The prompt reaction of Winterstoke Motors to this new situation showed that, like his father, Steve Foster was not a man who allowed the grass to grow under his feet. Through his father, who was now a leading figure in the affairs of the town, he received the news of the impending by-pass before it was generally known and promptly bought the moribund Cedars Guest House from its impoverished and unsuspecting owners. Steve’s business friends chaffed him for having, as they put it, ‘bought a pup’, but he merely smiled enigmatically and refused to be drawn. Ridicule turned to admiration not untinged with envy for what was called the Foster luck when the Cedars blossomed forth as a smart new roadhouse restaurant fronted by an impressive rank of electric petrol pumps. Steve sunk a concrete bathing pool on what had once been Sir Richard Blenkinsop’s croquet lawn and the ‘Knave of Hearts’, as it was now called in red neon lit letters, soon became a serious rival of the Wendle Bridge Hotel as a place of resort for the younger generation of the smarter suburbs. Steve Foster was not the only one who, to use a current phrase, ‘got in on the ground floor’ when the by-pass was built. Fred Isaacs, the enterprising proprietor of a fish and chip saloon in Canal Street, sank all his savings in the purchase and reconstruction of the long-derelict Upper Mill. As ‘the Olde Mill Café’, better known as ‘Fred’s’, the venture was an immediate success and became a favourite port of call for long-distance lorry drivers. Advertising undoubtedly helped, for Fred erected boards which announced in bold letters ‘Stop! Good Pull-In 200 yards ahead. Café open day and night. Always something to eat’. His road-signs were only one of many examples of commercial enterprise which advised the motorist to: ‘Stop at the Wendle Bridge Hotel’, ‘Drink Blenkinsop’s Ales’, ‘Take your troubles to Winterstoke Motors’, ‘Make a date with your favourite Stars at the Abbey—we have the best programmes’, ‘Smoke Wensums, all the best people do’, ‘Ask for Finnemans—you can’t go wrong’, ‘Bake better cakes with Wendle Valley Flour—My Mummy does’, ‘Don’t suffer in silence, Kilapane cures that after-eating agony’.
The Abbey Cinema’s boast to have the best programmes was, needless to say, hotly contested by the ‘Moviedrome’ in Wharf Square and by the palatial ‘Seville’ which reared its brick bulk on a commanding site near the Wendleside Estate. The latter lured patrons with boasts of its mighty electric organ whose console, looking like a cross between a telephone exchange and a gigantic typewriter, rose on a lift from the depths of the orchestra pit into a blaze of coloured lights when occasion demanded. But the pulling power of this novelty began to wane when the film found its mechanical voice and all three cinemas proclaimed that they were ‘All Talking, All Singing’. The pace set by these three strident monsters proved too hot for the older places of entertainment. The ‘Winterstoke Palace’ in Bridge Street soon gave up the struggle. Its exotic façade was replaced by the familiar frontage of a famous chain-store whose proprietors purchased the site for a very handsome sum. The old Theatre Royal put up a more stubborn resistance but found, as its houses grew thinner, that the legitimate drama was no match for the new and massive entertainment machine with its highly-organized publicity which created a world-wide cult of star worshippers. For a time the theatre management tried the experiment of alternating films and stage plays, but the house was unsuitable for the showing of films and the youthful fans of Winterstoke who were forced to occupy seats to the side of the screen disliked seeing their phantom heroes and heroines of Hollywood appear with their faces abnormally elongated. So the theatre then became a second-rate variety house, fighting the cinema with the only weapons left in its armoury: the sex appeal of the real-life ‘leg show’, the strip-tease act and the ‘blue’ joking comedian. In this way the once-proud Theatre Royal, cherishing the memories of past greatness only in the faded signed photographs on its foyer walls, was able to struggle on until the Winterstoke Blitz in 1941 when five hundred pounds of high explosive administered the coup-de-grace.
