When British Engines celebrated its 100th birthday with a party at the Sage Gateshead featuring soul singer Beverley Knight, and the Millennium Bridge lit up in the company’s colours, it was a rare public display from the firm.
While not quite the North East’s best kept secret – British Engines employs more than 1,200 people and is a major presence in the St Peter’s area of Newcastle, among other places – the firm is not one to seek publicity, let alone blow its trumpet. But not many companies can make it to the 100-year mark, and British Engines has done so with a return to profitability after some difficult years, and plans to create 100 new jobs.
As well as its sites in Newcastle’s east end, it also has engineering facilities in South Shields and Cramlington, plus a head office on the Quorum Business Park and a number of overseas offices.
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The company’s beginnings were certainly more modest, with brothers Charles and Harold Lamb – current chairman Alex Lamb’s grandfather and great uncle – setting up with just two employees and three machines to carry out machining work for local businesses. The name British Engines actually pre-dates the company by five years, having been acquired from an inventor whose design for a jet engine never came to fruition. (In all of its 100 years, despite that name, the company has never actually made engines).
Expansion at the firm was followed by tough times during the Great Depression, but the Second World War offered the chance to work with DeHavilland, Rolls Royce and the Ministry of War, supplying parts for engines that went in RAF planes such as the Hurricane and the Lancaster Bombers. The relationship with DeHavilland continued into peacetime, with British Engines becoming an important supplier for the DeHavilland Comet, the world’s first jet airliner.
Despite that success, it would be during the 1950s and ’60s that set British Engines on the way to the company it is today, largely through the work of Harold’s son Graham, who had served an apprenticeship at Vickers Armstrong, and Ron Dodd, who joined as a 15-year-old apprentice and would go on to become managing director. (His son Richard is now CEO).
The two men changed the nature of the company away from short-term sub-contracting to creating products of its own. This led to the establishment of BEL Vales, supplying ultra-high pressure valves firstly to the chemical industry on Teesside but also to the North Sea oil sector and coal mines. Cable company CMP and hydraulics firm Rotary Power followed (and are still a major part of the company today).
The 1980s – with oil crises, the miners’ strike and widespread industrial decline – brought the company close to collapse but it survived and would then thrive in the latter parts of the 20th century and the early 21st. The downturn in oil and coal markets in recent years has seen the company pivot to focus on the renewable energy, nuclear and defence markets.
Current chairman Alex Lamb, who joined the business around the turn of the century, having previously worked as an accountant at Price Waterhouse, attributes much of the company’s longevity to its survival as a family business for its entire history.
“We couldn’t have done it otherwise,” he said. “We would have had interests from outside stakeholders forcing decisions that we wouldn’t have made as a family, whether that’s short term or whatever. It allows us to think across a longer period of time.”
He also credits a long-running – and much-admired – apprenticeship scheme that has been a mainstay of the company for more than half of its history, and the contribution of its wider workforce to the success of the company – including family members in successive generations. “We’ve got really good people,” he said, “we always have. We try to look past the here and now all the time. We make sure that we invest, invest, invest in all aspects of the business so we move with the times.
“We keep ploughing our reserves back into the future of the business where we can.”
And for Mr Lamb, that is something worth celebrating. “We did the 100-year celebration at the Sage,” he said, “but when we started, the Tyne Bridge hadn’t been built. No one could imagine what Newcastle would look like in 2022 compared to 1922 and the same applies to another 100 years. Hopefully we’re still here but 100 years is a long time.
“It was great to get everyone together because 100 years in business is quite a big thing, it really was worth doing something special to mark it. And it was a great thing.”
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