Coventry Ordnance Works

Coventry Ordnance Works was a British manufacturer of heavy guns particularly naval artillery jointly owned by Cammell Laird & Co of Sheffield and Birkenhead, Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company of Govan, Glasgow and John Brown & Company of Clydebank and Sheffield. Its core operations were from a 60-acre site in Stoney Stanton Road in the English city of Coventry, Warwickshire.

At the end of 1918 it became a principal constituent of a brand new enterprise English Electric Company Limited. After World War II the works made electricity-generating machinery and heavy machine tools.

The company, the Coventry Ordnance Works Limited, was formed in July 1905 by a consortium of British shipbuilding firms John Brown 50%, Cammell Laird 25% and Fairfield 25% with the encouragement of the British government, which wanted a third major arms consortium to compete with the duopoly of Vickers Sons & Maxim and Sir W G Armstrong Whitworth & Co to drive down prices. The new company bought (as from 1 January 1905, 6 months earlier) from Cammell Laird the ordnance business established in the late 1890s by H H Mulliner and F Wigley which had been moved by them in 1902 from Birmingham to the 60 acre site in Coventry's Stoney Stratford Road. The ordnance business had been bought from Mulliner and Wigley by Charles Cammell, later Cammell Laird, in 1903.

By 1909 Coventry Ordnance Works had establishments, as well as at Coventry, at Scotstoun for manufacture of ordnance and gun equipment; for cordite shell loading and explosive magazines at Cliffe; and a gun-proving ground with a land range of 22,000 yards at Boston and was handling an order for 12 inch mountings of one of the new battleships. While to that time the works had been manufacturing the smaller sizes of Naval Guns and Mountings as well as Guns, Gun carriages, Ammunition and other military accessories, they had already extended their works since 1906 and had begun the manufacture of Guns and Turrets up to the largest sizes for both Battleships and Cruisers for the Admiralty. At Scotstoun a new factory had been built with a wet dock, pits and machinery for the erection and transhipping of the heaviest guns and mountings and hydraulic barbettes of the firm's own design but it was unused until 1911. A complete factory for the manufacture of Fuzes had also been installed in Coventry.

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