an unreasonable thing to want in my situation.  Valleys work was either very early mornings, booking on between 03.30 and 05.30, or late evening finishes, booking off between 22.30 and midnight.  It could hardly have been less attractive to anyone in my position; chances of going out and meeting girls, very low on mornings when you had to be in bed by about 8 or 9 in the evening to have a hope of lasting the following day, and non-existent on 'Afternoons' as they were misleadingly known as you booked on at times between 14.30 and 16.00, to end up working the last train on whatever valley it was, or Barry, or Penarth.  Wasn't long before I'd had enough, and I loved the job!

 

Bill Griffiths, the Train Crew Manager at Canton, tried to persuade me to stay, as if I'd toughed it out for a few years I'd have progressed through the links at least, getting better timed jobs and more main line work, and accumulating seniority with which to apply for careerr-advancing posts, and I sometimes regret not listening to him; he was genuinely trying to give me the best advice he could, and he had a point, but I couldn't wait the perhaps half a dozen years of the last of my youth for things to improve.  Had I done so, I might have retired from a senior management railway position earlier this year, but I could not face more of that constant early morning/late night grind that effectively denied me any social life at all back in 1978, and walked.  As I say, I only sometimes regret it.

[The Johnster]

There was a documentary a few years ago about the decline of the British shipbuilding industry, typical of our traditional attitudes and complacency, and, like the railways, investment starved from before the Great War.  An interesting feature was a collaboration between two very unlikely people, the communist trade union leader Jimmy Reid and the yardowner Sir Alex McGregor.  The accepted wisdom is that the British industry fell prey to foreign competition from newly equipped yards in Germany and Japan (Marshall again), but things were not as straightforward as that.  In the event, for the two decades immediately after the Second World War, British yards had full order books and were working flat out, highly profitably, either directly replacing merchant losses from the war, which were huge, or indirectly replacing the same losses as the 'Liberty' ships that kept the British Merchant Navy going for 10 years after the war, accounting of a third of the ocean going tonnage, were sold on and companies were in a position to afford something better.  Profits were high and steady, wages were good and there was plenty of overtime if you wanted more, and everybody was happy, until about 1965.

 

Reid and McGregor realised that, at around that time, the war losses had been made good, the airliners were taking over from the big passenger ships, and that they were going to have to go out and actively look for new orders in competition with the newly equipped and highly efficient German and Japanese yards from a position of using outdated methods and late Victorian equipment, admittedly producing fine ships, but not competitively.  What was needed was massive investment, and Reid and McGregor planned to persuade each of the big yards to close, one at a time, to refurbish while profits were still high and they could afford it, in the meantime paying the owners and shareholders out of a fund contributed to by the yards still working.  The wages of laid off men would be paid in the same way.  McGregor would get the owners and managers on board, and Reid would deal with the unions and the workers.

 

This was actually a very good idea; the industry would have regenerated itself from it's own resources and been better able to compete with the overseas competition (and each other) when the full force of it hit, as expected, in the early 70s.  But neither McGregor on the bosses side nor Reid on the men's could get any yard other than their own to agree; who was going to let an order go to another yard while yours was idle and being refurbished, when you could be making profits or racking up the overtime?  The plan, which might have saved perhaps half of the yards we lost over the following 20 years, was dead in the water before it had gone down the slipway (sorry, sometimes I just can't help myself).  But the thought of losing profits to competitors at home, or other yards' men raking in overtime which you could have had while you were being kept on basic money for doing nothing, was too much for the 'jam now' British attitude.  And, of course, in 1965 nobody really believed that the Germans or the Japanese, or anyone for that matter, could build ships as good as ours, so that shipowners would always come to the Clyde, or the Tyne, or Birkenhead for their vessels, even German and Japanese ones if they wanted the best.

 

I think this story sums up the short sightedness, greed, and obstinacy that plagued British industry in general for the 50 years post war that effectively destroyed it, and illustrates than owners, shareholders, investment banks, trade unions, and managers are all in some measure to blame, while they all blame each other and the government.  The bosses blamed the unions, justifiably, and the men blamed the bosses, equally justifiably, and the divisions still run deep.  Selfish, greedy, stupid, arrogant, borderline racist, short termist, small minded; you have to ask if we deserved any better than the hiding our traditional heavy industries took

 

Railways were not immune from this, of course, but looked at against that background and that of the motor industry, were by no means the worst offenders or as bad as they are usually portrayed!

Edited July 3, 2017 by The Johnster

[rodent279]

I said it in my first reply to this thread, and I'll say it again.....and still we don't learn.

