Emile Garcke

Emile Garcke, caricature in the Vanity Fair 1910

Emile Oscar Garcke (born February 3, 1856 in Naumburg , † November 14, 1930 in Pinkney's Green ) was a German-British manager. He became known in the UK as a pioneer in electrification and also as an expert in industrial accounting.

life and work

Childhood and youth

As a small child, he came to England in 1859 with his mother and several siblings, following his father. Emile received British citizenship at his request in March 1880. Nothing is known about his training.

He gained his first professional experience in mining and banking. In 1879, at the age of 23, he applied for naturalization. At that time he met the Irish George Bernard Shaw , who later became world-famous playwright and critic, and Sidney Webb , together with Shaw co-founder and later leading figure of the Fabian Society and a minister in the British cabinet. Emile and Shaw were the same age, Webb was three years younger. All three were members of the board of the Zetetical Society, a debating club in London in 1881/82, which brought together young, progressive intellectuals from the British middle class. Emile was treasurer.

In 1882 he married Alice Withers, whose father, John Withers, was a brush manufacturer. They had a son, Sydney, who was born in 1885.

In 1883 Emile became secretary of the Brush Electrical Engineering Company. In 1889 production was relocated from Lambeth, London, to Loughborough, northeast of Birmingham. The company was one of the largest manufacturers of equipment for the generation and transmission of electricity in the UK.

Garcke's origins and the associated lack of bias towards British traditions contributed to his dedication to the electrical industry. British engineers did not see the electric drive as a practical solution even after electrically powered trains were already running on the continent. In 1893 Garcke was chairman of the Brush Company.

In 1887 Garcke served as honorary secretary to the Parliamentary Committee on the Electric Lighting Act under Chairman Lord Thurlow. The committee was given the task of examining improvements to the law passed in 1882, in particular to give private companies greater incentives to get involved.

Author and editor

With the Brush Company's Assistant Secretary and Accountant, John Menger Fells, Emile wrote a forward-looking and highly successful book, Factory Accounts. Their Principles and Practice, which first appeared in 1887 and had a total of seven editions during his lifetime, the last in 1922. It was reprinted in 1976. Emile had already met the co-author Fells during the time of the Zetetical Society, of which Fells was also a member. According to the authors, the book should "provide a systematic presentation of the principles governing industrial bookkeeping and accounting, as well as the methods by which these principles can be put into practice and used for important purposes in industrial operations." Preface to the second edition). In a way, the book already hinted at the term “marginal cost”.

In 1893 Emile took over the position of managing director of the Electric Construction Co. in Wolverhampton for the period until the end of 1894. Under his direction the company was completely reorganized.

In 1896 he founded the “Manual of Electrical Undertakings”, which grew from a small book with a few pages to an annual index of over 2000 pages during his lifetime. Published from 1896 to 1960, known as Garcke's Manual, the volumes are now an important resource for the development of the UK electricity industry. From 1916 he also published the Motor Transport Year Book.

British Electric Traction Company Ltd. founded

In 1895 hopes arose that the legislation that had hindered the development of trams until then could be changed. The London Chamber of Commerce named Garcke as its representative at a conference of the Board of Trade in 1895, which then led to the enactment of the Light Railways Act. Emile was not only thinking of electrifying trams in the big cities, but also of letting electric vehicles pass through densely populated areas, right through to the establishment of networks to connect systems.

For his project, Emile was able to win the help of important financial friends to found British Electric Traction (BET), which was entered in the commercial register on October 26, 1896. The aim was to transport people and goods and to generate and distribute electricity. The first chairman of the BET board was Sir Charles Rivers Wilson, chairman of the board of the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada, before that an official in the Treasury, private secretary of the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and a member of the council of the Suez Canal Company. Other directors with political experience were Sir Charles Fremantle, also a former Treasury Secretary, Disraelis private secretary and member of the board of directors of the Suez Canal, and Lord Rathmore, who was also affiliated with the Suez Canal Company. You should help, if political constraints should prevent the expansion of society, to overcome them.

