John Brown & Company

John Brown and Company of Clydebank was a Scottish marine engineering and shipbuilding firm that built some of the most famous ships of the twentieth century, among them RMS Lusitania, RMS Aquitania, HMS Hood, RMS Queen Mary, RMS Queen Elizabeth and Queen Elizabeth 2. From about 1900 to the 1950s it ranked among the most highly regarded shipbuilders in the world. Unable to keep pace with yards in Eastern Europe and the Far East, it merged with other Clydeside yards in 1968 to form the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders consortium, which collapsed in 1971. The company then left shipbuilding, but its engineering arm went on making industrial gas turbines and became a subsidiary of Trafalgar House in 1986.