When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (14 page)

Others move south for the sake of their children. A Northumberland vicar left his living in the Tyne Valley after his family had taken a battering in the north. One 22-year-old son was made redundant from what had appeared to be a secure laboratory job and hadn't worked for two years, and two daughters failed to get employment at the end of YTS programmes. They had been working part-time in Woolworth's. The vicar moved to a tied house, for which he was thankful, comparing his own situation with those ‘whose husbands and fathers have got to go down south for work, and then find they can't afford the property.' The Church of England was finding difficulty in persuading clergy to go in the opposite direction, mainly because wives with jobs feared they would never be able to replace them in the north.

The obvious economic lesson to be drawn from Slough is that success breeds success. Much as it makes more sense to open an antiques shop next to a row of already thriving rivals than in a street full of grocery stores, so it makes sense to start a manufacturing business in an environment like the Slough industrial estate. It oxygenates people to be in the midst of economic activity. Mr Wolmar, the careers officer, had recently exchanged a four-bedroomed detached house overlooking Dartmoor for a three-bedroomed semi above the railway line in Slough. ‘In the south-west,' he said, ‘you know you're not going to do any more with your life after thirty-five. Here the character is “go, go, go,” and you feel the spirit of success. It's cramped, living on top of one another, not nearly as nice as Dartmoor, but we wanted to move to an area orientated towards achievement. It is more stimulating to be here and to be part of the success that other people are creating.' As he spoke, I thought of the Durham miners, who sold out their jobs in their early forties and passed the rest of their lives pottering between allotment and pub.

Slough's best known manufacturer is Mars. I was told that the sweet, chocolate smell of success frequently pervaded the town's air, though I never detected it myself. Mars is an authentic product for the proletarian town, the favourite chocolate bar of the British people, manufactured daily by the millions. (More chocolate is produced in Slough than in any other European town.) It would have been out of character for Slough to produce a confection even as loosely associated with frivolity or aristocratic pleasures as an after-dinner mint. Today, with the ‘single status' workforces of Japanese companies in Britain, industrial democracy does not seem such a novel idea, but Forrest Mars, a Yale-educated American, pioneered the status-free factory in Slough in 1932, when many British workers were still touching their caps to the bosses. He was then twenty-eight, the son of Frank Mars, who had founded the original business in Chicago, and who sent his son forth with the recipe for what was known in the United States as ‘Milky Way' to seek his fortune outside America. Forrest first looked at continental Europe, but was frightened away by the impending rise of fascism.

A visitor entering the Mars factory passes a big clocking-on desk where all 2,400 employees, including the managing director, must punch a card; every employee is on first-name terms with every other employee – again including the managing director; there are no reserved parking spaces for senior staff; in a vast open-plan office even the directors sit out on the floor at desks indistinguishable from those of secretaries; there is naturally only one cafeteria, in which everyone helps himself and then clears away his own place. When I was there, a committee was investigating whether there were any previously undetected differentials, apart from pay, that could be eradicated. I suspect they had their work cut out.

There are no unions, but even a local union organizer, who had been complaining to me that Thatcherism had unleashed a ruthless attitude amongst employers, found no fault with this company. His own wife had been kept on full pay by Mars throughout a serious illness, and had been encouraged to take her time before returning to work. Pay rises and bonuses are triggered by a formula which everyone understands: pension and insurance are non-contributory. Workers even get a bonus for clocking-on on time. The factory is in continuous operation, yet in fifty-five years has never lost an hour's production through an industrial dispute. Mars has always been good to Slough, in recent years replacing the mayoral mace when the town was ‘transplanted' from Buckinghamshire to Berkshire, and rebuilding the Slough College lecture theatre. In 1987 Forrest Mars was still alive, living in Las Vegas, where he had occupied his retirement by founding yet another candy manufacturing company.

