In 1944 I had been elected to the Executive Committee of the West of England Engineering Employees Federation, to which we belonged in common with most engineering firms. This involved me in monthly meetings in Bristol with the Committee which included representatives of the big aircraft manufacturers as well as the old established West Country firms Listers and Westinghouse, and was mostly concerned with more negotiations and easements of rules necessitated by air raids and other interruptions to working. The Director of the Federation's local activities was William Grant (later Sir William).
The first session I attended was to discuss some wage application prior to meeting with the Trade Union representatives. At the appointed hour they turned up for the meeting, but Grant, who seemed to run the whole show said they should be kept waiting for a while; when we were ready to receive them, Grant had all the tables at which the committee had been sitting, arranged in a horseshoe with four chairs and no table in the centre facing, for the Union men.
I protested at this, saying that it was more reminiscent of a court of law with the Union representatives in the dock, but Grant said they always had it thus and it "put them in their place". I doubt whether such an arrangement would have worked in, say, Birmingham, but the West Country was very conservative, and even four years of war was insufficient to show these Nabobs of Industry, that things were changing rapidly.
Some time later, after a routine committee meeting, Grant announced that at the request of London Head Office, he had invited a representative of "The Economic League" to address us on post war dangers. This organisation, a forerunner I believe of the present "Aims of Industry" was well known as a die hard group, financed by big industry to carry on propaganda against Trade Unions and the Labour Party in industrial areas. I had met them before holding street corner meetings outside factories in London and distributing leaflets crudely attacking "Bolshevism", whose pay, they alleged the Trade Union were.
This talk which sticks in my mind to this day was largely an attack on Attlee, Bevin etc. then in Government, and particularly the Archbishop of York who, he said, was opening the Church to the Bolshevistic Flood, and he warned that the workers had got out of hand during the war, and that we, as employers, would have to work very hard to counter this new-found power of the workers, now supported by members of the Church and Cabinet! He was astounded, and in the discussions which followed, I protested at this man having been invited to what was supposed to be a non-political committee, and trying to point out that the social advances during the war could not be reversed, and that the recently published Beverage Plan (which gave birth to the National Health Service) had the support of Churchill and the Conservative Party.
My only supporter was the owner of a small engineering company in Stroud, and I reflected that if this was a sample of the Engineering Employers, post war strategy, we were in for some trouble and decide to resign from the Committee, which I did towards the end of the war.
It may seem strange thirty years later when the workers' right to participate in the control of the firm he works for, is official Conservative Party policy, but the views reflected in the actions of the Employers Federation were by no means rare at the time. Many of my own colleagues in Ekco also hoped and worked for a post war world in which, with a queue of unemployed at the factory gate, management would once more have a sort of power over their workers they had enjoyed in the thirties.
Faced with this attitude of management in addition to the "We and They" legacy of British Class structure, it is no wonder that we have what is generally regarded as the most bloody-minded set of industrial workers in the world.
There were not many observers of the industrial scene in 1945 who wrote and talked of "Bloody-minded" management; even today, the term is rarely sullied in that sense. If the Employers Federation had adapted as enlightened an approach as their German counterparts when they set out to rebuild German Industry from the ruins of war, and if, in their turn, the T.U.C. had re-organised the British Trade Union Movement from a "Craft" to an "Industrial" basis, Great Britain might today have been near the top, instead of bottom of the European League!
To return to 1944, however, a few months experience preparing for my new position soon showed my unsuitability as well as dislike of the type of work I would be engaged in. Competitive salesmanship to woo the anticipated post war consumer society with all its wasteful overlapping and phoney advertising was entirely foreign to my temperament.
I had been awarded the MBE for my work at Malmesbury in 1944 and seeing which way my inclinations lay, the Board decided I should take over when the war ended, departments outside the domestic radio and Television fields, some of which I had managed before the war. This was to include Electrical Appliances as well as Electronics and Telecommunications and car radio for the motor industry.
Editors note:
The award of the MBE is gazetted in the London Gazette – supplement number 10 dated 10th June 1944 under 'Issac Lipman Esq. Manager E.K.Cole Limited. Note: There is no reference to what the award is for, nor could there be given the secret nature of the work and while his initials are M.I, with the exception of this award, his middle name Issac is not used for obvious reasons!
As a nucleus I asked Billy Verrells the Chairman, to buy back the 50% share in the Marconi-Ekco Instruments Company which Ekco had sold to Marconis in 1937, but to my great disappointment, he returned from his negotiations with Marconi, having sold them our 50% instead! Not a very good augury for my post war career!
