When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre

  So he quit, joined a construction firm, had an accident in which he damaged a hand, tried to rejoin the pit, and was rejected on medical grounds. He became a service engineer, going wherever the work took him, including the middle of the North Sea on oil platforms. There he met a self-employed contractor who lived near Mr Philpott. ‘I had never known anyone before with a Mercedes-Benz or a big house like he had, and he was just an ordinary lad.’ Nearly twenty years after leaving school, Mr Philpott made a connection between his skill and value and the possibility of a way of life which, without considering it very carefully, he had assumed was as far beyond his aspirations as being an airline pilot. The final push came when his new friend told him of the sizeable gap between Mr Philpott’s pay and the money his employers were getting for the hire of his talents. ‘I was the one in the middle of the North Sea, and they were getting the profit. I said to myself, if I went on like that, I could be working for years and years, and what would I have to show for it? A couple of pints on a Saturday night. If someone else could make money out of me, I had to have something to offer.’

  He had noticed when going about his job that firms were increasingly shedding their own service departments, and contracting the work to independent companies. ‘Over the years you could see the decline.’ He calculated: ‘If I could have a little factory of my own, and hire myself out, I could make a go of fetching in engineering equipment, overhauling and repairing it.’ He left his job, and sought advice. ‘There’s that many hotlines you can phone to be told how you can start in business.’ He negotiated a ten thousand pounds loan from British Coal Enterprise, who put money into the creation of jobs in coal-mining areas; the local authority found him a new factory, rent- and rates-free for two years (it was within view of the by-then abandoned pit where he had passed his youthful working days); the bank loaned him five thousand pounds; through one of the small business advisory agencies he met a man with redundant machinery to dispose of; by the time he was ready to start he had been unemployed for eight weeks and qualified for the twelve-month forty pounds a week enterprise allowance. ‘There are,’ Mr Philpott said, ‘all sorts of incentives here to set yourself up in business.’

  His wife, whose only working experience was a short time spent operating a sewing machine, taught herself to be a secretary and much else besides. She also qualified for the enterprise allowance. ‘She may be at a business lunch, and then cleaning out the toilets a few hours later. It’s hard to believe it’s the same woman. She hadn’t a clue how to do bookwork, and now everyone who looks at her books says they are a model.’ She has, when needs must, drilled holes all day.

  Not only had his calculation about the amount of servicing work available proved correct – a year after he had started the business it was, he said, ‘touch wood, rolling in’ – but Mr Philpott, then in his mid-thirties, also turned out to be an inspired ideas man. Reading a motoring magazine, he had seen a small item reporting that the Department of Transport was to require all garages that issued MOT test certificates to keep them in a secure place. The department specified the minimum acceptable strongbox – a small rectangular steel container protected by a seven-lever slam lock. Mr Philpott invested seven hundred pounds of his limited capital in such locks, and obtained a list of all authorized testing stations in the north-east. Using the one thousand free letters that the Post Office allows a new business, he circularized the testing stations, pointing out the impending law, and offering to provide the required strongbox. The department suddenly brought the date forward, there was a mini-panic amongst garage owners, and Mr Philpott pulled off a minor business coup.

  His next idea had considerably more potential. His foreman went on holiday in a MGB sports car, complaining on his return – as all sports car drivers must do – about the lack of luggage space. Mr Philpott designed a rigid rack that could be attached to a tow bar. A marketing entrepreneur saw it, signed a national franchise and ordered two hundred immediately. Mr Philpott had advertised his rack on local radio, and received a phone call from the husband of a young woman who had been crippled. The woman had an electric wheelchair, but it was impossible for her to go anywhere because they could not get the chair into a car, and it was too heavy to lift into a van. With ramps, the husband suggested, the Philpott luggage rack could be adapted to carry the wheelchair. The chair’s manufacturer was enthusiastic, and, after trials with various materials, Mr Philpott was ready to develop the rack using aluminium for the ramps.

