Qualla: Coventry Ordnance Works

Coventry Ordnance Works: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY 2.5. The British government in 1905 had a problem common to powerful countries: too few suppliers for the things that mattered most. Two firms, Vickers and Armstrong Whitworth, between them sold the Royal Navy almost every heavy gun and turret it bought, and the prices reflected the absence of competition. The Admiralty's solution was to encourage a third giant into the trade, and on a 60-acre tract in Coventry's Stoney Stanton Road the Coventry Ordnance Works was born from a consortium of three shipbuilders: John Brown of Clydebank with a controlling half-share, Cammell Laird of Sheffield and Birkenhead with a quarter, and Govan's Fairfield with the rest. For the next two decades the factory machined the breeches and mountings of weapons that fired across the Skagerrak and the Somme.

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Image: CC BY 2.5

Coventry Ordnance Works: An Arms Race in Three Shares

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Draceane, CC BY-SA 4.0. The ordnance business that the three shipbuilders amalgamated had originally been started in Birmingham in the late 1890s by H.H. Mulliner and F. Wigley, moved to Coventry in 1902, and bought outright by Charles Cammell the following year. By 1909 Coventry Ordnance had pushed bey...

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Image: Draceane | CC BY-SA 4.0

Coventry Ordnance Works: Guns for the Great War

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Horace Nicholls, Public domain. The works produced weapons that wrote their names into the catalogue of the First World War. The QF 4.5-inch howitzer, designed at Coventry and entering British Army service in 1910, became one of the most successful field pieces of the conflict. The BL 5.5-inch naval gun followe...

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Image: Horace Nicholls | Public domain

Coventry Ordnance Works: Peace and a New Name

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mintchocicecream, CC BY-SA 4.0. Four days after the armistice of November 1918, Dick, Kerr & Co Limited announced that it intended to merge with Coventry Ordnance. Within weeks the combine had a new identity. English Electric Company Limited was formed at the end of 1918 to own Coventry Ordnance, the Phoenix Dy...

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Image: Mintchocicecream | CC BY-SA 4.0

Coventry Ordnance Works: Rearmament, Recovery, Reuse

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Linwood from London, CC BY 2.0. The 1936 rearmament programme woke the Coventry works back up to make gun mountings, and the Second World War kept it running flat out. Afterwards the standard 4.5-inch turrets for County-class destroyers were assembled here into the late 1960s. Then the plant pivoted again, to t...

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Image: Jim Linwood from London | CC BY 2.0