William Morris, Viscount Nuffield
1877–1963 · Motor manufacturer, philanthropist
The Oxford-bred bicycle-mender who built Morris Motors at Cowley into Britain's largest car maker, then gave most of his fortune away — endowing Nuffield College, the Nuffield Foundation, and the Nuffield Department of Medicine.
William Morris arrived in Oxford as a three-year-old in the early 1880s and left it, at his death in 1963, as one of the most consequential figures the city has produced. The bicycle-repair business he set up in his parents' garden shed at sixteen became, within thirty years, the largest car manufacturer in Britain — and the philanthropy of his later years reshaped Oxford as a research university.
James Street to the High Street
Born in Worcester on 10 October 1877, Morris moved to Oxford with his parents at three. The family settled at 16 James Street, off the Cowley Road in East Oxford; the house now bears a blue plaque. Apprenticed at fifteen to a local bicycle-seller, he asked nine months in for a pay rise, was refused it, and set up on his own — first in the shed at the back of James Street, then at a shop at 48 High Street.
By 1910 he had outgrown the shop. He built new premises in Longwall Street, described by a local newspaper as the "Oxford Motor Palace", changed the business name from "The Oxford Garage" to "The Morris Garage", and still had to take additional rooms in Queen Street. The Longwall site was redeveloped in 1980, retaining the original frontage, and is now student accommodation for New College.
The Bullnose, and Cowley
In 1912 Morris designed his first car. Using bought-in components — including engines and axles from the United States — he began to assemble the two-seat "Bullnose" Morris Oxford at a disused military training college in Cowley. (The full story of the works is told at Cowley Works.)
After the First World War, production rose from 400 cars in 1919 to 56,000 in 1925. Morris was the first British manufacturer to apply Henry Ford's mass-production techniques on a serious scale, and through the period 1919–1925 he built or purchased additional factories at Abingdon, Birmingham and Swindon to add to those in Oxford.
Morris became Oxford's largest employer. The 1920s and 1930s saw heavy in-migration to the city from depressed areas of Britain — Wales, the north-east — seeking work in his factories. The first successful strike at a Morris plant came in 1934, led by the Communist Party activist Abe Lazarus with Labour support; on the eleventh day management agreed both to wage increases and to the recognition of trade unions in Morris factories.
Fascism, then repudiation
Historians describe Morris as anti-union and anti-Semitic, and a key financier of Sir Oswald Mosley's British fascism. The historian Dave Renton has documented that Morris gave Mosley £35,000 to fund the anti-Semitic newspaper Action and a further £50,000 in 1930 to bankroll Mosley's New Party, which the following year was absorbed into the British Union of Fascists.
After the BUF's reputation deteriorated, Morris withdrew public support from British fascists from 1932 onward. In 1934 he issued a statement through The Jewish Chronicle repudiating fascism and antisemitism and announcing a donation to the Central British Fund for German Jewry in support of European Jewish refugees.
Nuffield: college, foundation, hospital
Morris was created a baronet in 1929, Baron Nuffield in 1934, and Viscount Nuffield in 1938. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1939, a GBE in 1941, and a Companion of Honour in 1958.
His giving was on a scale matched in twentieth-century Oxford only by the Rhodes endowment. In 1937 he founded Nuffield College, the University's first co-educational college and its first post-graduate college, focused on the social sciences. In December 1938, during a polio epidemic, he commissioned an improved iron lung — the Both-Nuffield respirator, designed so it could be produced on car-factory lines — and donated approximately 1,700 of them to hospitals throughout Britain and the British Empire. In 1943 he endowed the Nuffield Foundation with £10 million for education and social welfare.
In later life he lived at Nuffield Place, near Henley — the country house that, on his death, passed first to Nuffield College and is now in the care of the National Trust.
Death
Morris died at Nuffield Place on 22 August 1963, aged 85. He was childless; both peerages and the baronetcy died with him. He was cremated, and his ashes lie in Nuffield churchyard beside those of his wife Elizabeth, who had predeceased him.
Sources: Wikipedia: William Morris, 1st Viscount Nuffield
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