Kevin Cameron
What is it that makesa manufacturing successpossible?
What is it that makes manufacturing change locations? Kevin has answers.
Back when print magazines could send editors to the great sporting contests, I could look out from my hotel window at night to see the lights of ships standing off the port of Valencia, Spain, waiting to enter in daylight. Yearslater I would count 13vessels waiting their turns off Marseille.
I naturally thought of the 'Peoples of the Sea' 40 centuries ago, moving along this same coast. Where might they have been bound? One likely destination was Cornwall, whose deposits of tin were essential to the production of tough, useful bronze for making tools and weapons. Tin from Cornwall has been detected in bronzes beyond the far end of the Mediterranean, produced as long ago as 2350 BCE.
Cornwall's last operating tin mine, the South Crofty, ceased operations in 1998. A similar termination is in progress for England's production of motorcycles, as Bloor Triumph moves major model lines to Thailand .
England and motorcycles were a perfect match, despite the original invention having been German and the motorcycle's first economic success taking place in France (20,000 de Dion -Bouton three wheelers had been produced there by 1900).While Germany laboured under its 18th century proprieties and France remained a farming nation with light industrial 'icing', England was still an industrial revolution-in -being. The creation of ships of iron and steel, of the railroads, and of a skilled workforce and middle class to serve them made England ideal soil in which the seeds of motorcycling could germinat e and flourish. Automobiles caught up to the motorcycle in numbers only with difficulty - in 1925 there were still more bikes than cars on England's roads.
Beginning in the inter-war period and continuing into the 1960s, England's motorcycles were the standard of the world. England had everything - specialist producers of wheels, levers, cables, chains, gearboxes, brakes, fuel tanks. Add to that proprietary engines from JAP,Rudge, Villiers and others, and producing your own brand of bike became as simple as assembling bought-in components. If Sturmey Archer couldn't fill your gearbox order, sure Burman or Albion could. Triumph cranked out 1000of their bare-bones-but-useful P-Models a week.
Sadly,being first to create an industry sets limits. Why replace manual assembly when it is (wrongly) believed to be the basis of high quality? When Royal Enfield sought tooling capable of making three main bearings accurately concentric, experts told them such fripperies were expensive and unnecessary
- what parallel twin needs more than two main bearings anyway? And so primacy passed to Japan, which started industry afresh after the Pacific War with the latest in American and German production systems . And when the US in 1986 by the 'Plaza Accords' strong-armed Japan into accepting an unfavourable revaluation of the yen, Japan's instant response was to rapidly shift parts production to China. Do you suppose that was a shot in the arm for China's emerging industries? Action and reaction. Today,Thailand has become a centre for motorcycle production, with 7-10 manufacturers pushing out nearly four million machines per year. Now it is Thailand that has everything, or 'can get it for you tomorrow'. Production machines? Measuring equipment? Byrail from China, manufacturer to the world.
When people think of motorcycle production shifting from England to Thailand, the first words from their lips are 'cheap labour: but the fact is that the very circumstances that once made England the centre of the motorcycle world no longer exist there. Now they exist in Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Thailand. That's not all. Where four million machines are produced annually, there are also a skilled workforce, banks eager to lend , acceptance of manufacturing as social progress - a fresh start separate from England's 240 years of mutually destructive conflict between labour and finance.
Nations finding profit in de-industrialisation have increasing difficulty in staffing manufacturing plants . Some concerns in the US find it useful to offer remedial reading so that new hires can complete their education. Others hope to 'create cultures of precision' offshore, to suppl ement the ageing domestic variety. Racer-engineer Bill Lomas was the son of
a man with years at Rolls-Royce, and grew up with tools in his hands and curiosity in his mind. Who comes up in similar fashion today? Grandparents and great-grandparents had those skills, operating Simplex, Archdale, Baush, Churchill, Kearns or other production machines.
When I visited Mr. Bloor's oper ation at Hinckley a few years ago I gloried in the mushy peas served in the canteen, but noticed German Heller machines on the production line. No English equivalents? Thanks to the low cost of ocean shipping, Heller can ship its machines anywhere.
Thailand has made itself into a centre of motorcycle production. Triumphs produced there will seek sales in expanding Asian markets. That's business.