Founding of the business The Company was founded by William Laird, who had established the Birkenhead Iron Works in 1824, when he was joined by his son, John Laird in 1828: their first ship was an iron barge.[1] John realised that the techniques of making boilers could be applied to making ships. The company soon became pre-eminent in the manufacture of iron ships and made major advances in propulsion. In 1903 the businesses of Messrs. Cammell and Laird merged to create a company at the forefront of shipbuilding.[2] Johnson Cammell & Co. had been founded by Charles Cammell and Henry and Thomas Johnson: it made, amongst many other metal products, iron wheels and rails for Britain's railways and was based in Sheffield.[2] In 1929, the railway rolling stock business of Cammell Laird was spun off and merged to become Metropolitan-Cammell Carriage and Wagon Company Ltd. Between 1829 and 1947, over 1,100 vessels of all kinds were launched from the Cammell Laird slipways into the River Mersey. Among the many famous ships made by the companies were the world's first steel ship, the Ma Roberts, built in 1858 for Dr. Livingstone's Zambezi expedition, CSS Alabama that was built in 1862 for the Confederate States of America, HMS Caroline (1914) that holds the record fastest build time of any significant warship (nine months from her keel being laid till her launch), the first all-welded ship, the Fullagar built in 1920, Cunard's second Mauretania of 1939, the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal (1937) and the largest vessel, so far, to have been built for the Royal Navy HMS Ark Royal (1950). In 1898, Cammell provided the half inch armor plate used to fabricate the four Fowler Armoured Road Trains built during the Second Anglo-Boer War. The armoured road train was the first self-propelled, free-roaming, armored military land vehicle ever built, predating the tanks of World War One by nearly two decades.
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