  Mr Philpott already employed nine people, and shortly afterwards had to take extra factory space. His slogan was, ‘If you can draw it, we can make it.’ He still, he said, didn’t see himself as a ‘boss’, but his perspectives had changed. While regretting the damage to communities that pit closures cause, he appreciated the rationale. ‘If I had three shops, and one wasn’t making money, I’d close it. That’s fair enough. I’m looking at it now from the other side of the fence.’ He understood also the sterility of some of his youthful habits. ‘I’m not knocking the place, but it’s a way of life. Friday, Saturday nights, in the pubs and clubs, you’ll go in and know exactly who’s sitting where.’ It wasn’t, he said, his ambition to be a millionaire. ‘I’d like a few bob in the bank, and my children to come into the business when they leave school. I want to prepare a future for them.’ His current ambitions were to buy his wife a car, upgrade his own six-year-old Porsche, and be able to buy whatever the family ‘fancied’.

  He was ambivalent about the large number of unemployed people in the area. A local paper, writing about his company, erroneously reported that he had vacancies. He received three hundred letters. ‘Some,’ said Mr Philpott, ‘were heart-breaking, from people who hadn’t worked for three years, who wrote that any wages were better than dole money. Made me want to take them on.’ For others, including people who had disliked him at school but now wanted his help and some who demanded three hundred pounds a week minimum, he had no sympathy. There was, he suggested, always work if you really wanted it – driving a taxi or working in a bar. As we stepped out of the small factory, Mr Philpott looked across the open fields to the silent pit. He had been back to poke around, he said. Papers had been blowing round the abandoned medical room, and he pointed out a white building to me. ‘I remember people being carried in there who never walked out.’ The flooded pit, the dangers, the night shifts were now another world.

  A few days later I met two young men, Roger Hine and Ken Eagle, who had recently started a printing business. Mr Hine had been with the Gas Board for ten years, growing fidgety at the restrictions placed on his enterprise. ‘You never really have any power at the Gas Board – even as a depot manager you’re controlled from above, confined by a set of rules,’ he said. Mr Eagle, a neighbour and drinking friend, was already in the print business, but at risk of being made redundant – ‘the prospect of being on the dole didn’t excite me.’ The friends started a part-time business collecting waste paper, but trade was poor, and they decided to capitalize on Mr Eagle’s experience. ‘I had seen from the inside where the printers went wrong – some weeks ten to fifteen mistakes would go out. We decided we could make a better shot at it.’ The two men also got premises rent- and rates-free for two years from Peterlee Development Corporation in Durham, raised a British Coal Enterprise loan, claimed the enterprise allowance, and six months later were already employing six people, and expanding their company, Advance Printing and Design, faster than they had forecast. Mr Eagle said: ‘I didn’t want to be working up to sixty-five. We get more satisfaction from the success than from making money. When we got our first job in, we were like two kids at Christmas. Each new order and client is a challenge, getting it just right. We go out of our way to make sure we satisfy the customer.’

  When I returned from America, one of the national preoccupations was ‘Can Britain create an enterprise culture!’ It was a tenet of Thatcherism that, as increased efficiency shook out surplus labour, so the natural ingenuity and latent drive of the British people wou
ld begin to regenerate the economy from the grass roots. Prince Charles made a whistle-stop tour of the United States, returning to lament that his inheritance might be a fourth-rate nation unless his fellow countrymen could emulate some of the get-up-and-go vim he had detected between banquets in Dallas and Washington. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘how to kindle a spirit of enterprise … because one of the difficulties, it seems to me, is that we are so often struggling against a completely different culture in this country … the problem is how to change attitudes so [people] realize they can make a contribution themselves towards the creation of jobs.’

  Britain was also on the eve of industry Year’, an eleventh-hour attempt by manufacturers to persuade the nation that man could not live by services alone. Unless there was to continue to be something concrete at the foundation of the economy, it would in the end, they said, collapse, like a house of cards before a puff of wind. A House of Lords Committee, deeply influenced by blue-chip industrialists like Lord Weinstock and Sir John Harvey-Jones, argued that Thatcherism was not enough. The decline of manufacturing, it said, posed ‘a grave threat to the standard of living and to the economic and political stability of the nation’. Services, contended the Lords, are in the end dependent on manufacturing. Mr Leon Brittan, still at that time Industry Secretary, but about to be engulfed by the Westlands affair, piped up that the Lords’ report gave ‘a totally biased and misleading view of the economy’. We were once again embarked on a ‘wets’ versus ‘dries’ confrontation.

