Peak workforce of 1,200 from 1960s for Perry Engineering but merger starts its loss control from South Australia
The huge Perry Engineering plant at the Adelaide inner western suburb of Mile End South from the 1960s to 1980s.
Image courtesy City of West Torrens
Perry Engineering, based mainly at Adelaide’s inner western suburb of Mile End South, in 1960 employed what remained its largest ever peacetime workforce: around 1,200 workers from 42 countries, up from 600 in 1950.
Later in the 1960s, company chairman Don Laidlaw became an advocate for employing females, negotiating an agreement with the Australian Society of Engineers that saw Perry’s became the first major employer of women in Australian manufacturing. Laidlaw was also president of the metal industries association of Australia in the late 1960s.
In 1961, Perry Engineering announced it would build plants at Whyalla, for heavy duty steel fabrication and constructing aluminium windows. Also that year, Perry’s began a contract to build paper making and pulping equipment for the British Walsmley (Bury) Group. Significantly, with the opening of its Tonsley Park car plant, Chrysler Australia in October 1965 sold its 6.5 acre site at Mile End South to Perry’s for £225,000. The total factory area owned by Perry at the site now covered more than 750,000 square feet, making it the largest heavy general engineering plant in Australia. (Perry’s later progressively sold off the land, for example in 1991 to LeCornu furniture discount store.)
In 1965-66, Perry’s profits were a record $781,438. In 1966, Perry’s won a contract to make forging machines for the new (1967) Chrysler car plant at Lonsdale.
Perry’s management realised in the mid 1960s that South Australia’s 30-year manufacturing boom was starting to slow. The company felt it could secure longer-term national growth only through being allied with another established company. In 1966, it announced a merger with Johns & Waygood Holdings, a Melbourne-based lift and escalator manufacturer founded in 1888. The new company, Johns and Waygood Perry Engineering Limited, had an issued share capital of $13.5 million, with Johns and Waygood holding 67% and Perry 33%.
With the merger, Don Laidlaw becoming deputy chair and joint managing director. The Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide described Johns and Waygood Perry, that went on to have more than 5,000 employees, as a “new giant … on the Australian industrial scene”. But, with Johns and Waygood holding two thirds of the new company’s 10 board positions, Perry’s business decisions would now be made in Melbourne.
Over the next 20 years the ownership and names of Perry Engineering changed through corporate manoeuvrings. In 1977, Johns and Waygood Perry became Johns Ltd that had a $180.42 million takeover by Boral in 1986. The new company was briefly named Boral-Johns Perry.
Meanwhile Perry Engineering remained a distinctive part of the Australian engineering environment. In the 1970s and 1980s the company continued to build car chassis for General Motors Holden. Laidlaw was especially proud of the company winning the tender to make the chassis for the Holden Kingswood range of cars – a project which lasted 13 years and produced 1.5 million frames. Perry also built the chassis for the HQ Holden One-tonner into the 1970s.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Perry worked on defence projects such as the making lift trucks for loading bombs onto planes, and in the 1990s contributed to developing the Bushcraft armoured miliary vehicle prototype as well as to the Collins Class submarines (hull segments, interior platforms, storage tanks) and Anzac frigates (rudders and stabilisers).
Civil projects included work on Adelaide Festival Centre, Goldsborough House on North Terrace, Adelaide city; and Yallourn W powerhouse in Victoria in the early 1970s; telecommunication antennae in the late 1970s and mid 1980s; the Olympic Dam and the Northern Power Station at Port Augusta in the 1980s.
