Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  We should be supplied with clothes in the same way that platelayers are. I have to depend on cast-offs.10

  It was the same in the Port of London. When my mother arrived from Germany in the spring of 1950, her ship berthing at the West India, what most struck her was the sight of the dockers wearing not work uniform but instead their ordinary heavy overcoats.

  The third emblematic sector was altogether more modern. ‘The vitality of the British motor industry,’ the Minister of Supply, George Strauss, told the annual dinner of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders on the eve of the first post-war Motor Show in October 1948, ‘has confounded the wiseacres who foretold that the industry would die a lingering death in the post-war world.’ He added that ‘the main reason for our export success is that British cars are exceptionally good’. Next day, the FT agreed: there could ‘be no doubt that the industry has done very well, much better than its detractors can have thought possible’; if it had not managed to achieve ‘the visionary target of “one car, one firm” which has sometimes been urged upon it’, this was because ‘this target is both impracticable and undesirable, not because the industry is not aware of the need for standardisation’; and in general the temporary lack of competition in the export market was far from meaning that there was no ‘substantial underlying demand for British cars’ – indeed, ‘the quality displayed at the show should banish any doubt that they will be unequal to the opportunity’ when circumstances changed. Or, as a talk soon afterwards on the Home Service put it with due caution, ‘Britain, perhaps just for the time being, is the greatest motor-car exporting nation in the world.’

  Nor had the situation changed by 1950, with the huge American motor industry still trying to satisfy its swelling domestic demand and Europe still recovering from the war. That year, the British motor industry enjoyed a staggering 52 per cent of world motor exports. In terms of overall production, whether for domestic or export purposes, the French, German and Italian combined total only just exceeded Britain’s 476,000. Japan, meanwhile, produced only 2,000 cars in the entire year. A report on the British motor industry did concede that it would not be a seller’s market for ever and identified Germany in particular as a potential future competitor of ‘permanent importance’, but that competition would not come from the Volkswagen, which the report reckoned ‘by British standards’ to be ‘uncomfortable and noisy’. Despite increasingly persistent, disobliging complaints from abroad that British cars were becoming a byword for unreliability, it would take a lot to shake the industry’s complacent assumption that British was still best.11

  It was an industry clustered in five main places. Each had significantly different characteristics, but in all of them the conveyor-belt assembly line – ‘the track’ – was the relentless, remorseless, unforgiving nerve centre of operations.

  Dagenham was the British home of Ford – a Detroit in miniature since the early 1930s. The works put a premium on continuous, integrated production and included a blast furnace, coke ovens, a powerhouse, iron and steel foundries, and fully mechanised jetties for loading and unloading that reached out into the Thames. ‘Ford has always applied the principle that higher wages and higher standards of living for all depend on lower costs and lower selling prices through increasingly large-scale production’ was how the British chairman, Lord Perry, summed up the Ford philosophy soon after the war. By 1948 Ford was the highest-volume as well as the most profitable car manufacturer in Britain, while by 1950 its production had trebled over the previous four years. There were also by the end of 1950 two new models about to come on stream – the Consul and the Zephyr, both very successful, heavily American-influenced family saloons – which for the time being most of the quarter of a million or more on Ford’s home-market waiting list could only dream about. Meanwhile, the barely revamped pre-1945 models (the Anglia, Prefect and Popular) still enjoyed huge appeal at the less expensive end of the market.

  In general, coming into the 1950s, Ford had the most professional management, the most systematic product planning and a powerhouse leader in Sir Patrick Hennessy. A self-made Irishman, with drive and strongly held free-market views, he was more frustrated than most by what he saw as the Labour government’s congenital interference in the motor industry. ‘They tell us what to do, what to make, when to make it and what to do with it when we have made it,’ he complained to an American colleague in June 1948. Even so, when soon afterwards the Board of Trade tried to persuade him that the socially responsible way for Ford to continue to expand its production was by opening a new plant some 200 miles away in Kirkby (about to become an overspill area for Liverpool), he successfully stood his ground. ‘It is neither good economic or business judgement for this Company, or the Country, to upset the balance of the only integrated factory in the motor industry by so distant a dispersal,’ insisted a colleague on his behalf.12Ford, more than any other British motor company, was focused on the bottom line.