The share capital of BET was ₤ 600,000 when it was founded. Ten years after it was founded, the share and loan capital was almost ₤ 5,000,000; of these were approx. ₤ 2,000,000 bonds.

The first tram projects were developed in Hartlepool, Kidderminster, Oldham and Stoke-on-Trent. By 1899 almost 40 tram companies belonged to the group. In 1901 BET ran 189 km of electric trams, in 1902 it ran 451 km. The lines in the Midlands were most concentrated in Birmingham, Dudley, Stourbridge.

In 1899 BET had already bought the Auckland Tramways in New Zealand, which became one of the company's most successful ventures. In 1906, BET and the Brush Electrical Company founded a company with a capital of ₤ 1,200,000 to electrify the trams in Mumbai, then called Bombay, in India.

The BET Company was regionally organized. As soon as BET established or bought a tram company, the responsible district overseer took the position of director of the local company. Emile Garcke was generally the chairman of the subsidiaries in all counties. He was directly or indirectly connected to over 80 companies. The daily business was a matter for the local companies. BET itself was an umbrella company with only a small workforce. In the early years there were not much more than 30 people working at headquarters other than the directors. The credit for this far-sighted organizational scheme was entirely due to Emile Garcke.

Emile Garcke was firmly convinced that a fair balance had to be sought between the interests of the company's shareholders and those of the employees. Paid leave was introduced as early as 1899 and an annual supplementary benefit fund was set up within four years of the start of the BET company. By 1900 such a practice was by no means widespread. The BET personnel management was guided by the idea of ​​camaraderie and cooperation. A company sports club was founded in 1900. Some of the subsidiaries gave lectures on electricity to employees.

Many BET projects around 1900 met with fierce resistance from the communities affected by private tram lines. Against their economic endeavors, representatives of the private sector for their part made front in various organizations and actions and tried to influence politics in their favor. Among them, Emile Garcke was one of the most important pullers. In the fall of 1902 he founded the Industrial Freedom League. This was mainly active in 1902 and 1903 in the central English industrial area around Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds (Midlands). It still existed in 1909. The dispute of interests ultimately ended in a draw.

The BET founders had originally intended that their trams not only cross large cities, but also connect several cities in densely populated areas. After a few years, however, it became clear that this could not be achieved. In the years after 1906, the number of BET tram projects even began to decline, slowly at first, then accelerated, especially after the First World War. Municipalities pressured that trams be sold to them. This was one of the reasons why the company switched its activities to other forms of transportation. As early as 1902, the company had formed an automobile committee. Garcke was a member. In 1905, BET founded the British Automobile Development Company, which was the parent company for BET automotive interests. Emile became one of the earliest pioneers of the bus industry in Great Britain. In his opinion, however, buses should support the tram lines as feeders.

Emile Garcke was BET's Chairman from 1911 to 1920. The new strategy involved substantial general investments, including substantial stakes in a number of gas companies serving the Firth of Forth area in Scotland. As deputy chairman, Garcke kept his position as head of management until he retired in 1929, when he was 73 years old.

Inter-company activity

Garcke had acquired his technical knowledge of electrical engineering in self-study. How successful he was is shown in the report on him when he was 70 years old: for many years he had played a leading role in Great Britain in both practical and theoretical questions of electrical science.

In addition to making himself available to public committees, Emile Garcke was also active in various semi-public bodies. He campaigned for the London Chamber of Commerce to form an electricity group and was later chairman of this group himself. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Federation of British Industries, was President of the British Electrical Federation and Vice Chairman of the Tramways and Light Railways Association. He was also elected a member of the Royal Statistical Society and became a member of the Institute of Actuaries.

Towards the end of his professional career, Garcke was assisted by a personal secretary, John Spencer Wills, who later became the chairman of the BET board and husband of Emile's granddaughter Elizabeth Garcke.