The cinemas were by no means the only attractions against which the old theatre struggled to compete. There was the new greyhound racing track on Wendleside beyond Blenkinsop’s Brewery. There was the Winterstoke United football ground off Cemetery Road which drew its roaring crowds every Saturday afternoon from September to May. And like the all-electric suburban homes with their many gadgets, the new amenities, from petrol pumps, and neon signs to super-cinemas, called for power. Needless to say, the demand far exceeded the capacity of the original power station. That station had gone at the same time that the trams ceased running. Winterstoke was now ‘on the Grid’, to use a phrase intelligible enough to us though quite incomprehensible to our ancestors. On the site of the old a new Grid Station displayed all the most modern apparatus of power: high-pressure water tube boilers automatically stoked by chain grates and fed from huge hoppers filled by conveyors; more conveyors to clear the ash pits; a phalanx of chimneys and concrete cooling-towers breathing steam like immense cauldrons; tall steel pylons horned with high tension insulators which were irradiated at night with stray current from their leashed lightning as with St. Elmo’s fire; pylons which marched away over the slopes of Emberley and High Hanger to supply half Midshire with current. Here there was a concentration of horse-power far in excess of anything Winterstoke had known before and far more formidable and frightening for its very lack of apparent movement or dramatic effort. There was a new impersonal and inhuman quality about the smooth black shapes, gleaming but quite immobile, of the turbo-alternators which filled the power house with a sound like that of a gale of wind and yet betrayed no flicker of motion, stirred no current in the warm acrid-smelling air. Formidable, too, the long frieze of black control panels with their rows of staring dials and their mysterious tell-tale lights winking red, green and amber eyes. This was the new heart of Winterstoke, dominating the town less dramatically and obtrusively than the old industries of iron and steel had done but much more effectually as it pumped out its life blood of electric current. This power station symbolized, too, the still accelerating tempo of technical progress. That great crescendo which had begun with the first laboured breath of the Newcomen beam engine had now become the tempest of the turbine.
Chapter Fourteen
THE HISTORY of the Darley Bank Forge after the first world war affords a good illustration of the irreparable damage which that war inflicted on ‘the workshop of the world’. When the Forge resumed its peacetime work of locomotive building it was found that while it had been preoccupied with armament manufacture some of its best customers among the overseas railways had been forced, either to place their orders in the United States or to develop their own locomotive building plants. Nevertheless the world was wide, there were four years of lee-way to be made up, and so for a time the works throbbed with life and energy. The Nasmyth hammers thundered as of old as they forged the heavy crank-axles, the long coupling and connecting rods. Great glowing plates of steel slid out of the mouths of furnaces between the die blocks of the hydraulic flanging presses to be moulded as easily as tin foil by the slow but irresistible power of the ascending rams into the throat plate or tube plate for another new boiler. Electric cranes moaned and rumbled to and fro high under the roof girders. Over the foundry the air shimmered in the fiery breath of the cupolas, and from the boiler shop sounded the deafening staccato bombardment of pneumatic riveting hammers. Through the high doors of the erecting shop there emerged, slowly and majestically in their sober birthday suits of shop grey, the fruits of all this fiery and tumultuous travail: long, low metre gauge engines for Mysore State with bulbous spark-arresting chimneys and enormous headlamps; squat little shunting tank engines destined for a life of industrious obscurity in some colliery yard; eight-coupled monsters bound for Buenos Aires, engines which would have to be dismantled again before they left the works because they were too large to travel ‘dead’ over English metals to their port of shipment. All these made their first slow journeys up and down the mixed gauge test track attended by watchful fitters.
But by the
end of 1925 it became apparent that the pace of production at Darley Bank was beginning to slacken. It was not only in the locomotive building trade that the backlog of the war years had been overtaken and the advantage of temporary shortages lost. A war-inflated industrial machine was beginning to satiate its peacetime market and after a brief boom the shadow of yet another slump lurked in the offing. It was over the coal pits of High Hanger and Ketton that the shadow first fell. As the great Ruhr coalfield got into its stride once again the English coal owners found they were being priced out of their European market and their pit-head gears no longer spun so merrily. To meet the threat they called for a reduction in the wartime level of wages and longer working hours. But despite the fact that England had just had its first disastrous Labour administration, the coal owners did not reckon with the new power of organized labour which had been steadily growing for a hundred years. The miners replied with the slogan: ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’, and won the support of the newly established General Council of the Trades Union Congress. Negotiations between the Government and the union leaders having broken down, union after union declared overwhelmingly in favour of strike action and, to the accompaniment of the singing of ‘The Red Flag’ by their leaders, the strike was called.