Paternalism is part of the ethos of Slough and the industrial estate. Between the wars the employers joined forces to found a social centre and an occupational health scheme. Both thrive today, though the social centre is now run by the council. The catalyst for these amenities was the Slough Estate company, whose chairman is Sir Nigel Mobbs, grandson of Sir Noel Mobbs, one of the men who bought the vehicle depot after the First World War. Sir Nigel is a tall, bulky man, who, when I met him, was just back from a trip to America, where he must epitomize the upper-class Englishman. If Slough has a non-resident grandee, it is Sir Nigel: Marlborough and Christ Church, Oxford, married to a peer's daughter, chairman or president at some stage of every institution with clout in town, whose leisure time is spent riding, hunting, travelling, skiing. He wore a check suit, and at his feet lay a large rectangular American attorney's briefcase. He was well-organized, kept his own files – he found me an eight-year-old article in thirty seconds flat – and courteous. We drank coffee made in one of those ubiquitous machines that have liberated secretaries in even chairmen's offices at the cost of producing a sour, grey sludge: democracy and automation have combined to produce a close to undrinkable liquid. Sir Nigel had known Slough professionally for twenty-five years, and, through his family, had an institutional memory of its development. The complaint that house prices are too high goes back, he said, at least to the sixties, when managers coming to the town from the north were shocked by what they had to pay for homes. There have also always been skill shortages, though both prices and shortages are more extreme now than they have ever been.

‘Why,' I asked, ‘does Slough prosper, while much of the industrial north languishes without work or much hope?' ‘Some of the reasons,' replied Sir Nigel, ‘are subjective and have little to do with rigorous cost analysis.' Executives like living in the Thames Valley or Buckinghamshire. But the main reasons are practical: the town has always had first or second generation, upbeat industries – even in the thirties the St Helen's Rubber Company moved its operation, including its workforce, south, to get away from Merseyside and to be near the expanding radio business which required rubber cables. There has been little union influence and few demarcation rules, which has allowed enterprise to flourish. Shortages of labour encouraged its efficient use. Competition for workers meant high wages, eliminating ‘the bloody-mindedness generated by low pay.' Workers feel secure, because usually they ‘can go round the corner and pick up an equivalent job.' Junior and middle management are confident of finding promotion without having to move house. Sir Nigel told of one firm that decided it would be attractive to move from Slough to north Devon. They made two mistakes. They did not realize that summer seasonal employment would strip away their workforce; and they did not foresee that their managers would find the professional isolation intolerable. The managers resigned almost en bloc to return to Slough where they would once again be surrounded by opportunity.

Even before Heathrow and the M4 were built, communications out of London were best to the west. Americans, looking for industrial sites before the Second World War, found the north cheerless and inhospitable, with few decent hotels and without what they would think of as ‘executive housing' for managers who came to Britain to work. ‘American company presidents wanted a degree of comfort. There were few northern hotels with bathrooms,' said Sir Nigel. The poor quality of northern hotels in the early thirties is confirmed by J.B. Priestley's continuous grousing in his
English Journey
. To my own cost, I know most of them are not much better today.

Sir Nigel said that northern employers often have themselves to blame for poor labour relations. One of the few Slough firms that had severe labour difficulties was managed from the north, and, quite exceptionally, did not enrol its workers in the occupational health scheme. ‘A small thing,' said Sir Nigel, ‘but possibly an indication that they did not cherish their workers.' What about the town's left-wing politics? ‘Did they not frighten capitalist business people?' I asked. If anything, Sir Nigel appeared to favour a Labour council. The extreme left, he said, tended to be more vociferous than effective, and were mainly not involved in planning or other areas where they might be harmful to business. There were also good council officers. ‘Why, given such a rosy picture of Slough's economy, should anyone be out of work?' I asked Sir Nigel. ‘There are not many seriously looking for work who could hold a job down,' replied the chairman, a view widely endorsed by other Slough businessmen, who state with great assurance that the town has a thriving black economy.

