Commander Sir Arthur Trevor Dawson, 1st Baronet (1 May 1866 – 19 May 1931) was an English businessman who served as managing director of the armaments giant Vickers from 1906 to 1931.
[1] Other directorships included Wolseley Motors and William Beardmore & Co.[1] He participated in the development of the Vickers machine gun,[3] co-inventing the muzzle booster together with J. Ramsay in 1904.
He also collected intelligence for the Admiralty on his foreign trips, including one occasion when he skated around the ice-bound dockyards of Kiel to see the German naval ships under construction.
In 1915–1916, Dawson aided the MP and speculator Grant Morden in setting up the British Cellulose and Chemical Manufacturing Company.
This blatant war profiteering was investigated by a parliamentary select committee in 1918 and an official inquiry chaired by Lord Sumner in 1919.
[1] He was to have been raised to the peerage in the 1917 New Year Honours, but his name was removed from the list at the last minute, probably because of the unpopularity of the armaments companies.
[11] The Canadian Steamship Lines named a 600-foot lake freighter the Sir Trevor Dawson in October 1916.
The baronetcy passed to his son, Sir Hugh Trevor Dawson, who also served as an officer in the Royal Navy.