  But there was a crucial flaw. ‘Labour relations were perhaps the area in which Sir Patrick was least at home’ is his biographer’s verdict. ‘So high were the standards of dedication and performance he set himself that he found it difficult to understand why every Ford worker could not be as disciplined and loyal.’ That is one way of describing the implications of what was a wholly unsentimental deal on offer to the Ford workforce: in essence, reasonably high day wages (with no piecework element) in return for accepting more or less all-encompassing management control. Typically, there had been no recognition of trade unions until almost the end of the war, and then only grudgingly. It was an overly inflexible, macho approach that had worked during the unemployment-scarred 1930s but it was much less suited to the relatively full-employment post-war era. In the three years from the spring of 1946 there were almost 40 strikes and go-slows at the Dagenham plant – or what management in March 1949 bitterly described to the TUC’s Victor Feather as ‘the lamentable, frequent, and serious breaches of the current Agreements’. A tough-minded approach on the part of management was probably inevitable, given the broadly sensible decision to pay largely by time rather than by piecework, with all the inevitable problems and disputes that the latter approach involved; at Ford, however, it seems as often as not to have been a tough-mindedness that, counterproductively, allowed an insufficient degree of dignity to the workforce.

  A trio of recollections gives a flavour of Ford’s methods since the 1930s and the ensuing atmosphere of resentment:

  They were great disciplinarians. You’d go down to where the job was, and hang your clothes up, and there’d be a man standing by this rack arrangement that the clothing was put on to. And as soon as the hooter went you would all start work immediately and out of the corner of your eye you could see this rack start to sail up into the roof with all your clothing. And there it stayed until 4.30 in the afternoon . . .

  Those of us who worked in the Dagenham plant recall the fear of talking out of turn and the suspensions and even worse if one spoke out. The Gestapo-like Service men, and the cat-walk high above the factory where the superintendent usually patrolled, for all the world like a prison warder . . . Many former employees will remember the raids on the trim and upholstery departments to see whether a worker had committed the heinous crime of having his packet of sandwiches near his job. The company insisted that they be kept in a locker which was above the heat treatment, making the sandwiches uneatable at lunchtime . . .

  Working on the line was filthy, dirty and noisy. Basically, you had to have a bath every night. The metal dust that was flying around would turn all your underclothes rusty. No matter how much you washed the sheets they would go rusty and so would the pillows. But what really caused the trouble was the speed-up. We used to have a works standards man come round, and he’d time you with his watch. Then the foreman would come and say, ‘Well, you’ve got to produce faster.’ But it just didn’t work out like that, because you felt you were working and sweating hard enough as it was . . .

  Over the y
ears, observers of the industrial scene (such as Graham Turner) tended to find the factory and its environs a sullen, dispiriting sort of place. The work itself was so intensely narrow and repetitive that the concept of any intrinsic job satisfaction was unimaginable; a high proportion of the workforce, going back to the 1930s, were incomers to the area attracted solely by the material rewards of the work – men characterised by Turner as often ‘at odds with their particular situation or with society in general, the misfits, the dissatisfied and the restless’. As for Dagenham itself:

  The only relief amid the vistas of identical houses [almost entirely built by the London County Council between the wars] is the occasional mild rash of shops, garnishing the burial mounds thrown up to allow the District Line tube to pass beneath them. Wet or fine, the wind blows down the broad avenues and across the litter-laden open spaces. It carries the smoke and the smells from the factories by the river and deposits them among the houses.

  Altogether, concluded Turner, there hung over this one-class, ‘fossilized’ community ‘a towering sense of insecurity, an insecurity compounded of old and new fears, of past memories and current rumours’.13That was in the early 1960s; the collective psyche was unlikely to have been very different in the late 1940s. The human factor, in short, was where the Detroit model was found wanting.

