ABSTRACT
In 1914 the Sir William G. Armstrong Whitworth Company had grown into one of Britain's largest industrial enterprises, with a worldwide reputation for the highest-quality guns and mountings. Jealously guarding its control over the production of guns and granting contracts to only a few private firms, Britain's national arsenals remained as obsolete, unprogressive and reactionary as they had in 1854. The country's leading armaments companies – Armstrong, Whitworth and Vickers – were excluded from the list of suppliers to the army. The political, diplomatic, strategic, financial and international context of the armaments business in 1919 was completely altered by the war. In many ways manufacturing and selling locomotives was a rational diversification for the company to wean itself off total dependence on armaments. If the world economic recovery continued, the company would successfully transform itself into a general engineering company with locomotive production for global markets at its core.
