John Brown & Co.
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| Public | |
| Industry | Shipbuilding |
| Fate | Shipyard amalgamated into Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS), 1968 |
| Successor | Shipyard sold by UCS to Marathon Oil, 1972 John Brown Engineering bought by Trafalgar House, 1986 |
| Founded | 1851 |
| Defunct | 1986 |
| Headquarters | Clydebank, Scotland |
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Key people
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George Thomson (founder) James Thomson (founder) Charles McLaren, 1st Baron Aberconway (Chairman) Henry McLaren, 2nd Baron Aberconway (Chairman) Charles McLaren, 3rd Baron Aberconway (Chairman) |
| Products |
Naval ships Merchant ships Submarines marine engines |
| Parent | John Brown & Company (1899–1968) |
| Subsidiaries | Coventry Ordnance Works |
John Brown and Company of Clydebank was a Scottish marine engineering and shipbuilding firm. It built many notable and world-famous ships including RMS Lusitania, HMS Hood, HMS Repulse, RMS Queen Mary, RMS Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Elizabeth 2. At its height, from 1900 to the 1950s, it was one of the most highly regarded, and internationally famous, shipbuilding companies in the world. However thereafter, along with other UK shipbuilders, John Brown's found it increasingly difficult to compete with the emerging shipyards in Eastern Europe and the far East. In 1968 John Brown's merged with other Clydeside shipyards to form the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders consortium, but that collapsed in 1971.
The company then withdrew from shipbuilding but its engineering arm remained successful in the manufacture of industrial gas turbines. In 1986 it became a wholly owned subsidiary of Trafalgar House, which in 1996 was taken over by Kvaerner. The latter closed the Clydebank engineering works in 2000.
Marathon Oil bought the Clydebank shipyard from UCS and used it to build oil rig platforms for the North Sea oil industry. UiE Scotland (part of the French Bouygues group) bought the yard in 1980 and closed it in 2001.
Two brothers — James and George Thomson, who had worked for the engineer Robert Napier — founded the engineering and shipbuilding company J&G Thomson. The brothers founded the Clyde Bank Foundry in Anderston in 1847. They opened the Clyde Bank Iron Shipyard at Cessnock, Govan, in 1851 and launched their first ship, SS Jackal, in 1852. They quickly established a reputation in building prestigious passenger ships, building SS Jura for Cunard in 1854 and the record breaking SS Russia in 1867. Several of the ships they built were bought by the Confederacy for blockade running in the American Civil War, including the CSS Robert E. Lee and the Fingal which was converted into the ironclad Atlanta.
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Wikipedia