The Factory: Geoff's story
It was 9.15 on a Friday morning, the 6th of June 1986, when it was announced that Churchill’s in Blaydon was closing. It was the biggest employer in the town. Some of the younger lads were in tears. It was devastating news. They told us that all work would cease and production would shift to the company’s Matrix plant in Coventry. The factory manager wanted us to vacate the premises immediately. However, after a big meeting with the union convenor and shop stewards, it was agreed that we would get a stay of execution for a few weeks until we had finished the work that was allocated to us. So, every Friday leading up to the closure, as each section finished their work, they would be out of the door. I was told I had about six or eight weeks left. I’d worked there for ten years.
A lot of the nightshift workers who had already left to go home knew nothing about the closure until the next morning when they heard about it on the radio while they were having their breakfast. There was one lad who went to the TSB bank with his wife that morning for a meeting about getting a mortgage. The bank manager said, “Well, we can’t give you a mortgage because the factory where you work is closing.” And that was the first he knew that he was being made redundant. He hadn’t received a phone call or anything. It was disgraceful, really.
As I had a few weeks before I left, I thought I would try to document the closure of the factory in photographs. I had been a keen photographer for many years, and I kept a small compact camera at work because the union would occasionally ask me to take pictures of incidents in the factory, including accidents where workers were injured, so that they were on record.
I approached the managing director and the shop manager and asked for permission to take photographs in the weeks leading up to the closure. They did give me permission, but it was on the condition that the photos were only taken during break times, for safety reasons and so it didn’t disrupt any sections that were still finishing off their work. So it was quite difficult, because I was still trying to do my own work in the cutters’ shop where I worked, and I could only use the small camera that fitted in my top pocket. When the buzzer went for break time, I would hurry over to another section and take a couple of pictures, then go back and carry on with my work. I shot in black and white because I’d set up a monochrome darkroom at home and could process them there. I also thought black and white was more representative of the gritty factory environment.
There was a lot of tension and friction between departments and between workers because people were being made redundant at different times. I did take one photograph of a group of people having a heated discussion, and one of them objected to having his photo taken. In fact, he chased me off the shop floor, although he didn’t catch me. The next morning, when everything had cooled down, I went back and spoke to him about the photograph, and he said, “Look, I’m OK. If you want to use the photo, use it. We’re all up a height. I’m sorry for chasing you off the shop floor. We’re all keyed up. We’re all on edge.” Some people didn’t want their photo taken, some people did.
I started at Churchill’s in 1976. I’d served my time at Parsons, the famous engineering works at Heaton, Newcastle, but I moved to Churchill’s because it was closer to home and paid more money. I lived up the bank from Blaydon, so I could walk to work instead of getting two buses. When I first went there, I was a universal miller. After that, I worked in the cutter shop where we made master gears for car gearboxes. The job involved high precision tooling to really fine tolerances, so it was a highly-skilled job. Churchill’s was a company that excelled at that sort of thing. As far as we were aware, the company was doing well and had new orders on the books.
It was tremendously difficult for the laid-off workers to get a new job. There were very few engineering jobs. People had families to support, and some had recently bought new houses. I knew lads who suffered quite badly from depression. They weren’t given any support. Some of them eventually found different jobs, but some never worked again. It put a lot of pressure on local families. I had two children of my own, and we didn’t get a big pay-off, just basic redundancy.
The closure affected the whole community. At lunchtime, most of the workforce would go across the road to Blaydon Shopping Precinct to buy sandwiches and snacks, and after work they would get their grocery shopping to take home. I knew a lot of the people who worked in the shops, and they said, “We can’t believe it. We get most of our income from the people who work at Churchill’s.” I also knew the barman of the precinct’s pub, the Geordie Ridley, and I remember him saying, “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” You might have 300 or 400 people going to the precinct from Churchill’s every day. So a lot of the shops found that when Churchill’s closed, they lost a lot of income. The newspaper shop alone sold hundreds of papers to Churchill’s workers every day, and suddenly all that business had gone. Blaydon became a ghost town for a while.