[The Johnster]

Can't help but think that with a little imagination & investment, it would surely have been possible to remove most, if not all, of the drudgery out of disposal. Surely some sort of large vacuum hose could have been used to suck up dust and ash out of smokeboxes and fireboxes before it started flying around? Surely it would have been possible to have some sort of conveyor system in ash pits to carry hot coals and ash away? Maybe with a water spray to help keep ash down, and extinguish any remaining combustion?

 

Come on, shoot me down in flames. Even in the 1950's we had rockets and jet aircraft!

Put your finger on the ejector seat button and check your parachute; it might have been possible to attach a loco with it's smokebox door open to a big vacuum cleaner, but the big vacuum cleaner would have to be fireproof.  Remember those ashes are still hot, as are the ones you dropped from the firebox, so the conveyor system has to be fireproof as well, even with the aid of the water spray.  This makes them very expensive, it's the 1950s and the nation's broke, and you're going to be scrapping those engines in 20 years tops anyway.  The water spray has to drain away somewhere, and it is now hot and acidic claggy mud.  And some poor b£^*er still has to empty the vacuum cleaner bag and dispose of the mess.  Oh, yes, and your smokeboxes must all be of a standard size to fit the nozzle.

 

Sorry to rain on your parade, rodent.  You're on the right track; conveyor systems were used to clear ashpits and the job of cleaning fireboxes and smokeboxes could have been much more mechanised; indeed, in the US where they used huge locos that were too big to be cleaned any other way and there was no shortage of capital on railroads that were still profitable (for a while) such methods were used extensively, but in austerity Britain it was never gonna happen; attempts to reduce the amount of work involved in the preparation of locos are always about saving time, never labour, which was still, and erroneously, assumed to be a limitless resource and the railway as a desirable place to work as it had been before the Great War.  Recruitment people were constantly, but genuinely, puzzled by not being able to attract young men into such an attractive and fascinating environment when all they wanted to do was work on a boring factory line where they stayed clean, earned better money, and could even meet girls after working proper shifts.  Railways were not conducive to meeting girls, who were not interested in dirty railwaymen who could not be relied on to turn up for a date because they were still on duty, or had been called out, or you just couldn't keep up with his shifts.

Edited July 3, 2017 by The Johnster

[rodent279]

Consider my parade totally washed out!

 

I'm sure even 50's Britain could have come up with some better ways of removing ash from a smokebox than a bloke with a shovel. Even if you didn't use conveyor systems for hot ash/coals/clinker, you could use a container, rail mounted, which could be rolled or lifted out of an ash pit to be tipped into a wagon.

 

Point is, little real effort was made to make these things easier, when, with a little thought, it could have been.

 

In the end though, electric traction has always been the way forward. The logic of importing, refining, and then burning oil, in order to move coal from mine to power station, to generate electricity, has been referred to above.

[Nearholmer]

The railways, in common with a great deal of the rest of British industry, were using the best of mid-Victorian technology, and the best of mid-Victorian working conditions, until about 1960, and it "no longer washed" in a world where all sorts of more efficient ways of making and doing things existed.

 

Why? Under-capitalisation.

 

We certainly had free capital in the early to mid C19th, and it wasn't spent wisely, and I think the same probably applies until the Edwardian period. Whether or not there has been enough free capital since, I really can't fathom, but it appears not, probably because the earlier squandering left us without the capacity to compete with the USA and Germany, and because Empire was costing more to hold than it was worth in terms of markets (picking up Rocker's point) and raw materials, which is the same problem the Romans had 1500+ years before.

 

Under-capitalisation is sometimes laid at the door of post-WW2 taxation regimes, needed to fund the welfare state, but the rot was deep well before that.

 

On the point of "Empire as markets", I do wonder if that was at least partly illusory, in that making the Empire productive required a lot of capital investment, possibly abstracting free capital from "home industry". Possibly the very projects that were the markets for high-value manufactured goods were robbing the factories that made those goods of investment.

