Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (77 page)

The key figure was the managing director of Standard Motors, Sir John Black, who during the war (when the firm built Bristol and, later, Mosquito aircraft) and in its immediate wake worked closely with the TGWU district secretary, Jack Jones, to implement a policy that combined high wages with high output. ‘A dashing, debonair man with a touch of the dynamic,’ Jones later wrote admiringly, ‘he stood out in sharp contrast to many of his contemporaries in management. He enjoyed walking around the shop floor, chatting to the work-people and sensing the feeling which existed between line managers and the workers.’ Black was convinced that in the post-war world an ever-expanding demand for cars would be matched by a serious shortage of labour, and by 1948 he had – entirely independently of the Engineering Employers Federation – negotiated with Jones a comprehensive agreement for Standard. Its three main elements were that it guaranteed high wages; effectively created a closed shop by giving the union the prime responsibility for hiring labour; and divided the workforce in the main plant at Canley into 15 large, inevitably powerful gangs, with whom piecework rates would be negotiated and to whom bonuses (dependent on output) would be paid. The upshot was that, for the next six years or so, the shop stewards more or less ran Standard.

None of the other employers in the motor industry quite followed Black’s example, but at Rootes, run by the brothers William and Reginald Rootes, an initially aggressive approach after the war soon gave way to what one disgruntled manager there recalled as ‘management by abdication’, with their Coventry factories being 99 per cent unionised by 1950. Senior shop stewards met with management on most Friday nights to explain what they had been doing; the gangs by the early 1950s were able to elect their own leaders; strike action was relatively infrequent; and in a way that would have seemed inconceivable in the 1930s it was the workers who largely called the shots, albeit in a less institutionalised form than at Standard.

It is in the context of this broad shift of power – and in particular the emergence of the gang system – that the oral historian Paul Thompson has penetratingly evoked the world of the post-war Coventry car worker, in effect between the 1940s and the 1970s. He portrays a world where the unions were in charge of recruitment, which they tried to keep ‘in the family’ (ie of workmates and their kin) as much as possible; where although in theory there was an elaborate system of apprenticeships, in practice almost all the training took place on the job itself; and where the demands of ‘the track’ made a potential mockery of the craft traditions so important in Coventry’s earlier industrial history. ‘By the 1950s some of the major skilled crafts, like hand tin-hammering and wooden joinery body building, had effectively vanished,’ he writes. ‘Even in the most conservative firms, moving assembly lines were now the normal practice.’ It was, in short, a deskilled world of what one former car worker described as ‘very monotonous, terribly monotonous, repetitive work’. Or, in the words of another, ‘It was just pure drudgery. You became a wage slave, nothing else – the only thing you could see at the end of the week was your wages and that was it.’

Nevertheless, Thompson contends that this potentially dispiriting, deskilled reality co-existed in Coventry – above all at Standard – with a
culture
that owed much to earlier craft traditions. ‘The essential aim,’ he argues, ‘was to recapture traditional craft discretion in planning work’ – an objective made possible only through the post-war strength of the gang system, whereby ‘for more than twenty years’ there was ‘re-created in the context of mass production something of the old spirit of pride and mastery in skilled work, fused with a particular group solidarity’. By swapping around on the assembly line, eventually a worker could feel capable of carrying out all the multiple tiny processes in making a whole car. The recollections of a trio of former Standard workers give a flavour of this distinctive culture, a culture in which (in Thompson’s words) ‘both control over the work pace and also job shifts within the gang were determined, within the outer limits set by management, collectively by the workforce’:

It was a rota for everything. There was a rota for overtime . . . You’d be on primer in the morning, and you’d be on finish in the afternoon, and then the next day you’d go on preparation, preparing the work for the spray booth. (
Painter
)

You could be finished by half-past two, three o’clock . . . You got your day in, and that was acceptable in the company, because they were getting what they wanted, but of course at the same time they were also getting information about the job, they could find out the real times of the job. (
Polisher
)

The discipline was built into the system by the men themselves, not by the authorities or the management. It was self-pride that made you get it right . . . Nobody wanted to look like a silly arse by scrapping out a whole lot . . . It was just a man’s pride, it’s his work and he should get it right. (
Grinder
)

Thompson does not deny either that the nature of the mass-production work remained essentially unchanged by the gang system or that (as recalled by a machinist) the shop stewards inevitably morphed into ‘another layer of management’ and ‘sort of gloated over the fact that they had this – certain amount of power over people’.
¹⁷
But undoubtedly it was a system that made intrinsically attritional, unsatisfying work somewhat more palatable.

Of course, from a strictly economic point of view there were some serious flaws.
¹⁸
Empire-building by the gangs and their leaders, bitter and protracted disputes over which gangs should do which jobs, endless wrangling over the collective piecework rates, the overwhelming inducement never to price a new job lower than its predecessor, often well-founded accusations about favouritism in recruitment: all these were inherent and pervasive. Even Thompson, for all the warmth of his account of what he terms ‘a type of egalitarian co-operation that at least some workers believed to be the dawn of a new social world’, ultimately condemns the gang system as a case of collusive and Luddite complacency on the part of management as well as organised labour. ‘The key stage was in the immediate post-war years,’ he claims, ‘when neither management nor the trade unions showed any significant commitment to serious research and development programmes.’ Instead, ‘they assumed a slow-growing world with an eternal taste for British goods’ while devising the gang system (providing an adequate degree of flexibility and workforce motivation) to meet pressing short-term production needs. He not only cites comparative studies with North America and Japan to show that ‘new technology need not imply personal deskilling’ but explicitly compares the Coventry experience – based essentially on negative workplace resistance – to that of Italy’s equivalent motor city, Turin, where the metalworkers’ unions made ‘constant demands on management for more intensive investment and higher-level training for the workforce’, as well as funding their own research centres on technological change. Altogether, it is a compelling analysis. Rather like Galsworthy’s Forsytes at the height of their power, the Coventry car workers at the zenith of theirs exhibited an admirable tenacity matched only by a profound lack of imagination. ‘Playing at being skilled men’, to use Thompson’s perhaps unkind but far from contemptuous phrase, was not enough.

