Laurence Hartnett - Early Career

Early Career

After leaving school in 1915 he became a management apprentice with British arms manufacturer Vickers Ltd, demand for whose product had been heightened by the outbreak of war with Germany in the previous year. In the day-time his training focussed 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 till hostilities ended in the following November. He received practical training at Chingford and Northolt airports before being appointed to Number 304 Bomber Squadron in Shropshire. However, the Armistice was signed before he had been able to fly a single mission. Nevertheless, prior to his return to civilian life he did do a stint as manager of an Air Force ground transport unit thereby qualifying in Aerodrome Management.

In 1919 he purchased a South London business which he renamed the Wallington Motor Company. In addition to making parts for gas stoves, it bought, sold, hired and repaired bicycles as well as the occasional automobile. Demand for motor cars in England in the immediate aftermath of the war was far greater than the supply and Hartnett increased the automotive side of his new venture by instructing his employees to make enquiries in nearby villages with a view to locating war widows who couldn’t drive but whose husbands prior to enlisting had left their cars up on blocks to await their owners’ return. He would offer to buy these vehicles, which often needed work done to make them roadworthy, with a view to repairing and reselling them at Wallington Motors. Initially, he was very successful. But then the bubble burst as the economy slowed and motor cars became harder to sell. Already in September 1920, the Wallington Motor Company was forced to take out a £200 bank loan in order to remain afloat. Three months later, a further £600 was borrowed. Even so, the venture was unable to meet its liabilities, closing its doors for the last time in December 1921.

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. But the economy had grown sluggish and when this, too, failed he turned to earning a precarious living as a free lance automotive consultant. He obtained commissions with firms such as the Nyasa Consolidated Company which wanted him to inspect vehicles it was considering buying for its commercial operations in central and east Africa. But the pickings were meagre and time weighed on his hands. In 1923 he sold a patent for improving insulators on radio aerials to a ceramics firm.

But his next important career move came in March 1923 when he was offered and accepted a job as Automobile Engineer with trading firm Guthrie and Company which administered rubber plantations in southeast Asia as well as importing goods such as tea, alcoholic beverages and motor cars into the region. On his arrival in Singapore two months later he was put in charge of Guthrie and Co’s automobile distribution and sales operation in Grange Road. There, he handled mainly Buick cars for which the company had obtained the local franchise from American manufacturer General Motors in the previous February. Hartnett’s job was to unload and assemble these vehicles when they arrived by ship and to distribute them to a network of dealers he had appointed and whose activities he supervised throughout the region. He conducted the Singapore dealership himself.

The Grange Road operation flourished as booming worldwide demand for rubber brought prosperity to southeast Asia, greatly increasing demand for motor vehicles. At the same time, Hartnett benefited personally from the boom by speculating in rubber futures as a sideline. He also took an extracurricular interest in commercial radio during this period. 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. So, he moved the operation to Johore where the British fiat had less force and whose Sultan initially welcomed it. But it didn’t last long there either as pressure exerted on Guthrie and Co by the imperial government in Singapore once more ensured its closure—this time definitively.

Then in 1924, following a change in the composition of Guthrie and Co’s London management, Hartnett began to feel that the firm was losing interest in the automotive side of its southeast Asian business. His consequent disaffection grew so that in September of the following year, determined to leave, he wrote to General Motors Export Company seeking employment. 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. This in turn had generated a spiralling demand for senior staff to work for automotive exporting companies in markets proliferating throughout the world.

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. His main function would be to appoint and supervise the work of GM distributors in the Madras district. He accepted the position, resigning from Guthrie and Co on 31 March 1926, and embarked for Calcutta on 10 June accompanied by his wife, Gladys (née Tyler), whom he had met when, as an employee of Vickers Ltd., he had lived with his mother next door to the Tyler family in Bexley Heath. They had married in Singapore on 26 February 1925