Armstrong Whitworth in the First World War

Abstract

Some time before the First World War, Sir Edward Grey remarked that one effect of a major conflict would be a substantial extension of state control over the economy, an advance of what he described broadly as socialism. The war was to sweep Armstrong Whitworth and other armament and heavy industrial firms into a crisis similar to that which Sir Edward Grey had anticipated. The position of Armstrongs was made still more vulnerable as they had by this time a new Chairman, one who was in some ways ill-equipped to deal with the crisis, or even indeed with the peacetime organisation of so vast a concern.