Laurence Hartnett
Sir Laurence John Hartnett CBE (26 May 1898 – 4 April 1986) was a British engineer and businessman who made several important contributions to the Australian automotive industry, and is often called "The Father of the Holden".
He played a pivotal role in the development of Australia's automotive industry by leading General Motors-Holden during the design and production of the first Australian-made car, the Holden 48-215.
From there he graduated two years later to Kingston Grammar School and from 1909 he attended Epsom College, which specialised in educating the sons of doctors who were, themselves, generally destined to enter that profession.
[10] After leaving school in 1915 he became a management apprentice with British arms manufacturer Vickers Ltd, demand for whose products had been heightened by the outbreak of war with Germany in the previous year.
[11] In the day-time his training focused on industrial management at the company's Crayford plant while in the evenings he studied theoretical subjects such as metallurgy and mathematics at a nearby technical school.
Then in March 1918 he decided to enlist in the war, entering the Royal Naval College at Greenwich as a Probationary Flying Officer, a rank he retained until hostilities ended in the following November.
[19] Undeterred, in the following year, Hartnett set up as an automobile engineer, renting part of a Wallington boot repair shop and dealing in bicycles, motor bikes and cars.
When his employer imported a small transmitter, he began broadcasting music and talks from the Grange Road premises for about 15 minutes each day with financial support from local advertisers.
However, he had neglected to obtain a licence and the colonial authorities, fearing that such a small, shoestring operation would fail and thereby make it more difficult for any subsequent larger venture to succeed, soon forced him to close down.
[26] Then in 1924, following a change in the composition of Guthrie and Co's London management,[27] Hartnett began to feel that the firm was losing interest in the automotive side of its southeast Asian business.
Global automobile sales were rapidly expanding at this time due in large part to a general reduction in prices resulting from the adoption of mass production techniques.
[28] General Motors, which had just sold its five millionth car and had been impressed with Hartnett's success in distributing and selling its Buicks in southeast Asia, now offered him a job as a field representative in southern India.
They had married in Singapore on 26 February 1925[29] He found GM's business in Madras was being conducted in a haphazard manner and he appears to have been successful in improving the situation—so much so that he became one of only four salesmen world wide to win an award in General Motors' 1926 "Prize Contest"—which earned him a large bonus.
It was GM's policy that all senior employees working overseas should spend some time in America studying the relationship between the Corporation's business there and its international operations.
Late in September 1927, he was appointed sales manager of General Motors Nordiska in Stockholm, taking charge of marketing the company's vehicles throughout Sweden and Finland.
Attention to such external details was becoming increasingly important in determining GM's growing success[33] and senior overseas representatives like Hartnett were given some leeway in choosing them in the light of perceived local preferences.
[37] In September 1929, with his wife and daughter Maureen, he set out on a yearlong round-the-world-trip to acquaint himself with Vauxhall's overseas markets, including in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
That tax, however, did not apply to exports,[39] which meant Cadets offered for sale outside Britain were fitted with the new, powerful Bedford Truck engines first manufactured by Vauxhall in 1931 and were therefore very popular in foreign markets.
[46] With a fair amount of tact and the support both of the American head office and most of the other Australian directors, Hartnett managed to emerge victorious from this conflict and this in turn enabled him to reorganise the company's clumsy administrative structure and to increase its efficiency generally.
The ceremony captured wide attention in Victoria, at least, the Melbourne Argus devoting sixteen pages to it in addition to its editorial which predicted that it marked the beginning of the city's transformation into "an Australian Coventry".
[48] At the same time, Hartnett became aware of widespread hostility among Australians towards GMH, which many viewed as a ruthless, profiteering American-oriented organisation cynically bent on enriching its mainly US shareholders at the expense of the local community.
To combat this mindset, he took every opportunity to portray the company as a patriotic corporate citizen, emphasising particularly the amount of employment it provided, both directly and indirectly, as well as the auxiliary industries it supported and its contribution to Australia's defence potential.
[49] In addition, he himself played a high-profile public role in seeking to promote Australian industrial development generally—among other things, by calling for the creation of a national standards laboratory and an aeronautical research facility, while also helping to advance the objectives of the Australian Industries Protection League and advocating a more thorough exploitation of the country's mineral resources and the harnessing of tidal movements in Spencer Gulf for energy generation.
[55] As well as taking charge of ordnance production, Hartnett was also made head of the Army Inventions Directorate created by War Cabinet in January 1942 to solicit and evaluate proposals from the general public for improving the fighting efforts of Australia's military forces.
[56] While most of the 21,645 suggestions received by this body over the subsequent three and a half years were dismissed out of hand as impracticable, 3,686 were sent to an expert advisory panel for closer consideration and 127, including a process for water-proofing maps and a container for safely dropping supplies from aircraft, were finally accepted for production.
Also in January 1942, as Japanese forces were heading southward down the Malay peninsula towards Singapore, Hartnett offered to forestall them by flying to the island, himself, gathering up valuable machine tool gauging equipment left there and bringing it back to Australia before the enemy's arrival.
[62] The government was certainly interested as Australia's industrial competence had increased enormously during the war due to the necessity of manufacturing a wide range of precision products for the fighting services.
[63] Furthermore, post-war motor vehicle manufacturing promised to provide many jobs for returning service personnel while the necessary acquisition of the accompanying skills and industrial infrastructure would help build up the country's defence capacity.
[64] Accordingly, Hartnett warned his American directors that the Australian government was determined to have cars manufactured locally and might, itself, establish a factory for that purpose if private industry proved unwilling.
