English Electric

The English Electric Company was formed in December 1918 under the chairmanship of Sir Charles Ellis by bringing together five wartime manufacturers: the Coventry Ordnance Works, the Phoenix Dynamo Manufacturing Company of Bradford, Dick, Kerr & Co. of Preston (acquired in 1919, and with it Willans & Robinson of Rugby), and the dynamo works of Siemens Brothers. It employed 10,000 people by 1920. Preston kept tramcars and rolling stock, Stafford became the main centre for transformers and switchgear from 1931, Rugby built steam turbines and diesel engines, and after the 1930 reorganisation the manufacture of electrical machinery was concentrated at Bradford, which produced electric motors and generators, industrial generating sets and vehicle-mounted power equipment. The group went on to build the Canberra and Lightning aircraft, the Napier Deltic engine, the DEUCE and KDF9 computers and the Thunderbird missile, with its head office in the Strand, London.

The Bradford works had begun as the Phoenix Dynamo Manufacturing Company, a partnership making arc lamps and electrical instruments from 1895 and motors and dynamos from 1897-98, incorporated in June 1903 with £60,000 capital after buying the works, business and patents of Rosling & Fynn and consolidating at Thornbury on the Leeds Road. Phoenix built flying boats and Armstrong Whitworth FK10 biplanes in the First World War before merging into English Electric, which made it the centre of its electric motor and generator design; the old company was wound up in June 1923. The Leeds Road factory remained English Electric's until 1966, and the site is now occupied by the Odeon cinema multiplex.

The Land Rover product came from Bradford. The leaflet for the ''English Electric' 15 kVA Generating System', 'as approved by the Rover Co. Ltd for use with the Land-Rover', was issued by The English Electric Company Limited, Special Products Group, Bradford, Yorkshire (telephone Bradford 65221) and printed by Percy Lund Humphries of Bradford. The system was designed as a mobile high-output power source for power tools, pumps, floodlighting and welding sets: a two-stage, brushless, air-cooled, self-excited generator coupled to the centre power take-off shaft and mounted on a chassis cross-member beneath the body floor, so that freight space, ground clearance and manoeuvrability were unaffected. It gave 15 kVA at 200 V (115 V to earth), three-phase, 400 cycles a second, at 0.8 power factor to four 16-amp sockets at the rear, the frequency chosen to run high-power low-weight induction-motor tools; a semiconductor voltage regulator sat on a control panel on the dash, with a thermal overload breaker and earth-leakage trip, and the whole could be installed in a day from a kit of parts. The Land Rover needed the centre power take-off, an engine speed governor on petrol models and, in the tropics, an oil cooler. A later edition, 'English Electric Land Rover Generating System 400 c/s', is dated by the archive to about 1975.

In 1968 GEC took over English Electric, creating a combine of more than 250,000 people and bringing the English Electric name to an end. English Electric's Bradford electrical-machines business continued under GEC, latterly as part of GEC Alsthom Electromotors, whose works at Bradford, Birmingham and Newcastle-under-Lyme were bought by Hawker Siddeley in 1989; Hawker Siddeley was in turn acquired by BTR Industries in 1991.