FEW North-East companies made a bigger impact on world affairs than the one established by Bishop Auckland Grammar School boy William George Armstrong.

Yesterday, the former Vickers Armstrong tank factory in Scotswood Road, Newcastle, became the latest victim of Government spending cuts.

The factory, now run by BAE, is earmarked for closure at the end of next year. The works can trace its roots back to 1847.

WG Armstrong & Company made the hydraulics that helped Newcastle’s Swing Bridge to swing and London’s Tower Bridge to wow tourists for more than a century.

But, it was the manufacture of big guns that turned the company into a global brand.

War can be a lucrative business and making cutting-edge weaponry employed thousands of North-East workers in the factory’s heyday. Its field gun was the weapon of mass destruction of the mid Victorian age and its tanks dominated battlefields from the Somme to the Sahara.

But BAE’s order book is almost empty. Like suits of armour, castles and battleships, the tank has been unable to halt the march of technology.

Recent conflicts have increasingly exposed it as a throwback to another era. Why pay millions of pounds for a tank when you can propel rockets at your enemy from the back of truck?

It would be nice to think that the demise of an arms factory meant that we had found a more humane way to settle international conflicts. Sadly it is just a sign that we have found cheaper ways to kill one another.