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Leonard Lord
Leonard Percy Lord, 1st Baron Lambury KBE (15 November 1896 – 13 September 1967) was a captain of the British motor industry.
Early life
Lord was educated at Bablake in Coventry. Between 1914 and 1918 he worked in a munitions factory in Coventry, then after the War he worked in a manufacturing plant for Daimler engines.
Automotive career
In 1923 he moved to the Morris Motor Company, where he was involved in rationalising all stages of the production process. In 1927 Morris bought the Wolseley Motor Company, and Lord was transferred there in order to modernise their production equipment.
In 1932 Lord was promoted to General Manager at Morris, working from the Cowley factory. In 1938 after many years of conflict with William Morris, Lord left to join Morris's chief competitor, the Austin Motor Company.
At that time, Herbert Austin was looking for somebody to direct his company, his only son having been killed during the War. Ultimately, Lord was selected to manage the company.
With the advent of World War II, Austin converted from civil to military production, and in particular the construction of ambulances and government vehicles.
After the war, Lord became Chairman of Austin in 1946, and moved the company to a resumption of civil motor-vehicle production. His KBE came in 1954.
Through further mergers and acquisitions, Lord ultimately became president of the British Motor Corporation.
He died in 1967, aged 71, during the discussions which ultimately formed British Leyland. Despite his early career success, his legacy was a sprawling and unprofitable product range, weak distribution and feeble management - ills which took their toll on BL.
In a review of the Longbridge operation, Graham Searjeant, Financial Editor of The Times (31 May 2007) notes that Lord was a "foul-mouthed, hard-driving production man". Searjeant credits some of the failures at Longbridge to Lord's "lack of vision" and the "inadequacy" of his protege-successor, George Harriman. However it was Lord who persuaded Alec Issigonis to rejoin BMC to create what became the Mini and the 1100, Austin/BMC's two most successful products. That Issigonis had the freedom to create such revolutionary cars is thanks to the mandate given to him by Lord. Gillian Bardsley, Archivist of the British Motor Heritage Trust, in her biography of Alec Issigonis, credits Lord with the vision that BMC needed an entirely new range of cars if it was to remain competitive into the 1960s.
