DIFFLOCKEDTHE REGISTRY
Converter, Engineering, Defence contractor, Manufacturer, Coachbuilder · Beaumaris, Anglesey, Wales, United Kingdom · 1968–1997

Laird (Anglesey) Ltd

Defence and specialist-vehicle engineers formed in 1968 at the former Saunders-Roe flying-boat works at Beaumaris on Anglesey, when Cammell Laird brought the Beaumaris and Llangefni factories together with its own engineering business. Among landing craft, radar aerials, air bridges and trackway, Laird built the Centaur — the Land Rover-fronted, Scorpion-tracked half-track of 1978-84.

History

The works came first. Saunders-Roe opened the factory at Fryars, Llanfaes, near Beaumaris on Anglesey at the outbreak of the Second World War, well away from the German raids on its Isle of Wight base, and used it to modify Catalina flying boats for the RAF — 399 aircraft passed through, many receiving air-to-surface-vessel radar in strict secrecy. After 1945 the site turned to aluminium fabrication: motor torpedo boats (including P1602, claimed as the world's first in aluminium alloy), minesweepers, hydrofoil work, road tankers, bus bodies for Cuba and masts for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Cammell, Laird and Co. bought the factory from Hawker Siddeley in 1967 and ran it as an autonomous subsidiary; in 1968 Laird (Anglesey) Ltd was formed, incorporating the Beaumaris and Llangefni plants of Saunders-Roe together with Cammell Laird's engineering business. A financial crisis in 1970 left the parent renamed the Laird Group, with the shipbuilding half taken into 50 per cent government ownership. Through the 1970s and 1980s the Anglesey works was busy with defence and airport contracts: naval radar antennas, decompression chambers, airport air bridges and fuel tankers (including for BOAC at JFK), Shark refuse vehicle bodies, landing craft and assault boats used in the Falklands, and the MLC-rated aluminium trackway for driving vehicles over soft ground that the MoD had been buying since 1964.

The Centaur belongs to this period. From 1978 Laird developed a half-track military carrier in the old Saunders-Roe hangar at Beaumaris, mating a Land Rover cab, 3.5-litre Rover V8 and gearbox to a rear hull on shortened Alvis Scorpion CVR(T) running gear. Six pre-production vehicles were built in 1979 on Stage One V8 109 front ends and a final car in 1983 on a coil-sprung One Ten front; the type was demonstrated in Nigeria and the Gulf and trialled in Oman and Norway, but only two are believed to have been sold and Laird abandoned the project around 1984-85. Seven or eight were built, sources differ, and most survive.

Laird Anglesey Ltd was bought in 1996 by FAUN GmbH of the Kirchhoff group and became FAUN Municipal Vehicles Ltd, building refuse collection vehicles and sweepers alongside the trackway business at purpose-built premises in Llangefni; the historic Beaumaris site closed for good in 1997 and stands derelict. The trackway line survives as FAUN Trackway Limited, so named since 2015. (FAUN's own timeline dates the business to the 1940 opening of the Catalina works rather than to the 1968 incorporation of Laird (Anglesey) Ltd.)

Imagery

The former Saunders-Roe works at Fryars, Beaumaris — the factory Laird (Anglesey) Ltd occupied from 1968 and where the Centaur was built, photographed derelict in 2021.
The former Saunders-Roe works at Fryars, Beaumaris — the factory Laird (Anglesey) Ltd occupied from 1968 and where the Centaur was built, photographed derelict in 2021. Mike Searle, via Geograph and Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0 ↗
Another view of the abandoned Beaumaris works on the Menai Strait, empty since production moved to Llangefni in 1997.
Another view of the abandoned Beaumaris works on the Menai Strait, empty since production moved to Llangefni in 1997. Mike Searle, via Geograph and Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0 ↗

Vehicles in this registry (1)

Sources & citations

Maker record updated 2026-09-10T05:17:07.280Z · status: researched