William Morris, Viscount Nuffield(1877–1963)

William Richard Morris was born at Hawkesbury Road in Worcester on the tenth of October 1877, the only surviving son of a Worcestershire draper's traveller. The family moved to Oxford when he was three. He left James Street Board School at fifteen, was apprenticed to a Cowley Road cycle repairer for six months, and on a fall-out with the employer over a sixpenny rise opened his own bicycle-repair shop at 16 James Street, Cowley, in 1893, in his sixteenth year, with capital of four pounds.

He built bicycles, then motorbikes, then through the early 1900s a car-hire and taxi business operating around Oxford station. By 1910 he had decided that the small British car market, then served by a handful of expensive bespoke manufacturers, could be cracked open by an American-style production line building one cheap, reliable, repairable model in volume. In 1912 he set up WRM Motors at a former military training college at Cowley on the Oxford ring road and brought out the first Morris car, the Morris Oxford, two-seater, eight horsepower, list price one hundred and seventy-five pounds. By 1925, after a decade of relentless price-cutting and component-cost engineering, the Morris Cowley was selling at one hundred and seventy-five pounds and Morris Motors was the largest car manufacturer in Britain by output, with forty-one per cent of the British market.

Through the 1930s he absorbed Wolseley (1927), MG (1935) and Riley (1938) into the Morris group, and on the eve of the Second World War his factories at Cowley employed twenty thousand people and produced more than a third of all British cars. In the war the Cowley works built Tiger Moth airframes, Horsa glider components, repaired battle-damaged Hawker Hurricanes by the thousand, and produced the prefabricated Mulberry harbour units used on D-Day. He was knighted in 1929, created Baron Nuffield in 1934 and Viscount Nuffield in 1938.

From the early 1920s he had set out to do something with the money the cars were earning him that no industrialist of comparable scale in Britain had yet attempted. He gave £2 million in 1937 to set up the Nuffield Foundation, the largest single charitable endowment in British history to that date; £1.25 million in 1937 to found Nuffield College, Oxford, the university's first graduate-only college; the entire foundation cost of the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford in 1936; the foundation cost of the Nuffield Department of Surgery, Anaesthetics and Obstetrics in 1937; the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust in 1939; the Nuffield Trust for the Forces of the Crown in 1939; and the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in 1950. The total of his lifetime giving, by the published audit of his executors in 1963, was thirty million pounds in pre-war and post-war sterling, more than thirty billion pounds in 2025 money, the largest single act of industrial philanthropy in British history.

He died at his house at Nuffield Place near Henley on the twenty-second of August 1963, in his eighty-sixth year. Morris Motors was merged into the British Motor Corporation in 1952, in turn into British Leyland in 1968, and the Cowley works passed to BMW in 1994; it continues as the MINI plant Oxford, producing the modern MINI for global export. The Nuffield Foundation remains one of the largest independent grant-making philanthropies in Britain, Nuffield College is among the leading social-science research institutions in Europe, and the Nuffield medical departments at Oxford are the largest single donor-funded medical complex in the university's history. The Morris name in British industry, and the Nuffield name across British medicine, education and social research, carry the weight of the four-pound bicycle shop the sixteen-year-old opened on the Cowley Road.