What We Have Lost by James Hamilton-Paterson - review: Harking back to the good old days of manufacturing

I’m just old enough to remember the scent of my grandfather’s workshop, a mix of warm oil, Atco mowers and green leaded paint, against a backdrop of spanners in imperial inch measures. It was a relic from an age when people made things and fixed things and drove British cars fuelled by five-star petrol. It is the age captured by James Hamilton-Paterson in a book that is by turns engrossing and infuriating — a response to Brexit in mechanical form.

Hamilton-Paterson adores that seductive but misleading late burst of British confidence, the moment between the end of the Second World War and Suez, when our global swagger was supported by more than words. There was early nuclear power, the first computers, jet engines, fast fighter planes and big ships — all made here, and all advanced. It was an age when the Queen still looked young on newsreels and Prince Philip was fascinated by technical success. But six decades on, our domestic manufacturers are all but gone and Britain imports more than it exports. So what went wrong, he asks?

It is a good question, but one this book fails to answer. Reading it is a little like hearing an elderly relative insist the old days were better. You know some things were, but that there is another side to the story too. As Hamilton-Paterson puts it, a mix of bad managers, dodgy investors, foolish politicians and lazy, misled workers killed off one of the world’s leading manufacturing economies. Great names from Alvis to Avro went to the wall, to be replaced by city spivs doing who knows what for salaries they certainly don’t deserve. For him, an economy that makes things is much more noble than one that does things for others.

He’s right, of course, that some of the losses were tragic. How, he asks, did our motorcycle industry die within the space of a decade as late as the 1970s? Why isn’t Britain a leading builder of profitable cruise ships? Why did we let a diverse car industry merge itself to bankruptcy, so that Morris models competed with Austin ones from the same company, neither of them a match for French and German rivals?

All true. But I’m not sure it’s right to blame the City of London for this. The government made huge strategic mistakes, backing too many types of fighter jets and diesel railway engines, for instance, or, in the end, nationalising our shipyards into one rusting disaster — a point he acknowledges. Bad luck counted too. Had windows on the the Comet 1 not cracked at the corners, the plane would have been a world beater.

Britain’s first place in the industrial revolution also meant that it was always likely to be overtaken: our ironworks were older, our shipyards smaller, our working practices more archaic, our industrial centres more congested. Germany’s manufacturing march began a century ago.

In the end, though, what spoils Hamilton-Paterson’s book for me is the lack of recognition of the things that went well: the rescue of Rolls-Royce engines, the rise of JCB with its beautiful Staffordshire factory, our role making satellites and pharmaceuticals, the resurgence of the car industry.

It’s not clear if he wants manufacturing in Britain, or British-owned manufacturers, or why that distinction matters. Moving in its recollection of the objects and firms that made up this lost age, the book is lessened by dubious and angry analysis. Read it for the former and ignore the latter.

What We Have Lost: The Dismantling of Great Britain by James Hamilton-Paterson (Head of Zeus, £25).