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Men Who Make Transport

22nd September 1961
Page 46
Page 47
Page 46, 22nd September 1961 — Men Who Make Transport
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

Archt siah Watts

IF septuagenarian Arthur Watts, who is chairman and managing director of Watts (Factors), Ltd., Lydney, were not so immersed in the day-to-day operations of so many companies that there is not space enough here to mention them all, I, for one, would like to persuade him to write a history of the internal combustion engine's development.

For he was in at the start—in it at any rate from the day when an enthusiastic policeman booked him for speeding on his motor bike in Chepstow. It having been proved in court that he had been scorching at 12 miles per hour the magistrate observed that there was no doubt that motor cycles were noisy and dangerous machines. His horse always shied when one passed, he said.

That was about two years after young Arthur was apprenticed to J. S. Willway and Sons, of Tramways Centre, Bristol (whose showrooms I well remember way back in 1910 for they always had a fine display of Overlands!). From Bristol he returned to the scene of the foundation of the family fortunes in Lydney, Glos, where his father owned an ironmongery business and where Arthur lost no time in developing along his favourite lines—selling and repairing cycles, motorcycles (for which he had grown a passion) and, later, motorcars. They were days, let me remind the nostalgic, when motor bikes were equipped with a fine starting apparatus—" push and jump.Who today remembers the Watney? Not a brewer, but a motor bike assembled and sold by Watts, the name deriving from an elision of Watts and Lydney. In its time a startling success.

Arthur Watts told me about his first car, bought in co-operation with his brother. It was a De Dion Bouton, circa 1900, with a single-cylinder engine, tiller steering and a gear change which looked very much like a steering wheel: left turn bottom gear, right turn top, and no reverse. Petrol, incidentally, was Is. per gallon-2--when you could get it! Some 10 years old, the car cost I5.

That seems to have sparked off as keen an enthusiasm for cars as for motorcycles, for it must have been around the year 1912 that the Watts organization started selling Fords.

Then, Arthur's taste for getting ahead being far from satisfied, the company operated one or two hire cars and was granted a G.P.O. mail contract for the Forest of Dean area.

The first war intervened. Arthur finds himself in the Royal Naval Air Service at Cranwell (then H.M.S. Daedalus) and was serving When the Royal Flying Corps became the Royal Air Force. Now his days were spent working to his heart's content on the maintenance of acro engines—Sunbeams, Rolls, Le Clerget and many others.

It was after the war, during 1920 and 1921, that Arthur Watts, with a wider experience of motor engineering and an unquenched, and undiminished, eagerness to "get on" helped to reorganize his father's business. From that time the motor trade department was separated from the ironmongery, new premises were built in the centre of Lydney, and off went Arthur on a Grand Tour of Europe in search of ex-War Department lorries, chassis and spares. A truly mixed bag of time-expired warlike material was brought back to Gloucestershire, much of it being used by Red and White Bus Services in their early days.

Incidentally, he was to spend the next 40 years in close association with that company, acting for some time as chief engineer and later as technical director.

What impressed me about the whole Watts set-up in Lydney is its ramifications. Name a motor development or type of transport enterprise, and it is more than likely that at some time in his long career Arthur Watts has experimented with it, improved it, or operated it. It looks like a history of uninterrupted development, of unfaltering 3,uccess. But, of course, no company has a story like that.

We've had our failures and we've done things that ought to have turned out much better than they did," says Arthur. Certainly he and, under his guidance, his company, have been untiring in trial and error; nor does it appear that his energetic inventiveness has faded very much now he has passed the three score and ten mark.

There was, for instance, the oil vaporizer, one of several fuel devices for bus operation in which he was closely concerned during 1926 to 1930. Later came experiments with a two-stroke diesel. In 1928 he became interested in the old L2 Gardner marine diesel and fitted some into ex-W.D. Leylands, allowing for the greater torque by changing from solids to larger diameter pneumatics.

Diesels seem to have interested Arthur right from the start. He never wearied in arguing and demonstrating. Thus it was that around 1931 he urged the other directors of Red and White to convert a bus to diesel power by fitting a Gardner oil engine, the opposition to such a conversion by all passenger fleet operators being at that time very considerable. By 1936, however (Arthur Watts related with glee), conversions had been made on a broad scale. Good or bad? I put the question to him from the point of view of a passenger and pedestrian. No less a personage than the Duke of Edinburgh recently complained that he was sure he was being choked to death by diesel fumes. Nonsense claims Watts. "Fumes come only from badly maintained engines," he says. "That doesn't condemn diesel fuel or engines."

He faced his second world war in a different capacity from the one in which he served during the first. In November, 1939 (still inventing), he took out a patent for a gas producer with gravity feed to the fire furnace, a development which incorporated a fuel hopper on the roof of a bus. Before 1939, he pointed out, very little attention was paid to the development of solid fuels, a factor which led to the invention of the Watts gravity feed boiler.

The war pursued its tragic and 'monotonous course. The Watts organization was much engaged in overhauls and repairs of many types of diesels. Essential commercial vehicle work was, of course, continued.

Between 1954 and 1956 he twice visited Africa where his son Geoffrey is in charge of United Transport's interests in Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda. The Rhodesias saw him, too. Untiring and full of initiative still, he went across the Atlantic in 1960 and secured the manufacturing rights for the U.K. of Mitco Industrial Tires Co. Inc.

And 1961? I'm working as hard as ever," he told me. " I still attend all the board meetings. I'm involved in developing Mitco tyres." But some relief is ahead. "1 may be relieved of the technical side of United Transport direction in 1962 when my son comes back from Africa."

But my bet is that he won't be long filling that gap in his day's activities, if gap there should happen to be. H.C.


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