Before the 1960's, when Tony Benn and the left of the Labour Party fell under the control of asset strippers like Brent Walker, Great Britain was covered in engineering and manufacturing workshops.But Benn and his clique were inured by the 'cult of planning', which involved the 'all centralisation is just so gooooood' ideal, and scum like Peter Walker (later to be an MP and at the centre of the Great Miners Strike) played them like a guitar, gaining governmental support to close and strip thousands of businesses in the name of progress and modernism. Benn ruefully admits this in the BBC Adam Curtis series The Mayfair Set (google &download it on a torrent....)
This is Bath Street, branching off Wherstead Road, which lead to the main gate of Ransome and Rapier (R & R) , a world renowned engineering company. The large building in the centre of the picture was a detached workshop, the main works being to the right (and out of view) of the picture.
One of it's R & R's to fame:
The Stokes trench mortar was developed by an Englishman, Sir Wilfred Scott-Stokes (1860—1927) who was the managing director of a mechanical engineering firm, Ransome & Rapier of Ipswich, England. Although Stokes did not have a military background, he quickly grasped the need for a "portable gun" soon after war erupted in Europe. Stokes correctly reasoned that such a weapon would be valuable for reducing the deadly machine gun nests that were beginning to wreak much havoc on the Western Front. Stokes had a working prototype of his trench mortar ready for testing in December of 1914, barely four months after the war started.
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All gone to the benefit of the shareholders (for whom Robert Maxwell asset stripped R & R in the mid eighties) , the motor car and ... no-one else. The asset stripping of the eighties was merely a re-run of the sixties, hoovering up what was left of Britain's working class employment base.
