British Steel Industry

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 71, 21 July 1948, Page 5

British Steel Industry

N.Z. JOURNALIST’S SHEFFIELD VISIT (By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) Sheffield, July 3. Production figures are valuable, but soulless cyphers. The figures for steel are a direct measure of Britain’s progress towards economic * recovery. Sometimes they are good. Sometimes not so good. But always souliess compared to the flaring, Crashing work in a steel mill. Recently I toured • the Sheffield works of the English Steel Corporation, a Vickers subsidiary. Even a short morning’s glimpse of the work of this one component of the industry gave assurance that indeed there is production in Britain. English Steel is not turning out products which grab the export limelight. But seeing row upon row of completed car and truck crankshafts, I realised the spectacular motor exports would begin to look sick without English Steel. New torsion rod springs, also for the motor industry, are coming off the lathes in their thousands. This is the factory which, for a time during the blitz had the only drop forge in Britain turning out crankshafts for Merlin aero motors. In the same great moulds as cradled the ten-ton bombs we saw 90 tons of steel run boiling and furious. This was to become, after many days’ rolling and pounding, another of several giant cylinders for Australian hospitals. \ What the mill turned out for New Zealand not even the directors knew. Most of their products go on to assembly factories, of whose orders they know nothing. The great marine gearwheels we saw may spin in the engine room of a New Zealand bound liner. Some from, among the piles of railway wheels may start their working life trundling up and down the Wairarapa. Among the executives of this particular foundry, who could not be said to be Britain’s steel kings, I found fatalistic unconcern over whether or not the steel industry was to be nationalised. The. European sales manager, just back from Denmark, confessed he had not yet thought up a convincing answer to the question from European buyers: “If we give you our order and the industry is ‘then nationalised, what of our order?” » Heavy industry is so interlocked in some parts of Britain that nationalisation has already produced entertaining problems. A coal mine in Sheffield was owned by a steel company, and situated right in the middle of their works. The steel works and the coal mine pooled their needs of power and water. Came coal nationalisation, and some fine negotiation was needed before the mine got power, water. and access to itself through the steel works. As the British cabinet is no doubt sacly aware, if it nationalises the production. of steel, 'how far can it take nationalisation down the manufacturing line? Some steel factories work so much as a unit that to try to separate production from the manufacturing side would render, both uneconomic.