War and Post-war Britain
The post-war house building programme put gas at a disadvantage. Whereas electricity had long developed a national distribution grid, which enabled supplies to reach even small new housing developments, gas was still distributed only locally. Many new housing estates were beyond the reach of the gas main and the stringent Treasury rules about return on investment made extension of mains uneconomic. Electricity made inroads into the home heating market with underfloor heating and night storage heaters using cheap off-peak electricity supplies.
By the 1960s, manufactured gas, compared with its main rival in the energy market, electricity, was considered "nasty, smelly, dirty and dangerous" (to quote market research of the time) and seemed doomed to lose market share still further, except for cooking where its controllability gave it marked advantages over both electricity and solid fuel. The development of more efficient gas fires assisted gas to resist competition in the market for room heating. Concurrently a new market for whole house central heating by hot water was being developed by the oil industry and the gas industry followed suit. Gas warm air heating found a market niche in new local authority housing where low installation costs gave it an advantage. These developments, the realignment of managerial thinking away from commercial management (selling what the industry produced) to marketing management (meeting the needs and desires of customers) and the lifting of an early moratorium preventing nationalised industries from using television advertising, saved the gas industry for long enough to provide a viable market for what was to come.
Read more about this topic: Coal Gas
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“This is not only a war of soldiers in uniform. It is a war of the people, of all the people, and it must be fought not only on the battlefield but in the cities and the villages, in the factories and on the farms, in the home and in the heart of every man, woman and child who loves freedom.”
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“Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be “too clever by half.” The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.”
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