ABSTRACT
Engineering has never been a single industry. The Engineering Employers’ Federation, the national representative body for em ployers in the industry, was obliged to divide its mem bership into thirty different ‘sections’ or trades. Their products ranged from capital equipm ent for o ther industries like agricultural and textile machinery, transport like aircraft, ships, locomotives and m otor vehicles, to consumer goods like radios, lamps and telephones. They included producers geared mainly to domestic markets as well as those geared mostly for export. Further divisions could be drawn between ‘old’ and ‘new’ engineering trades and their regional con centrations. The older sector produced capital equipm ent like tex tile, agricultural and m ining machinery, steam engines and ships. Electrical equipm ent and goods, aircraft, m otor cars and cycles, on the o ther hand, were products of the newer sector. M anufacture within these two divisions was often highly localised. Between the wars, m arine engineering was centred in Scotland and the North East, textile machinery in the North West, motors, vehicles and allied trades in the Midlands and electrical engineering in the South East. A simple underlying characteristic gave some unity and defini tion to the industry, however. All branches of engineering made ‘highly composite articles of which the main constituents are m etal’, and they used ‘the finished or semi-finished products of many dif ferent industries’.1
