History of MSM continued...1947-1957
In the austere post war period, with aircraft work slow, MSM began to manufacture motor car trafficators for the Lucas Company in Burnley. These were soon to be replaced by the current flashing indicators we still see today, but we certainly made many thousands of “Lucas Lollipops” . These were projection welded levers which pushed the trafficator arms out of the vehicle door pillars to indicate a change of direction. The Lucas Gas Turbine Company also asked us to help with the welding of Nickel Alloys for the combustion chambers of their new jet engines, together with spot welding the aluminium alloy shrouds which surrounded the hot jet pipes. The new propulsion technique and it’s associated sheet metal fabrications would soon be desperately needed for our military aeroplanes in the Korean conflict of the early ‘50’s, and MSM was proud to manufacture these very special components.
AVROS were converting Lancasters into Lancastrians, which were to be a stopgap supply of "civil" aeroplanes before the Tudor came along. MSM manufactured many ECS pipes and ducts in aluminium and stainless steel for the Avro Tudor and the chap in the dirty white boilersuit under the Tudor Seat was one of our people, fitting the "Navigator's Seat" into the Tudor 2, for which we made all the crew seats. Later in the blockade of Berlin, the Tudors did sterling service in supplying food and other needed supplies to the Berliners, who had been blockaded by the Russians, and were "saved" by the Berlin Air Lift. Freddie Laker, who had been a bomber pilot in the war bought up the spare Tudors, and used them to save the Berliners, before creating Laker Airways, the first competition for British Airways with his "cheap flights"!
The Berlin Blockade (24 June 1948 – 12 May 1949) was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War and the first resulting in casualties. During the multinational occupation of post-World War 11 Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway and road access to the sectors of Berlin under Allied control. Their aim was to force the western powers to allow the Soviet zone to start supplying Berlin with food and fuel, thereby giving the Soviets practical control over the entire city.
In response, the Western Allies organized the Berlin Airlift to carry supplies to the people in West Berlin. Great Britain's Royal Air Force and the recently formed United States Air Force, flew over 200,000 flights in one year that provided 13,000 tons of daily necessities such as fuel and food to the Berliners. By the spring of 1949, the effort was clearly succeeding, and by April, the airlift was delivering more cargo than had previously flowed into the city by rail.
The success of the Berlin Airlift brought humiliation to the Soviets who had refused to believe it could make a difference. The blockade was lifted in May 1949 and resulted in the creation of two separate German states. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) split up Berlin. In remembrance of the airlift, three airports in the former western zones of the city served as the primary gateways to Germany for another fifty years.
AVROs were busy developing the magnificent Vulcan Bomber, for which we produced many assemblies such as aluminium Navigators Tables and tubular seats, it’s splendid Air Intakes and many other ducts in both light alloys and stainless steels. Towards the end of the fifties, when the Vulcan and Victors presented a Nuclear Deterrant to the Soviet Powers, MSM made a series of stainless steel fuel pipes for the HTP Powered Blue Steel Stand Off Weapon, which was slung underneath the aeroplane. We also produced a number of Telemetry Tanks during the Weapon Development stages to control the flight path and attitude of the Blue Steel once it had been launched. It seems the Vulcan was a very successful deterrent, as the weapon was only ever launched under trial testing!
English Electric Canberras & Glosters Meteors and Javelins also contained many MSM Fabrications such as Oil Tanks and the associated Pipework, Jet Pipes and Blankets, as well as the external components such as Dive Brakes and wing & tail trailing edges including ailerons & elevators.
During the fifties we also made winch assemblies for the Blackburn Beverley, fuel & water tanks for the AVRO Shackleton, together with many small components for the Hawker Hunter, meanwhile keeping our spread of work in the Textile Industry to include glass fibre dyehouse carts and trolleys, not to mention a “one off” batch of Bumpy Cars for the Blackpool Pleasure Beach! Much later in our history, we were pleased to have had experience in composite manufacture some fifty years ago, as the Aerospace Industry became vitally interested in Carbon Reinforced Plastics for some of today’s aeroplanes. But once more, THAT is another story!