A recent book on the disaster of the airborne attack at the end of the war at Arnhem attributes a great deal of the blame for defeat of the airborne landing to lack of radio contact due to malfunction of our tank radios. This may be due to a decision early in the war on the choice of which tank radio to produce out of three or four types submitted for trial by competing manufacturers, to produce. My then colleague John Wyborne, the Company's Chief Engineer, who was present at the trials informed me when he got back that the wrong set had been chosen - he hinted at some jiggery-pokey - and this may well have been the case as tank communications sets came in for a lot of criticism right through the war.
I personally know one case where the Managing Director of an important radio manufacturing company went over the head of the Chief A.I.D. inspector at his works and indeed over the head of the whole A.I.D., to a source of political "muscle", who did actually overrule the A.I.D. and caused questionable equipment to be delivered - with what operational results I do not know. The A.I.D. inspector in charge was afterwards transferred to another factory and the whole affair was hushed up. This inspector related the matter to me after the war, but I cannot give details as some of the participants in the unsavoury affair are still alive.
Regarding the "Human Factor", the Malmesbury factory can claim to have pioneered a number of reforms in traditional labour relations. At the parent factory in Southend, where, for a long time it was almost the only industrial employer of labour there was no personal manager; there was what was called a labour manager - who hired and fired a man of limited ability and intelligence and who in the prevailing circumstances needed neither, but the conditions in Southend did not encourage an enlightened labour policy.
There was a canteen of quite a good standard but segregated into factory workers, staff (weekly paid) executives and directors. One of my first decisions at Malmesbury was to provide one canteen only, used by all grades including technical staff, with the sole exception of a small dining room for the four or five senior management who almost daily had visitors from one of the Services or Ministries, when luncheon was usually a continuation of their conference.
During the early days, I instituted a works council for airing complaints and suggestions on working conditions and amenities, employees of all grades voting in secret for their representatives. As has been the experience of most works councils, nothing very much of importance came up (hours and wages being settled separately) but its very existence was its own justification, by preventing petty complaints from growing into major issues in the absence of such a channel of communication.
As usual, the few Communists in the factory were elected to the Council, being the most eager to serve and usually the most experienced in industrial relations. It was often very frustrating for them, as knowing my strong socialist views, reflected in the way I managed the place, they found it difficult to pursue the kind of tactics to which they had been accustomed in the less enlightened atmosphere of their pre war employment.
One constructive suggestion, was that assembly line operators, held up for material supply or technical reasons, should not sit idle at the bench, but help in the large kitchen garden which supplied the canteen. Coming from their works council representatives, it was taken up with enthusiasm; if it had been a management order, there would surely have been trouble, but there was a Sequel.
One lunch time, there was an angry knock on my door and in walked one of our Cockney shop stewards, a hard bitten, tough ex dockland type, who thrust at me a plate of food from the canteen. The peas accompanying the meat were all mixed up with the husks in an unsavoury looking mess! "We're striking", he said, "you can't serve us pig swill like this", It seams that plenty of peas were available from the garden that day, but no "idle" labour to shell them. The canteen manageress, very temperamental, but an excellent supervisor, was short of staff herself, and had proclaimed that if there were no hands to shell the peas, they would have to eat them unshelled! After much recriminations and apologies all round peace was restored. Our only strike in six years!
Sir Stafford Cripps the Minister of Aircraft Production
to whom EKCO was responsible. He was Air Commodore Hugh Leedham's ultimate boss.
Then Sir Stafford accompanied by Lady Cripps came down on an official visit as Minister, with his top Ministry Officials, he met and discussed the factory's affairs with the Works Council, as also did other V.I.P. visitors. Oddly enough, members of the Ekco Board of Directors who showed up from time to time never asked to meet the council, nor did the Council ever ask to meet them. They really did not exist as far as the workers were concerned; the local management were visual and ever-present emblem of authority and with the exception of the nucleus of staff from Southend, the Board of Directors were quite unknown to the general body of employees.
This suited me, as although certain general management matters were co-ordinated through a central committee of top management from the by now five factories (Southend re-activated, Woking, Aylesbury, Rutherglen and Malmesbury), I had a free hand to run my bailey-wick as I pleased. This did not always work to my advantage, as Malmesbury, while not the largest by any means of the Company's operations, definitely had the glamour, being on most secret work, and the jealousy this aroused during the war operated to my disadvantage when it came to peacetime consolidation of the Company's activities.
We opened a first aid department in 1939, and as our numbers grew we engaged a very competent nursing sister, and later on a full-time doctor working in co-operation with the employees' National Health doctors and the locally appointed works doctor from the town appointed under the Factories Act. The was a file on each employee containing details of past illnesses, name of home doctor, blood group, list of illnesses and absences since with the factory and other relevant information.
This not only enabled new employees to be directed, in association with ability tests, to the most suitable work, but gave each employee a feeling that he or she was cared for. This sort of thing was by no means common in industry in those days – only leading firms like I.C.I. had anything like it, and by carefully avoiding any semblance of the "Big Brother" image created a unique works atmosphere which caused us to be the subject of studies by, among others, the Industrial Welfare Society, the Tavistock Clinic, Birmingham University Social Science Department under Prof. Madge, as well as "Picture Post" who published a feature article on us.
We were also visited by a number of Parliamentary Delegates, one of which was a group of women who spent some time studying the hostel system at Rodbourne operated by my wife and on which they commented favourably in their report to Parliament.