In his later years, Emile had already found more time to devote himself to social and philosophical questions. In 1929 he published the book Indiviual Understanding. A layman's approach to practical philosophy , in which he emphasizes that classifications and definitions are particularly important in order to arrive at philosophical insights. Emile was one of the founders, honorary treasurer and sponsor of the Institute of Philosophical Studies, now the Royal Institute of Philosophy. Garcke was also a member of the Council of the Philosophical Society of England. He was an avid beekeeper.

Deeply impressed by the grave industrial crisis of the late 1920s, he believed that employee participation in companies could be the most effective contribution to improvement. He succeeded in realizing this concept in the Brush Electrical Engineering Company. BET had been the main shareholder of this company since 1903. By 1927 the company had 1700 employees, mainly in Loughborough northeast of Birmingham. Emile continued to be the company's chairman in 1927. The amount in excess of the normal dividend was distributed each year between employees and shareholders according to the proportion of wages, salaries and dividends paid. Starting with profit from 1925, employees received part of the profit in the form of shares. The participation in Brush was considered to be one of the most remarkable ventures of its kind in Great Britain in the period after the First World War. In 1929 Garcke was elected Chairman of the Council of the Industrial Co-Partnership Association. The organization founded in 1884 and now known as the “Involvement and Participation Association” (IPA) had adopted this name only a year earlier. The council headed by Emile elected the board. Emile was a source of inspiration for this organization. He personally covered the cost of setting up an office for the association.

He died of a heart attack on November 14, 1930 at his home, Ditton Meads, in Pinkney's Green, Cookham, near Maidenhead, Berkshire. His estate was estimated at £ 167,150.

General accounts of British economic history report on Emile Garcke even today (see David J. Jeremy, A Business History of Britain 1900-1990, Oxford 1998).

Publications

• (with John Menger Fells) Factory Accounts. Their Principles and Practice, London 1887; further ed. 1888; 1889; 1893; 1902; 1911; 1922 (4th edition reprinted in New York, USA, 1976)
• Individual understanding. A Layman's Approach to Practical Philosophy, London 1929, 383 pp.
• Garcke's Manuel of Electrical Undertakings and Directory of Officials (editor), London, from 1896 (published until 1960)
• The Motor transport year book & directory (editor), London 1916
• Electricity Supply; Lightning, Electric (Commercial Aspects); Railways, Light Railways (in part); Telegraph, Commercial Aspects; Telephone, Commercial Aspects; Tramway, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 29 vols., Cambridge 1910–1911

Web links

Commons : Emile Garcke  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• British Electrical Traction (Graces guide)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In association with the British Academy, edited by HCG Matthew and Brian Harrison, New York 2004, vol. 21; Garcke, Klaus, History of the Garcke Family, Insingen 2018 (German Family Archives Vol. 161), pp. 153–163
2. ↑ Bernard Shaw, The Diaries 1885-1897, edited by Stanley Weintraub, University Park London 1986, pp. 31, 33, 400
3. ^ Offer, Avner, Property and Politics 1870-1914. Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England, Cambridge a. a. 1981, p. 236
4. ^ Fulford, Roger, Five decades of BET The story of The British Electric Traction Company, Limited; London 1946; Klapper, Charles, The golden age of tramways, London 1961, pp. 144 f., 239 f.
5. ↑ Offer (see footnote 3), pp. 235-238
6. ↑ Klapper, Charles, The golden age of buses, London Henley Boston 1978, p. 113 f.
7. ^ MacLaren, Charles Benjamin Bright, Lord Aberconway, The Basic Industries of Great Britain. An historic and economic survey. Coal, iron, steel, engineering, ships, London 1927, p. 324
8. ^ Fulford, Roger, The Sixth Decade 1946-1956, British Electric Traction Co. Ltd., London 1956, pp. 6-9
9. ↑ Raffety, FW, Partnership in Industry, London 1928, pp. 71, 74, 140-143; MacLaren, Charles Benjamin Bright, Lord Aberconway (see footnote 7), p. 323