Introduction

Although, in certain contexts, the Royal Ordnance Factories, the Royal Dockyards and the Shadow Factories, are well known to historians, they do not occupy the place they should in the history of public ownership. Neither do they exhaust the story of public ownership in arms production. The total, cumulative, state investment in armaments capacity between 1936 and 1945 was around £1 billion. About £2.6 billion was paid out in compensation for the major nationalisations of the late 1940s. Nevertheless, even historians familiar with the history of war production do not take armament factories (or research and development (R&D) facilities) into account in the history of public ownership. William Ashworth – the official historian of wartime armament contracts – argued in his recent study of nationalised industries that ‘the Second World War saw little change in the extension of state ownership to business undertakings’ (Ashworth 1991, p. 17); the nationalisation of Short Brothers and the creation of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board ‘were tiny modifications in the relations of the public and private sectors’ (Ashworth 1991, p. 18). The reasons for this misunderstanding become clearer when we note that Ashworth, like most historians, argues that from the inter-war years ‘when large new additions were made to public ownership of industry the form of institution used was always some sort of public corporation.’ (Ashworth 1991, p. 60). Although he recognises that other forms of public ownership existed – local authority and central government operation, and state-controlled limited companies – he ignores their subsequent development.