[The Johnster]

Joking aside, your are quite right, rodent; of course the work could have been made easier, and it should have been.  But in many ways the railway wasn't the people's utopia that nationalisation was to bring about in the minds of many of those who worked on it and travelled on it, it was still what tradition had always made it, an industry managed by gentlemen, and operated by the lower orders.  The gentlemen who managed it may have had varying degrees or sympathy or contempt for those who operated it, but very little real concern; they simply didn't care that working conditions had not merely not changed for a century, but, because equipment and accommodation had not been renewed for a century or maintained for half of one, had actually deteriorated.  In many cases they didn't even know this.  Men worked outdoors in terrible conditions when they should have been under cover, where there was cover, it was often illusory as the wind whistled through broken windows and the rain came in through non-existant skylights, men ate in rat infested messrooms, took down big ends to renew bearings with icicles hanging off them, everything was not just filthy because it was a dirty working environment, but because nothing had ever been cleaned.  The bosses, if they could be bothered at all (and to be fair some could) only saw things during daytime; few were committed enough to want to indulge in the wonderful atmosphere that only occurs at around 3 am on a freezing foggy night, the time the cleaners are starting to get the engines ready for the day's work.  This was the grim reality of the majority of engine sheds and the work that had to be done in them, and it was worst at the end of steam in the 50s and 60s when the management had more or less given up trying, overwhelmed by it all.  

 

If you were involved in running the railway, by and large you flew a desk and went to work in a suit, and you went home clean at 5 o'clock.  If you were involved in operating the railway, especially in an engine shed and even more especially if your contribution to operating the railway involved preparing or disposing locomotives, you went home dirty, and not at 5 o'clock.  In your turn you had varying degrees of respect or contempt for those who managed it, but you had very little contact with them, and they with you. so you were blissfully (perhaps that's not quite the right word) unaware of each other's problems and concerns.  

 

In short, the filthy and thankless task of disposing of steam locomotives was never made any easier because nobody who had any say in making it easier was really aware of the fact that it was hard, and filthy, and awful, and took place at dark and forgotten corners of sheds and at similarly dark and forgotten times of the day.  The bosses didn't care, so nothing was ever done.  Look at the railway newsreels of the period, focussing on modernisation and progress; new is good, old is bad, so get rid of it, scrap it, replace it from scratch with new stuff, there's no point in repairing it or cleaning it or improving it or, especially, spending money on it.  So the lower orders had to struggle in conditions worse than their Victorian forebears had had to endure for another 20 years, and even in my time in the 70s some places were pretty grim; everybody was by then used to working in a more or less derelict environment and knew it was pointless trying to do anything about it.

 

The unions, who should have been manning the barricades on this sort of issue, were useless.  There was an attitude that it was good enough for the previous generation, and you're just a wimp if you think you deserve any better, kids today, bloody soft, country's going to the dogs...  They campaigned hard and with some success for better wages, a five day week, and better holidays, and better terms of employment, but as far as working conditions were concerned they weren't interested; Leader's fireman's compartment was a bit of a one off.  The main thrust of what the unions believed they had to do was to protect jobs, which is why it took so long for BR to institute single manning of trains, an ongoing issue, and, having protected jobs, protect overtime.  Overtime was a con; it looked as if all you had to do to earn the level of income you wanted was to put the hours in, but it was a cheap way of getting work done from the management point of view as they could get away with employing less staff and saving on administration costs, and the unions, supported by the greed of their members, fell for it.  So, appalling working conditions were put up with and not complained about by men who feared labour-saving devices that would speed up the work and threaten their overtime.  God bless the British economy!

Edited July 3, 2017 by The Johnster

[The Johnster]

The railways, in common with a great deal of the rest of British industry, were using the best of mid-Victorian technology, and the best of mid-Victorian working conditions, until about 1960, and it "no longer washed" in a world where all sorts of more efficient ways of making and doing things existed.

 

Why? Under-capitalisation.

 

We certainly had free capital in the early to mid C19th, and it wasn't spent wisely, and I think the same probably applies until the Edwardian period. Whether or not there has been enough free capital since, I really can't fathom, but it appears not, probably because the earlier squandering left us without the capacity to compete with the USA and Germany, and because Empire was costing more to hold than it was worth in terms of markets (picking up Rocker's point) and raw materials, which is the same problem the Romans had 1500+ years before.

 

Under-capitalisation is sometimes laid at the door of post-WW2 taxation regimes, needed to fund the welfare state, but the rot was deep well before that.

 

On the point of "Empire as markets", I do wonder if that was at least partly illusory, in that making the Empire productive required a lot of capital investment, possibly abstracting free capital from "home industry". Possibly the very projects that were the markets for high-value manufactured goods were robbing the factories that made those goods of investment.

