1960s WORK
0151 BTR -- British Tyre and Rubber
A decade or so before I joined it, BTR had been one of the United Kingdom's main tyre manufacturers. Tyres were the main use of rubber in those days, and indeed this is still the case. BTR had, at that time, decided to become much more sophisticated and had invested in management accounting; a practice I would always encourage. In particular, it had looked at its whole operations in terms of cost accounting. The outcome of this was that it had realised that it was actually making a net loss in its main business, the production of tyres. The board, having received this information, took what seemed to them the logical step. They shut down its tyre making capacity in its entirety -- hoping to get rid of the net loss. Unfortunately, as is often the case for those who have only a little knowledge, they had not noticed that the tyre operation was carrying almost all the overheads of the business. Accordingly, when it was shut down, all those overheads transferred to everything else; and the company overall went into a massive loss. It had been lucky to survive this.
It had facilities all round the country. In particular it had since merged with Leyland rubber in Lancashire, which was strong in the production of conveyor belts. My location was at Burton on Trent, where it had two factories close together. Again, the spectre of management incompetence haunted these. Thus, a few years before I arrived, a helicopter fluttered down from the sky to land on the helipad which was in the corner of the sports field -- which itself was in the centre of the factory. The distinguished figure of one of the main board directors descended and asked that all the workers be congregated on the sports field. He then mounted a soapbox and delivered what was intended to be a morale boosting speech to these workers. The gist of it came at the end, when he said that “...by the way next week we will be shutting down our Burton on Trent operations, but I hope this doesn't spoil the weekend for you chappies”! At that he got back into his helicopter and fluttered off again.
A week later almost exactly the same thing happened, except the there were now far fewer workers gathered on the field -- since those who could had got jobs elsewhere. The gist of it this time was “...I don't know if you remember what I said last week, but I think I mentioned something about shutting down the factories here. Sorry about that mistake, I really meant those in London”! When I looked at the board minutes, soon after I arrived at BTR, I found that what actually happened was that, on the Monday after the first visit, the board had only then decided to debate the implications of the shut down. They had found, to their horror, it was complete and utter folly.
The result, in terms of the Burton factories, was that anyone who was any good had gone elsewhere for a job -- leaving behind a workforce made up of those who couldn't get jobs elsewhere!
Surprisingly, considering what happened, it was actually a very loyal workforce. But it was not a very skilled one, and certainly not one I would have chosen.
The division, Polymeric Division, was divided into three businesses. One of these comprised precision mouldings which included cutless bearings (used on the propeller shafts of naval vessels). Another one was PTFE, polytetrafluoroethylene plastic, which was then used in the chemical industry -- and BTR had a massive order for a reactor, which was a cube - in Central Europe - several hundred feet on each side, filled with PTFE lined pipes.
The remainder was my province, the polymeric business. The biggest part of this, on the main site, was the general moulding shop. It was essentially a job shop, but associated with it we also had the manufacture of vulcanised pipe stems. The other products, on which great hopes were pinned, were printing rubber and escalator handrails. The biggest drag on the business, however, was in the smaller factory and was the production of rubber boots. This was my inheritance.
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