Timex bosses handed out the envelopes on Christmas Eve. White, you kept your job. Brown, you were fired...
Thirty years on from the bitter strike that devastated Dundee
IT was April 1974, it was my eighth birthday, and to my joy unconfined my present was a watch. A real watch. A little Timex, a luminous watch with a leather strap and a seconds hand in cheery red, and which I proudly wound up every evening. What I did not know was that my first timepiece had been made by women in Scotland – and, 30 years ago, on August 28, 1993, that huge Timex plant in Dundee closed its doors for the last time, after months of foul-tempered industrial dispute, with thousands at times demonstrating, politicians posturing at the gates and with the loss of 300 jobs.
The Timex imbroglio looms all the larger in hindsight because it was the last major strike in Britain, and with all the trappings familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1970s – baying folk on the picket line, blazing braziers, a pantomime villain of a managing director, trades union bosses in cheap suits and even a turn from Arthur Scargill.
And it ended in entire defeat: an exercise in futility in which, at the last, everybody lost.
We are so used to the truism about Dundee as a city of ‘jute, jam and journalism’ that we forget it was also till recent decades a place of serious manufacturing industry. Shipbuilding, batteries and – from the Second World War – Timex and its mechanical watches.
The city fathers first drew the American concern to ‘Juteopolis’ in 1942, selling it much public land for £57,000 and soon hosting what became an enormous operation.
By 1966, Timex was the thirdlargest employer in Dundee and the biggest employer of women. Its workforce peaked, in 1974, at 6,000. There were two plants – one, at Milton, hammering out parts and tools and employing largely men, and one at Camperdown, with an 80 per cent female workforce who swiftly assembled watches. People joked that Timex was a city within a city. That women could buy practically anything, to order, in its toilets.
‘You were thinking,’ David Howie recalled wistfully in 2019, ‘when you came to Timex that that was your job for life because everyone’s always going to need a watch.’
Timex mechanical watches were tough and cheap. As the jingle went, ‘Took a licking, but kept on ticking…’ One TV commercial showed a Timex still going strong after protracted submersion on the propeller of an outboard engine.
And it was very much the dexterity of Dundee women – demonstrated through many decades at the jute mills, running up sacks and so on – that had drawn the corporation to the city. It was a good employer, with many side-benefits – subsidised canteens, generous overtime terms – and wages remarkable for the time.
Margaret Hogg, who first walked through the gates as a 15-year-old straight out of school, still smiles to recall her first weekly pay packet. ‘My wage was £7 15/ 11d [£7.79] – that got me a pair of Sta-Prest trousers and a new jumper and money to do me all week.’
‘Huge money for the time,’ Margaret Blackstock reminisces of her 1970s heyday. ‘Couldn’t believe how much money I was earning, when you heard everybody else was on £25 – when we were making about £60 a week.’
‘We used to live on my husband’s wage,’ says Joyce Mathieson, ‘and I used to save mine – one of the things that meant was a new car every two years. We got foreign holidays, which we’d never had before.’
But they had to work hard for it. The ladies even had a word for it – ‘nabble’, to put together watches as fast as they could. ‘You had to be at your bench by eight o’clock – a buzzer went, and that was it – that was your working day started. I suppose we were like wee chickens, on the run, heads down.’ And in 1982 they excelled themselves, producing 2.5 million watches that year.
And yet, remorselessly, mechanical watches – and that whole order of job-for-life manufacturing industry – were already going the way of the corncrake. In 1977 Timex directors had noted with concern the increasing trend for digital watches, but – fatefully – decided it was just a passing fad. In Dundee, the firm had begun to diversify, switching many women to the production of Polaroid and Nimslo 3D cameras. By the 1980s, they had cut a deal with Sinclair Research and made ZX81 and ZX Spectrum computers – marvels for their time, though your mum’s dishwasher these days has more computing capacity – but then, in 1986, Sir Clive Sinclair was bought out by Amstrad, which quickly nixed the Timex contract.
All the while, the demand for mechanical watches declined – someone on Reporting Scotland had dark fun establishing just how few Dundee jewellers sold watches made in the city – and Timex entered an increasingly unhappy spiral, industrial relations growing ever more strained as its workforce dwindled into the hundreds.
By 1992, Peter Hall was its UK president. Significantly, he and his family never moved north from their south of England base.
‘An arrogant b ****** ,’ recalls one worker. ‘A distant character,’ remembers another. ‘Kind of hid a bit – he wasn’t on site very often. He tended to be barking his orders from elsewhere.’
And then, on December 24, 1992, ‘ten minutes before we were ready to leave the factory,’ as Wendy Cobb recollects, ‘the supervisors came up. With envelopes. White envelopes or brown envelopes. White envelopes, you were getting stayed on – brown envelopes, you were getting paid off. Who would do that on Christmas Eve?’
‘You do it,’ concluded Charlie Malone in 2019, ‘because this is the time people are going into debt, they’ve got to get Christmas presents for the family. It’s the middle of winter, the bills are going to be more expensive – the company’s
‘Everybody else was on £25 a week when we were on £60’
timing is perfect. It’s about psychological warfare on the workers.’
Half the 300 employees were to be sacked. Mr Hall flatly refused to negotiate – and, with an overwhelming show of hands, employees struck from January 29. Within hours, Timex had hit the Court of Session and served interdicts on the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU), forbidding more than six striking workers on the picket line at any time.