  The Lords appeared to be speaking self-evident truth. Britain had invented the television, the commercial computer, the jet engine, the video recorder – but now imported millions of pounds’ worth of these items each week. We needed jobs – even window-cleaning and car-washing generate economic activity and hope – but we essentially needed to start making things again. We still had sediments of the creativity of the first industrial revolution, most visible perhaps in the innovative street styles of London – striking after the conformity of American youth. But post-punk bravado was scarcely the structured basis for a national industrial revival: we were not going to fashion an economic miracle out of purple coxcombs.

  It did not seem to me that the doctrine that went by Mrs Thatcher’s name was a solid enough foundation for the necessary economic regeneration. Nor did she appear to have a sufficient grasp of the odds against both social mobility and enterprise in Britain. Her own rise from ‘corner shop’ to Downing Street is largely a political myth. Her father had been mayor of Grantham, chairman of the governors of the local grammar school, and host to Conservative government ministers when they came to town. Margaret Roberts studied upstairs for Oxford, while fifteen-year-old shop girls served at the counter. The spoon in her mouth had been at the very least silver-plated. Her anti-Establishment populism, rooted in this myth, was therefore itself somewhat of a fraud. She sent her son to Harrow, and re-created hereditary peerages. The conservative in her nature was often at odds with the radical and often emerged triumphant – as her government’s wielding of Section Two of the Official Secrets Act had betrayed. Her brittle, antagonistic personality – perfect for the Falklands War, if such a war were necessary – alienated so many whom she should have been winning to her cause that her legacy threatened to be a harshly divided society, rather than one harmoniously adapting to new ways. The shake-up she desired for Britain’s ossified industrial habits was long overdue, but her flint-like certainty and her lack of patience, were, by the beginning of her third term, alienating even enthusiasts for her cause. ‘She’s so bloody arrogant,’ I kept hearing from businessmen.

  It became a cliché to describe Mrs Thatcher as a schoolmarm, but the image is unfair to teachers. Yes, there are those who stand at the front of the class, ruler in one hand, chalk in the other, and woe betide the child who chatters. But they are not the teachers whose influence stays with a child throughout his lifetime. In part, economic Thatcherism has been essential, but it has been preached by a flawed apostle. Workers may have been cowed by the miners’ strike and Wapping, but industrial antagonisms, ‘them’ and ‘us’, seemed to me on my return to be barely suppressed. Mrs Thatcher has often been compared to Ronald Reagan, but their political strengths are poles apart. Reagan was elected, not because – even at his finest hour – anyone thought he was competent to run anything, but because people liked him. If Mrs Thatcher had depended on that sort of popularity, she would not have become even the mayor of Grantham. If our new-found ‘enterprise culture’ is to survive, it needs a more fundamental underpinning than hard times and hectoring leadership. My visits to Messrs Philpott, Hine and Eagle were part of an eighteen-month inquiry to attempt to find out whether that underpinning did exist.

  I had known Brian Bottomley since before my American assignment. Shortly before going to America I had spent some time in Coventry, reporting that city at the geographic heart of England as a metaphor for Britain’s post-war rise and fall. First, the regeneration – hope, Basil Spence’s cathedral, pioneering comprehensive schools, shopping precincts, the ring road, the municipal theatre, car factories – for two decades Coventry had been the future. Then the disillusionment – shoddy materialism, the vandalized and violent walkways, unemployment, hopelessness. The day I met Mr Bottomley proved to be the worst day of his life. He was the managing director of a large machine-tool company, the subsidiary of a national giant. Or rather he had been. A few hours before I called, he – and several hundred of his workforce – had been made redundant. At first he was too hurt to tell me what had happened. Suddenly, he rose, closed the door to his outer office, and – on the strict condition that I revealed neither his name nor his industry – told me his story. It was a microcosm of the accelerating disaster that was overwhelming British industry. Here was a man, then aged fifty-three, of immense enterprise and ability, who had worked his way from the shop-floor via night school – he had left school at fourteen – gaining an incomparable knowledge of his business, from the smallest technical detail, to design, production and a first-hand knowledge of foreign markets. ‘I have tried very hard, and feel that it has been a waste of time,’ he said. He accused Mrs Thatcher of killing the national golden goose.