To be a trade unionist in such an environment is to farm stony ground. In the ten years that Dixie Dean has been district secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW), local membership has collapsed from nine thousand to six thousand. Mr Dean is one of the old school. He served twice in the RAF, first in the war and then he re-enlisted; he had been a miner in Nottinghamshire for a short period. During our conversation he rose to produce his campaign medals from a filing cabinet. He is the sort of man with whom Harold Wilson used to have beer and sandwiches at Number 10. But he was truly indignant about what he considered to be a new industrial callousness. ‘In the wonderful world of Thatcher things shock me to the core.' One well-known multinational, he said, had sent a routine warning letter to a woman suffering from cancer, telling her she would be sacked if she didn't improve her attendance. Another company gave a man an hour's notice of redundancy, after he had worked for them for nearly thirty-two years. A girl who suffered a nervous breakdown was sacked because her speeds had slowed. ‘If this lot,' he said, referring to the Conservative government shortly before it was re-elected in 1987, ‘go on another five years, no doubt we'll survive, but employers' attitudes are so ruthless that I don't know what will happen.' I wasn't sure that he spoke with much heart. With his malapropisms and his
bons mots
– on privatization, ‘if we all become bloody millionaires, who's going to deliver the post?' – Mr Dean is among the last of an endangered species. When Britain still had its post-war map, men like him were as familiar and reassuring as signposts at country crossroads.

Ironically, Mr Dean's image of the affluent society without postal deliveries is a real enough threat in Slough. So acute is the shortage of postal staff that in winter second-class mail is sometimes taken to south coast resort towns, where it is sorted by seasonally unemployed people, and then returned for delivery; and letters have been put on trains to south Wales for Welsh workers to sort as the train shuttles back and forth. In 1986 – when officially there were 4,500 people out of work in a town with a population of 97,000, 313 postal workers had quit by the end of October out of a complement of 1,050. Nearby, Maidenhead is always fifteen or sixteen workers short out of a total establishment of one hundred. It is not unusual for five or six workers to resign in a week. Postal staff get paid according to national wage scales – special payments are restricted to London – which are uncompetitive and inadequate in Slough. It is possible to earn a decent living as an ‘overtime baron', but only with extraordinary hours on a split-shift basis that leave no time for social or family life. An Indian supervisor told me that he used to get up at 4.00 a.m. six days a week, work till noon, and then go back from 4.30 till 8.00 in the evening when the heavy sorting was done. ‘You never go out for a blooming drink or anything. It gets a bit monotonous. The first couple of years are bad.' He sounded like a lifer discussing how to get through his sentence. The Post Office locally spends more on advertising vacancies than would be needed to match the London weighting allowance, but efforts by successive postmasters have failed to budge the powers that be. ‘We are told,' said the supervisor, ‘that the line has got to be drawn somewhere.' Postmen who leave Slough for another part of the country, expecting an immediate job, are shocked to find a waiting list.

Sharon Richmond, an Oxford graduate, wanted to be a journalist but couldn't find a job. She had been running the Slough unemployment centre for eighteen months when I met her. She was a thin, articulate girl, with a flowing shirt outside her jeans, and a scarf tied through her short brown hair. The centre was founded in 1982, after unemployment had tripled in three years to the then unheard of figure of four thousand. (Unemployment had been 0.8 per cent in 1973, 2 per cent in 1979, and by 1986 was between 8 and 9 per cent.) The rise was caused by recession in certain industries – like car manufacturing – for which components were made in Slough, and by new technology. Mars, for example, was producing more chocolate than ever in 1986, yet employed 1,500 fewer workers than fifteen years previously. Less skilled people inevitably lose their jobs to machines, and each year Slough's corpus of employed semi-skilled dwindles, throwing people with marginal abilities or resolution on the dole. Very few of them will get back. New firms will be yet more automated than existing ones, requiring highly skilled workers, whom they'll either have to poach locally or recruit from outside the town, bringing more highly paid people to Slough and forcing house prices yet higher.