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Under New Management (1937-1949)
By 1937, Kilpatrick as an independent, home-bred company had achieved a turnover of £100,000 and a workforce of 75. It was at this stage that the shareholders decided to sell their interest to the property millionaire, Sir Duncan Watson and Kilpatrick became a subsidiary of Duncan Watson (Electrical Engineers) Limited of London.
But the reality was more like a reverse takeover, for the London firm was much the smaller of the two. James Orr moved south to become its managing director and his place in Paisley was taken by the former apprentice, James D.D. Shaw. Sir Duncan succeeded Mr Scott as the company’s chairman.
This was the shape in which the company was about to go through its second world war, from which it emerged more than four times bigger. But even before the outbreak, it began to expand rapidly and enhance its prestige with some very important contracts.
None was a bigger feather in Kilpatrick’s cap than its appointment as main electrical contractor for the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park in 1938. This £80,000 (£1.5 million at 1980 prices) order, which would normally have taken three years, was carried out in just 10 months. It involved more than 100 buildings, a 300 ft. tower which was the exhibition’s centrepiece and illuminated lakes, cascades and fountains. In its six months’ run the exhibition used half as much electricity as the town of Paisley.
Less spectacularly, but to its long-term benefit, the company got in on the ground floor with the newly formed Scottish Industrial Estates by installing a supply in its first factories. It also won the contract for the new head office of the National Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh and decided to open a permanent office in the Capital.
Just before the war started in 1939, Kilpatrick began work on what snowballed, over the next three years into the biggest electrical contracting job ever carried out on one site in Scotland. This was for the new Royal Ordnance factory at Bishopton and by the time it was finished it was valued at £440,000 (£10 million at 1980 prices). It involved some 1500 buildings and a separate organisation to handle it and was set up with a workforce of more than 300 men.
Yet this was only one of many important ways in which Kilpatrick threw its weight into the general war effort. One highlight was the hush-hush "Scheme Y" somewhere in Northern Ireland, where in 1943 a whole community was built for the assembly of lend-lease fighter aircraft sent in packages from Lockheed in America. This was the first scheme of its kind after the Atlantic meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt, at which the British leader appealed to our allies to "give us the tools and we’ll finish the job". It involved the building of hangars, workshops, five villages, a hospital, and a cinema. An army of men was mobilised, including five thousand Americans, who brought a touch of glamour to the scene with their Stetsons, gaudy checked shirts and high-heeled boots. Like the Empire Exhibition, this was a major contract carried out at the double two years’ work completed in six months.
The company also worked on 150 vessels of various kinds. Many were troop landing craft built at a disused shipyard on the Cart brought into use for this special programme. The first of these took nine weeks, but later the job was done in as many days. Others were the much bigger L.C.T.’s (Landing Craft Transport) for carrying the Army’s hardware and these were built at John Brown’s in Clydebank. The company also worked on troopships and on rocket ships built by Lobnitz.
Another contribution to the war at sea was the installation of Asdic for submarine detection in merchant ships. When Portland in Dorset was bombed, the Asdic laboratories there were moved to the Ayrshire coast at Fairlie. They were housed in a yacht yard which was equipped by Kilpatrick.
Hundreds of electricians from London were directed to the company throughout the war to work on airfields and naval establishments in Orkney and Shetland. Besides all its work for the frontline forces, Kilpatrick also played its part in a programme to step up industrial efficiency by modernising factory installations. It renewed all the lighting and electrical equipment at John Brown’s shipyard and at Carron’s of Falkirk, which at some points still used oil lamps.
While the war was still on, a solid foundation for the future was laid with the establishment in 1944 of the apprentice training school. In the immediate post-war years, the school had 800 to 1000 applicants a year. This reflected the company’s substantial growth: by 1947 it had 346 employees.
After the war, the country had to tackle the huge job of repairing the damage and re-equipping itself to live in peace. This meant the building of thousands of houses and hundreds of factories and in both these tasks Kilpatrick played a full part.
It employed about 80 women to produce some 20,000 electrical kits for the temporary houses known as prefabs. For the first time it got involved with conventional council houses, too, producing a different electrical package for them. In Clydebank, the worse-blitzed of all the Scottish towns, Kilpatrick did all the electrical work in the new housing that was built.
Scottish Industrial Estates was given the job of providing the new factories and the company was involved in most of its larger projects in Lanarkshire, the Glasgow area and the Vale of Leven.
A new activity for Kilpatrick was the construction of overhead transmission lines, up to 33,000 volts. This followed the setting up of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board towards the end of the war and the first contract to come from it was for a 33,000 volt line from Tummel Bridge to Pitlochry. A few years later, the company was also carrying out a number of overhead line works for the South-West Scotland Electricity Board as part of a rural development scheme.
Meanwhile, the organisation had spread across the Irish Sea to Belfast, where a branch was opened in 1946. Three years later came the start of a new chapter in the Kilpatrick story when the business was taken over for the second time.
