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Westwood Works 1903-2003

Westwood Works in World War 2

THE LAST WORD - LOOKING BACK

At the end of his book - "Wartime at Baker Perkins", Ivor Baker summed up his feelings about the new challenges that the Company faced after the long, hard years of war:

“It has not been difficult to write of our immediate past, for much that was unknown in 1939 is now known, and if the reader can bear a military simile when the whole world is weary of war, the blitzkrieg period of our early struggles to organise and equip ourselves for making guns merged from one of steady grinding effort gradually into triumphant mastery of the situation.

But now with the war behind us, the immediate future looms almost equally unknown. It is our determination to maintain our energy and enthusiasm, but the change back to peace-time activities involves problems no less challenging than the change forward.

No doubt we shall continue to be subjected to some measure of control; the raw materials of our trade will certainly not fall into our hands without effort on our part; considerations of national and world economy will lead to our being directed to earmark a proportion of our production for shipment abroad; these foreseen and may be many unforeseen factors are bound to complicate the difficulties of replacing several years’ normal wear and tear on our client’s plants plus the abnormal strain of war.

We have a strong incentive to fight this battle strenuously for our own sakes while incidentally we shall be fighting it on behalf of our clients, for they rely upon the performance of our machines for their living as we rely upon the manufacture of them for ours, but, with the best will in the world we cannot hope to produce everything that everybody wants without some vexatious delays, and to whatever extent we may have to ask our friends for indulgence, we shall do so believing that they will be just – and hoping that, if necessary, they will be generous”.

 

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