When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (12 page)

At the same factory, I met a 48-year-old engineer who had moved from Manchester six years earlier; there he had owned a substantial house which was worth enough to enable him to buy a much smaller one at Bracknell, a few miles from Slough. He had received £3,500 in government relocation grants, which are available to lower paid people. He added that although he didn't regret coming south – skilled men who had been made redundant with him six years earlier were still out of work – he had found southerners unfriendly. ‘Luckily,' he said, ‘the next-door people are from Leeds.' Other neighbours, even after six years, avert their eyes when they meet on the street: his wife had been ignored the day after a Tupperware party by a woman she had sat next to and with whom she had had a long, friendly conversation. She had been deeply hurt. Other transplanted northerners I met clung together: in the face of home-counties indifference, Bolton teams up with Newcastle, and Stockport with Sheffield.

Slough, the second leg of my inquiry into the north-south divide, is best known outside the town for lines penned by John Betjeman:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!

It isn't fit for humans now

It had been the fastest growing British town between the two World Wars (and has virtually doubled in size again since), and clearly offended Betjeman, the high priest of Victoriana, by its rapid industrialization and determined functionalism. Slough is still far from being a beautiful place – though it has a parks department that carries off gold medals at the Chelsea flower show – with its power station and its pylons, its sewage works beside the M4 (an area of town known as ‘Pong City', the smell of which even a liberal use of deodorant has failed to curb), its former LCC (London County Council) overspill housing estates, its factories and sprawling industrial area hugging the Bath Road. Close to tourist attractions and beauty spots like Eton, Windsor, Burnham Beeches and the Thames itself, it is crammed within a tight boundary, a ghetto of worker bees amongst the butterflies of Taplow, Marlow and Maidenhead, prevented from expanding by a surrounding green belt, in which the butterflies enjoy fine and spacious living. In the midst of ancient privilege and plenty, it is a determinedly working-class town.

A visitor who knew nothing of Slough's unusual prosperity would be surprised not just by the number of estate agents – I counted nine, together with eight building societies and a moneylender, in a two-hundred-yard stretch of the high street – but also by the money being spent. ‘Like there's no tomorrow,' said the town's public relations officer happily, adding that it was routine to see ‘nice new middle-class cars' like BMWs and Porsches outside the town's fast-food restaurants. Slough is at the heart of the national consumer boom, fuelled by the explosion of high-street credit: a man in work in 1987 could borrow until not another electronic gadget could be squeezed past his mock-Victorian front door into his starter home. But, while Slough's shopping and its thriving, largely union-free industry is the epitome of Thatcherism, its municipal politics in recent years have been left-wing, marked by rhetoric and gestures worthy of Liverpool Militant Derek Hatton. A sign outside the town hall proclaims ‘Welcome to Slough, an anti-nuclear town.'

Despite the sleek, glass and steel, architect-designed factories – there are parts of the industrial estate where you could fancy yourself in a booming Massachusetts town – Slough is not a ‘silicon' town like its neighbours Bracknell and Reading: much of what goes on behind both the art-deco factory fronts and the tatty corrugated iron shacks is an updated version of good old metal bashing, and its worker population still reflects that – at least when electing a council. (The town returned a Conservative MP in 1983 and in 1987, but is a marginal constituency. Joan Lestor represented it for Labour for many years.) Slough is not therefore the pampered south. Orwell wrote in 1936: ‘There can hardly be a town in the south of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.' Not many bishops' nieces are to be found in Slough.

Local history has not shaped attitudes here as it has in Easington: few people's roots go back to the days of royal excursions from Windsor. The only relevant history was practical – the building of the Great Western Railway in 1835. It was naturally opposed by the Establishment of the day in the shape of nearby Eton College, whose provost feared that, if his boys could be ‘carried a distance of five miles in fifteen minutes', they could easily remove themselves from the authority of the school. The college's influence was sufficient to have a clause inserted in an act of Parliament that there should be no railway station within three miles of the school, which ruled out Slough. However, even without a station, the trains stopped in the tiny town, and tickets were sold at the Crown Inn. Eton College protested, but at the same time ordered a train to carry boys to London for Queen Victoria's coronation.

Slough was an appropriate place in which to test the reality and practicality of the ‘on yer bike' philosophy. The Peterlee trainees, who were to be placed with a number of different Slough companies, were following a seventy-year tradition of labour migration into the town. In 1917 the government turned a six-hundred-acre site on the outskirts of what was still a small country community into a repair depot for army vehicles damaged in the First World War. After the war and a loss-making attempt to run what was known locally as ‘the dump' or ‘timbertown' as a nationalized industry, the government ‘privatized' the depot, selling it to a business syndicate for seven million pounds. A magazine called
Motor
News
commented: ‘It will be something of a miracle if they succeed in converting Slough into a money-earning concern … If private enterprise is successful with an establishment which drove officialdom almost to despair, it will be a telling argument against bureaucratic methods.' A telling argument it proved: the syndicate did succeed, and, as the repaired vehicles were sold off, let out the redundant space as factory units. So was created the Slough Estates company, now a worldwide enterprise, around which the town itself prospered. In 1987, there were 25,000 workers on the estate in 320 companies – though that figure is lower than its sixties peak of 33,000, whittled away by the introduction of new technology.

Between the wars, it was the Welsh who left the valleys and headed east along the A4 to the town rising from ‘the dump': recent newcomers have been Asians (‘it's the first town they come to after leaving Heathrow' is the local joke), and nearly a quarter of the population has origins in the Indian sub-continent, a proportion projected to rise substantially by the end of the twentieth century. Between these two mass migrations came Cockneys, Irish and Poles. The mobility continues, and one-fifth of all owner-occupier houses change hands each year. Because of its solid industrial base – and despite the extortionate house prices – Slough remains a community without frills. Shortly before my visit, the mayor, a former Londoner with a rough diamond reputation, had crossed swords with, of all people, the Queen Mother – a skirmish that said much about both the town and how its grand neighbours see it. She was quoted as saying that Windsor had been much nicer before the development of Slough. He was then said to have called her a ‘nasty old woman'. It ended with the mayor inviting the Queen Mother to a cup of tea – which she didn't accept.

