James Edward MacLaren (c1898-1951)
Born at Nova Scotia
MD of BSA Tools
1953 Obituary [1]
JAMES EDWARD MACLAREN, whose untimely death occurred on 2nd October 1951 at the age of fifty-three, was an outstanding engineer and was well known as an authority in the machine tool industry, with which he had been connected throughout his professional career.
He was educated at schools in Canada and the United States and served an apprenticeship with the Brown and Sharpe Manufacturing Company, Providence, Rhode Island.
He came to Great Britain in 1918 and served for a brief period as an instructor at the training centre of the Ministry of Munitions. During the following nineteen years he held the joint appointment of sales manager and specialist to the Brown and Sharpe Manufacturing Company and Buck and Hickman, Ltd., London, engineers and tool makers. He became a director of the latter firm in 1938 and a year later was elected chairman of the Machine Tool Control for the Midland area.
In 1941 he was appointed regional controller of the same area by the Ministry of Supply and during 1944 and 1945 he was deputy chief, economic division of the control commission of Germany. His final appointment, which he took up in 1946, was the important and responsible one of managing director of the B.S.A. Tools Group, an organization comprised of several leading machine tool and engineering concerns. In this capacity he was directly responsible to the chairman and in charge of some 2,700 employees.
Mr. Maclaren had been a Member of the Institution since 1950. He was also a Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and of many other technical bodies.