  Some 40 miles away, Luton was host to the other American-owned motor company among the British ‘Big Six’. General Motors had acquired Vauxhall in 1925, and by 1949 it had an 11 per cent share of total British car production (compared with Ford’s 18.7 per cent), as well as, through its Bedford trucks, a 17.7 per cent share of the British commercial-vehicle market. Vauxhall had also by this time streamlined its car production (making only the Velox and Wyvern models, both of them given Chevrolet-style makeovers in 1951) and started on a major expansion of the plant’s infrastructure. But what made Vauxhall really distinctive were its harmonious labour relations, earning it the nickname of ‘the turnip patch’. It was a harmony that may have owed something to Luton’s location – well away from other major car plants or indeed any local engineering tradition – but undoubtedly there was a key individual involved. This was Sir Charles Bartlett, managing director from 1929 to 1953, a highly intelligent paternalist who liked his workforce to call him ‘The Skipper’. Given considerable autonomy by his American masters, and inheriting a fairly brutal, hire-and-fire regime, he presided through the 1930s and 1940s over a gradual, quiet and almost entirely successful revolution – in which, crucially, workers were treated as human beings rather than Stakhanovite extras in a remake of Metropolis.

  Bartlett’s approach to industrial relations had several main features: avoiding lay-offs wherever possible, so that the workforce became more stable; paying good wages; using what was known as the Group Bonus System in order to enhance motivation and give the workforce at least a limited sense of control; introducing a profit-sharing scheme; developing an impressive range of social and welfare amenities; and, at the very core of Bartlett’s strategy from 1941, promoting the Management Advisory Committee (to which each area of the factory sent a representative elected by secret ballot) as a forum for meaningful rather than fig-leaf consultation. Bartlett was no sentimentalist, not least in relation to the unions. They had been recognised at Vauxhall (as at Ford) only during the war, and thereafter he was determined to keep them relatively marginalised. Indeed, even during the 1950s less than half of Vauxhall’s workforce was unionised, while it took a long time for a shop stewards’ movement of any clout to emerge. As late as 1960, ‘The Firm Without a Strike’ was the straight-faced title of an Economist profile of Vauxhall. Of course, that was not strictly true. ‘There wasn’t a strike for twenty years,’ an executive would wryly recall in the very different early 1970s. ‘We called them “pauses for consultation”. You can laugh, but that’s really what they were. Nobody lost any money. We were paid while the work stopped and the MAC went into the trouble squarely.’14

  There was by contrast no shortage of conflict at Cowley on the outskirts of Oxford, though in this case much of it was within the ranks of management. The ageing Lord Nuffield, formerly William Morris, was a classic example of a founding father – of Morris Motors – who, Lear-like, refused to let go. The upshot by the immediate postwar period was a disastrous managerial culture: lines of authority were at best ill-defined; Nuffield’s own approach to man management largely consisted of telling people about the shortcomings of their colleagues; there prevailed what one historian has described as a ‘distressing climate of suspicion and indecision’; and in general there was little in the way of clear-sighted or other than spasmodic strategic thinking. Market share (19.2 per cent in 1947) was declining, while a major management purge and reorganisation by a new chief executive, Reginald Hanks – who tactlessly told Nuffield that ‘Rome is burning’ – did not fundamentally change a divisive culture whose roots went back to the 1920s.

  Would the Morris Minor, unveiled at the 1948 Motor Show, be the firm’s saviour? In an obvious sense, yes, in that it soon became Britain’s best-loved as well as best-selling small car. But Correlli Barnett is probably correct when he argues that Morris Motors, by failing to concentrate on the Minor and instead spreading its production resources over additional models (including the Oxford, the Cowley and the Morris 6), missed a golden opportunity to challenge Germany’s equivalent small car, the Volkswagen, in the main export markets: ‘Total output of the Minor over seven years [1948–55] only reached 387,000 – not much more than a third of the Volkswagen’s total of one million cars in the same period achieved from a standing start in a bombed-out works.’ Barnett also has a pop at the actual design of the Morris Minor by the ‘supposedly brilliant’ Alec Issigonis, claiming that it was not nearly so advanced as the motoring cognoscenti claimed at its launch. However, given its undeniable instant popularity, this is perhaps trying to have it both ways.

