Leonard Lord
Leonard Lord, 1st Baron Lambury | |
---|---|
Born | 15 November 1896 |
Died | 13 September 1967 |
Nationality | British |
Occupation | Automobile executive |
Known for | Co-founding and leading British Motor Corporation |
Leonard Percy Lord, 1st Baron Lambury KBE (15 November 1896 – 13 September 1967) was a captain of the British motor industry.
Background and education
Leonard Percy Lord was born on 16 November 1896 and was the youngest child in his family. Lord was the son of William Lord, of Coventry, and Emma, daughter of George Swain. He was educated at Bablake School, Coventry. The school had a fully equipped carpenter's workshop and a working forge. Leonard did well enough and his fees, like many of the Bablake's boys, were paid for by Coventry Education Committee. He left the school at the age of 16 after his father's death. He used the technical training he had received at school to get a job at Courtaulds as a jig draughtsman.[citation needed]
Automotive career
He moved to
At that time,
Death
Leonard Lord died in 1967, at the age of 70, during the discussions which ultimately formed British Leyland. The editor of Commercial Motor magazine, H. Brian Cottee, in an obituary written shortly after Lord's death opined that he was "at heart a production engineer, and an immensely able one at that", and "one of the great engineer-administrators of the motor industry". Cottee described him as "tough, capable, sometimes blunt" with "a wry humour and a sometimes surprising humility".[4]
Legacy
Although Lord had success in his early career, his legacy was a sprawling and unprofitable product range, weak distribution and feeble management at British Leyland – ills which took their toll on the company.[citation needed]
He has contributed in the essential modernization of production methods at both Cowley and Longbridge, making the British motor industry compatible in world markets. He developed an export output of Britain's post-war economics. Finally, though he initiated the union of the industry's two major rivals, it was difficult to ensure that the two elements worked in harmony.[1]
In a review of the Longbridge operation, Graham Searjeant, Financial Editor of The Times (31 May 2007) notes that Lord was a "foul-mouthed, hard-driving production man". Searjeant credits some of the failures at Longbridge to Lord's "lack of vision" and the "inadequacy" of his protégé-successor, George Harriman. Lord's biographer, Martyn Nutland, thinks this is unfair, and that Lord dealt imaginatively with the inescapable circumstances of the day. It was Lord who persuaded Alec Issigonis to rejoin BMC to create what became the Mini and the 1100, Austin/BMC's two most successful products. That Issigonis had the freedom to create such revolutionary cars is thanks to the mandate given to him by Lord. Gillian Bardsley, Archivist of the British Motor Heritage Trust, in her biography of Alec Issigonis, credits Lord with the vision that BMC needed an entirely new range of cars if it was to remain competitive into the 1960s.[citation needed]
Personal life
Lord married Ethel Lily, daughter of George Horton, in 1921. They had three daughters.
Lord, who had been raised to the peerage as Baron Lambury in 1962, died in September 1967, aged 70. With Lord Lambury having no son, the barony became extinct upon his death.
References
- ^ a b "Lord Lambury, KBE" Archived 1 February 2018 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved on 9 Jan 2018
- ^ "No. 40053". The London Gazette (Supplement). 1 January 1954. p. 10.
- ^ "No. 42632". The London Gazette. 27 March 1962. p. 2513.
- ^ "Obituary". Commercial Motor. Vol. 126, no. 3235. Temple Press Limited. 22 September 1967. p. 31. Retrieved 21 June 2023 – via Internet Archive.
Further reading
- Nutland, Martyn (2012). Brick by Brick. AuthorHouse. ISBN 978-1-4772-0318-7.
External links