Winterstoke had experienced strikes before but never one like this. On Monday, May 3, 1926, a strange stillness fell over the town. It seemed as brooding and ominous as the breathless lull which falls before a thunderstorm. Not since the first Newcomen engine had begun its laborious life at High Hanger pit nearly two hundred years before had Winterstoke known such a silence. The great machine had stopped. There was no electric power; not a tram or a bus was to be seen; there were no newspapers. Over the Central station and the marshalling yards hung the same uncanny silence; not an engine moved and the bright rails tarnished in the morning dew. The pit-head gears stood motionless and the hubbub of the steelworks was stilled; smokeless chimneys stood forlorn as the trunks of dead trees in an air of unaccustomed clarity. Only the Darley Bank Forge, the Atlas Works and a few minor undertakings maintained a half-hearted activity, crippled by lack of materials and electric power, until the engineers joined the rest of the strikers on the eleventh of the month.
The great strike petered out without achieving its object although the miners continued the fight until the following November, but though it failed it was a demonstration, bewildering to many, of the power which the leaders of labour now commanded. By the labour supporters the failure of the strike was looked upon as a victory for the entrenched power of unscrupulous employers and financiers. For the ‘true blues’ it represented the well-merited defeat of a gigantic piece of national blackmail inspired by ‘Red’ agitators. Both were wrong. Each side laid the blame upon the other for evils which had been inherent in the industrial system from the outset and which made instability inevitable. Had the strikers won the day they would only have hastened the onset of a slump which no financial manipulation, no juggling with the currency, could prevent. It began in Wall Street in 1929 when the bodies of suicidal stock jobbers who jumped from their skyscraper offices spattered the New York pavements like over-ripe fruit, and the ripples of this financial crash spread rapidly across the world. At Great Ketton, at Darley Bank and in the pits, more and more men were ‘stood off’ while most of those who were luckier were soon working ‘short time’. Only one furnace remained in blast at ‘Ketton Bar’. Never before in working hours were there so many men to be seen in the streets of Winterstoke; aimless men with no means to kill the time that hung so heavy on their idle hands; men squatting on their doorsteps or leaning in listless groups against the walls of street-corner pubs they were too poor to patronize. They represented only a small detachment of England’s army of unwanted men which by the autumn of 1931 had reached a strength of nearly three millions.
It was in 1930 that Winterstoke experienced its heaviest blow. The Darley Bank Forge could not weather the crisis. The Company went into liquidation and under the watchful eye of a Receiver the orders already in progress were completed. Then, when the last new locomotive had been hauled away to the marshalling yards, the heavy gates closed and the silence of death fell over empty shops and idle machines. The brazen voice of the Darley Bank steam bull no longer roared its daily summons. On office doors and entrance gates wandering out-of-works read and re-read as though unable to believe their eyes the laconic obituary notice: ‘Works Closed. All inquiries should be addressed to the Official Receiver’, and the following address. At the Receiver’s sale all the plant was sold, most of it for scrap, and when the machinery dealers had done their work the deserted shops looked even more empty and desolate. Practically no evidence of past activity remained except a giant hydraulic riveting machine which no one had considered worth the labour of removal, and the black moulding sand on the foundry floor. So the old works stood forlorn for twelve months until a banner headline in the Winterstoke Sentinel brought hope to the work-less, ‘NEW HOME FOR FOSTER CAR’, it read, ‘MR. ROBERT FOSTER BUYS DARLEY BANK WORKS; EXPANSION OF PRODUCTION.’