  Management discord at Cowley was accompanied by a distinct abrasiveness in labour relations. Leading shop stewards were systematically weeded out, while union membership was sufficiently discouraged such that, as late as 1956, there was only 25 per cent unionisation at Morris Motors. A young shop steward in these difficult years was the remarkable Les Gurl. Born in 1921, the son of a labourer at a farm belonging to an Oxford college, Gurl started work at Cowley in 1935 and, after being demobbed from the navy, returned there in 1947. Soon afterwards, amid a sharp, pervasive divide between those who had left to fight and those who had stayed, he became a shop steward in the erecting-and-wiring shop:

  Most if not all charge hands, foremen, superintendents, managers and company directors had worked in the factory throughout the whole war. Morris men through and through, whatever Lord Nuffield said or did it was OK by them. They were now dealing with mainly young ex-Servicemen [about 75 per cent of the workforce in Gurl’s shop] who were looking for improvements in the factory way of life away from the hire and fire and the charge hands’ pets, the men who came in regularly with the bag of garden products which they left by the charge hands’ desks. Of course we had to be wide awake to the fact that if these old hands would bring in vegetables to get in with the bosses, then they would also run to them with any tales about the union or steward.

  By the time he came to write his recollections in the mid-1980s, Gurl was convinced that a more understanding attitude on the part of the company in these early post-war years would have made a huge long-term difference:

  Simple things were forced up into major problems because Mr Moore [the shop foreman] would seldom make the effort to solve our grievances. There was the case of the coat rail where the line workers would hang their macs and coats. Under this rack travelled telpher trucks filled with greasy prop shafts, shackle plates, axles. The bottom of the clothes were soon blackened with grease. Most people in those days only owned one mac or overcoat, many worked in very old shoes wearing their good pair only to and from work. There was a simple solution to this complaint – raise the rack say two feet. S
adly it took weeks and was only solved when in frustration I told the line I represented, ‘If you want action, then stop work’. It brought a quick solution. The maintenance men were soon down in the erecting shop and the rack was raised.

  Gurl from 1949 led the campaign for a workable pension scheme for those workers at Cowley who were paid by the hour. ‘We eventually won our case,’ he recalled laconically, ‘on the day British Leyland was taken over by the Government’ – that is, in 1975.15

  The fourth centre of production was Coventry: Motor City itself. Daimler, Humber, Maudslay, Singer, Standard, Rover, Riley, Hillman, Alvis, Triumph, Jaguar – between 1896 and 1928 all these firms had started producing cars there. By 1945 the city’s two main players were Standard (who took over the Triumph name in 1945) at Canley and the Rootes Group (producing Humber, Hillman and Sunbeam Talbot models) at Stoke and Ryton. Jaguar was under the formidable William Lyons, Daimler concentrated mainly on commercial vehicles, while Alvis, Armstrong Siddeley and Riley (owned by Nuffield and leaving Coventry in 1949) were notable among the smaller-scale producers.

  By 1951 the city’s output of cars was more than 130,000, representing just under 28 per cent of total British output, and the place was manifestly booming. The population was increasing rapidly, from 232,000 in 1946 to 258,000 in 1951; hourly rates in the motor and other engineering industries were up to a third or even more above the national average; and among the city’s 60,000 or so workers in the motor industry were many newcomers, of many nationalities, living in hostels or an improvised shanty town of derelict railway coaches while they waited for Coventry’s housing to catch up with its explosive economic growth. ‘A young city, virile, brimming over with skill and energy’ was how the visiting Laurence Thompson found it in about 1950, adding that the place was ‘the mother and father of British mass-production’ and ‘a town in which anything might happen’.16It was also one where, at least at Standard and Rootes, organised labour was far more powerful than anywhere else in the motor industry.