Royal Ordnance Factories

The Royal Ordnance Factories grew out of three older government establishments, the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, the Royal Gunpowder Factory at Waltham Abbey and the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, all thought vulnerable to bombing from the Continent. Most ROFs were built in the rearmament years before the Second World War, the Royal Arsenal designing many of them and acting as agent for the construction of the engineering and ammunition factories, and by 1942 some 300,000 people, 60 per cent of them women, worked in 42 Royal Ordnance Factories: 24 engineering, 8 explosives and 10 filling. The temporary factories closed soon after the war; those designated permanent carried on.

Nottingham was one of the permanent gun factories. The site on King's Meadow Road had been Cammell Laird's National Projectile Factory of the First World War, commissioned on 15 July 1915, its first shells made in May 1916; the War Office bought it back in September 1936, installed the first machine tools in January 1937 and set about 300 people to reconstruct it. During the Second World War ROF Nottingham employed about 14,000 on two twelve-hour shifts, making 3.7-inch anti-aircraft guns, Bofors 40 mm guns, 2-pounder and 17-pounder anti-tank guns, the BL 5.5-inch medium gun of 1940-42 and the prototype Centurion hulls. Employment fell to a few hundred in the late 1950s before the factory delivered the first L118 Light Gun to the Army in 1974 and began SA80 rifle production at its small-arms facility in 1988.

The Land Rover product of the ordnance factories is the 120 mm BAT family of recoilless anti-tank guns, designed for the British Army in the 1950s. The L2 BAT was accepted in 1953 and the lighter L4 MoBAT dropped the armoured shield; the L6 Wombat, the Weapon of Magnesium, Battalion, Anti-Tank, used magnesium alloys and a lightweight trolley carriage with a narrow axle and small wheels to bring the weight down to about 295 kg, and entered service in 1964. It was normally carried in the rear of a specially adapted ¾-ton Land Rover, the portee, with a rack of six ready rounds (four on the Lightweight), could be towed by or mounted on a Land Rover, was fully air-transportable, and could also go on the FV432 or, for Norway, the Snow Trac. It was the principal infantry anti-tank weapon of 1979, was replaced from that year by the MILAN guided missile, and lingered in Berlin's anti-tank platoons into the late 1980s; Australia also used it. Which of the ordnance factories built the Wombat could not be established from the sources fetched for this entry, which is why it is left in draft.

On 2 January 1985 the majority of the Royal Ordnance Factories were vested in the government-owned Royal Ordnance plc, which British Aerospace bought in April 1987 for £188.5 million; Patricroft, Enfield and Waltham Abbey South closed soon after. When British Aerospace merged with Marconi Electronic Systems in 1999 the sites became business units of BAE Systems, ROF Nottingham closed in 2001 with its work moved to Barrow-in-Furness, and in 2004 the Royal Ordnance name was dropped as RO Defence and Alvis Vickers were combined into BAE Systems Land Systems.