From the Kindle version of Leo McKinstry’s ‘Spitfire : Portrait of a Legend on Castle Bromwich.
Soon after Vickers had taken over, Beaverbrook instructed Sir Richard Fairey, the distinguished aircraft manufacturer, to conduct a full investigation into Castle Bromwich. Fairey’s subsequent report, which is contained on a microfilm in the Vickers Archive but has never been discussed in any Spitfire literature, provides a unique insight into the expensive shambles of Nuffield’s organization. It should be remembered that Fairey had an axe to grind against Nuffield, because he believed his Stockport factory should have been manufacturing Spitfires; nevertheless, his study, sent to Beaverbrook at the end of June 1940, amounted to a powerful indictment not just of Nuffield, but also of parts of the Castle Bromwich workforce. ‘It is, I regret to say, a picture of extravagance and an inability to understand the problems of aircraft production, coupled with an unwillingness to learn from those who do,’ Fairey began. ‘The state of affairs I have seen at Castle Bromwich is the exact reverse of that of other factories I have inspected on your behalf where output troubles have been primarily due to comparatively small companies with restricted finances having bitten off more than they can chew.’ In contrast, at Castle Bromwich, he continued:
Matters appear to have started with a blank cheque. Some £ 7 million of public money has been expended in a vast and extravagantly laid out plant, together with jigs and tools, with a large machine shop more than capable of the proposed output and huge stock of materials totalling 450 tons now on the premises. Much of this material has presumably been frozen there for some time. The machine shop is magnificent, comprising over 800 first-class machine tools, nearly half of which are perforce idle for want of equipment and skilled labour. For example, I saw the most perfect specimen of the Swiss jig borer costing some £ 14,000, just being erected. This machine should have completed its work six months ago.
Fairey went on to reveal further waste on buildings, expensive heating systems, and enormous steel hangars which could hold 200 Spitfires at a time. Records were hopelessly unreliable. ‘I myself inspected a number of boxes of components and parts that had literally been raked out from under the working benches and for which no records existed.’ Furthermore, Castle Bromwich had ignored the tooling work done by Supermarine and had instead started to design and plan its own tools, ‘even altering the manufacturing limits of Supermarine drawings for reasons which are quite incomprehensible’. Fairey was also aghast to find that
350 of the total schedule of 7,000 parts had neither been ordered on the shops nor placed out elsewhere. The whole conception was not good since the reason for spending so much capital on tools and machinery should be to produce an even flow of parts in the numbers required. I inspected among other things a battery of six large presses standing idle and a pile of large press tools, mostly incomplete or awaiting rectification, for making various parts of the machine, such as tank ends, which had not yet gone into operation.
Fairey’s harshest criticism, however, was reserved for the Castle Bromwich employees – which is interesting in the context of later mythology about the whole nation pulling together in the patriotic cause:
Over-riding all these considerations and in my opinion the greatest obstacle to an immediate increase in output is the fact that labour is in a very bad state. Discipline is lacking. Men are leaving before time and coming in late, taking evenings off when they think fit . . . In parts of the factory I noticed that men idling did not even bestir themselves at the approach of the Works Manager and the Director who were accompanying me.
Fairey mentioned that there had been a sit-down strike over a petty pay dispute the week before Vickers took over. ‘The labour in the Midlands and the north is not “playing the game”. They are getting extra money and are not working in proportion to it. In fact, in this particular factory there is every evidence of slackness. In my opinion it is management who are in need of rest far more than the operatives.’ Fairey suggested that workers should be warned that if they were found guilty of indiscipline or laxity they would be liable for conscription. ‘The labour are taking advantage of the services. In fact I maintain that without strong action on the labour not only will this programme not be achieved but that other factories will suffer.’
Fairey’s views on the workforce were not mere capitalist prejudice. The Supermarine engineer Cyril Russell had many colleagues who had been sent up to Birmingham to assist with parts and drawings, and heheard directly from them how ‘there were a lot of squabbles over money’, 68 how Castle Bromwich employees ‘stopped work for financial greed’, and how ‘the project was “bugged” with industrial action (or inaction) which fell short of a complete factory shutdown but was fragmented into areas where the cumulative result ensured that no Spitfires reached the flight testing stage.’ To his anger, the management had frequently caved in to such pressure, with the result that those on the Castle Bromwich payroll earned much more than those at Supermarine. Russell even suggested that left-wing extremism might have been behind some of the disputes: in his view, the bottlenecks might have been ‘orchestrated by politically motivated persons to delay the output of the aircraft that were so vital’ – action which he believed ‘bordered on treason.’ Apart from the complaint about general recalcitrance, however, there is no evidence for this in any of the archives.