Agreed, but it is worth pointing out that capitalisation of railways in the UK was very badly affected around 1850 by the collapse of the Hudson empire, in which many thousands of middle class investors were ruined.  We still have speculative bubbles, and people still lose heavily, but the scale of this event penetrated the national consciousness in a way that still had repercussions a century later and arguably even now; the British became institutionally reluctant to invest in railways, and so did their governments.  it is difficult to compare the UK with other European nations in this respect, as many of them started out nationalised or semi-nationalised, being seen as tools of military deployment primarily and as passenger and freight transport to a lesser extent.  It happened here to some extent as well, the LNWR having government input in the form of Treasury guarantees for the North Wales main line as a means of quickly transporting troops to quell Irish rebellions, and the GW had some input for the Severn Tunnel, as the Fleet at Portsmouth and Plymouth needed quicker access in a potential war with France (we hadn't fallen out with the Germans yet) to Welsh coal.  But it has meant that, for today's railways, Europeans are more conditioned to using public money on large investment railway projects of a sort that we are culturally reluctant to spring for, and the situation was no different in the 50s.

[rockershovel]

On the subject of overtime, manning and protecting jobs, I see that Virgin have just admitted relying on volunteer overtime to keep services operating.

[rockershovel]

Regarding European state investment, you need to bear in mind that Italy only existed as a country from about 1860, Germany as a unified entity only developed from about 1875 onwards. Spain fought a civil war within living memory, and the Spanish and Portuguese had revolutions in the 1970s. France only developed as a modern country in the 1800s.

 

Most of Pre-1914 Eastern and Central Europe existed as varying combinations of contiguous land empires with widely differing populations, often with deep ethnic divisions overlaid by semi-autocratic bureaucracies, and often with few natural geographic barriers.

 

The concept of the State which owes its shape and existence, to an act of will by that state, is typically European. So is the concept of State funded capital works which serve to define a State which would not otherwise function, in the same way that "all roads led to Rome" two millennia before.

 

Britain was never like that, with its sea borders and maritime trading empire founded very largely on access to resources, and its cultural English-speaking outliers and offspring with recognisably English legal systems, spanning the globe. Once you understand that, the fundamental differences between Europe and UK, which persist to this day, are self-evident.

Edited July 4, 2017 by rockershovel

[rockershovel]

Re #131, the problem of workforces being focussed on overtime was never really solved by the unions. The NUM really lost the 1984-5 strike, sometime in 1983-4; the government of the day conducted a long campaign of production and overtime, to build up stocks to levels never seen before in preparation for the strike, and the miners embraced it with a will.

 

This is what Jack Straw meant, by his aphorism about "you can't trust the working class". The "working class" consists of a wide range of groups with varying interests. I encountered this in the form of the NUM targeting of contractors; they didn't mind at all, sacrificing your interests to theirs. That's why the nascent offshore oil industry workers were so resistant to unionisation in the 1970s and 1980s, whereas the construction yard workforces (transplanted en masse from the dying shipyards and to a lesser extent, steel industry) were much more unionised.

Edited July 4, 2017 by rockershovel

[coachmann]

No doubt today's volunteer footplate crews on heritage railways have an easy time of it disposing steam locos! A fireproof vacuum hose to clear hot ash from smokebox,  a giant magnet that automatically removes fire bars, and a robotic Bill Hoole that goes underneath to rake ashpans.....  

[rodent279]

Volunteers, though. They're letting themselves in for it. Most are not doing it because they have to, in order to provide a roof over their heads.

[Zomboid]

And they don't have to do it 6 days a week for hours on end. It's unusual to have more than 2 locos to dispose of at the end of the day on most heritage railways.

[Titan]

I did say most. So 22 Deltics amongst well over 1000 type 4 locomotives is hardly significant.

 

What about all the type 1's - they were intended as freight only, and there were hundreds of them!

[runs as required]

Cripes! (to use a Billy Bunter Bojo word) We are well OT now!

 

There was a documentary a few years ago about the decline of the British shipbuilding industry, typical of our traditional attitudes and complacency, and, like the railways, investment starved from before the Great War.... 

An interesting post that, thank you, and true of Swan Hunters on the Tyne.

But no mention of the Makems on the Wear in Sunderland.

Give'm their due, by the end of the 1970s they had re-capitalised successfully and were building "modularised" ships from prefabbed sections and assembling them in colossal sheds down alongside the upstream side of the amazing Alexandria Bridge.

I first came to the North East in the late 1970s and this was the great manufacturing industry success story forever on TV.

But Thatcher killed it all off, I joined the Save the Sunderland shipyards group fostered by Newcastle University's  prestigious CURDS research centre

The whole shebang was eventually sold off to (I can't remember where, possibly...) South Korea where the method thrived.

We went on to squander our North Sea oil bonanza instead. I first heard the word short-termism in about 1980.

