By the standards of the previous seven years, 1929 was a good one for shipbuilding. Even so it was ominous that, within a month of the removal of the headquarters to Birkenhead, R. S. Johnson was quoted in the commercial press as reckoning there were 40 per cent more building berths in the UK than were ever likely to be needed. At almost the same time Hichens stressed that a large proportion of existing yards would have to go out of business before prosperity returned to the industry. In the UK that year 1.5 million tons of merchant shipping were launched; for full employment of its capacity the industry needed twice that tonnage, for which he saw ‘not the ghost of a chance’.

For heavy industries the 1930s were divided into two periods: in the early years the best that could be hoped for was to hold on; during the second half they were revived by national and international economic recovery, and by rearmament. In September 1929 55.7 per cent of the berths in the UK were occupied; in the September of the next three years the proportion fell to 32.7 per cent, 11.9 per cent and 5.9 per cent. At the start of 1930 unemployment in the industry was already 23 per cent; by the year's end it reached 45 per cent. As early as August, at the launching of the tanker Athelfoam, Johnson remarked dramatically that the shipbuilding industry was ‘being gradually filched away by foreigners’.