Nevertheless, frustration with the workforce is all too clear from the correspondence of Alexander Dunbar, a tough accountant who became the overall managing director of Castle Bromwich in May 1940. ‘We have been doing a bit of sacking this week and shall be doing a lot more before the end of the month,’ he wrote to a Vickers director in July 1940:
Among other things we are cutting out time and a quarter payments for staff overtime and I have spent a lot of time today arguing with the chargehands. Yesterday it was the Draughtsmen’s Union and last night it was the progress clerks but it’s all in a day’s work. Incidentally, we are sacking at least 60 Jig and Tool draughtsmen next week; we have tried to find out what they are doing but the answer’s not a lemon . . . In the meantime we manage to build the odd Spitfire or two.
The sheer technical idiocy of some of the early Castle Bromwich line workers was also revealed by another Supermarine expert, Bill Cox, sent up to the factory to help sort out production. Cox was talking to an elderly fitter about the stressed-skin construction of the Spitfire when the fitter replied, ‘Make things with aluminium? Not bloody likely. That stuff is OK for pots and pans but we are going to make things to beat the Nazis. We’ll use iron.’ Cox also listened to a senior Castle Bromwich manager saying that ‘the elliptical wing should be redesigned because the air would not know the difference between straight and curved leading edges.’ So adamant was this manager about changing the design that Cox had to get on the phone to Joe Smith at Supermarine and warn him of the problem. Immediately, Smith contacted the Air Ministry and a civil servant was dispatched to Birmingham with the message that ‘all drawings must be made to Supermarine’s orders.’
Beaverbrook was eager to show that Castle Bromwich was being turned around, so, with a characteristic showman’s touch, he instructed the factory to build ten Spitfires before the end of June. But the new Vickers managers knew that, for all their sackings and the tighter discipline arising from the threat of military service, there was little chance of meeting this deadline, given the disarray of Castle Bromwich. So they resorted to a devious stratagem. As Stan Woodley recorded, ‘By shipping up from Southampton large numbers of finished components, including some fully equipped fuselages, and working round the clock, the magic ten in June were completed.’ The managers were given inscribed silver cigarette lighters to celebrate this achievement, though in reality it was little more than a piece of trickery. The ten in fact came from a consignment of Spitfires ordered by Turkey, which was cancelled due to escalation of the war. Instead of being shipped across the Mediterranean, they were taken out of their crates, modified to revert to standard RAF type, and shipped off to Birmingham. Alex Henshaw had to test-fly the first of the ten, and the experience gave him a glimpse into the ‘complete and utter shambles’ of Castle Bromwich. As requested, he arrived early in the morning for the test, soon after sunrise, but to his annoyance he found that the Spitfire was not ready. ‘I think there were at least twenty people standing round one solitary aircraft. It was utter chaos.’ Henshaw was advised to go into Birmingham for some breakfast and return later in the morning. ‘I came back and there was still chaos. This went on all day.’ Finally, half an hour before sunset, the work was complete. ‘They took the plane out on to the airfield and I got into it. Everyone was absolutely bushed. No hilarity, no joyous occasion, everyone just fed up. They were tired, frustrated and concerned because they didn’t know how it would turn out, their first aircraft.
But I took off for a fly and it behaved perfectly.’ Remembering the glum faces he had seen on the ground, Henshaw decided he would liven up the spectators. ‘I thought that they’d been working for days and all I had to do was hang around and fly the bloody thing.’ So he launched into one of the daring aerobatic displays for which he became renowned, performing loops and inverted rolls before landing. The mood was now completely different. ‘They were cheering, patting each other on the back and all embracing each other. I’ll never forget that.’
