Author(s): | Arnold, A. J. |
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Reviewer(s): | Sumida, Jon |
Published by EH.NET (January 2002)
A. J. Arnold, Iron Shipbuilding on the Thames, 1832-1915: An Economic and
Business History. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000. x + 198 pp. $89.95
(hardback), ISBN: 0-7546-0252-4.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Jon Sumida, Department of History, University of
Maryland.
During the age of sail, the Thames River region was the leading shipbuilding
area in Britain. This predominance was not maintained when ships constructed
of wood gave way to vessels built of iron and then steel. The first iron ship
manufactured on the Thames was launched in 1832; the last builder of metal
ships abandoned its yard in Greenwich in 1915. Between these two dates, the
locus of British shipbuilding shifted to the Clyde in Scotland and the
northeast coast. The result was not merely the decline of shipbuilding on the
Thames, but the collapse of an entire industry with attendant severe social
consequences. In 1984, F. M. Walker, in his book on shipbuilding on the Clyde,
observed that general economic conditions in the Thames were not so
“dramatically different” from those on the Clyde as to explain its rapid and
complete demise, and that a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon had yet
to be offered (Walker, Song of the Clyde: A History of Clyde
Shipbuilding, 1984). A. J. Arnold’s monograph is addressed to this
challenge.
Arnold was confronted by a fundamental problem, namely the fact that the
documentary record for shipbuilding firms on the Thames is practically
non-existent. Hugh Peebles, in his study of British warship-building on the
Clyde from 1889 to 1939, founded his inquiry upon the accounting records of
the major companies, which included the formal sets of annual financial
statements, informal accounts and working papers, and financial and cost
records. In spite of gaps in the evidence, Peebles was able to extract “a mass
of accounting and cost data” (Peebles, Warshipbuilding on the Clyde: Naval
Orders and the Prosperity of the Clyde Shipbuilding Industry, 1889-1939,
1987, p. 3). Arnold’s survey of press reports enables him to give a detailed
account of such major financial events as the failure of Overend Gurney
banking house in 1866, which had an enormous effect on Thames shipbuilding,
but the almost complete lack company financial records, except for those of
the Thames Ironworks for the period 1899-1911, means that in general his
analysis is not based upon the information required to give a clear view of
business performance, which in turn undercuts elucidation of business motive.
Arnold’s extensions of various data series on British shipbuilding are useful,
but no substitute for systematic consideration of internal company papers.
Given the inherent limitations of the available evidence, Arnold’s stated
goals are modest — he hopes that his book “will cast some light on at least
the more important causes of the rise and fall” of iron shipbuilding on the
Thames, and “help in some small way to commemorate” the efforts of the
shipbuilders. His book, therefore, is devoted mainly to telling the story of
the eight private-sector yards, whose occupants included such famous firms as
Thames Ironworks, Thornycroft, and Yarrow. Arnold’s chapters are organized in
chronological order, and chart the rise and fall of the Thames shipbuilding
industry: Iron shipbuilding comes to rural London, 1832-46; Vertical
integration, 1847-53; The Crimean War and the first crisis, 1854-59; Trade
boom and the effects of ‘shady finance’, 1860-67; The long slump, 1868-88; An
excessive dependence on the state, 1889-1915. Arnold’s main original argument
is that “there were never all that many iron shipbuilding yards of any
importance on the river, so that the mistakes and misfortunes of individual
entrepreneurs could be as important in their effects on local output levels as
more gradual changes in broad economic factors” (p. 151).
This of course begs the question, for the “broad economic factors” — which
meant labor, land (including the characteristics of the river particularly
with regard to depth), and access to raw materials — must have affected the
attractiveness of the Thames to shipbuilding entrepreneurs in the first place,
and conditioned the subsequent fortunes of those who chose to situate their
companies in the region. It is hard not to conclude that the rise and initial
prosperity of iron shipbuilding on the Thames was propelled by momentum from
the earlier epoch of wooden shipbuilding magnified by close proximity to
London, the nation’s main center of commerce and finance. With the
displacement of wooden sailing ships by metal steamships, and the
decentralization of British transoceanic trade and industry, these legacy
advantages faded, exposing the Thames shipbuilders to the full force of the
fundamental economic facts of life. Arnold does not, in short, offer a
substantial alternative to the assessment of the failure of metal shipbuilding
on the Thames provided in Sidney Pollard and Paul Robertson’s economic history
of British shipbuilding in the late nineteenth century (The British
Shipbuilding Industry, 1870-1914, 1979, chapter 3).
Arnold dedicated his book to C. J. Mare (1815-1898), the most innovative, if
ultimately unsuccessful, industrial shipbuilding entrepreneur of the Thames
region. Arnold’s account of Mare’s activities, and also those of Arnold Hills,
the last owner of Thames Ironworks, are tantalizing, and indeed make a case
for more biographical investigation of these men. It is regrettable that
Arnold provided no map of the Thames region with the location of the
shipyards, or any illustration of the yard layouts. On the other hand, Arnold
has discovered what may be the funniest unintentionally salacious sentence in
British maritime history, a place previously occupied by the Admiralty’s
response to the Treasury’s suggestion that highly-paid boy clerks be replaced
by less well-remunerated women — “their Lordships cannot conceal their
decided preference for the boys” (N. A. M. Rodger, The Admiralty, 1979,
pp. 138-9). It is on page 29. Enough said.
Jon Sumida is an associate professor of history at the University of
Maryland, College Park. He is the author of In Defence of Naval Supremacy:
Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy 1889-1914 (1989/1993) and
Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: The Classic Works of Alfred
Thayer Mahan Reconsidered (1997/1999).
Subject(s): | Industry: Manufacturing and Construction |
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Geographic Area(s): | Europe |
Time Period(s): | 20th Century: Pre WWII |