Slough, in short, with its factories and its immigrants, its right-wing entrepreneurs, its left-wing Labour council and its working-class ethos, is an unlikely town to find on the Queen's doorstep on the banks of the ‘sweete Thames'. But, with the planes from Heathrow trundling across the skyline, the M4 on its doorstep, the M25 girdling London a few miles to the east, Slough symbolizes the prosperous energy of the south. If all Britain was as hard and as profitably at work, the nation would be enjoying a prosperity that would put it alongside Japan in the world industrial league table.

I pondered several questions during my visit. Is there a magic to be found there that could transform a northern town like Peterlee into a similarly thriving community? Are there government policies that could spread the wealth more evenly and create opportunities that would keep the travelling trainees at home? Why would most industrialists, faced with a choice between a green field site in the north-east, backed with development grants and other incentives, and an overcrowded, urban site, still, one suspects, plump for Slough – despite the town's housing shortages, the labour difficulties and the high rents and rates?

Of all the people I met in search of some answers, Matt Sobol most embodied the spirit of the place. His parents had moved the twenty miles from London when he was a child. According to his own account, he had been a deadbeat in school and lucky to get an engineering apprenticeship. He was in his mid-thirties and looked like a younger version of the football manager, Brian Clough. He was manufacturing director of another small engineering firm, Production Machines, which employed 110 people and manufactured special purpose machine tools. He loved complex, infinitely precise, steel component parts, as a Russian aristocrat might have loved Fabergé eggs, handling them with delicate care. ‘Components are living things. We don't do mass production. We don't want automatons pushing a button: we want thinking men. You're turning a block of metal into a work of art. One tiny mistake can wipe out a component worth ten thousand pounds. One-thousandth of an inch out and you have to chuck it in the bin.' Feeling like that about his firm's products, he valued with an equal intensity the men who were skilled and dedicated enough to make such mechanical wonders. He said: ‘We don't want a labour turnover. We want to think we can keep them, that they'll buy a house, settle down, become an integral part of the company. I get so annoyed when engineers are maligned, caricatured like “Wack”, the cartoon character. We've got the best workforce in the world. We don't manage them properly. The attitude is “you work for us, and do what you're bloody well told”. They need to be cultivated. There's no point in driving people.'

The company had been taken over thirteen years earlier by a management buy-out, and, in a recent production reorganization, had been shrewd enough, enthusiastically supported by the bank, to make Mr Sobol a director. He was often in at seven in the morning, and was usually still there twelve hours later. So acute was the firm's labour shortage that he spent 60 per cent of his time on recruiting, despite a vast range of other responsibilities. Orders were met only through ‘excessive' overtime – the factory worked between sixty and seventy hours each week – and even so business was occasionally turned away. ‘We'd like to expand, the business is there,' said Mr Sobol. The crux of the problem is that in recent years, as British manufacturing industry has collapsed like a cliff battered by a relentless sea, almost no young people have done apprenticeships.

Mr Sobol found to his regret – and to the firm's cost – that unemployed people trained at government skill centres were not good enough. (They are known unkindly in the trade as ‘dilutees'.) He said: ‘With the best will in the world they couldn't make it. You can only learn so much in six to nine months. You need total immersion in engineering. They might be able to operate a machine, but they don't have a feel for the job.' Boys who do come are often reluctant volunteers, sent by parents who think they ought to have a trade. ‘Ask them what they want to be doing in five years, and they'll say “drive a lorry”. People don't want to get their hands dirty.'

So when Production Machines' business picked up in the mid-eighties, Matt Sobol recruited in the north. Two things struck him immediately – the despair of the unemployed and the complacent inertia of government bureaucracies. ‘They like,' said Mr Sobol, ‘to keep their benefits secret.' One DHSS office was furious when he told a job applicant that the man was entitled to his train fare south. ‘What bloody right had you to tell him?' he was asked. He squeezed a council flat out of Slough Council under the national mobility scheme – an almost unheard-of achievement – by threatening to publicize his employee's difficulties in local newspapers. But his deepest concern was with the anguish suffered by the unemployed victims of this official indifference. He said: ‘I wouldn't wish to be in their shoes. They may have been made redundant three or four times in a couple of years, and used up all their savings. All they are left with are their wives and families. They have to leave them to come down here for a job and live in a cheap bedsit. All the people I know from the north have undergone some form of personal trauma. They're shell-shocked when you pick them up at the station: sometimes it's nearly brought tears to my eyes.'

Like the first manager I spoke to in Slough, he is not, however, enamoured of northern work practices, though he understands the history that created them. ‘They have always had to fight for their rights. Employer/employee relationships are abysmal. Workforces are wary and uncooperative. Everything the guv'nor wants must have something behind it. Management in the north is based on the big stick, going back to the days of sweatshops in the textile mills. It's a diabolical way to get production. You don't get the flexibility we get. Here you can say to a guy, “Do me a favour, jump on a lathe or a mill or a forklift truck”.' Production Machines and six other Slough firms did open subsidiaries, not in the north, but in south Wales. All of them, faced with union inflexibility, had pulled out within two and a half years, Production Machines being the last to go. Mr Sobol, then a foreman, was sent down by his boss, who thought it was time he was exposed to industrial ‘reality'. ‘When we told them that in Slough we had working foremen, the shop steward said, “Well, you're not going to have the first working foreman in south Wales.”'