James Leasor

Wheels to Fortune: The Life and Times of William Morris, Viscount Nuffield (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

William Richard Morris, later Viscount Nuffield, set up business as a cycle agent and manufacturer in Oxford, in 1893, at the age of sixteen. He was, through sheer hard work, to go on to make the Morris-Oxford car and set up the famous car works at Cowley, where many other Morris designs were manufactured, becoming Britain's largest motor manufacturer. This is an account of his life and of his vision: 'the £100 car', a car the public could afford to buy. Leasor tells of this unusual and determined man's success, the millions he made and the millions he gave away.

His direct industrial legacy has sadly almost gone, with the demise of the British motor industry that has gone from being one of the largest in the world to just a niche player in the specialist market as well as a convenient location for assembly plants for various foreign manufacturers.

But his memory lives on as possibly the greatest British philanthropist. Over his lifetime he gave away over £30million, which if compared to relative share of GDP would amount to some £5billion at today's (2011) prices. There are still numerous bodies that bear his name and are based on his initial grants, that are household names, such as the Nuffield Foundation, the Nuffield Trust, Nuffield College, Nuffield Health, The Nuffield Institute for Health Services Studies, Nuffield Farming Scholarships Trust, and Nuffield Trust for Forces of the Crown. Few beneficiaries probably ever spend any time thinking of the man who started it all as a bicycle repairer in tiny rented premises in Oxford, or how their funding came about. This is that story.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: James Leasor
• Erscheinungstermin: 13. August 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781908291257
• Artikelnr.: 45463670

Autorenporträt

James Leasor was one of the bestselling British authors of the second half of the 20th Century. He wrote over 50 books including a rich variety of thrillers, historical novels and biographies.

His works included Passport to Oblivion (which sold over 4 million copies around the World and was filmed as Where the Spies Are, starring David Niven), the first of nine novels featuring Dr Jason Love, a Somerset GP called to aid Her Majesty's Secret Service in foreign countries, and another series about the Far Eastern merchant Doctor Robert Gunn in the 19th century. There were also sagas set in Africa and Asia, written under the pseudonym Andrew MacAllan, and tales narrated by an unnamed vintage car dealer in Belgravia.

Among non-fiction works were lives of Lord Nuffield, the Morris motor manufacturer, Wheels to Fortune and RSM Brittain, who was said to have the loudest voice in the Army, The Sergeant-Major; The Red Fort, which retold the story of the Indian Mutiny; and Rhodes and Barnato, which brought out the different characters of the great South African diamond millionaires. Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes? was an investigation of the unsolved murder of a Canadian mining entrepreneur in the Bahamas,

He wrote a number of books about different events in the Second World War, including Green Beach, which revealed an important new aspect of the Dieppe Raid, when a radar expert landed with a patrol of the South Saskatchewan regiment, which was instructed to protect him, but also to kill him if he was in danger of falling into enemy hands; The One that Got Away (later filmed with Hardy Kruger in the starring role) about fighter pilot, Franz von Werra, the only German prisoner of war to successfully escape from British territory; Singapore the Battle that Changed the World, on the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1941; Boarding Party (later filmed as The Sea Wolves with Gregory Peck, David Niven and Roger Moore) concerned veterans of the Calcutta Light Horse who attacked a German spy ship in neutral Goa in 1943; The Unknown Warrior, the story about a member of a clandestine British commando force consisting largely of Jewish exiles from Germany and eastern Europe, who decieived Hitler into thinking that the D-Day invasion was a diversion for the main assault near Calais; and The Uninvited Envoy, which told the story of Rudolph Hess' solo mission to Britain in 1941.

Thomas James Leasor was born at Erith, Kent, on Decembe...