The Foster Car Company was a member of a young and virile industry which, while by no means unaffected by the slump, was able to withstand it better than its older neighbours. Nevertheless, the outlook before the Atlas Works had not looked any too rosy to Bob Foster and he had come to the conclusion that unless he staked everything on further expansion the Foster car would soon be driven off the market by more powerful competitors. A visit he had paid, along with other English car manufacturers, to the Ford plant at Trafford Park on the invitation of that Company, had convinced him that his future lay in applying the methods of mass production which the Americans had so successfully developed. The old individual methods he was using at the Atlas Works could not hope to compete against such a system; he must either arm himself before his rivals or lose the battle. But there was no room for further expansion in Institute Road. Where else then? The answer was obvious—at Darley Bank.
The Leeds family would have been almost as bewildered as any laymen if they could have seen the ingenious and complex machines which now re-animated Darley Bank. The tools introduced during Darley Bank’s first transformation under the ægis of Henry Blenkinsop were childish and simple toys compared to these batteries of bar automatics and automatic capstan lathes which performed unbelievable feats of mechanical legerdemain behind dark, smoking screens of cutting oil or in a white stream of sour-smelling suds. A fabulous cosmopolitan company of machines, German machines, Swiss machines, American machines from Milwaukee and Ohio, assembled to roar, to whine, to chatter and to moan in the mechanical bedlam of the new Darley Bank works. Humming centreless grinders spewed out gleaming gudgeon pins into waiting stillages; complicated milling machines and boring lathes machined the several faces of a casting simultaneously; with remorseless mechanical deliberation the spined heads of a multi-spindle drilling machine closed like an Iron Maiden upon a cylinder block and crankcase casting; towering presses shaped chassis members and sheet steel body shells. The old foundry was revived in highly mechanized form with moulding machines and conveyor fed core ovens. But there was no longer any forge at Darley Bank. The Foster Company bought in their forgings, mostly light stampings, from specialists and the old forge became a hardening shop filled with glowing muffle furnaces and steaming vats of lethal looking liquids. The tributary streams of overhead conveyors bore away finished components to the old locomotive erecting shop. Here they joined the main river of the assembly tracks on which, in the course of one short journey, a bare chassis became a near-finished motor car.
When all these machines at Darley Bank had got into their stride the new Foster ‘Flying Fours’ began to pour off the assembly lines almost as fast as the bolts that fell from the bar automatics. What matter if a few old die-hard customers thought that a thin false shell of chromium-plated steel was a poor substitute for the handsome German silver radiator of the older Foster, or complained of inferior road holding and steering q
ualities, inaccessibility and shoddy workmanship? What matter if the little high revving engines did wear themselves out in fifty thousand miles? This was the new age of mass production and its machines had come to stay. The best way to keep costly machines busy and avoid slumps was to produce an article with a short life. Judicious advertising and the introduction of new gadgets would soon educate the public to the habit of discarding and replacing their cars as often as their worn-out shoes. The Foster ‘Flying Four’ made a substantial contribution to the traffic jams in the streets of Winterstoke because it was ‘cheap’. Judged by standards of value based on quality of workmanship and materials, however, the new ‘Flying Four’ was very dear indeed compared with its predecessor from the old Atlas Works. The public would have been astonished had they known how little each car actually cost the Foster Company in materials and labour and how much of their purchase money represented overhead expenses, plant maintenance and depreciation, advertising, selling commission, and the steadily growing burden of the unproductive staff in the great new office block.
The continued success and expansion of the Foster Car Company during the 1930’s did much to improve the employment position in Winterstoke. By a process of amalgamation with other less successful and weaker concerns, Bob Foster (Sir Robert Foster in 1937, first Baron Emberley in 1940) became the head of a vast commercial concern owning several plants in various parts of the Midlands, each as large as that at Darley Bank. Between these different factories production became highly specialized. Thus the Darley Bank factory ultimately became responsible for manufacturing all the engines for the group, while car assembly was concentrated in another plant at Earlspool.
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