The smiles belie the sadness – saying goodbye on our last day at Ewarts
IN Bugle 1457, dated July 29, 2020, I told of the dire straits of the company I once worked for – Ewarts Ltd, of the Burnt Tree Works in Dudley.
But to be fair our company wasn’t on its own. Most of the manufacturing firms around the Midlands and beyond were trading on a perpetual knife edge in the early 1980s, and cutting their losses by making many of their skilled workforce redundant – as was the case of my old toolroom colleague Thomas Simpkins, who I told you about in my last story.
Departure
His stroke of ‘good fortune’ came about when he bravely volunteered for redundancy with only 18 months left to go before he was due to retire at the age of 65. His departure on April 30, 1981, left me and the rest of my toolroom workmates nervously contemplating how long it would be before the rest of us followed his path
into redundancy, and that demeaning trip down to the Labour Exchange.
But to my astonishment, we did somehow last out the rest of 1981, which gave us hope that the tide of fortune may have returned to Ewarts. I began to think that maybe my job as toolroom metal hardener and steel storeman was safe again. But regretably, no such luck. I early February 1982 the rumour of more job losses began to circulate around the toolroom and the rest of the factory. The toolroom was scrutinised by a consortium from the management
team of the Delta group of companies who had taken over Ewarts in 1977, and after five years in their control we all believed they didn’t have our old company’s best interests at heart.
It was of course speculation on our part, because we didn’t know what financial troubles Ewarts might have endured for them to sell out to Delta – perhaps they did it to guarantee a few more years’ survival.
But our fate was sealed a few days after that inspection, and I’ll stick with the facts as penned in my diary of the time.
Bad news
On February 25, 1982, our stressed toolroom superintendent Mr Norman Fox called for a shop floor meeting, and emotionally told us the bad news we had all been anticipating. 26 men from our department were on a hit list to face redundancy within the next few weeks. This would leave a skeleton staff of ten, and just a handful of apprentices, to run the toolroom.
Before we all dispersed, Norman dropped the bombshell that he was being taken out of the toolroom himself
and given an unspecified new job. Our chargehand, Dave Evans, would be taking over what was left of the toolroom. With emotions running high, Norman didn’t give us any clue as to what was on that redundancy list, and to add to our woes, on that same day the local newspaper reported that 115 personnel from Ewarts would be out in the near future.
That of course meant that it wouldn’t just be the toolroom workers having their lives turned upside down – the whole spectrum of its workforce, the stamp shop, the drilling section, the battery terminal department, pipe bending shop, polishing shop, etc. If this wasn’t the start of closing the company down altogether, it came very close to it. It seemed that the Delta buy-out of 1977, which seemed such a good thing at the time, had all gone drastically wrong.
It was on March 1, 1982, that the management officially gave prior warning of the wholesale shop floor redundancies which would be coming into effect on Friday March 12.
Colleagues
And yes, I was amongst those 26 who were to go. Some of my workmates who shared the same fate whose names spring to mind after all those years are Dave Rose, Stan Hunt, Jerry Baker, Mark Oseland, Vernon Shepherd, Dave Robertson, Bobby Marsh, Mustag Hussain, Les Blackham, Geoff Acaster, and Bill Haddon, the chargehand of the die-sinking section.
It was on Wednesday March 10, in my final working week at Ewarts, that the management team gave us all in turn a brief summary of our impending redundancy payouts. My
golden handshake for 27 years’ service was £3,724. They told our group to finish work at 3.30pm, an hour earlier than usual, and not to come to work again till late on Friday morning, to collect our redundancy cheques and a week’s wages.
In my state of mind I was glad to abide by that, because it would give me my chance to say my goodbyes to my now former workmates. Even our former gaffer Norman Fox gave us the time out on that despondent day to wish us all the best of luck in whatever jobs we ventured into in our future lives.
I left Ewarts on the afternoon of that Friday, March 12, full of emotion. I made my way up to Dudley to sign on at the Labour Exchange, and with that harrowing journey completed, I closed the book on the last chapter of my working life at Ewarts.