British shadow factories

British shadow factories were the outcome of the Shadow Scheme, a plan developed by the British Government in the buildup to World War II to meet the urgent need for technology transfer to implement additional manufacturing capacity for the British aircraft industry.

'Shadow' was not for secrecy but for the protected environment they would receive by being staffed by all levels of skilled motor industry people alongside, in the shadow of, their own similar motor industry operations.

The project was created by Sir Kingsley Wood and headed by Herbert Austin and developed by the Air Ministry under the internal project name of the Shadow Scheme.

Shadow

It was impossible for them to be secret though they were camouflaged after hostilities began. They were duplicates built in "the shadow" of motor industry plants to facilitate technology transfer to aircraft construction and run, for a substantial management fee, in parallel under direct control of the motor industry business along with distributed facilities.^[1]

Background

Up until 1936, the Air Ministry had been headed by Lord Swinton, who at that point had been forced by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to resign his position due to a lack of progress in re-arming the Royal Air Force. Swinton's civil servants approached their new boss, Sir Kingsley Wood, and showed him a series of informal questions that they had asked since 1935 on the subject, such as those posed to Morris Motors with regard to aircraft engine production capability at their Cowley plant in Oxford.^[2] Wood's immediate response was to put forward a plan which would enable the trebling of aircraft production and manning.

Implementation

The plan had two parts:

• Development of nine new factories
• Extensions to existing factory complexes to allow either easier switching to aircraft industry capability, or production capacity expansion

Underneath the plan, there was government funding for the building of these new production facilities, in the form of grants and loans. Key to the plan were the products and plans of Rolls-Royce, whose Merlin engine powered many of the key aircraft being developed by the Air Ministry.

Wood handed the overall project implementation to the Directorate of Air Ministry Factories, appointing Herbert Austin to lead the initiative (most of the facilities to be developed were existing motor vehicle factories), and the technical liaison with the aircraft industry to Charles Bruce-Gardner. He also handed the delivery of the key new factory in Castle Bromwich, that was contracted to deliver 1,000 new Supermarine Spitfires to the RAF by the end of 1940, to Lord Nuffield though in May 1940 the responsibility had to be taken from Nuffield and given to Vickers.^[3]

As the scheme progressed, and after the death of Austin in 1941, the Directorate of Air Ministry Factories, under the auspices of the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP) gradually took charge of the construction of the buildings required for aircraft production. In early 1943 the functions of the directorate of Air Ministry Factories were transferred to the Ministry of Works.

Follow on initiatives

The shadow factory proposals and implementation, particularly its rigidity when bombed, meant that other key areas of military production prepared their own shadow factory plans:

• Alvis had 20 sites in Coventry alone, producing vehicles and munitions.^[4]
• The Birmingham Small Arms Company Limited alone during the war controlled 67 factories from Small Heath, employing 28,000 people operating 25,000 machine tools. This organisation produced more than half the small arms supplied to Britain's forces during the war. BSA's war production included 500,000 Browning machine guns, 1,250,000 service rifles, 400,000 Sten guns, 10 million shell fuses, 3.5 million magazines, and 750,000 anti-aircraft rockets.^[5]
• Ford of Britain at their Dagenham plant built over 13,000 tracked Universal Carriers, 250,000 V8 engines,^[6] over 185,000 military vehicles,^[6][7] Agricultural vehicles were also an important element - at one point the Fordson represented 95% of UK tractor production.^[6]

London Aircraft Production Group

In parallel with the Shadow Factory scheme, the London Aircraft Production Group (LAPG) was formed in 1940 by combining management of factories and workshops of Chrysler at Kew, Duple, Express Motor & Bodyworks Limited, Park Royal Coachworks and London Transport. The major activity of the group was the production of Handley Page Halifax bombers for the RAF, ammunition, gun parts, armoured vehicles and spare parts for vehicles. The group was led by London Transport from their works at Chiswick, Aldenham Works and the De Havilland factory at Leavesden, Hertfordshire, which had a large purpose-built factory and airfield for production, assembly and flight testing of completed Halifax bombers.^[8]

Due to the high priority placed on aircraft production, large numbers of workers were drafted with little experience or training in aircraft production, with over half the workforce eventually being female. At its peak the LAPG included 41 factories or sites, 600 sub-contractors and 51,000 employees, producing one aircraft an hour. The first Halifax from the LAPG was delivered in 1941 and the last, named London Pride, in April 1945.^[8]

List of shadow factories

National Archive catalogue entries

Information concerning the Shadow Factory plan and Shadow Factories can be found among the following records and descriptive series list code headings held by The National Archives. For the full set of references (including German shadow factories) see the Catalogue below:

References

External links

• The Shadow Scheme a 1 hour 10 minute documentary released 15 July 2013
• "Production - what is wrong?", Flight, 14 April 1938  - A contemporary critic of the pre-war expansion of UK aircraft production
• London Aircraft Production Group