Then I was ready. I asked for a cab to be summoned, and directed it to the Beswick plant, where I was to meet Mr Williams, the general manager. I will sketch over most of my conversations, as they were not of great significance. I had sent a telegram the day before, saying I had been retained by the executors of the Ravenscliff estate to sort out certain matters regarding the will. I let it be thought that I was a lawyer, as it would have been far too easy to discover my ignorance had I pretended to be anything else. Even with this disguise there were moments of awkwardness, as Mr Williams knew very much more about company law than I did. He was a grim, tight little man at first sight, and did not relish his time being wasted. Only as our conversation progressed did I realise there was very much more to him. He was an interesting character, in fact, and his initial caution derived principally from the fact that he detested people like me, or rather people like I was supposed to be. Londoners. Money men. Lawyers. With no understanding of industry and no sympathy for it. Williams had more in common with the artisans in his yards than he had with the bankers of the City, although both gave him grief. He was an intermediary, beset on all sides.

I won him over eventually. I confessed that I knew nothing of the City whatsoever, told him of my own antecedents surrounded by the bicycle shops of the Midlands, made myself out as much as possible to be more like him than the bankers of his imagination and experience. And eventually he relaxed, and began to talk more freely. 'Why are you here, exactly?'

I did my best to look a touch shamefaced. 'It is completely foolish,' I said. 'But the law requires that the executors confirm the existence of assets in the estate. That is, if the deceased leaves a pair of cufflinks to a friend, then the executor must confirm the existence of those cufflinks. I am here merely to confirm that this shipyard exists. I take it that it does? It is not a figment of the imagination? We are not making some error here?'

Mr Williams smiled. 'It does. And, as the law is a demanding beast, I will show it to you, if you wish.'

'I would like that very much,' I said with enthusiasm. 'I would be fascinated.'

He pulled out his watch and glanced at it, then sighed like a man who can see his day being wasted and stood up. 'Come along then. I normally do my rounds at lunchtime, but there is no reason why I should not vary my routine a little.'

'Your rounds?' I asked as we left the office, Williams having told his clerks where he was going. 'You sound like a surgeon.'

'It is the same idea, in some ways,' he replied. 'It is important to be seen, and to take the mood of the place. We have to do more and more of that, as so many of our people now join unions.'

'Does that annoy you?'

He shrugged. 'If I were them, I'd join a union,' he said, 'even though it makes my life more complicated. But I have always done this. His Lordship thinks – thought, I should say – that it is important.'

'Did you know him well?' I asked. 'I never met him. He sounds an interesting man.'

'He was very much more than that,' Williams said, 'but he will never be recognised as such. Actresses are better known than men of industry, even though the latter generate the wealth which keeps us from poverty.'

'So what was so great about him?'

Williams looked at me thoughtfully, then said, 'Come this way.'

He took me through a doorway, along a corridor, then up a flight of stairs, Then another, and another, and another. He flitted up nimbly enough, I puffed behind in the dark, wondering where we were going, until he reached another door, opened it and stepped out into the bright sunlight. 'This is what was so great about him,' he said as I stepped through.

It was breathtaking, a sight such as I had never seen before, never even imagined. I knew, all schoolboys knew, about British industry. How it led the world. We knew about the rise of the factory, and mass production. Of iron mills and cotton mills and railways. And daily we saw the results: Sheffield steel, railway engines from Carlisle, ships built in dozens of yards all around the country. We saw the iron girders of bridges, visited the Crystal Palace and knew all about the other marvels of the age. How such things came to be was rarely taught to people like me. They merely existed. I had only ever seen the outside of factories, and there were few enough of those in London, and certainly nothing of any great scale. Even in my home town the biggest employer, the Starley Meteor Works, only had a couple of hundred people.

I stared in utter amazement, and with emotions verging on awe. The yard was gigantic, so big you could not see the end of it, whichever way you turned, it was simply swallowed up in the haze of sunlight through smoke. A vast mass of machinery, cranes, yards, buildings, storage areas, assembly sheds, offices, stretching out before my eyes in every direction. Plumes of thick black smoke rose from a dozen chimneys, the clanking, thudding, scraping and screeching of machinery came from different parts of the scene. It seemed chaotic, even diabolical, the way the landscape had disappeared under the hand of man, but there was also something extraordinarily beautiful in the intricacy, the blocks of brick buildings set against the tin roofs and rusting girders and the dark brown of the river, faintly in view to the east. And there was not a tree, not a bird, not even a patch of grass, anywhere to be seen. Nature had been abolished.

'This is the Beswick Shipyard,' Williams said. 'The creation of Lord Ravenscliff, more than anyone else. It is only one part of his interests; he reproduced factories like this across the country, and across Europe, although this is by far the biggest. What you see is not a factory, it is a sequence of factories, each one carefully linked to the other parts, and this, in turn, is linked to the other sites across the continent. It is the most complex, elaborate structure that mankind has ever constructed.'

'And you run it all?' I asked, genuinely impressed.

'I run this plant.'

'How? I mean, how can one person have the slightest idea what is going on in that – chaos?'

He smiled. 'That is where Ravenscliff was a genius. He developed a way of controlling all this, and not just this, but all of his factories, so that any moment you can find out what is going on, where it is happening. So that chaos, as you call it, can be tamed and the hidden patterns and movements of men, and machinery and capital and raw material, can be forced to act in a way which is efficient and effective.'

'Elegant?' I suggested.

'That is not a word a businessman often uses, but yes, it is elegant, if you wish. Not many people can, or want to, understand it, but I would even say it has a sort of beauty to it, when it works well.'

'And the reason for of all this is . . .'

Mr Williams pointed, out to the east towards a dark grey shape. 'Can you see that there?'

'Vaguely. What is it?'

'That is HMS Anson. A Dreadnought, 23,000 tons. Three million different parts are needed for that ship to do its job. Every one must work perfectly. Every one has to be conceived, designed, fabricated and assembled into its correct place so that the ship will perform properly. It must sail in the tropics and in the Arctic. It must be able to fire its guns under all conditions. It must be ready for full speed at a few hours' notice, capable of sailing for months at a time with no repairs. And all of those pieces have to be gathered together and put in place on time, and within budget. That is the point of all this. Would you like to see it?'

Williams led me down the stairs and across a cobbled road to what seemed very like a cab stand. 'The plant is three miles long and two miles deep,' he said as we got in the back of a horse-drawn buggy that was waiting there. 'I can't waste my time walking around, so we have this system of carriages around the place. The horses are used to the noise.'