Even after the first Spitfires came off the Castle Bromwich production line, there remained tremendous problems at the factory, not least because the buildings had not even been completed. Two years after Sir Kingsley Wood had cut the first sod, parts of Castle Bromwich were still like a construction site. The architect overseeing the works, William J. Green, was an ineffectual manager, and his weakness was ruthlessly exploited by the contractors, led by an intractable foreman, a Mr Riley. So serious were the delays that Beaverbrook’s department sent in a surveyor, A. J. Hill from Taylor Woodrow, to compile a report. Just as Sir Richard Fairey had done, Hill painted a picture of dangerous stagnation at Castle Bromwich. Work on the canteen and the main office block was ‘almost at a standstill’, while the architect had ‘not shown any control over the contractors’.
When Hill interviewed Riley the foreman he found him ‘abusive and resentful’. Hill continued that Riley ‘is bigoted, conceited, offensive and cannot be told anything that he thinks he knows already which, according to him, is everything’. Thanks to Riley’s influence, contractors were refusing to work Saturday afternoons or Sundays. Hill concluded that his impression of his visit was that ‘There was a total lack of organization and programming of the work. Co-ordination and construction and fitting out of buildings were completely absent. Meetings to discuss progress have been a waste of time.’ 75 Another difficulty was that, as Sir Richard Fairey had noted, the factory’s recording procedures were in chaos, which also encouraged fraud and abuses within the workforce. J. E. Anderson, one of Vickers’ experts, reported in July that the system was so ‘poor’ and riddled with ‘inherent weaknesses’ that the proper ordering of the work was impossible. ‘The actual booking of operators’ time on jobs is inaccurate and confused,’ he wrote, which led to ‘numerous cases of overpayment’. Gradually during the summer of 1940 the Vickers team began to transform the management of the factory, through the creation of efficient records, stores and production lines, as well as through the sacking of idle or troublesome employees. On 8 August, for instance, Dunbar told Craven, with a degree of relish, that he had just dismissed 184 staff, among them ‘sixteen foremen whose experience and ability proved unsatisfactory’. In the new climate of well-organized determination, output increased rapidly. In July, 23 aircraft had been produced; 37 followed in August. By the end of October 1940, 195 Spitfires had been delivered from Castle Bromwich. Beaverbrook wrote to Dunbar to say that he was ‘very pleased with the improvement in the morale of the factory’, to which Dunbar replied, ‘Castle Bromwich is a long way yet from being perfect but steadyprogress is being made in every way and I am confident that we shall justify the trust you have reposed in me.’ By February 1941 the Spitfire total from Castle Bromwich was above 600, proving that the factory had huge productive capacity provided there was effective management and a co-operative workforce.
Eventually, over 13,000 of the type would be built at Castle Bromwich – more than half the total of all Spitfires produced. The fiasco of the early years at Castle Bromwich, set out in Whitehall and Vickers files, has never been fully told before, perhaps because it does not fit in with the uplifting wartime narrative of British courage and unity. Moreover, Nuffield himself was anxious to downplay the mess over which he had presided: there is hardly a mention of the episode in any of his papers. He was, by all accounts, never the same man after being so ruthlessly ousted by Beaverbrook, and lapsed into a long, melancholy decline. ‘He seemed to lose the vital force that drove him inexorably to greater and greater things,’ wrote Miles Thomas. Yet in two crucial ways Castle Bromwich is a vital chapter in the Spitfire saga. First of all it destroys the myth, so sedulously cultivated by cheerleading propaganda, that a mood of patriotic endeavour was sweeping through Birmingham and the nation in early 1940. In the words of Cyril Russell, the truth was a tale of ‘managerial weakness and ignorance, and an overdose of worker bloody mindedness’. Second, the chronic delay in producing Spitfires had severe consequences for the fabric of Fighter Command. Given Nuffield’s promise to make 60 planes a week, the contract for 1,000 Spitfires should have been easily fulfilled by the time the Battle of Britain reached its peak in September. If he had come anywhere near to meeting his pledge, the position of the RAF would have been transformed.
Every squadron in the two front-line groups in the south of England could have been equipped with Spitfires, and there would have been enough for reserves and training. The desperate tactics that Dowding had to use to protect his dwindling numbers would have been unnecessary. Much of the bitter controversy between his group commanders, caused by arguments over fighter resources, could have been avoided. The ‘narrow margin’ of the Battle was partly of Nuffield’s creation.
