John I. Thornycroft & Company

John I. Thornycroft & Company Limited, usually known as Thornycroft, was a British shipbuilding firm founded by John Isaac Thornycroft at Chiswick on the Thames in 1866. It built steam launches and yachts, then became a major supplier of torpedo boats to many navies from the 1870s and developed a water-tube boiler patented in 1885. The company became a public limited company in 1901, bought the former Oswald Mordaunt yard at Woolston, Southampton, in 1904 and closed the Chiswick yard in 1909. At Woolston it built destroyers and other warships for the Royal Navy through both world wars, including the first seaworthy Landing Craft Assault, of which 1,929 were built. In 1966 it merged with Vosper and Company to form Vosper Thornycroft, which later became VT Group and was absorbed by Babcock International in 2010.