The Flying Yorkshireman

Out of Southampton one day last week sailed a cargo of six knocked-down British tractors, bound for India. Their builder, David Brown, 50, Britain's third biggest maker of tractors (after Harry Ferguson and Ford), had stolen a march on competitors. Instead of trying to hurdle India's import barriers on foreign goods, he had signed a deal with Bombay's locally owned Mahindra-Mahindra plant to assemble and sell his machines. After the tractors, Brown dispatched a team of instructor technicians to set up a tractor school in India. Before long, he hopes to have Mahindra-Mahindra making the complete David Brown tractor on license.

Such enterprise has made David Brown Corp., Ltd.--one of Britain's few remaining large family-owned companies--one of the country's fastest growing. David Brown's industrial empire (18 plants) sprawls from Australia to South Africa, turning out everything from gears and castings to oilfield equipment, tractors and automobiles (the famed Aston Martin sports car).

A Will to Grow. The company's biggest growth has come during the 20 years since Yorkshire-born David Brown, grandson of the founder, succeeded his father in the family business. Fresh from an American tour and full of Yankee ideas of expansion, Brown wanted to expand the company, then Britain's biggest gear maker, into other products.

In 1935, he moved into one of England's most depressed areas, Penistone, Yorkshire, and, against his father's warnings of the lack of skilled labor, started a steel and bronze foundry. He developed simplified techniques which required only a handful of skilled men, used unskilled workers for the rest, thus kept down costs. The foundry prospered, and Brown made a deal with Harry Ferguson to start making his tractors. But they soon disagreed. In 1939, after Ferguson made a new deal with the late Henry Ford, Brown began making his own tractors. They cost more than Ford's or Ferguson's, but Brown said simply: "If we can't be the cheapest, let's be the best." He laid down the rule that the tractors should be "solid, comfortable to sit on, as weatherproof as possible, and as easy to drive as a car."

A Fast Track. Brown's ideas paid off. When the government tried to stop his tractor-making during the war so that he could concentrate on making gears for the military, he persuaded it that tractors were essential, too, and kept on expanding. At war's end, with U.S. tractor imports restricted by the dollar shortage, he grabbed the opportunity, got the materials he needed to continue expanding.

Brown now sells abroad fully three-fourths of his present tractor production of 8,000 a year. Out of the profits, he bought up the sickly Aston Martin Ltd., and began designing, in 1947, the sleek, swift "DB" (for David Brown) sports cars, which were soon winning many a British and European trophy. Brown turned each year's racing model into the following year's production model, also produced a luxurious, saloon-type car (the Lagonda). Although production is limited (about ten a week) and the cars are virtually handmade, they have earned Brown plenty of prestige and some profits. This year his DB3 latest racers have won six out of eight races, including England's premier race, the T.T. (for Tourist Trophy).

A Knack to Manage. David Brown has done more than show Britain's manufacturers how to move faster. He has been far ahead of most in finding ways of improving morale and productivity of his workers and developing his executives from their ranks. When a 25-acre estate and mansion near one plant became vacant in 1944, Brown transformed it into a dining room and social center for his workers. He turned his former home at Huddersfield into a guest house for his executives.

Brown has given up racing himself (though his 21-year-old daughter Angela and son David Jr. race), but he still rides in county point-to-point races on the thoroughbreds he raises on his 700-acre farm, Chequers Manor, near London. A licensed pilot, he often flies his own plane on business trips. In his hunt for new markets all over the globe, he has found he can ship British tractors through the Panama Canal cheaply enough to compete with Midwest tractor makers for California sales. Says he: "We wouldn't try to sell in the Midwest, because those farmers are like our Yorkshiremen--inclined to distrust a product they don't know. Californians are willing to try something new."

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