 

The railways, in common with a great deal of the rest of British industry, were using the best of mid-Victorian technology, and the best of mid-Victorian working conditions, until about 1960,..
Why? Under-capitalisation.
We certainly had free capital in the early to mid C19th, and it wasn't spent wisely,

The Liverpool and Manchester and the Brunel's GWR were capitalised by the Merchants' profits from the triangular Slave Trade.

The wisest investments in the Industrial Revolution were by the Quakers - beginning with the Darby's inventing iron rails in 1767 at Coalbrookdale (predating their Ironbridge). As a hedge against a slump they continued producing pig iron but stored it as substitute wooden rails. Nowadays we would sack the workers.

 

dh

 

Ed - formatting - and I forgot to insert "short-termism"

Edited July 4, 2017 by runs as required

[rockershovel]

One might think that the slave trade was the sole commercial activity of the 18th and 19th centuries... the British didn't begin in, weren't the only participants, couldn't have sustained it without the active involvement of African and Arab slavers onshore, abolished it long before anyone else, and devoted substantial efforts to stamping it out...

 

Slavery was intrinsically linked to the sugar trade, which was immensely profitable, and to the growing of tobacco in North America, Cuba and elsewhere. The demand for milling and refining plant contributed greatly to the development of the growth of industrial capacity which would become the Industrial Revolution. Slavery was replaced by indentured labour, which had many of the same features in practice but was, at least, entered into freely and had a finite term.

 

None of which is to imply that the British of the 17th and 18th centuries WEREN'T men of their time, behaving in ways which we now find unacceptable; but that's not the same thing at all.

Edited July 4, 2017 by rockershovel

[rockershovel]

I've never forgiven the Conservatives for the wasting of the North Sea oil revenues. Seeing what the Norwegians did with theirs, making themselves world players from pretty much a standing start... the Dutch and Italians rebuilt their offshore construction fleets and have prospered by it.

 

That's about when I ceased to believe that the Conservatives knew anything about business...

[Reorte]

Volunteers, though. They're letting themselves in for it. Most are not doing it because they have to, in order to provide a roof over their heads.

So they get even less from it Joking aside though I agree it's not really comparable. I was happy enough shovelling stuff around in knee-deep water down an old mine (and having to stack it up in sacks rather than tip on a heap) without getting paid, but that was once a month, I might have lost some enthusiasm if it started or finished at 4 am, day after day.

 

Turned out the stationary steam engine to pump out the shaft that had been installed there and we hoped might still be there (no record of it having been sold when the mine closed) once we were through the collapses wasn't there any more.

[Reorte]

The wisest investments in the Industrial Revolution were by the Quakers - beginning with the Darby's inventing iron rails in 1767 at Coalbrookdale (predating their Ironbridge). As a hedge against a slump they continued producing pig iron but stored it as substitute wooden rails. Nowadays we would sack the workers.

How much of that is due to individual short-sightedness these days and how much due to the nature of the world we're in? Long term planning has a short-term cost, and those who pay it get out-competed in the short term by those who don't. We might all be part of a herd galloping towards a clfif edge but try to avoid that by turning to the side and you'll just get trampled.

[Nearholmer]

I beg forgiveness for my obsession with under-capitalisation, but my point wasn't simply about the railways, it was about British industry, and hence productive capacity, at large.

 

Early Empire excursions, plantations, the slave trade etc produced a bonanza, some of which was spent wisely in capitalising the first wave of industrialisation (a lot did go into quite ludicrous stately homes and rolling acres, though). That takes us to The Great Exhibition, at which point we really were Top Dogs. [re-reading that, I realise it might be taken to condone subjugating and exploiting people. I don't, I'm simply trying to summarise economic history]

 

Second wave of industrialisation was around chemicals, electrical engineering, and the internal combustion engine. Britain had a clutch of leading scientists, but having failed to create a decent education system, increasingly lacked the highly numerate and scientifically aware technicians to turn science into utility on a commercial basis. And, Britain seems to have utterly failed to capitalise effectively in these new areas. German, then American, capital came into play in Britain in chemicals and electrical, and slightly later in automotive.

 

Our own free capital was flowing out into building the infrastructure of modern Empire, which looked jolly profitable to investors, and less into home industry, and was financing another round of ostentatious stately-home building. The City and Guilds system came as a late attempt to deal with technical education, but it wasn't adequately supported, and didn't become integral to the education system.

 

There were capital investments made in industry, railways included, in the pre-WW1 period, but nothing like enough ..... we were getting left behind, and it was a double-bind: less productive capacity meant fewer profits, which equalled less free capital to reinvest.

 

Anyway, I've banged-on about this far too much; I promise to shut up now!

Edited July 4, 2017 by Nearholmer