Shop stewards skipped round this by calling ‘mass meetings’ instead, as the dark farce began.
It is important to remember the historic context of this. Unions by now had lost battle after battle, from the humiliation of the miners’ strike in 1984-85 to Rupert Murdoch’s triumph over the print unions at Wapping.
A seemingly bombproof Conservative government passed evertighter employment legislation.
Labour, which had lost four general elections in a row, was increasingly desperate to distance itself from shouty industrial disputes and their snarling protagonists, and one of the most reliable allies of the workers – the Communist Party of Great Britain – had pretty well disintegrated with the Soviet Union. Even in January 1993, as one jourpolitical nalist observed, the Timex standoff already felt like something from another era. But, at first, the workers were bullish. Even confident.
‘What I remember most was the camaraderie,’ remembers Mr Malone. ‘You could see the humour, you could feel the humour.’ Someone brought along a caravan, on which some wag tried to paint the slogan ‘Timex Intifada’. There was not enough paint and it ended up bafflingly as ‘Tim Intifada’.
‘When the strike started,’ says Margaret Thompson, ‘the police used to bring up a tray of pies for us in the morning. We didn’t have a problem with the police because, in the main, all the policemen there had an aunt or a granny or a mother that had worked in Timex before.’
On February 5, hand-delivered Timex letters fell on everyone’s doormat. The company would give ground on lay-offs – as long as its workers agreed to such terms as a 10 per cent pay cut, reduced canteen subsidy and reductions in pensions. If you did not sign, you were out of a job. Ten days later, after still another mass meeting, everyone agreed to go back to work. They were met at the locked Camperdown gates by policemen, threedeep, who refused to let them in.
Shoving began: little old ladies (some of whom had worked at Timex for 39 years) whacking big burly cops rather pathetically with plastic umbrellas.
Timex now sacked everyone and advertised for semi-skilled and skilled workers. ‘The company has tried very hard to bring this dispute to an acceptable negotiating conclusion,’ Mr Hall said. ‘We’ve put together a peace package and that was unfortunately rejected by the workforce. Therefore we consider this dispute to be at an end.’
Things grew distinctly ugly, as more and more protesters – from Glasgow, Newcastle, York and even London – joined the picket lines, howling abuse and throwing things at buses bringing in new strikebreaking labour. Soon Tommy Sheridan, cutting his teeth as a activist six years before becoming an MSP, made regular appearances. Feelings ran so high – and such depth of bitterness remains – that, in a 2019 programme, the words of one of those ‘scabs’ had to be voiced by an actor: the real chap was still too terrified to show his face.
‘One lady had a petrol bomb thrown at the front door of her council house,’ he said. ‘It was threatening. I always travelled with a pick axe handle in the boot of my car.’ A thoughtful police officer said the strikers were badly let down by supporters they had not invited – ‘Leftists and opportunists determined only on disruption and thuggery.’
Workers now bitterly grasped how lukewarm was the support from AEEU officials in London. They also noted the odd withdrawal of friendly local bobbies: police were drafted in from Fife and Glasgow, as Mr Sheridan led the crowds in chorus, ‘Oh, I’d rather be a picket, rather be a picket, rather be a picket than a scab’.
On May 17 came the first serious violence: 5,000 baying protesters marched by the Camperdown gates, 38 police were injured and several people arrested. Shortly after, a bunch of politicians – including a youthful Alex Salmond – turned up in a show of support, or at least for the TV cameras. At their head, oozing entitlement, was Mr Scargill. A hero to the militants, yes – but, to union leaders in London, increasingly an embarrassment. The AEEU’s Scottish leader, Jimmy Airlie, just two years out of the Communist Party, remained conspicuously absent.
On June 14 there was brief cheer when Mr Hall resigned ‘for personal reasons’ – doubtless for Timex tactical ones, for the following day its vice-president, Mohammed Saleh, met AEEU negotiators, commanded by three Timex employees, all men – Willie Leslie, Mr Malone and John Kidd.
Given that the workforce was largely female, some still whisper women might have made a much better shift of directing the strike and negotiating more fruitfully. The meeting availed nothing and Mr Saleh addressed the cameras. He said: ‘Since 1987 we have lost £10 million. We kept trying to reach a solution. We tried today to negotiate with them. They kept repeating
‘One lady had a petrol bomb thrown at her council house’ ‘Those women sum up Dundee – don’t cross us’
their demands to take back everybody – demands I consider nevernever-land unrealistic. We informed them today we will be closing, regrettably and sadly, the factory after 50 years in Dundee.’
Yet still the dispute ground on, in all its pointlessness, as the picket lines withered and Timex dismantled its signage. Ironically, it was finally and decisively ended by Mr Airlie, who went and bluntly told the workers the AEEU was withdrawing its legal protection. He was all but chased from the premises.
There are still those, three decades on, who insist on romanticising the dispute.
‘I don’t want this strike to be remembered in terms of Jimmy Airlie,’ railed Mary MacGregor several years ago. ‘I don’t want it to be remembered in terms of the scab workforce – I want it to be remembered in terms of the bravery, the courage and the determination of those women on that picket line. They sum up Dundee, Dundee women – don’t cross us.’
A steep road up the hill from Camperdown Park, past those scenes of distant strife, is still fondly known locally as ‘Timex Brae’. But the Dundee women were crossed. And they were defeated.