  We went our separate ways, and, as the unemployment figures rose and British manufacturing crumbled, occasionally I thought of Mr Bottomley and what a national defeat his personal disaster symbolized, regretting that I was unlikely ever to learn what happened to him. However, a few months after my return from America, he telephoned. This time he had a story of remarkable success to tell. He was still in machine tools, running his own business, and taking on new workers proportionately faster than almost any employer in Britain. He was back where he started, in Atlantic Street, Broadheath, near Manchester, a few yards from where he served his apprenticeship. With his son, Nigel, the firm’s financial director, at his side, he brought me up to date. Back in 1981, after ten weeks out of work, he had been taken on as managing director of a firm called Kearns-Richards, another machine-tool subsidiary of a large conglomerate. As soon as he arrived, the bottom fell out of the business. He was charged with the unpleasant task of laying off three hundred people and trying to sell the company. The more he looked at the figures he had prepared, the more confident he was that he himself could save and run the company, pulling off what is known as a management ‘buy-out’. The parent company was sceptical and protective, worried that Mr Bottomley might ruin himself in the attempt.

  They were not the only ones with cold feet. The Bottomleys rapidly discovered the large gap between the theory and reality of Britain’s supposed ‘enterprise culture’. Although Mr Bottomley had adapted his proposals to the realism of the market, supporting a machine-tool company was considered to be as desirable as cuddling up to a gorilla. Eventually, one bank had faith: the Bottomleys had their deal. When I met him again, he had increased the workforce of thirty-seven by one hundred people, and profits were handsomely exceeding forecasts. Twice during my visit Mr Bottomley had led me w
ith pride to the cavernous works, where huge machine tools, worth upwards of £200,000, awaited shipment to all parts of the world. Asking him why he had risked so much so late in his career was almost a superfluous question. ‘The alternative was to sell my house, buy a smaller one and hibernate. I love work and the industry, and have always wanted to do something on my own,’ he said. There were still frustrations: the Ministry of Defence had been three weeks late paying a bill; while the Bottomleys waited, the Inland Revenue gave them a mere three hours to pay a much smaller amount, threatening to send in the bailiffs; the bank had pressured them when a storm in the Bay of Biscay held up an export order – although the bank knew the money was on its way and that the firm had security in buildings, plant and machinery far exceeding its overdraft. The Bottomleys were convinced also that foreign governments unfairly subsidized their overseas competitors. But these problems seemed like small clouds in a blue sky.

  Nine months later Mr Bottomley phoned again. The roller coaster had taken another dip. The bank was bouncing cheques although profits were good and the firm was still secure: subsidies to Spanish and East German companies by their governments had cost him four orders in the home market – the foreign companies were quoting finished prices below the cost of materials and labour. The Bottomleys were embroiled with the bank and the government, losing business while they battled for survival. They had incurred £55,000 in fees to financial consultants. I returned. Once again the Bottomleys were struggling back to their feet. A deal was about to be struck with venture capitalists, which would free them from the bank’s clutches; orders were picking up; profit forecasts, despite the time wasted fighting unnecessary financial battles, looked healthy. As the Bottomleys told me the history of the past year; I began to understand what unusual resilience is required to run a manufacturing business. There were battles with the bank, dealing sometimes with faceless people, sometimes with ignorant ones – the Bottomleys had one horrific encounter with a man with the power to break them, who had outlined the history of their company to them getting virtually every fact wrong. There were battles with civil servants – Brian said: ‘I vented my spleen on them. I told them that in other countries civil servants are aware that their salaries are paid by enterprise.’ We were again touring the works, when he suddenly burst out: ‘I cannot honestly believe that a country of our size can live by service industry. The City seems geared up to shipping money out of the UK rather than investing it here.’ It was an anguished cry from a man in the front line of British manufacturing.