It would have helped if the product ranges of the two big firms had been more satisfactory. The main white elephant at Rootes was the Humber Pullman – the civilian version of a wartime staff car – while at Standard there was the 1947 launch of the disastrous Vanguard, very much Black’s flagship project. Freddie Troop, Standard’s service manager in Scotland and the only person in the service department possessing a foreign passport, was soon summoned into the breach:

My boss said to me, ‘We’ve got a few problems with the Vanguard in Belgium. You know how these continentals panic. We’d like you to go over there.’ When I got there I found they really had problems, particularly with the chassis and suspension. The fractures in the chassis had to be seen to be believed. The shock absorbers were weak after a few thousand miles. The Belgians put a stiffer oil in, and that just made the shock absorbers go solid when they hit a bump. It used to fracture the bolts to the chassis, and it used to come up and over and straight through the wing. We got over that by fitting a sort of fireman’s helmet . . .

It was the same all over the world, with a disastrous trail of breakdowns and unavailable spare parts. Perhaps Black and his men should have listened more carefully to Sir Stafford Cripps before they let the Vanguard loose. Inspecting it at Canley, he declared it a failure because he was unable to sit in the back seat with his top hat on.
¹⁹

Finally, just up the road, there was Birmingham, including Rover at Solihull (having left Coventry at the end of the war) and Austin at Longbridge. At Rover the cardinal mistake was not concentrating on the superb Land Rover, launched in 1948, but instead spreading resources across a range of solid but unexciting saloons, such as the P4 ‘Auntie’ model that from its launch in 1949 became a favourite car of bank managers and doctors. At Austin, which had been making cars to the south of Birmingham since 1910, there was a similar lack of clear-sighted product focus. By the late 1940s the sensible thing would have been to concentrate mainly on the recently launched A40 and thereby attempt to challenge the Volkswagen head-on in the world’s markets; in the event the emotional attachment to larger saloon models with reassuring names like the Hampshire, the Hereford and the Somerset was too great. Historically, the great rivalry of the British motor industry was between Austin and Morris, or between Longbridge and Cowley; between 1946 and 1950, however, their combined market share slipped four points to 39.4 per cent, with Ford emerging as an increasingly serious challenger. There was talk from the late 1940s of a merger between the two members of the old guard, but by the new decade nothing had been settled.

One man, originally a talented production engineer from Coventry and briefly in the mid-1930s Nuffield’s right-hand man at Cowley (creating an undying mutual enmity), dominated management at Long-bridge. He has been memorably characterised:

Ruthless yet capable of touching generosity, frequently guilty of rudeness to the point of cruelty yet sometimes capable of admitting and apologising for his mistakes, Leonard Lord was both crude in speech and manner and the victim of an inferiority complex. He detested pomp and also distrusted anything approaching sophistication in the running of a business. He regarded both salesmen and accountants as overheads: if they were any good, cars sold themselves – ‘make proper bloody products and you don’t need to sell ’em’.

Told on one occasion that his cars did not stand up to Australian roads, Lord’s typically brusque response was that the Australians should build roads to suit them. Certainly he did not lack drive – including embarking by 1948 on a major modernisation programme at the Longbridge plant – but at this stage of its fortunes, the firm, and indeed the industry, could have done with a subtler operator.

Lord’s credo was simple. ‘Industry needs Freedom,’ he declared in the
FT
in 1946. ‘Freedom from control and inexperienced academic planning, freedom from interference arising from departmental indecision or jealousy; freedom to apply the principles and experience of production on which the foundations of British trade and prosperity were built.’ Predictably, he saw the unions as at best a more or less evil necessity, and in the immediate post-war years his approach to them was almost unremittingly hostile. There were several waves of victimisation of shop stewards – at one point he made 600 of his workforce redundant with a week’s notice – and his unwillingness to consult with the unions was encapsulated in the blunt public assertion that ‘it is the directors and not the workers who run the factory’. Overall, the business verdict by Lord’s biographer implies much: ‘His priority was not the financial success of the enterprises he worked for, but extracting the maximum from the material and labour resources available to him.’

The other key figure, among the almost 20,000 who worked at ‘The Austin’ by the end of the 1940s, was on the other side of the industrial fence. Richard (Dick) Etheridge was the son of a Birmingham shopkeeper, joined the Communist Party in 1933 at the age of 23, and in 1940 went to Longbridge as a capstan operator. In 1945 he became convener of the shop stewards there – a position he would hold for 30 years. He is described by his biographer as ‘over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and robust of build’; as a ‘teetotaller, non-smoker and non-gambler but a great trencherman’; and as a lover of Maxim Gorky, Jerome K. Jerome and Rudyard Kipling who ‘for many years took his family holiday at Clarach Bay near Aberystwyth in a caravan that he built himself’.

As convener, Etheridge gained the well-justified reputation of being a painstaking organiser and adroit tactician who pursued an ‘economistic’ interpretation of Communism (ie the pursuit of improved immediate material conditions), as opposed to a more overtly political approach. Given that the CP branch at Longbridge had only a dozen members by the early 1950s, this was well judged. Predictably, his relationship with the take-no-prisoners Lord tended to be adversarial, a flavour of which comes through in a statement, in Etheridge’s handwriting, published in May 1949 by the Joint Shop Stewards Committee: