History
The Company was founded in 1871 by James Ramsden as the Iron Shipbuilding Company, but its name was soon changed to Barrow Shipbuilding Company.
In 1897, Vickers & Sons bought the Barrow Shipbuilding Company and its subsidiary the Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company, becoming Vickers, Sons and Maxim, Limited. The shipyard at Barrow became the Naval Construction Yard. In 1911 the company was renamed Vickers Ltd, and in 1927 became Vickers Armstrongs Ltd after a merger with Armstrong Whitworth, whose shipyard at High Walker on the River Tyne became the "Naval Yard".
In 1955 the name of the shipbuilding division changed to Vickers Armstrongs Shipbuilders, Ltd and changed again in 1968 to Vickers Limited Shipbuilding Group.
The shipbuilding group was nationalised under the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Act in 1977 and subsumed into British Shipbuilders.
The ex-Vickers yard at Barrow was the first shipyard of the British Shipbuilders group to return to the private sector. It was sold in March 1986 to an employee-led company, VSEL Consortium, which also included its Birkenhead-based subsidiary, Cammell Laird. The company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in December 1986.
In 1994 VSEL was subject to two takeover proposals, one from GEC and another from British Aerospace (BAe). VSEL was willing to participate in a merger with a larger company to reduce its exposure to cycles in warship production, particularly following the "Options for Change" defence review after the end of the Cold War. Both bids were referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) which issued its conclusions and advice to government in May 1995. BAe's bid was approved, while the MMC concluded (with two of 6 members dissenting) that GEC's bid was likely to "operate against the public interest". However it was GEC's bid that was approved and accepted by VSEL.
Following GEC's purchase VSEL became Marconi Marine (VSEL), part of the company's GEC-Marconi division. With the merger of British Aerospace and GEC's defence business - Marconi Electronic Systems - VSEL passed to the resulting company, BAE Systems as part of BAE Systems Marine. In 2003 it became an independent division known as BAE Systems Submarines after BAE systems split its ship and submarine building operations. This was renamed BAE Systems Submarine Solutions in January 2007.
Read more about this topic: Vickers Shipbuilding And Engineering
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
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“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)