John Brown & Company

John Brown & Company

John Brown and Company of Clydebank was a pre-eminent 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 RMS 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 1986 it became a wholly owned subsidiaryof 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.