George Turnbull (autoindustry executive)

Sir George Henry Turnbull, CEng, FIMechE (17 October 1926 – 22 December 1992) was a UK automobile executive best remembered in the UK for his period as managing director of the Austin-Morris Division of British Leyland.

The son of a works manager at the Coventry-based Standard Motor Company, George Turnbull left his grammar school at the age of just 14 to take up a six-year automobile engineering design apprenticeship with Standard. It was the company that sponsored his engineering course at Birmingham University from which he obtained his first degree. He married in 1950 and fathered three children.

Between 1950 and 1951 he held a post as personal assistant to the Technical Director of the Standard Motor Company. Between 1955 and 1956 he was employed as works manager with oil engine manufacturers Petters before returning to Standard, where he achieved a series of promotions, initially within Standard, where he became General Manager from 1959-1962. and subsequently working for successor companies (much of the Midlands-based UK motor industry consolidated itself into what became the British Leyland Motor Corporation, late in 1968).

On his promotion to the board of the newly formed British Leyland in 1968 he was, at 41, the youngest member of the board. His time as managing director of the Austin-Morris division ran from 1968 to 1973 and is remembered as a period during which the company reaped the harvest from a decade of insufficient investment in product development and production technology, crowned by increasingly troubled industrial relations. Product launches during Turnbull's time included the Morris Marina.

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