The newspapers reported that we were offered the chance to go to Coventry and work at the Matrix factory, but that wasn’t quite true. Some key workers were offered short-term contracts to go down for three months to teach local workers how to use the machinery. Once they’d done that, they were out of the door. The papers said there were 190 jobs on offer and only 20 men took them up. But there were never 190 jobs, and they were temporary. I don’t know anybody who got a full-time job in Coventry. It was very controversial because the Daily Mail wrote an article with the headline: “Jobless Geordies say no to work.” They said we would rather stay on the dole than move to a new job. It was insulting, really.
I applied for a few jobs in engineering but didn’t hear anything back. Other firms, including Parsons, were also making redundancies. Then I saw an advert for a job as a courier at Newcastle Polytechnic, which later became Northumbria University. It couldn’t have been much more different from working in a factory. But I applied for the job and was so pleased to get it because it meant I wasn’t out of work long. So when I was finally made redundant, I finished at Churchill’s on Friday, had a week’s holiday, and then started at the Polytechnic on Monday. I was there for 24 years until I retired.
One thing I’ll always remember about Churchill’s is the camaraderie and friendship. There were good times. There were disagreements and arguments, too. It was a very male-orientated environment. There might be a row between two blokes, and they would settle it outside. But there was this camaraderie, this unspoken comradeship. I think these photos capture that, and they also capture something that doesn’t really exist anymore. They capture the decline of engineering in the North-East. It’s a piece of social history. I think it’s important to preserve it in photographs. Something the photos can’t really capture is the smell and noise. The factory floor had these distinctive smells of metal, oil, grease and white water lubricant. When you first walked into the factory, the noise was deafening, but you got used to it, and could recognise the different pitches of the different machines. It’s these sort of things I remember when I look at these photos. I hope they will take others back to this lost era. It’s part of our history that no longer exists. Geoff Brown
This is an extract from The Factory: Closure of Churchill's Machine Works, Blaydon-on-Tyne, 1986 by Geoff Brown
History of Churchill's
Churchill’s factory opened to great fanfare in Blaydon-on-Tyne on 28 September 1957. The plant was regarded as a wonder of automation, with cutting-edge machines for the manufacture of gears. The Churchill Machine Tools Company had initially been formed by the American Charles Churchill in 1889 to import machine tools from the USA to Britain. By 1906, the company had offices in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, and Newcastle. In 1946, Churchill’s leased part of the Vickers-Armstrong factory on Scotswood Road before, in 1957, moving to the purpose-built new factory occupying a 25-acre site just across the River Tyne on Shibdon Road in Blaydon.
In 1966, Churchill’s was acquired by TI (Tube Investments). The expanding company was hugely successful and took over several other machine tool companies, including Matrix in Coventry. Sales peaked in 1980, and management spoke of employing more than 1000 workers at Blaydon. But the type of automation the company had pioneered began to put it out of work. A round of redundancies in 1982 was followed by an all-too-brief resurgence. In 1985, the company’s name was changed to TI Machine Tools Ltd, but the Blaydon factory was still known locally as Churchill’s.
The factory’s closure was announced on 6 June, 1986. 440 jobs would be lost, and production would be moved to the parent company’s Matrix plant in Coventry. It was reported that Churchill’s had been a big loss-maker for several years. Managing director John Wareing said that the closure had been announced “with very great regret” to secure the future of the business.
Jackie Crystal of the Amalgamated Engineering Union called the decision “totally outrageous.” Crystal, the former Churchill’s convenor, said: “The North-East is being ravaged by closures and redundancies. It is in danger of becoming a wasteland.” In the six months before Churchill’s closed, more than 6,300 jobs had gone from North-East shipyards, mines, steel mills and engineering works, including 825 at the Swan Hunter shipyard and 790 at NEI Parsons.
By October 1986, the Blaydon factory had closed. The site was put up for sale in 1987. Shortly afterwards, the renamed Matrix Churchill became embroiled in the Arms-to-Iraq scandal. The company was liquidated in 1992.
Today, the shell of the Churchill’s remains on what is now Blaydon Industrial Park, but the factory has been broken up into smaller units. Longstanding plans to turn the site into a retail park remain unfulfilled. Paul Brown
This is an extract from The Factory: Closure of Churchill's Machine Works, Blaydon-on-Tyne, 1986 by Geoff Brown
